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Blender 5.1: Sequencer

User Interface

Timeline

  • Blade tool now has a box gesture that allows for quick cuts, with support for "rippling", where future strips move backwards to fill gaps. (4c7ecb80fc) The size and positioning of the box allows for fine control of this ripple behavior: if any part of the box lies on a channel, all strips on that channel will be included in the ripple operation as well. Hold shift to keep gaps and prevent rippling.
  • Snapping to display bounds of a metastrip is now possible if snap to "Frame Range" is enabled. (PR#151954)
  • The speed control strip can now take negative values in "Multiply" mode to reverse footage. (PR#152982)
  • Retiming keys can now be completely hidden, with a new retiming icon that shows when the strip has retiming keys on it. (PR#153683)
  • Groups of selected strips can now be snapped to the playhead while maintaining their positions relative to each other with the new keep_offset property on the sequencer.snap operator. This behavior is enabled by default and can be invoked with Shift+S. (PR#153735) The operator was also updated to allow snapping entire strips to either the left or right side of the playhead based on the position of the mouse cursor when the keybind is pressed (this may be adjusted afterwards in the redo panel).

Preview

  • Strips can now snap to increments when scaling or rotating in the preview if control is held. (PR#153109)

Properties

  • The strip time properties panel was cleaned up with improved names and extra information. Now left and right handle timeline positions are displayed clearly, as well as the underlying content start and end. See PR#153012 for before/after comparison and rationale.

Modifiers

  • Strips inside or outside of meta strips can be assigned as mask modifier inputs. (PR#148097)
  • Compositor modifier can use the new Sequencer Strip Info node. (a420f5974a)

  • Pitch modifier can be added to sound strips. Pitch can be adjusted in semitones or as direct numeric ratio. (d295416d61)
  • Echo modifier can be added to sound strips. Echo can be controlled with Delay, Feedback and Mix paramters. (PR#150449)
  • The "Compositor" modifier can now be created together with a compositing node tree directly from the compositor. (b70f8ce818)

Other

  • Meta strips have audio volume setting to control volume of all sound strips within the meta. (PR#149559)
  • Render settings audio bitrate can be set to higher values than 384kb/s now (up to 2048kb/s, depending on audio codec limits). (PR#151126)
  • The progress bar is more useful when building proxies for multiple movie clips. (273c5e2e5a)
  • Soloing strips for the right-click select keymap is now Shift+Left Mouse by default. This allows for easier scrubbing of the entire edit with just Left Mouse. (PR#153097)

Python API

  • Strip (strip.) time properties were renamed to improve clarity and make them easier to remember for scripting. Old properties will still be available, but are deprecated (to be removed in 6.0, see PR#153012). The full list of renames are as follows:
    • frame_final_duration -> duration
    • frame_final_start -> left_handle
    • frame_final_end -> right_handle
    • frame_offset_start -> left_handle_offset
    • frame_offset_end -> right_handle_offset
    • frame_duration -> content_duration
    • frame_start -> content_start
    • animation_offset_start -> content_trim_start
    • animation_offset_end -> content_trim_end

Note that "content" refers to the underlying source tied to a strip (e.g. a video file for a movie strip), which may be outside the bounds of the "strip" timeline extents.

  • A new strip.content_end was added for read-only access to the underlying strip content's ending frame (which may be beyond the right handle). (PR#153012)
  • The keep_retiming option for the sequencer.retiming_segment_speed_set operator has been removed, since segments would only get properly retimed if it was set to true. Setting its value to false merely added unwanted clamping, leading to buggy behavior. (PR#153509)
  • The changes above are also visible in the Python API section of the release notes.