Fading Between Scenes

[ab-tools]

Hello everybody,

just discovered this great VSDC Video Editor today and I like it a lot:
Very quick and easy to work with!

Just one thing I didn't find yet:
I did create several scenes and now I want to fade e. g. the first scene out while fading the second scene in.
How can I accomplish that?

I generally understood how fading within a scene works (e. g. fading between two images), but I did not find a way to fade between two complete scenes.

Best regards and thanks in advance for any tip on that
Andreas

[manono]

If I'm understanding correctly what you're asking, what you want is called a dissolve or sometimes a crossfade. See if this YouTube video explains how to do what you want:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uCmasn_s5Q

[ab-tools]

Hello manono,

first thanks for your quick reply!

Unfortunately this video does not help, because as you can see in this video there is only ONE scene:
As I wrote I do know already how fade-in/-out works within one scene, but I did not find a way yet to fade from one scene to the next one.

Of course, I can just put everything into one scene, but this would make the whole project extremely confusing (with hundreds of layers in just one scene). Therefore I would like to keep it separated into several scenes.

But in this case I need a way to fade between scenes - that's the reason I asked!

Therefore I'm really looking forward to any further ideas on this:
I can't believe that this is not possible at all as it would make the scenes basically useless...

Best regards and thanks in advance for any further tips on this
Andreas

[raffriff42]

Use layers to fade out one video and reveal the one underneath.
http://www.videosoftdev.com/how-to-fade-image-or-video

And the object placed under this object will accordingly fade in.

[ab-tools]

Hello raffriff42,

sorry, please don't get me wrong, I really appreciate you taking the time to reply, but exactly that's what I wrote already:
I do know already how to fade between different layers within a single scene!

But it can't be the solution that for a bigger project with several hundred layers (video, image, text, audio, ...) I should use just a single scene and put all that layers into that one to be able to use fading?

That's why I ask how to fade between DIFFERENT scenes that I can organize the layers in several scenes and still fade between these scenes.

Best regards
Andreas

[smrpix]

Are you saying you want to dissolve between several different timelines without combining them into one? You can't. (Well, there are ways, but it defeats the purpose of using an NLE.)

Nor does each scene need to be it's own layer. One option is to checkerboard them. Scene 1 on layer 1, scene 2 on layer 2, scene 3 on layer 1, scene 4 on layer 2...etc. (Though it's usially done by simply putting the entire show on layer 1 and moving the transitional shots to a second layer if necessary.)

edit:
Or here's another thought. Make the dissolve part of timeline 1, but actually start scene 2, the new timeline, at the first hard cut.

[ab-tools]

Hello smrpix,

thanks for your reply, too!

Maybe to make it a little bit better to understand what's the reason behind it:
We are not making a moving, but tutorial videos.

So "a scene" is e. g. the intro to the tutorial with several layers of images, texts, audio and so on.

Then the second scene is e. g. an overview page showing the contents of the tutorial (again with many layers) and in the third scene the "real" tutorial video starts.

So now we would like to e. g. fade between the intro to the overview scene:
As both scenes contain a lot of objects (and thus layers), it would be much nicer to organize them in separate scenes, but when we want to fade between them this seems not to be possible currently.

That's why I asked as there are these "scenes" you can add to your project and it seems they can only be used at the moment when doing "hard cuts" only which seems a bit strange to me. Therefore I thought I just missed something here...

Best regards
Andreas

[smrpix]

I see. If VSDC does not allow nesting, you can output each scene separately as a high resolution or uncompressed file, which will be very large but temporary, and then build a new timeline where you are simply assembling prebuilt elements.

[ab-tools]

Thank you, smrpix, for the suggestion!

Although a bit ugly as it would add another processing step, this would work, yes.

I might have found another way in the meantime, too:
Instead of different scenes I could use sprites for grouping of objects. Then everything could stay in the same scene and I should be able to apply transition effects between sprites.

I didn't fully tested this approach yet, but it seems a doable way.

Still strange that there seems to be no transition option between scenes (as I don't know what scenes are good for then or everybody else uses "hard cuts" only ), but still it should be a solution without an additional processing step.

Best regards and again thanks for your support
Andreas

[manono]

Although a bit ugly as it would add another processing step, this would work, yes.

As I wrote I do know already how fade-in/-out works within one scene, but I did not find a way yet to fade from one scene to the next one.

Fades don't need an overlap; dissolves do. I thought it would have been fairly obvious from the video tutorial to which I linked that you'd have to break up the single video into separate scenes wherever you wanted to put a dissolve.

There's another way I often use - but in AviSynth - that keeps the length the same so the audio doesn't go out of synch. That is to create duplicate frames of the last frame of the first clip or the first frame of the second clip and then create a dissolve between the two clips lasting the length of the number of duplicate frames I've created. But, apparently audio synch isn't a concern of yours. I do it this way quite often with static film credits to dissolve from one screen to the next.

[ab-tools]

Hello manono,

I think you talk about something else when you say "scene" then I do.

I'm talking about what the program VSDC Video Editor is considering a "scene" and that's these on the left side of the program here:

[Attachment 42246 - Click to enlarge]

And the problem is that if you have several scenes you can obviously NOT dissolve. You must have it in a single scene to use dissolve between different layers.

That's a pity, but as I wrote above already you can use "sprite" objects instead of "scenes":
This also allows grouping of objects and transition effects can still be applied (for e. g. dissolving).

Best regards and thanks anyway
Andreas