Blender - It's complicated, but is it any good?

In the pantheon of free video editing tools, Blender is - in my mind - in a class of its own.

Why do I say this? Because I've used it!

It is very, very powerful. The film 'Elephants Dream' was put together using it and it certainly was up to the task. For something a little more approachable (and funny) look at Big Buck Bunny.

It was originally a commerically designed piece of software but was then made open source (for various, unknown reasons). 

The thing about this tool is that it isn't easy to classify. It is most well known for being a 3D graphics tool (In other words you can use it to create 3D shapes such as the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park), you can also use it for compositing (adding the 3d shapes into live footage or shooting against blue- or greenscreen) and you can also use it for video editing and putting your final footage together. It can be used for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, water simulations, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulations, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications.

Whenever you find a tool that does all of these it must suck at one or other of them. But it doesn't!

It's fully functional in all areas. With regard to video editing the wiki says:

The Video Sequence Editor within Blender is a complete video editing system that allows you to combine multiple video channels and add effects to them. Its functionality has been inside Blender since the beginning. Even though it has a limited number of operations, you can use these to create powerful video edits (especially when you combine it with the animation power of Blender!) Furthermore, it is extensible via a plugin system to perform an unlimited number of image manipulations.

The problem with (and the strength of) Blender is it's user interface. Click on this graphic for a closer look

As you can see from this screen shot it is very different to just about any other tool you'll see on the market. 

The user interface is context sensitive and works primarily through buttons rather than the mouse. The windows are totally configurable too. Blender has had a reputation as being difficult to learn. In Blender, nearly every function has a direct keyboard shortcut and, with the number of functions Blender offers, several different shortcuts per key.

Once it is downloaded and used it is still very, very complex. Although to be fair the complexity is the selling point as well as the power. As an example, in the month since the release of version V2.44, there were over 800,000 donwloads of the blender package. Learning the tool usually happens through tutorials, but an alternative wasy is to study models that are already made and see how they work. There is a repository of ready-made Blender models at the Official Blender Model Repository. Just in case you think this isn't a serious tool, Blender was used on the movie Spider-Man 2 to help the filmakers pre-visualise some of their sequences.

Summary
For a free, open-source piece of software it is very, very good value. If you can work your way through the steep learning curve and the quirky user interface this tool can do some great things.

Go to the Blender Home Page.

From here you can read the Wiki, follow tutorials, download the software and even check out shots and movies that folks have put together themselves.

This is, in my opinion, the best all round movie creation suite that is available at no charge. It is functional, powerful and well supported. It is stable and constantly being developed. Although the learning curve is great the rewards are well worth it!

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