I just started work on a screencast video for this year's EmacsConf. Previously I had used ScreenFlow on macOS for this sort of thing, but having since fled macOS I was casting about for something in the Linux world to replace my workflow.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Blender has a fairly competent video editor built into it. I was also stoked to learn that Blender has a built in Python interpreter, and it was pretty easy to build a Python startup module that registers a timer callback that polls a directory looking for evidence of new OBS screen recordings, and upon finding one automatically appends it to the open project. An integration with i3 and the OBS WebSocket API made it possible to start, stop, and finalize screen recordings to ensure that all the filesystem writes were atomic.

Another Blender Python startup module was able to implement all the timeline editing commands that are hardwired into my fingers from a decade of ScreenFlow and Logic Pro use, so I was able to be reasonably productive right away. Blender 5.3 is the first version I've used, so I don't have anything to compare it to, but color me impressed! It supports my old 5700xt GPU via Vulkan, so with a little more tweaking I was able to get hardware H264 encode/decode working too.

Pretty cool, no need for ScreenFlow!