Drag the four corners of a strip in Blender's Video Sequence Editor preview to distort it, and have the distortion render.
Reach it from the preview toolbar, the Transform menus, or the keyboard shortcut (default "P").
Corners can be dragged anywhere within the strip's geometry, which can be scaled out of bounds, rotated, cropped, etc. as usual. (A corner will not drag into a shape the perspective cannot be solved for.)
The transform is stored as a Corner Pin node inside a compositor strip modifier, so Blender evaluates it as part of normal strip rendering. What you see is what renders.
Because the transform lives in a node group on the strip, it survives save and load, shows up in the Strip Modifiers tab, and every corner can be keyframed.
Corners animate the way the rest of Blender does.
- Turn on auto-keying and drag a handle.
- Or key by hand: click the dot beside any value in the Perspective panel.
- The keys appear in the Dope Sheet under your scene, in a channel named after the strip, and retime like any other animation.
Reset clears the corner animation along with the shape.
- Blender 5.0 or newer. Compositor strip modifiers, which this depends on, were added in 5.0. Tested against 5.0.1, 5.1.2 and 5.2.1 LTS.
- Works with any visual strip: image, movie, text, color, scene, etc.
- Works alongside the strip's own scale, rotation, mirror and crop
- Select a strip and open the VSE preview
- Activate the Perspective tool from the toolbar, or press "P"
- Drag any of the four corner handles
Numeric corner values and a filter setting are in the Perspective panel, at the bottom of the Strip tab of the Properties editor. It works like the Transform and Crop panels above it: the values are always there at their defaults, and typing one in gives the strip a perspective without touching the preview at all.
Clear removes the transform: Image > Clear > Perspective in the preview, or Alt P. Reset returns the corners to the image rectangle, and is in the tool settings bar at the top of the preview while the Perspective tool is active.
The numeric fields write the corner straight to the node, so unlike the handles they can reach a shape that will not render - push a corner past its neighbors by typing and you get a bow tie rather than a quad. The panel says so when that happens, and offers Make Convex, which moves whichever single corner has least to travel back to the nearest shape that renders. On an animated corner it keyframes the repair, so the fix is not undone by the curve on the next frame.
Blender's Corner Pin node clamps corners to the edges of the source rectangle, so a corner cannot be dragged outside the strip's original bounds. Scale the strip first, with the strip's own Scale, and the corners have somewhere to go.
Download the latest zip and install it as an extension: in Blender, Edit > Preferences > Add-ons, then the drop-down arrow at the top right > Install from Disk, and pick the zip.
It should work immediately after installing. If the tool does not appear:
- Check you are on Blender 5.0 or newer - on 4.x the addon will not load
- Check the console for errors
- Restart Blender