Tutorial to edit your video with Shotcut

Tutorial to edit your video with Shotcut

Last modified May 9, 2020

This site has been automatically translated with Google Translate from this original page written in french, there may be some translation errors

Object

This page aims to provide you with the basics to be able to edit videos with Shotcut. This is not a master class on video editing, but this page will allow you, by example, to make your first edits. For the installation of the software you can consult the page on the installation of video editing software.

Quick overview of the interface

Shotcut is launched from the menu of your favorite distribution or from a terminal. On first launch, you will need to define a folder for the project, the name of the project and the video mode for rendering, note that by leaving it automatic it will take by default the resolution of the first video file imported into the project.

By default Shotcut is divided into several workspaces:

You will find:

1 The timeline at the bottom
2 The project file manager, called Playlist , in this area also displays the properties of the selected item
3 The file viewer of the project manager (rushes or source) and of the project present on the timeline
4 A history of the latest commands, latest imported files and latest tasks
5 A menu bar with buttons with quick access to certain functions
6 A classic menu bar

You can resize the spaces, in particular by increasing the timeline, which by default has a ridiculous size. Be aware that there is always a way to go back using the Cancel button found at the top left.

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Configuration

Actually there is no real Preferences menu, or rather everything is concentrated in the Settings menu. You can play on the Project, Player and User Interface settings (the 3 appear grayed out and cannot be selected).

I left the default settings but we can possibly change the Theme, for example with the System theme

You can also change the project resolution via the Video Mode button.

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Importing files

Media files are imported from the Open File menu... and a whole group of files can be selected at once by holding down the CTRL key.

The imported files will be found in the Playlist, by clicking on

we have a display respectively in list mode, in mosaic mode and in detailed list mode. By clicking on a video it will automatically launch it in the player, if this automatic launch bothers you by clicking on the button

it will bring up a menu in which you will have to deselect Play after opening.

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The assembly

The principle of assembly

Please refer to this page to learn the main principles of assembly.

Arrange clips on the timeline

The first step is to select video sequences in the rushes, move them on the timeline (they will become clips) and arrange the clips in a chosen order. We will therefore start to view the rushes, we select one in the project manager then we view it with the VCR buttons provided for this purpose

. You must locate the sequence that interests you and that you would like to include in the project, for this you have this tool

the two ends mark the beginning and the end of the selected sequence.

Then by drag and drop we move the video from the player to the timeline.

Note that clicking on the button

will have the same effect. Little by little you can select several sequences from the same rush and other sequences from other rushes, which you put end to end on the same track in the timeline, it will give something like this:

At this stage, for the moment, we will not necessarily pay attention to the order in which you place the clips, however if you consider it useful to insert a clip at a location in the timeline marked by the cursor, you select the sequence from the Source player and you click on the tool

This will insert your new clip at the exact location of the cursor by moving the other clips to the right. However, for ease of editing, I prefer to stagger my clips across two tracks; I create a second one from the menu accessible via the

timeline button.

The goal of the maneuver is now to order the clips by dragging them onto the timeline.

It may be useful to shorten some clips that are too long, you have the Cutting tool materialized by the

button. You have to place the cursor at the clip to cut, click on the Cut button and the clip is cut in two with a white line separating them.

Now the excess clip bits can be deleted by cutting them and clicking the

Illustration button in the screenshot below, the clip to be deleted is selected and highlighted in red.

by default with the scissor tool all clips to the right are translated to fill the space left empty by the deleted clip as seen below

on the other hand if we click on the button

the space created by the deletion of the clip is maintained as we can see below

At this point, you have noticed that you can play on the zoom

to view the entire project on the timeline or on the contrary zoom in on a part. Note the Swipe while moving tool

when you move, shorten or lengthen a clip, the timeline cursor will automatically follow the movement and the video will be displayed in real time in the project player.

Note that it is possible to shorten or lengthen a clip on the timeline, in case of lengthening the clip Shotcut will start from the initial rush to lengthen from the initial video. In the example below we can lengthen or shorten the beginning of a clip simply by holding down the left button, this will bring up a green bar that can be moved in one direction or another.

Likewise, you can lengthen or shorten a clip at the end of a clip, this time the bar will be red.

Now let's say you wanted to move the selected clip highlighted in red below to the cursor, by clicking the paste button

This will have the effect of inserting it on the same track, shifting the other clips on the track to the right.

The downside is that we now find ourselves shifted with the top V2 track, so that the insertion impacts all the tracks, we click on the Propagate changes to all tracks

in the timeline button or in the menu accessible via the

timeline button, we check Propagate all tracks

I do the same thing by clicking on the Paste button,

my clip will be inserted and all the clips on all the tracks will be shifted accordingly to the right.

You can optionally select multiple clips by holding down the CTRL key and selecting them one after the other, the selected clips will appear highlighted in red.

Now I import an audio file that I drag onto an audio track of the previously created timeline, this audio track will act as the soundtrack for the final video.

The general idea is that the clips of tracks V1 and V2 do not exceed the duration of the soundtrack, which is not the case above, in fact we keep a small margin to place transitions which will in fact shorten the clips.

To be completely complete you can copy a clip with the Copy button

and paste it in insert with the button

Some other subtleties of the software, by selecting a clip on the timeline, from the context menu or by clicking on the button

you access the clip property with the video format of the original rush.

You also get access to some interesting functions, including Reverse, which as the name suggests will reverse the clip, by clicking on it you can leave the default settings

and it will reverse the clip. You can also change the speed of the clip with the Speed parameter, here 80% of the normal speed, the Pitch compensation allows to adjust the sound of the video to the speed.

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Create a title

Now we will create a title clip, we place the cursor at the beginning of the timeline and select the first clip. We choose the Filters tab then click on the Add a filter button

then Text: HTML

We have the choice between different and animation, I choose Simple Scroll

A WYSIWIG editor appears where you can type text and arrange it as you want (color, font, size, position, etc.), but also add images as you can see below, you can possibly directly modify the HTML code.

In practice the text and its image will scroll from bottom to top (modifiable with the Direction parameter above) for the duration of the selected clip.

We can also add a simple subtitle on a clip, just select it and in the same way we add a Text filter, I choose blank.html which is a simple text to position without animation, it will be displayed for the duration of the clip. And here is the result:

Note that the display of the title in the project player is done in real time of the modification in the HTML editor, which is quite practical for positioning the text well. Otherwise there are other title formats including this one

For the end credits I will just add text on a black background, I first select the video track (which must go black) on which the rightmost clip is located. We will already create the black background from Open Others->Color, I select the color black.

Now in the filters it is my black background which is selected by default, I add my text and I click on the

timeline button, in fact my black background with the text will be displayed to the right of the rightmost clip as we can see below.

For the duration of the credits clip, you can pull at the end to lengthen (or shorten) it.

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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 abruptly go from one clip to another. We start from this situation

We're going to place a transition between the bottom left clip and the top one, to do this we're going to slide the top clip down so that it overlaps with the bottom left clip, like this

In practice the clip inserted downwards has overwritten the end of the previous clip and for the moment we have no transition. We will then lengthen the first clip by making it overflow onto the one we have just inserted, like this

Our transition appears and we adjust its duration with the mouse. By default it is a Dissolve type transition, in project player mode we see the videos merged with the first clip tending to disappear and the other to appear.

There are a bunch of other transition types just click on the Video setting of the Transition Properties to choose, example below with the SW-NE Diagonal Barn Door transition

you will notice that we will not put them everywhere because the excess of transition can make the video heavy to watch. It is possible that the transition is reversed, in this case you will have to check the Reverse box. For the audio part, you have no choice it is an audio fade transition with a mix of the two audio tracks, decreasing for the first clip and increasing for the second.

We finish placing some other transitions without excess and we must arrive at a project almost finalized in its structure the duration of all the tracks that correspond to the soundtrack, the end credits will not have a soundtrack.

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Add filters

A filter or effect is a particular video treatment that modifies the appearance of a clip, we will quickly understand what it is by selecting a filter in the filter library, they are classified by audio and video filters. I start by selecting in the timeline the clip on which I want to apply my effect. Then at the Filters tab then Video button I choose an effect, in the example below Old film: Technocolor

This should have an immediate effect when viewing the clip, you can experiment by changing the effect settings

In the same place you can remove the effect by clicking on the Remove selected filter button.

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 add the Audio Mute effect

It can be quite laborious to add the same filters with their same parameters to all the clips, we can first apply filters to a first clip, below we have a Mute filter and an Old Film: Technocolor filter with custom parameters.

We will click on the Copy Filters

button. Now we will select another clip and in the Filters tab we will click on the Paste Filters button,

this will apply the filters of the first clip to this clip with the same parameters.

For the last clip we will set up a fade to black effect before switching to the end credits on a black background, in the top right corner of the clip we see a flashing black dot, click on it and slide it slightly to the left.

This will give something like this, we will slide the black point which materializes the start of the fade, the duration appears in superimposition (here 2 seconds)

In terms of filter properties, two filters have appeared in addition to the filters already present, these are the Video Fade Out and Audio Fade Out filters for which the duration can be varied.

To disable a filter, simply deselect it or click the Remove Selected Filter button.

Now some interesting filters, a filter to stabilize a video, especially for action cameras, we can leave the default settings and click on the Analyze button.

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Key images

Shotcut has the keyframe feature, this function is interesting when you want to do a bit of advanced editing. 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 return to the first clip with the credits title, we will select the Keyframes tab at the bottom, we will select the Text: HTML filter and with the buttons

we will define the activity area of the filter, the first symbol represents the first keyframe and the second the last keyframe. In this case the text will not scroll during the entire clip but only in the duration defined by the two keyframes.

The principle is the same for other filters, you can set activation timings in the same way.

Now some filters can work with images, this is the case for example with the Cut: Circle filter, we can see that in the filter properties there is a kind of stopwatch,

you have to click on it and it will make two lines appear in the Keyframes tab. The first Cut: Circle allows you to play on the duration of the filter, by default it occupies the entire duration of the clip, and the second line Radius allows you to play on the value of the radius, by default the radius is at 50% for the entire duration of the filter.

Now the idea is that we start with 100% of the image, then it ends up in a circle whose radius will reduce until the image disappears completely, leaving a black background, then the circle will widen again until the image returns completely in its entirety. To do this, we will place ourselves at the beginning of the clip and click on the button at the Radius

line , this will create the first key image materialized by a diamond on the bottom line, I create a second one in the middle and a last one at the very end of the clip.

We will move from keyframe to keyframe with the tools

and

and we return to the first keyframe which switches to red, at the filter properties level. We set the radius to 100% for the first keyframe, to 0% for the second and again 100% for the last keyframe. Now when we launch the visualization we can clearly see the radius of the circle evolve, the software will calculate all the intermediate points between the keyframes.

Now if the interpolation you have performed seems too linear, you are free to add other key images. You will note that once created with the button

you can move the key images on the graph with the mouse by drag and drop, this will modify the value of the radius which is represented by the ordinate of the graph (100% at the top and 0% at the bottom).

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Other refinements

In the Open Others menu you will find other refinements, for example with a noise target

The parameters of this target can be changed in the properties

in the same style we also have the psychedelic sight with Plasma

we then integrate it into the timeline via the button

to put it to the right of the last clip of the selected track or the button

to insert it where the cursor is on the selected track.

In the same way, you can add the video from the webcam, you will have to choose Video4Linux then click on the Export button

We will make sure that the Source button is on Source , then we click on the Capture File button and indicate a location and a file name to capture the webcam

This will automatically start recording, then click on the Stop Capture button and you can add the video to the timeline using the button

to place it to the right of the last clip of the selected track or the button

to insert it where the cursor is on the selected track. In the same way, you can record your own voice via the microphone by choosing JACK Audio or PulseAudio .

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Exporting to the final video

Now you can export your video by clicking on the Export

button , in the format I chose the YouTube format, at the Source level, you will have to make sure that Timeline is selected, I chose to launch the rendering with hardware acceleration, we can see in the screenshot below the hardware encoding configuration window. Then click on the Export file button

the rendering task appears in the task list

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FUNIX

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Miscellaneous

Multimedia

Video editing

Edit your video with kdenlive

Network and system

Email management

LAMP

Securing

Tutorial to edit your video with Shotcut

Object

Quick overview of the interface

Configuration

Importing files

The assembly

The principle of assembly

Arrange clips on the timeline

Create a title

Add transitions

Add filters

Key images

Other refinements

Exporting to the final video