Two years of Blender VSE

So, Blender 5.0 has shipped while I was away at the excellent Graphics Programming Conference, but while all that was happening, I realized it has been two years since I mostly work on the Blender Video Sequence Editor (VSE). Perhaps not surprisingly, a year ago it was one year of that :)

Just like two years ago when I started, I am still mostly flailing my arms around, without realizing what I’m actually doing.

The good

It feels like recently VSE did get quite many improvements across workflow, user experience and performance. The first one I contributed anything to was Blender 4.1, and look what has happened since then (pasting screenshots of the release overview pages):

4.1 (full notes):

4.2 (full notes):

4.3 (full notes):

4.4 (full notes):

4.5 (full notes):

5.0 (full notes):

In addition to user-facing features or optimizations, there also has been quite a lot of code cleanups; too many to list individually but for a taste you could look at “winter of quality” task list of last year (#130975) or WIP list of upcoming “winter of quality” (#149160).

All of this was done by 3-4 people, all of them working on VSE part time. That’s not too bad! I seem to have landed about 200 pull requests in these two years. Also not terrible!

For upcoming year, we want to tackle three large items: 1) more compositor node-based things (modifiers, effects, transitions) including more performance to them, 2) hardware acceleration for video decoding/encoding, 3) workflows like media bins, media preview, three point editing. That and more “wishlist” type of items is detailed in this devtalk thread.

If you have tried Blender video editor a long time ago, and were not impressed, I suggest you try it again! You might still not be impressed, but then you would have learned to not trust anything I say :P

The bad

It can’t all be good; some terrible things have also happened in Blender VSE land too. For one, I have became the “module owner” (i.e. “a lead”) of the VSE related work. Uh-oh!

The wishlist

From the current “things we’d want to work on”, an obvious lacking part is everything related to audio – VSE has some audio functionality, but nowhere near enough for a proper video editing toolbox. Currently out of “just, like, three” part-time people working on VSE, no one is doing audio besides maintenance.

More community contributions in that area would be good. If you want to contribute, check out new developer documentation and #module-sequencer on the developer chat.