Now the unnecessary clips can be deleted by cutting them and clicking on the  Illustration button on the screenshot below, selecting a clip then Delete clips button

Note that if you have cut a sequence a little abruptly and you want to go back to cut a little further in time, you can pretend to enlarge it by pulling its end, this will automatically lengthen the clip from the original imported video, it is the same principle if you want to reduce the clip, you have to take the cursor back.

Little by little you will end up with a video with gaps and therefore several clips. Let's now move on to the second video imported from the media library, by clicking on the button it will be automatically added to the first layer after the last clip. We will proceed in the same way by selecting and cutting the superfluous clips, and so on with all the other imported videos.

• You can play on the zoom  to view the complete project on the timeline or on the contrary zoom in on a part, it also works with the CTRL key and the + or - key.
• By clicking on Zoom the timeline automatically adapts to the entire project 
• Selecting a clip in the timeline and holding down the SHIFT key will move the clip and all subsequent clips in the layer.
• By selecting a clip and clicking CTRL+left arrow key you go to the beginning of the clip and with CTRL+right arrow key you go to the end of the clip
• Clicking on the left arrow goes back one image and clicking on the right arrow goes forward one image.
• Clicking SHIFT+left arrow goes back one second and SHIFT+right arrow goes forward one second.
• To get a list of all keyboard shortcuts, simply click on /

To find your way around the timeline it can be useful to place markers there, you can create them by clicking above the numbers on the timeline. Below we see three markers, we simply move them by drag and drop and delete them by clicking on them. Unfortunately we cannot create a marker precisely at the position of the cursor and that is a shame, because suddenly the markers have a rather approximate position.

The general idea is that the clips of layer 0 put end to end do not exceed the duration of the soundtrack, above we see that there is still some cutting and arrangement work to be done. It will be necessary to finalize the selection and arrangement of the clips, the goal is to put them end to end with a duration that slightly exceeds that of the audio track, in order to preserve a small margin (let's say 20% of the total duration) which will be particularly useful for the transitions. It will give something like this in the end.

At this stage you can merge several contiguous clips into a single clip, this will have the advantage of only doing one operation on a merged clip instead of doing it for as many clips, to do this you will have to select the contiguous clips by holding down the CTRL key and click on the group button

The selected clips will be merged into a single clip and the boundary between the clips will disappear, you can unmerge by selecting the merged clip and clicking ungroup   . Also note that you can also copy a clip with the copy button and copy it elsewhere on the timeline with the paste button.

Tip : Buttons allow you to mute a layer or turn off the video.

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Create a title

We will now create a title clip that we will place on a new layer that we will create, we move it by clicking on the camera and Move this layer to the top

In the Sequence tab , click on the Create a title clip button. The setting is relatively basic, it will be superimposed on the video clip of the highest layer at the location of the cursor, you can play on the font and its location by drag and drop.

The title clip can be moved and placed at the beginning of the timeline.

In the same way you can create subtitles that you can place wherever you want on the timeline. Now to view your work, place the cursor at the beginning of the timeline and use the VCR buttons.

For all intents and purposes under the title creation button, you can also create a clip with a solid color by clicking on Create a color clip , this can be used at the end of a clip for example if you want to put a black background.

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Add transitions

Transitions are video effects to go from one clip to another, we can obviously do without them in this case we will go abruptly from one clip to another. To set up a transition, we must prepare the clips by overlapping them (for the duration of a transition) from one track to another like this:

The cursor should be at the overlap between the two clips, a zoom can be useful, we now click on the Transition tab . You choose the transition which appears highlighted in blue. By moving the cursor, you can see the effect of the transition.

The transition may be reversed, in which case you will need to check the Reverse direction box . For the audio part, you have no choice, it is an audio fade transition with a mix of the two audio tracks.

Tip : you will note that we will not put them everywhere because the excess of transitions can make the video heavy to watch.

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Add effects

An effect is a special video treatment that changes the appearance of a clip, you will quickly understand what it is by selecting an effect in the Effects Library. In the example below I selected the contrast effect that I dragged and dropped onto a clip in the timeline.

With the clip selected on the timeline, you can access the effect properties in the Sequence tab and change the contrast value.

In the same place you can delete the effect by clicking on the delete effect button in the shape of a cross.

Now we will remove the sound from the clips so that it does not overlap with the soundtrack, in other words we will mute the clips. To do this for each of the video clips, we will select the clip, ungroup it ( Ungroup command ) this will create an audio clip under the video clip, which will need to be selected and which we can delete by clicking on the Delete clips button . It will look something like this, we do the same for the other clips to mute.

It should look something like this, in layer 0, the title, in layer 1 the video clips with the transitions, the effects and in layer 2 the soundtrack.

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Key images

Pitivi has the keyframe feature, this feature is interesting when you want to make editing a bit more advanced. They allow you to sequence a clip by stopping points that mark a particular event. To illustrate the interest and the functioning of keyframes, we will set up a fade to black, that is to say at the end of the video, the clip which will darken and gradually pass from the image to complete black.

To do this we will select the last clip in the timeline.

The yellow line represents the alpha channel which allows you to play on the brightness of the video, by moving the line you can play on the brightness of the clip in its entirety, in the screenshot below we have lowered the value from 1 to 0.533

Now we're going to put the line back at the top (alpha value at 1) and a few dozen seconds before the end of the clip we're going to click on the yellow line, this will put in place a key image materialized by a small orange triangle.

we're going to take the triangle from the top right corner and move it to the bottom right corner, between the keyframe you created previously and the last keyframe, this will have the effect of lowering the alpha channel value from 1 to 0 linearly and therefore fading to black.

If the linear function from 1 to 0 seems too abrupt to you, feel free to place other keyframes and set up a smoother function, like this.

Another illustration with the Pixeliz0r effect to pixelate a video, the idea is that at the beginning of the video when the title is displayed, the video is pixelated then gradually appears completely clear when the title disappears. To do this we will place the Pixeliz0r effect on the first clip, we select the clip in the timeline and in the Sequence tab we will click on the Show keyframes button for this value for the Block height value. We see a yellow line that appears at the bottom of the clip in the timeline, we place the cursor at the beginning of the clip and we create a first keyframe with the mouse by simply clicking on the yellow line. We now move the cursor to the end of the title and we create a last keyframe on the yellow line. We return to the first keyframe, with the mouse we move it upwards, this will have the effect of varying the pixelation value, the last keyframe should not move on the yellow line. We do the same for the Block width value. It should look something like this:

When you move the cursor, you will see that the pixelation will decrease until it disappears at the end of the title display.

You will notice that the soundtrack also has a yellow line on which you can place keyframes to make the sound evolve and also to make a fade to silence or vice versa. If you move the entire yellow line it will have an effect on the volume upwards (line up) or downwards (line down). The value appears by moving the line (here a gain of 1.457).

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Other refinements

You can see that by selecting a clip you end up with an outline and black handles which allow you to resize the image.

Then we can move it in the frame by moving the blue box which materializes the video.

This allows you to arrange the view to display multiple videos at the same time. For example, to make a split screen with 4 different views, you will have to overlap the videos on different layers, you size each of them (layer 0 for the top-left corner, layer 1 for the top-right corner, etc.). Example below with the video from layer 1 selected and which is found in the top-left corner.

HAS

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Exporting to the final video

Now you can export your video by clicking on the Render button, in this case from HD format to an MP4 container that can be fully integrated by YouTube. If intermediate clips have been enabled, the rendering will be done from the original resolution and not that of intermediate videos.

We finish by clicking on Render.