Summary:
- With less than 3 months of the year left, Blender presents a new personal challenge to learn a new tool used by professionals and popularly known for being complicated with a steep learning curve.
- The tool is Open Source and therefore free to use. Should I ever need to enhance or extend its powers, it allows me to do that through Python, one of the languages I'm already familiar with.
- I have a belief that one day, as my self mastery improves, I'll create time to address my 3D animation itch.
The Need to Chop Scenes From A Movie
In Star Wars Episode IV, A New Hope, the Jawas on lifting R2-D2 complain that "uyasinda lomsunu" - A South African phrase meaning "This machine looks interesting but may be a challenge to dismantle". This is what I believe I hear(d) and my ears refuse to hear otherwise. I've posted about what I hear(d) on various social media platforms and have been called out as a liar or simply looking for action where there is none.
I needed to chop these few seconds from the movie to prove my super hearing ability and a number of video editing tools that I tried failed me. The complete movie file was about 5 Gigabytes in size and some free video editing tools would crash from just trying to load the file. Others would crash while in the middle of chopping the scene that I want. The purpose of this post is not to bash other tools so there won't be any names dropped. Safe to say that I tried a umber of tools both on Windows and Linux platforms. Chances of proving that the Jawas say "uyasinda lomsunu" were looking bleak.
A Tool For Professionals - No Cutting Corners
With a bit of "Top Tools To Do X" blog-posts-crunching, my Open Source and Flexibility filter left me with Blender. Most reviewers who just needed a tool for quick video editing without wanting to know what's under the bonnet were throwing No-Go flags. A number of Introductory videos on YouTube showed Blender to be a bit on the complicated side. The fact that the tool is boldly sold as "used by professionals" captured me. Needless to mention that it was used to create the pre-visuals of the movie Spiderman 2. I'm not aiming for professional or expert status with this but it should be fun to have a crack at learning the basics of a tool that professionals use.
The cherry on top is that it runs on Linux and is completely Open Source. I'm a dual-boot kind of guy but I prefer more of my time spent on the Linux side. I do some work on Python whenever required and the fact that I can edit or extend the power of Blender using Python just sealed the deal for me.
Know Thy Specs
My experience so far has been drastically different from other tools I've tried before. It took a couple of online videos for me to get comfortable with the user interface. It also required me to know technical specifications of the end product that I want.
With easy-to-use tools, like Windows Movie Maker, you don't need to know technical details such as resolution and the file type you're creating. When you're done editing you just click on button that creates a file for the target platform like YouTube or Facebook. The tool figures out the resolution and file format to use for you.
With Blender, I had to know the correct technical specifications of the file for the target platform and specify these settings in a number of not-very-obvious places during the editing process, before trying to export the final product. In my case, I needed to export files to Twitter, Instagram and Facebook with different formats supported. More painful was the Twitter requirement to generate different formats for mobile and PC.
Overall it's a great free tool for video editing and I'm looking forward to many hours of learning about its nuts and bolts. Kodwa unzima lomsunu.
