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Edit Strip with Compositor

The color grading and compositing features in the VSE are rudimentary while Blender comes with a great nodal compositor that cannot be used in the sequencer directly. This addon tries to unleash Blender's great grading capabilities by offering a way to grade sequencer clips in the nodal compositor. The initial Addon had been written by TMW in the Blender Artists community and for some time, Carlos Padial and I are trying to further improve the script. You can follow the Development here.

Usage: The addon's interface provides two menus: The first one is located in the Sequencer's SunTools panel and provides Buttons to create compositor strips, which are newly created scenes with a prebuilt node setup, from existing video or image strips in the timeline and to jump to the compositor in order to edit the created compositions. The second menu is located in the node compositor panel. It provides buttons to return to the video editing view and to open a compositor strip from the sequencer timeline. The Addon is designed for two different workflows:

• Single monitor setup: After using the "Create Comp from Strip" button to create composite strips of all selected videos, select the composite strip you want to edit and press the "Edit Composition" button to jump to the compositor and after editing the composition, use the "Get Back" button to return to the sequencer view.
• Dual monitor setup: Use window -> duplicate window in Blender's top panel to create a new Blender window. Use one window on the first monitor to display the sequencer view and use the other one to display the compositing view. After using the "Create Comp from Strip" button to create composite strips of all selected videos, select the composite strip you want to edit in the sequencer view and then use the "Edit Composite" button in the node editor panel in the compositor view to open the selected composite strip.

Movie Manager

Dedicated NLEs provide a way to manage your video material before adding the clips to the timeline. Blender does not allow this, but using the SunTools Movie Manager Addon you are able to view and trim your clips before adding them.

It works with one Blender Window but is actually designed to be used with a dual monitor setup: Duplicate the Window in Blender's info header so that you end up with two windows, each showing your timeline setup. Now, it is important to set the scene you want to insert the strips into (your actual timeline) using the 'Set as Timeline' operator in the sequencer "SunTools" "Movie Manager" panel section. You will notice that the other operators in the Panel disappear. This is intended: Those operators are meant to be used in other scenes that are NOT the timeline, in order to insert the pretrimmed strips into the timeline.

Now you can add a file manager area to one of them and use that window to pretrim your clips by using the Edit Range operator in the file browser's properties panel. You can also set cuts as you like, for example if you like to divide a source clip into different sections which will be added to the timeline separately. To add a selected clip from the range editing timeline to your main timeline in the other window, use the Insert into Editing Scene operator in the Sequencer's Movie Manager panel section.

You can create proxies of the selected resolutions of all clips in the folder shown in a file browser area by using the Create Proxies operator in the File Browser. This way, you don't have to add all movies to the sequencer in order to create proxies. You can create proxies for all files in your folder at once. Please Note: Blender will freeze until all proxies have been created! This is normal. It is important to have the "Proxy Setup" set to "Manual" in the Blender system Settings (See https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/editors/preferences/system.html ). Otherwise chances are high that Blender will crash during proxy generation.

TrimTools

Trimming strips and navigating through the timeline is not really comfortable. For example there are many situations which demand for a way to move and trim clips quickly and precisely in relation to each other and to the playhead (for example if a clip should start exactly after the previous one ends).

The SunTools Addon provides a second section called TrimTools. It enhances the efficiency of trimming and cutting clips in the timeline by providing operators to trim a clip's starting- or endpoint to the current playhead position. You can also select a video strip and it's according audio strip simultaneously and use a snapping operator that works in analogy to the Blender's one, moves the strip so that it's endpoint matched the playhead, not it's starting point.

Darktable

This part of the addon integrates the Open Source raw photo editor Darktable for color correction. In the corresponding section of the SunTools sequence editor Panel, activate "Use Darktable for Strip" when a movie strip is active. Then, click "Edit with Darktable". Darktable will be opened with the current frame of the selected strip. Make any adjustments here and close Darktable afterwards. If "Render with Darktable" is activated, darktable will be called on each strip during rendering and apply the associated edits to the whole strip, so that the final render will show the processed version of your videos.

darktable, darktable-cli and ffmpeg must be installed and in your path for the plugin to work. The functionality was only tested on Linux.