How to Use Openshot Video Editor - Complete Tutorial

hey everyone in today's video i want to show you how to edit with openshot video editor a completely free and open source video editor that you could use on windows or mac or even linux and i've been editing professionally for 15 years and i've been teaching it for about four years or so so i do have all kinds of tutorials for other editing software and editing techniques so i'll put a playlist in the description if you want to learn more and learn more advanced video editors like adobe premiere for example so the very first step is just click the link in the description below to come to this website and it's just openshot.org and if you press download here it will recognize your computer here if it's a pc it will show you the pc version i'm on a mac here and the application is actually the same for both go ahead and download it and then unzip and open the file here let me go ahead and open it up here i moved it to my application folder so i'm going to double click to open it up and what's great about this is it's laid out like the more professional video editors okay right here is your project window so all your media video audio images everything shows up over here once you bring them in and then this is your preview of your actual video over here and then down here is what's called the timeline your edited timeline all your edits will take place down here now most video editors are laid out exactly like this with these three major windows and i'll kind of walk you through some of these icons over here so you have icons on top here you could use transition and effects on these tabs over here which we'll talk about and then you have some tools for the timeline these are how you actually make some of your edits over here and then this is going to be the slider to zoom in and out of your timeline so we'll go through that as we get going the first thing i typically do is i import my video files or audio files or even images if i want to use that so to do that you just press the plus sign up here and import file and i'm actually going to show you a real project here so i'm building a youtube studio so here's a card i shot on my camera so let me go inside of this card and typically you want to find mp4 files like these mp4 files so i'm going to select bunch of these i'm just pressing command or control here if you're on a pc and select all the mp4 files you want to bring in now if you have audio files like mp3 that's the audio file you could bring in the same way and i'll go ahead and press open and it's going to start bringing it in here now it may take a little bit of time depending on how much you're bringing in okay it's done so i have a video clip of me talking so i could show you how to work with clips like that and then i just got footage of building the studio here that has no audio so i'll show you how to work with both and then up here it lets you sort things by video so if it's a video file like mp4 files they'll show up but if you sort by audio nothing is going to show up because i don't have an audio only file and same with images so this does come in handy when you have a lot of stuff going on here you could also right click in this empty section and choose import file this way so that's kind of the same thing as pressing the plus sign and let me just go ahead and bring like an image here i'll show you how to use an image like this too so i'll press enter on that and let me go to show all here so it actually doesn't filter out the image so here is the image okay so that's importing media i'll bring in actually a music file too i'll bring in this music file i get my music from a place called enviro elements and they're royalty free so i won't get into any copyright related issues so if you want your music the same way i get it i'll put a link below and i have videos explaining how that works so let me go ahead and import this in so you can see that's an audio file that's music this is a picture and these are all videos next is assembling your project so assembly typically means just placing your video files from up here into your timeline and just to explain the timeline timeline has multiple different tracks by default you see it has five different tracks typically we're just gonna work on track one and then i'll show you reasons why you'll use track two and three but right now let's just focus on track one let's just imagine we only had one track here now all we have to do is to look at any of these clips you could go ahead and right click on it or control click if you're on a mac like me and then you could preview the file this is just so you kind of get a glimpse of what that video file looks like so this is just me talking this is what it looks like right usually in other video editors there's a whole preview window that makes it a little bit easier you don't have to do that but in this one it's not the case so what i typically do is i'll go to a file i want to start with i'll grab it and i'll bring it down here and put it in the very beginning of track one and this is going to start my edit and now you could see the preview shows up over here right so this timeline is your clips in the order that you lay them out and up here is if you press play is how you could see all of it from that timeline okay so what you could do here is go through all your clips so i'll bring this one down this one's going to be much much longer because it's me talking so there it is and the reason why he snapped onto the other one is because this little magnet is turned on this is snapping okay that just means one clip easily snaps to another clip just like this as i get them to connect so now if i press play what happens is when this clip is done it just cuts to another clip so that's just a simple edit from one clip to another clip that's just called a cut when there is no transition between we'll talk about transitions in a bit so in the assembly project this is typically what i do right i lay down all my shots in the order that i want the shot and here actually let me show you this is a good time to show you you could shrink the timeline down like this so if you have a lot of stuff like this and you can't see it go towards the minus sign also minus and plus on your keyboard do the same exact thing so i could just drag more clips down here make sure it snaps to the next one and i could continue to build out by project like this right so if you want to take your time with this another way to do it is you could right click on one of these hold down the right click and then preview the file make sure it's the clip that you want before you bring it down and there's another option here that i'm not a fan of but if you right click on any clip you could add to timeline this way select this and it gives you this big menu of selecting the start time and the length of the file i don't like to do this i like to just bring the whole clip down here and then i'll make my edits down here this is just me assembling not editing disassembly is just choosing which clips i want to use and then i'll come and edit it down here once the assembly is complete so i add a couple more clips here and then i'll go ahead and show you how to actually make some changes down here to your timeline okay one of the most common things once you assemble is you'll decide that the order which you laid down clips is not the way you wanted it let's say this clip should have came after the following clip right so how do i change the order well if i grab this clip i could bring it before this clip and let go and look what happens it just blended the two clips together right that's not what we wanted i don't want this gap here i just wanted to move one and move the other one back so press command or control z that's undo i'm gonna press that two times undo comes in really handy it's also up here under the edit menu redo and undo and it'll show you the keyboard shortcuts for them but i use that all the time so it's one of the keyboard shortcuts that i recommend you learn and i use spacebar all the time because if you come up here and press spacebar that basically plays and pauses the video a very useful option as well okay so how do we actually change the order of the clips well you could do this you could bring one and put it on top like this and then bring this one over here and then bring this one down so it's kind of like a puzzle if you want to use it that way you could drag things to another track create this gap and then change the order of your clips if you want to change two clips select two like this just drag over the two bring him up and then you could go ahead and move this one over and then move this so this is really the basics of video editing here where you move your tracks around anytime also you could select the clip and press delete and that will delete and then make sure you close this gap otherwise it will just show black video here so you want to close that gap you don't want to have any of these blank sections because if you go to them let me just bring this line over here and if i press play this is literally what your video is going to look like it's just a black screen so you don't want these gaps you want to go ahead and close them up like this when you make edits that's how you move different clips around here on your timeline and it's also how you delete a clip that you change your mind on we still haven't edited it right this is still assembly so we learn how to bring footage into this box and then bring it down here we learn how to change the order and we learn just pressing delete and then closing that gap but now let's get into editing our clip so sometimes this is just called trimming a clip or splitting a clip there's going to be multiple different things we're going to learn here so what i want to do here is let me go ahead on this clip and press start and let's say i wanted to start this clip here not where it originally started so one way to do that is with this clip selected go up here and use this scissor tool activate it and then come back here and then cut on that line okay so you cut and then if you give it a second it makes two clips out of that clip this is called splitting the clip so now i'm going to deactivate the scissor here and if i press delete if i select this press delete see it creates that gap for me and then i could close that gap now i basically made an edit right i started my clip a little bit later than the original clip and then i could do the same thing to end it or i could actually stretch it in like this so this kind of gets the same result instead of splitting the clip i could change the clip that way the splitting comes in handy because with the split let me show you i'll use the scissor tool you could cut here and you could cut again here and then let me take the scissor off here and i could select this and cut in between clips too right so now i could just take another clip and let me bring this clip for example between those two clips right so then it'll go from this clip to a new clip and then back to the original clip so this is kind of useful but really all you have to know here is let me go ahead and select this and delete it all you have to know here is when you have a clip if you want to start it later just bring it in this way okay and you'll get a live preview of when it starts and if you want to end it sooner bring it in this way and you get a live preview of that and if you want to split it use the scissor tool so you could precisely cut where you want to cut in this program this is called the razor tool on some programs it's called the cut tool or the blade tool and basically it's the same process of cutting which is really the ultimate editing tool that you have in any video editor so let's go to a track where i'm talking and do the same thing right so i'm not talking in the beginning so i talk let's see right here i'm just muting here so i could talk over it but i'll just drag over here right there and i'm gonna close this gap here and if i go back in the beginning of this clip now and press start it starts exactly in the spot that i want right so this is the basics of editing let's talk about adding what's called b-roll so a lot of times when i make videos i'm talking but then i want to show what it is that i'm talking about and cut away from myself but still keep the audio okay so this track has audio of me talking so to do that is called either a cutaway or adding b-roll and that's where track two comes in handy so to show you an example if i press play here i'm talking and i'm talking about let's say this room or this drywall so what i could do is find a shot up here that shows that drywall like this shot here and i could grab it and bring it here on track two not on track one because it will delete the audio and my video behind it but if i put it on track two this is what ends up happening if i go a little bit sooner i'll press play and then it will cut away to the shot that i'm talking about here and you could also edit these the same way as any other video on any other track right bring it in to start it later end it sooner you could still use the razer tool to cut it but these cutaways are really really useful because basically i'm talking here i'm talking about this thing you don't need to be looking at my face it will cut to the thing i'm talking about and as soon as this clip gets to an end let me just let it get to an end here it's going to cut right back to me right then i'm still talking and i could add maybe another b-roll clip or cutaway clip on top here so it'll come back to me then it will cut back to this other video clip so that's a really good use case of a track two for using these cutaways oftentimes you'll hear the word b-roll that's why i wanted to mention it here but a lot of times they might be referred to as a cutaway that's when you cut away from the main action to a secondary action to show what you're talking about what's great about this is you could also do this with pictures too and i'll show you that when we get to that section now typically with every video editor if you select the clip and right click on it you do get a bunch of options like you could copy the effects of the clip you could fade a clip you could do all these different things but i don't want to overwhelm you with all these options but i'll mention some of the more important one as we go through right now all i want you to worry about is assembling your whole story here and make all your edits to it by just simply getting this arrow tool and dragging the inside and outside and using the razer tool to make your cuts that's really all there is and make sure the snapping tool is activated most of the times it makes your edits a lot easier now let's go ahead and add music to our project let's say we finish editing our project so how do we add music to our project and then i'll show you how to actually work with audio too that's the audio of you talking for example you could change a lot of that later too here's our audio file up here i'm going to grab it and i want to put it on a timeline on a different track though i don't want to put it on my video track because it'll erase what's already there i want to put it on a blank track if at this point you don't have a blank track just right click in this area and add a track above or below so you actually get an empty track and you could rename your track music for example in this case and it will look like this so you have your two video tracks right the main a-roll track the b-roll track and now you have a music track so that's how you use multiple tracks let me just press play to show you what happens now so here's the problem when you add music like this you can't hear someone talking it's great if no one is talking and i was just using these shots but since someone is talking we need to worry about working with audio levels so let's go ahead and tweak audio levels and work with audio now for music if you right click on a music track you should change the volume of the track for the entire clip typically and i'll go ahead and reduce this for my track to like 30 now again go ahead and press play and make sure if you're using this with someone talking it's very very audible here and the music is not interfering this should make it background music this doesn't have a whole bunch of control and this is one of the reasons why i like the more advanced video editors here but it does give you a simple explanation like if you wanted to fade something in or fade in slower you have all those options you could also fade out the audio clips this is usually handy for the end of your clip as well but i like having the volume level here and it's one of the most useful options here and you could do this with your talking head too if you have someone talking like i'm talking here you could right click on that track and you could go ahead and change the volume here and let's go to the end here with our music file let's see our music file ends here and typically i like to fade out any audio so again i showed you this for a second but if you right click on it and go to volume there is an option here that at the end of the clip you fade it out slowly or fast i like to end it slow and you see you get the little green dot over here and the audio is going to smooth out here at the end now i do this for the beginning and and when i use music and i fade out the audio is something that you should do if you're using a music track okay let's go ahead and talk about transitions so there's a tab right here called transitions and there is a lot of transitions that i definitely don't think you should ever ever use like these kind of transitions but what i like and typically this is true with any editing software i like to do just this fade transition so let me show you if you grab it and put it at the end of a clip like this for example and if i go over here and press play you can see it goes from one clip to another clip like this right but it's far too long so you want to kind of squeeze it to make it shorter and make sure it's at the end of the clip it's a little bit glitchy here so that's another issue with this program that i don't like it's a little bit hard on your computer the way it deals with transitions here where adobe premiere for example doesn't do that but i recommend you keep the transitions very very simple basically these top ones are really nice to use but you just drag it put it at the end of the clip and then change it here you could also add transition actually like this in between clips like this too on the same track and then shrink them down here again i don't like these type of transitions i stick with fade or just no transition at all typically on most editing projects now effects two are kind of like transitions but instead of going between clips they go on top of the clip so let's say i wanted to add an effect to this right let's say i wanted to make this brighter i could grab this drop it on top okay now you see that you got that b right here so now if i select this and choose properties i should get some kind of a box that looks like this where i could grab the brightness value and make it darker if i go this way or brighter this one was fine but i could also change the contrast so if you want things to really pop you basically bring up the contrast that makes the blacks blacker and the highlights brighter that's what contrast does here so that's one of the useful filters that we have if i don't want it i could go ahead and right click on it and remove that effect then it's gone same thing if i wanted to blur this clip i could drop the blur again i'll right click and add properties this will open up and then i could go ahead and make changes to how much it blurs so you can see that okay so now let's talk about adding a picture let me close this one and let's go back to our project file and we have this picture here so with pictures it's kind of the same thing you bring it and dedicate a track to it like this so then it will go from a video of me talking and it will cut to that picture just like how b-roll works so this is how you add a picture and with pictures you also have an option to animate it a little bit too so start of a clip you could zoom in let's see what that looks like so you could get this kind of effect for cutting into a picture so that's really handy that's just right clicking again and animating you do have other options like fading and rotating too but i usually stick with animate or fade on that and you have an ability to add text that's in your top menu if you come there's a top menu and there's a title menu animated titles requires another free program so i'm not going to show you that but if you click it it's going to tell you if i choose one of these it's going to show you that you need blender so that's for more advanced animated text but for simple text this is all you need go up to title and choose title right here and you have a bunch of options like this but if you wanted to do simple text let me find a simple text here let's go with this title right here so this is just a title i could go ahead and change this to my name for example we'll go there and then let's press save and it appears like this just like any other type of asset that you have like video or image you could grab it and bring it down here and you could see this is a great title for example if you wanted to show someone's name like that and some of those are full screen so you have a bunch of options under the title tab when you choose it so choose one that closely represents like a title could be like this or like this where it shows up in the middle so it doesn't show up on the side like this and you could use blender if you want more advanced options there and it's really that simple to add text i'll delete this one and last thing i want to show you is when you're done with your project first save it because it actually is not saving your project so you have to come up here there's an option to save a project this way you could come back to this project so title it and save it where you're going to be able to find it later and then come up here to file and then we want to actually export our project so saving it is different than exporting exporting gives you a finished video file that you could use saving basically lets you come back to this edited project so i'm going to go ahead and export you also have if i show you right up here an icon for export this red icon click it and again name your project and your destination where this file is going to show up so i'll put on my desktop now for formats you don't have to worry about this just leave it on all format because we're going to change things here so for targets we always want mp4 but there are movs and avi but mp4 is the most common way things are encoded so in this case we're gonna go mp4 that's what youtube videos are and h.264 that's the encoding as well so this is what you want this one typically and use the cpu option instead of this one because it'll do it faster using your computer's processor so i use this right here every time with every editing software basically and then video profile this one could get a little bit confusing if you're not sure what the video was shot in mine for example was shot in this format it was in 4k at 23.98 frames per second and this is the resolution but i know this could be really overwhelming if you've never really edited before so what i typically recommend if you know it was shot in 4k typically this is the one you choose or this one the 2997 frame rate these are the two more common frame rates with cameras but if you have no idea a safe one is actually this one right here this 1080 this is hd 2398 or 2997 now i don't know what you shot your footage on or where you got it from so i'm not sure which frame rate it would be but both of these are the most common for hd i would stay away from 720p it's far too outdated 1080 if you're 4k do the 4k options in this case and almost all the time now i choose this one for youtube for example quality leave that on high and then just press export right over here and then this may take quite a while okay so it's taking eight minutes but i have a pretty powerful computer but it's going a little bit faster than that so i know we covered a lot of stuff in this video so hopefully the way i laid it out for you was easy to comprehend because you know you kind of got to walk through the editing process in the order i showed you from assembly don't jump into adding effects kind of walk it through the way i showed you every project that i've created for clients in the last 15 years has kind of followed this path okay and i organize everything onto an external hard drive if you're editing more than one project definitely buy one of these external hard drives because video files are really really big okay so i'll put a link to this one in the description as well but hopefully this was useful to you as i mentioned in the beginning i have resources to all kinds of editing softwares and editing tutorial and i have a playlist in the description if you want to learn more about different ways to edit this is not the only software out there but it is free and open source and easy to learn once you learn it you could always upgrade to a different paid version thanks so much for all your time please give it a thumbs up share with anyone else that may find it useful and i will see you next time

Channel: Howfinity

Views: 42,111

Keywords: How to Use Openshot Video Editor, howfinity, how to, Tutorial, openshot video editor, openshot tutorial, openshot video editor tutorial, how to use openshot, free video editor, openshot video, how to use openshot editor, how to use open shot, video editor, open shot video editor, how to edit youtube videos, best free video editors, open shot editor, openshot tutorials, open shot, openshot video editing

Id: 2b0iZTUQ4Uw

Length: 25min 32sec (1532 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021