Importing VSE project as sequence to another project

Question

I'm new to blender so I hope my question is not very strange.

I'm making a video presentation using vSE. For sake of clarity, lets say each slide of presentation is a video that I created as blender VSE projects (I emphasize them with italic). For each slide, I have created a blender project and added my sequences, process them and etc. Now I want to add all these individual slides into one comprehensive video. What I did, which was a failure, was to render each slide and them import them to the final project as clips. The reasons it fail are three:

1. Duplicated render time. Render each slide, then render the main video
2. When I render my slides and re-import them, their lengths are different (even though I'm very careful with frame count. Compression issue maybe?)
3. It's not flexible. If I decide to change something in a slide, I have to re-render from scratch.

For all these reasons, particularly 2, I want to know if it is possible to import a VSE project as a clip into another VSE project. Loosely speaking like a precomp in adobe after-effects. Ideally, I like them to appear as single strip even though the slide project consists of many strips.

Is that possible? If no, how should I render each slide so that when I import them as videos the fps and duration remain unchanged? I tried with raw AVI but it creates gigabytes of file for few seconds.

edit: I have no audio track.

Answer 1

Use a new scene per slide.

Create a master scene with a VSE timeline to assemble the other scenes.

If you are making the slides in a VSE timeline then there is a button in the properties panel of each scene strip that says Use Sequencer. Otherwise you can use the output of a compositor scene or just the 3D view.

If you use the 3D view you can run the VSE master scenee in OpenGL mode and simply render using the OpenGL movie button. This renders much faster and adheres to your Scene render settings.

Answer 2

Many questions here, and plenty of complexity. Short answer is that the Blender doesn't support a form of EDLs so taking your project to Resolve or such will be difficult.

Your frame slippages are codec related. It is possible that one of the timestamp settings may help. If all else fails, render to frames and then set your strips to the frames.

The only way to conform shots is to dump them down to singular channels and render our reels of your cuts with black "slugs" to hold frame counts. If you collapse your final edit down to one or two tracks, they will hold sync because of the black slugs.