Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "Blender As A Video Editor? It's Actually Really Good!" video.

One great feature that Blender has is tracking objects in a video. You can capture handheld video and Blender can measure camera settings and object positions if you track e.g. a couple of corners of your desk and the corners of some other things in the video. Then you can position text in 3D world and the resulting text appears to be floating in the room where the original handheld recording was done. Of course, if you want to have stuff in the original video that goes over some of the text, you may still need to do some rotoscoping (in Blender, too) which is more or less manual process.
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4:00 You can totally render video to e.g. PNG. That's just renders each frame in a separate file! For movies, they do that to allow full image quality for every frame so that video compression doesn't mess the image quality if you want replace some frames later. Obviously this is more important to 3D rendering where single frame may take somewhere between 1 second and 17 hours so you don't want to re-render extra frames. For normal video export in most video editors, the cost of re-rendering a couple of frames is usually not important.
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@ottovonmier9385 Import all the frames as PNG (or any other supported still image format) files to a timeline (Sequencer) in video editor (Add - Image Sequence).
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@tonyramirez5707 It's a bit like VIM but you need to use both keyboard and mouse at the same time. If you can do that well, the productivity gets sky high. You can also bind your own keyboard choices to nearly all actions just by right clicking the action you want and assign a shortcut. That also includes stuff like checkboxes in different panels. For example, if you find that you often need to toggle the waveform checkbox, you can apply any keyboard button to it to toggle it even when the option is not visible on the screen.
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Also you can just slide pretty much all numerical inputs and the results get updated in real time. Every time you see a number input, it's actually a slider, too!
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@ottovonmier9385 It's my understanding that big movie studios do all movies this way. They render each frame as EXR and continue from that.
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I would say that "Blender has some things that it does quite a bit diffferent than what most other _____ does" pretty much summarises all features of Blender. The thing that's really weird but works really well once get it is that mouse hover targets your keyboard. So the same key press may do different things depending on where your mouse cursor is. That's done to allow really fast editing because you can do stuff with both hands at the same time. You also definitely want three mouse buttons in addition to mouse wheel so forget about simple mouse usage.
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For example, you can scroll pretty much everything with grabbing the view with middle mouse button and dragging the mouse. And that works with literally anything, menus, viewports, timeline, control panels etc. You don't need to bother with scrollbars or something like that. And also try shift+middle mouse button, it does different things for nearly everything. You can copy-paste pretty much anything just by hovering something and pressing ctrl+c and hovering where you want it and press ctrl+v. Also, as e.g. G (grab) is modal action, you can press shift while you're moving stuff to position it more accurately (it makes your mouse like 20x slower for moving the item you're moving) or you can directly type the position as a number (there isn't any numeric entry box but you can see already typed value in the bottom left by default - and by default I mean that you can reposition nearly everything in the UI). You definitely want to learn basic actions such as Grab, Size, Rotate by heart so you do actions by pressing a keyboard button with left hand, adjust the value by moving the mouse and confirm the action with mouse button. And the another mouse button is cancel if you're not happy with the result so you don't often need to use undo because nearly all actions can be done with action + adjustment + confirm pattern.
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Blender doesn't have a lot of pre-canned effects but you can apply the input video as texture to 3D objects (or 3D object data!) and do whatever you want with the results.
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And you can use HDR videos as textures for sculpted objects if you want. Blender actually always does tone mapping to get the colors back to usual 8 bit per color channel mode for the output.
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@EwanMarshall And defaults are pretty bad for 3D animations, too. For example, the default rendering pipeline still assumes you don't have a GPU so the defaults are tweaked for CPU rendering.
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@EwanMarshall I meant that Blender could default to automatically adjusting to sensible defaults. For example, automatically enable multithread processing for ffmpeg, use bigger tilesize for GPU rendering than the CPU default. The implementation could even be that if config hasn't been manually set, Blender renders a small predefined test scene with different settings and automatically selects the fastest options for the current host hardware.
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For more control over text you actually want to use text as 3D objects and position those over the video. And when you learn to use Blender effectively, rendering text as 3D objects appears easier than doing it like in this video. This is especially true if you want to start moving (animate) the text. Rendering such text as real objects allows rendering physically correct motion blur which looks better and smoother than the usual jittery you get with moving text with lesser methods.
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@2HInformatica Maybe try video titled "A Beginner's Guide to Camera Tracking in Blender 4.0"?
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@EwanMarshall Yeah, I write software for living so I know that the old saying "the devil's in the details" is absolutely true. The optimal configuration for x264 library alone is really complex problem which would require compressing multiple sample animations and that would be just for the H.264 encoding configuration only. My point was that because Blender doesn't (yet) have automation for these, the end user must tune Blender manually to get the best performance.
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