I'm looking into the Blender Video Sequence Editor to create animations out of existing sequences of images. The image sequences are generated with POV-ray. I've downloaded Blender 2.79, I run W7 64-bit.
So far my main source for learning about the Blender VSE has been the series of Youtube tutorials by Mikeycal Meyers. Other than watching the first videos of that series I have no experience with the Blender VSE.
The shots of the video that I want to create are all looping sequences. For instance, the shot that I'd like to render for my first try is a sequence of 240 frames (sequentially numbered PNG files). Designed to loop around the last frame connects seamlessly to the first frame.
With Google as my friend I succeeded in importing the 240 sequence of images into the Blender VSE. Using Shift + D I can create a duplicate of the image sequence, and when I drag that to the right the duplicate appends itself after the last frame of the original image sequence.
At that point I got stuck.
To test I would like to render a 480 frame animation; two repetitions of the image sequence. But after the dragging the 'Edit Strip' says the
'start frame' is 240. What I need, of course, is that the 'Start Frame' remains 0, and that the 'Length' increases to 480.
I tried editing the 'start frame' field. But when I do that the VSE bumps the duplicate from Channel 1 to Channel 2, so that doesn't work.
So my question is:
Is there a way to render a sequence of multiple duplicates of an image sequence as a single animation?
For many of the shots of the video that I have in mind the animation needs to loop multiple times.