Workflow for adding audio to scenes and combining them in the VSE

Question

I've been trying to experiment with a workflow for putting all animation, editing, and post-processing into one blender file:

• 0000_Master combines clips of all scenes' sequences and edits them together, along with background audio, VFX overlays, etc
• 0001, 0002, 0003, ... individual scenes with audio track(s) for lip-syncing added to the sequencer (needs to be in the sequencer to control starting/ending point of the audio)

Unfortunately, I'm running into this issue, where the VSE is unable to combine the Camera (video) and Sequencer (audio) of a particular scene into the VSE. Is there a clean/better way to do this? I'd really like to be able to use the embedded scenes this way, as it allows for quick renderings of previews without preparing different quality files/proxies to export/import per scene, and there's very little setup overall.

If there's a feature request/issue that I can track (if it exists), that would be great to have.

Answer 1

This is a bit silly, but you can create additional scenes and put the scene's camera output in 0001.Video, and then combine that with 0001's sequencer output in 0001.Comp. The latter can then be inserted into your master as one clip that's easy to edit. The render start/ends are a bit difficult to manage between the three of them, but if you overshoot them all (I'm not sure if render times are affected here) and just plan to edit them down in the master's VSE, it's a pretty usable workflow.

e: the 0001.Comp scene can be avoided by using meta clips, but that requires renaming the clip for clarity.

Answer 2

Ow I'm not sure I understood your pipeline/process, but I wanted to do the same thing, basically replicating iClone in blender, having a number of lip-synch animation scenes in my blender file, and be able to edit them together with the flexibility of a video edit.

So I found a super simple way to do that in a couple clicks, just have a blank scene for each animation scene (shot or group of shots) and it that blank scene just define the camera from the aniamtion scene, and the background scene. So in the VSE having one scene clip that calls the sequencer (not the camera) so it plays your lipsynch sound, and one scene clip for this "ghost" scene that's absolutely empty but displays the camera + animation scene in background.

It literally takes 4 clicks per shot so it seems super handy even with dozens of shots, it would just mean a loot of scenes in the blender file as they are doubled, but if you do a few shots per scene, and say they're more sequences, it might the dream setup, muuch more flexible than iClone as everything is compartmented, and it might still playback the whole film in real time for final edit & tweaks: