Dummy's guide to video editing through Shotcut (open source)- Part 1
Introduction:
Shotcut is a video editing software for Windows, Linux, and iOS. It can be utilised to trim videos, attach intro panels, outro panels, crop the slides within the presentations, for encoding and much more.
Shotcut is a primary, free, open-source non-linear cross-platform software. It is available on the official website.
Steps for basic uses of Shotcut are demonstrated below:
Setting The Editor Format:
A preview screen is set as the default layout of the software. The navigation menu and toolbar can be accessed from here.
You can open different panels from here, as per your needs and what suits your screen. Settings such as the Playlist, Timeline, Properties, Jobs and Encode can be and added to the Shortcut screen.
Click on View menu entry and then select Playlist >P roperties > Encode > Timeline > Job
Now, a panel is opened which has different tabs for Playlist, Encode and Properties. The Jobs panel is to the extreme right whereas at the bottom is the Timeline panel. It will look like this-
You can change the size of these panels according to your screen resolution or any other way that you feel comfortable with.
Video Editor Settings:
You can leave majority of the settings untouched. However, the setting of default time for an image file should be set beforehand when importing images.
For setting the default time following steps should be taken. Select Open File > Select an Image > click open.
Now, click Properties which is a tab at the extreme bottom left of the screen. Here you can set the time. Choose the default time to any time length that you want (say 5 seconds) and then click on Set Default in Duration option.
This becomes the default time now for every time you import an image.
For adding a video, Select Open File, choose the video. Then click Open. The video, intro as well as the outro can be added simultaneously of they’re in one folder.
After all the files are selected, we can move on to the editing part in the Playlist. To start editing, simply drag the desired file to the bottom panel i.e., the timeline. This will create a timeline. Make sure that you put the original video which you wish to edit in the timeline because Shotcut video editor uses the first file’s metadata for the project.
The playhead is placed at the video’s end by default. You can move it to the beginning by clicking on the scrubber and dragging to the beginning while holding the mouse down. Click on the timeline to place the playhead.
Trimming the Video:
Sometimes when you edit a raw footage, there are many unwanted portions throughout the video. That unwanted footage can easily be removed by splitting the video.
For splitting the video, move the playhead at the position where you want the split. Now, hover the mouse for a second over playhead line. A pop-up screen will appear.
Click on Split.
The video will be splitted at that point.
To delete a particular portion, select the required section and delete it using the Delete key from your keyboard. Now, only the desired video, blank space and beginning of the timeline are left.
To remove the blank portion, select it and click on the right mouse button. Click on Remove option.
The blank space is now removed. Remove all the blank spaces to the end for a good video.
In the next part of this tutorial we will see how to add panels, add transitions to the panels and other important functionalities of Shotcut - The Best video editing tool!
The most important thing you need is perseverence and hardwork. If you have these two you can really do great. Keep exploring this tool and I'll be back with the next part of the tutorial.
Till then Bye Bye!!
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors