I recently created an animation project. But instead of CGI I used my trusty Canon 550D DSLR with Magic Lantern inside.

I had the artist (my daughter) create a story and artwork, that we placed up on a copy stand (the cupboard door). With the camera locked off we proceeded to animate the scenes and characters. Some shots were cutaways others were sequences. By the end of the shoot we had a 20-30 shots.

I wanted to load them all up as individual strips in the VSE as they needed to be different lengths, none would run 1fps as in typical Blender animation sequences. But when I select a range of images in the folder of course that is what Blender does. It joins all the frames up as a sequence, running at 1 frame per second.

I tried seperating the frame sequence strip into frames but then each shot was just 1 frame long. I really needed a arbitary duration of a couple seconds that I could trim to length if neccassary, as stretching just a single frame strip is fiddily and tedious.

My answer at the time was to drag in each shot individualy, then they get to be a couple seconds each.

Recently I noticed an interesting factoid from Sago on a thread at BA http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?236351-Since-2.59-Separate-Images-in-VSE-no-longer-asks-for-Length

When you seperate a strip into individual frames using the Y key (or menu) there is a Tweak Last value to alter the resulting strip durations. BUT it isn’t shown in the VSE, you have to look in the 3D view tool shelf, right down the bottom!