The Blender add-on: VSE renders straight to a client gallery

Blender's Video Sequence Editor (VSE) is underrated. It's a real NLE — multi-track timeline, transitions, audio, color, the lot — and it's free. If you're a videographer who wants a pro-grade editor without the Adobe / Resolve subscription, the VSE is genuinely viable.

Our Blender add-on plugs Fotofolio into the VSE the same way the Premiere panel plugs into Premiere.

What it does

• Adds a Fotofolio panel to the VSE's right sidebar (N panel). Browse your albums.
• Click any clip to download it via a presigned URL and add it as a VSE strip at the playhead.
• One operator — Send VSE Render to Fotofolio — configures Blender's render output as MP4 H.264 + AAC, renders the timeline as an animation, and uploads the result to a destination album you set in the add-on preferences.

Setup

1. Generate an access token. Fotofolio dashboard → Integrations → Blender → Generate token. Copy it.
2. Download the add-on. Same page. You get a single fotofolio_blender.py file.
3. Install via Blender Preferences. Blender → Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Install. Pick the .py file.
4. Enable the add-on (tick the checkbox next to its name).
5. Paste your token into the add-on preferences. Same panel: set your default destination album ID for renders.
6. Open the Video Editing workspace. In the Sequencer, press N to open the right sidebar. A Fotofolio tab is there.

Day-to-day workflow — a wedding film, again

• Raw footage is in the couple's shoot album (Watch Folder picks it up from a camera offload).
• Open Blender, switch to the Video Editing workspace.
• N panel → Fotofolio. Refresh albums (one click). Pick the shoot album.
• Click each clip you want — it lands as a strip at the playhead.
• Edit the cut in the VSE. Color grade, transitions, audio mix — all normal Blender VSE work.
• When the cut's done, hit Send VSE Render to Fotofolio. The operator runs Blender's render-as-animation with MP4 H.264 + AAC, then uploads the rendered file to the destination album.
• Couple gets the highlight reel in their gallery, ready to share.

Why a single Python file

Blender supports both single-file .py add-ons and zipped folder add-ons. We chose single-file because:

• Easier to read. The whole add-on is one file you can audit.
• Easier to install. No unzip step.
• No third-party dependencies. We use only Python's stdlib (urllib for HTTP, json, tempfile). Blender's bundled Python doesn't make pip-installing easy; stdlib avoids that entirely.

The render settings we use for "Send to Fotofolio"

When you click Send, the operator configures render output as:

• Format: FFMPEG → MPEG-4 container, H.264 video codec, AAC audio codec.
• Output to a temp folder (we own the path so the upload finds the file).
• Frame range: whatever's set in your scene properties.

We restore your previous render settings after the run so the operator doesn't silently change what you'd set for other renders.

Limitations

• Render blocks the UI. Blender's render(animation=True) is synchronous. For a 5-minute timeline at 1080p on a decent machine that's a few minutes; Blender's window will be unresponsive while it runs.
• No background download progress. When you click a clip, we use urllib.urlretrieve which is also synchronous. For typical NLE source clips (a few minutes long) that's fine; for full-shoot multi-hour MP4s, expect Blender to look frozen for the duration.
• Blender 3.0+ required. Older versions use a different operator naming convention; we don't backport.

v2 fixes the synchronous-download issue with async background tasks. Tracked as a follow-up; tell us if it's hitting you and we'll prioritize.