audio waveform and grab strips

[j2l]

The duration of shots usually follows the audio rhythm. Audio plays when previewing shots but, setting a shot precise duration before preview would be great!

Also I need to be able to grab strip (shot) start and end (like in video editing), without entering start and end frame numbers in the shot list, since, as soon as you manually enter a number, it also move the play head to the start of the shot (so you have to memorize the end frame, then enter it in the shot list

Describe the solution you'd like a Sequencer like strip above shots, or simply a button to open and scale the sequencer (zoom on first track, same time window as timeline)

Describe alternatives you've considered Add Sequencer, zoom track and time manually, but no strip grab, play head always moving back to shot start frame:

EDIT: Hmm, looking at your video, I guess audio was added in post-prod since the back in time ellipse didn't break the audio. Wouldn't it be nice to also be able to play the audio linearly while jumping in time? I know it's far beyond shot manager since we only have one line of time in a scene in Blender. Maybe if shots could populate VSE once a sequence is validated?

EDIT2: I tried to do the post-prod in Blender (I did my short film with Blender). Actually, your pipeline breaks the Blender internal way of editing a sequence which is: create a new scene (empty) go to VSE tab Add > sound Add > scene > first scene select strip > N > define camera and duration of the strip duplicate the strip move strip on timeline change camera and time offset for ellipses

J'devrais p'tet venir chez Ubi ? :smile_cat:

[werwack]

"Actually, your pipeline breaks the Blender internal way of editing a sequence"... Actually it introduces another way of working. It does this by allowing a non linear editing of the sequence, leveraging the flexibility of filming the content of a scene. By using the VSE directly in the scene you are bound to be linear and you miss the advantages of Shot Manager.

I perfectly recognize that this may not be easy to get at the beginning since I haven't done many tutorial videos so far. You had a look at the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btLygAlD41c) and indeed some sounds were added in post prod, some not. There is a "background camera sound" feature that is integrated in Shot Manager (still in early beta) that allows a sound to be linked to a shot even if you move it in time. There is another approach for sound that works well also, in spite of the limited settings available on that asset: it consists in putting the sounds directly into the scene as 3D sound emitters. That wasn't in this scene though.

And there is at last the approach you mentioned which consists in doing a "final edit" in the VSE. This has to be done in a VSE in another scene. I planned to improve this workflow during summer in order to better match the new Storyboard workflow coming with Blender 3.3

[werwack]

@j2l Questions: It looks like you are using Blender 2.93.3 right? Are you bound to this version? Since 2.93 is a LTS, could you consider switching to the latest release (2.93.10 I guess)? That would ensure the bugs you mentioned are as little as possible coming from Blender.

[j2l]

deb doesn't exist beyond 2.93.3 :( the snap version (3.2.0) can't install dependencies because it's snap, haaa. So yeah, I'm stuck with 2.93.3 until they update it.