Blog

29 Jun

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The wait is over! One of the big features I have been secretly working on over the past few months is a new feature which I'm calling the "Animated Title Editor". Using Blender 2.5+ behind the scenes, OpenShot can now easily generate animated 3D title sequences.

This feature has been in my dreams since I started working on OpenShot. I have always enjoyed working with Blender to create animations, but I also realized that most users will never have the time to learn a professional 3D animation package. Blender is simply too complicated for most users, which is why you don't see more 3D titles on videos created with Linux.

My goal is to bring the power of Blender, the creativity of the Blender community (in the form of templates) to OpenShot in the most intuitive interface possible. I really feel like I've accomplished that, which is why I'm so excited about this feature. =)

Here are some pictures to explain how it works:

Step 1: Choose a template.

Step 2: Change some settings, such as the text, color, size, and font. Preview any frame in the animation by moving the slider.
Step 3: Click the 'Render' button (and wait for a few minutes while your title is being generated). A preview of each rendered frame is shown, so you can watch the animation as it's created.

Step 4: The new animation is then added to your OpenShot project as a clip. It will have the same height, width, and fps (frames per second) as your OpenShot project. Drag your new clip onto the timeline and enjoy!


This new animated title sequence is created as a RGBA image sequence. That means that each frame has full alpha (i.e. transparency), and can be composited on top of any other video, such as the screenshot above of the chimpanzee.

As far as I know, OpenShot is the first FOSS video editor to incorporate 3D title animations (not including Blender of course). Hopefully this feature (along with a few more we are working on) will start to differentiate OpenShot from the pack of FOSS video editors.

This feature will not be available until our next version is released, which we are all working on, so please be patient. Soon enough everyone can test it out. But please don't mess up your current install of OpenShot trying to install this "alpha" feature. =)

More news soon, so stay tuned.