How to Use Shotcut Video Editor - Free Video Editor

hey everyone in this video i want to show you exactly how to use shortcut video editor a completely free and open source video editor for mac pc and linux and i've been editing professionally for 15 years using variety of different softwares and this one impressed me even though i don't have much experience with it it really keeps up with the professional video editors and the paid version of those editors that i use i do have other tutorials on other editors like davinci adobe premiere imovie so i'll put some resources in the description below this video so you could watch those too but if you've never edited a video before this is a really good software to get started with i'll show you step by step how to use it and if you plan on editing all the time i recommend you pick up one of these external hard drives because video files are really big so you don't want to use up your entire computer's hard drive space so i usually edit on these i have one connected right now and i put all my footage all my video files onto this connected to my computer edit right off of here it doesn't take up any space on my computer that way and keeps things nice and organized i have a link to this website in the description again it's completely free it's open source and it works on multiple platforms like mac and pc click here to download and it will recognize your device and you could go ahead and download it over here so i've already gone and done that and let me go ahead and open up a brand new install of shotcut video editor here and let's go step by step on what you need to do step one the very first thing you need to do is you need to create a new project and this panel should show up right in the middle just make sure you're on this editing tab here as well and you should see this right in the middle here project folder let me click this so typically you want to choose a folder where everything is going to be saved on a mac here it's just choosing the movies folder but as i mentioned you could pick an external hard drive like this one i have plugged in i could just click this and say files that way and that will create a new project for you as long as you create a project name so i'll call this shotcut tutorial and video mode you could leave it on automatic if you don't know much about video modes but basically this is going to tell you the resolution of your video so if you're a little more advanced and maybe you know your video was shot in 4k for example this is ultra hd 4k this stands for 4k which is 3840 by 2160 resolution again you don't need to worry about that if you're new but 1080 basically is hd 2160 is 4k and 720 is 720p hd a lower resolution hd i'm gonna leave it on automatic and let it decide based on the footage that i bring into it on the next step press start right here okay now we have created our project step two we want to import media that means just bringing your footage your music your pictures whatever you want to edit with that has to be brought in and this is the window for that after we do that i'll kind of show you exactly what you're looking at in this whole space now i have some drone footage here that i'm gonna bring in so there's a bunch of drone shots that i captured so i'm gonna grab all those clips here and i have a music file too i could just grab this whole folder and drag it over to this box okay so drag and drop over will import everything for you see they're importing right now it takes a few seconds and you should have all your clips over here with the description so that's the easiest way really to import anything it's just kind of opening up a different window with all your files and then drag and drop them right over here okay for step three we're not going to do anything just yet i just want to kind of show you what you're looking at in this whole space and i'll turn on my pointer here so you can see a little bit better so here is all your media files so these are mp4 video files that music file was an mp3 i believe or a wav file wav file so that's your music file jpegs would be your image files they will all appear over here and it will tell you the duration the length of each of those clips so 9 seconds 49 seconds 8 seconds that's what you're looking at here and the date it was created here is your preview window here and this will show you the clip so if i double click on a clip it will show up over here and it will go ahead and play at any time i could go ahead and pause it and i could go ahead and double click on a different clip here's one of my favorites i'll double click it and you could see it's playing these are just some shots i took with a drone here in 4k resolution then here you have your recent activity so whatever you've done here your search bar and your history will appear on this side on top you see how there's six different panels here we'll go through these panels as we go through but on editing is pretty much where we're gonna spend most of our time pretty much in every video editor until we get to more advanced stuff here on the bottom every single video editor ever made has this thing down here called a timeline timeline is basically your entire edited project down here and all your editing will take place here and you have some tools over here for your timeline that we'll talk about and up here you do have a menu that's going to come in handy especially for opening and closing different panels you can see if i press the meters here this will appear for audio meters and bunch of other things like your playlist this is that so these are gonna come in handy your timeline is down here now step four let's go ahead and assemble our clips down here into our timeline so we're gonna tell our story down here and then we'll make fine edits in the next step so step four is assembly that's what you do after you bring in your footage basically so how do we assemble our timeline well go through your clips double click each one and then let it appear over here and let me pause this one there is a really really useful keyboard shortcut that everyone ever wanting to edit should learn and it's i for in point i on your keyboard and then the out point wherever you want your clip to end sorry i didn't mean to grab that i'm gonna press play to get to my where i want the clip to end let's say right here i'll pause it i'll press o so i stands for in point o stands for out points so this is how i start assembling my project i go through all the clips double click preview them in this window choose an in point that means just where the clip is going to start and i'll point where my clip is going to end and then add it to my timeline down here by just grabbing it and dragging it down here and letting go and it's going to create this timeline for me okay v1 stands for video track number one all i have right now so let me just show you with another clip because once you figure this out you're already halfway through your editing so let me see let's say i'm going to pause it here put in point spacebar is useful to know because it will automatically play and pause things so i usually use space bar on my keyboard okay i'll pause that on the out point select that and then i could go ahead and grab it and put it next to this other clip okay so there's one clip there's a second clip and i will go through and double click everything and do the same exact thing with all my clips okay let me go ahead and bring this all the way over here out points and put it right here so now my edit is basically three different clips now don't worry if you didn't select the endpoint and out point perfectly because on the next step we could actually make adjustments down here to our timeline and to our edited video also make sure this magnet tool right here is called the snapping tool is turned on because when you grab a clip it snaps to the previous clip or the next clip it's really easy rather than if you don't have this turned on it's really hard to get them to line up it's not going to snap and you might have a little gap there okay and another thing to know is undo and redo so i'm going to undo but undo and redo are really useful because you will make mistakes and you'll have to undo them quickly and you may want to go backwards or forward too with redo okay so after i go ahead and add all my clips what i do next is i go to my timeline down here and i'm going to just grab this white line here this is basically your preview window what is showing you so if it's in the beginning it's going to show you the very beginning of your project and if i press spacebar now it's going to basically play my edited project so it's going to be clip 1 it's going to cut to clip 2 and if i keep going a little bit more here press spacebar clip 3 okay and i'll talk about transitions between clips too in a little bit okay in this step let's look at trimming or editing our video after we brought them down here to our edit and timeline okay so let's say over here i decided this clip is too long i want to start uh later maybe i want to start over here so how do we do that well you have a couple ways and this is the same with every video editor you could grab at the beginning of the clip here and you get that bar that green bar you could grab that and bring it in see that it created basically an edit where now i started a little bit later i basically cut this section out but it will create a gap here so this will just be black when there's nothing here you see this section is going to be black so i will need to grab this and bring it back and make sure my snapping is turned on and let us snap to the previous clip so now that edit has taken place okay so that's one way to do it basically just taking it bringing it in and moving the clip the other way is you could split a clip so split at playhead playhead is this white line so wherever this is if you press this it splits your clip into two clips now i have one clip here one clip here it was the same clip i brought down but it just made them into two for me so now again i could go ahead and grab the first part press delete and then bring this one back okay so same thing as before or i'll show you a keyboard shortcut that's really useful click this and if you right click on it you could choose x on your keyboard or just press remove and look what this does it just moves that for you so you don't have to do two different steps you don't have to press delete and then move in the next clip this is called the ripple edit basically ripple delete so this is really really useful because most of the time here i'll show you with this clip too if i go on this clip i split the clip and if i just select this and press x it does a ripple delete it leaves no black areas behind where the other version the first version i showed you leaves a blank or a black section so you do have to move something over it or bring the clip back so besides the snapping tool here and the split tool i do also like this plus and minus minus will remove whatever clip is on right now so it will just remove that clip that i was on i'll go ahead and undo that and if i come at the end here or where i'm standing here if i double click and choose another clip here i'll just pause it right now and if i press the plus sign see it puts the clip at the end of my edit the whole clip here i didn't put it in point on out point so it's putting the whole clip right here at the end so the plus sign will add clips from your preview here and the minus sign here let me press it removes the clip that you're on very very useful so what about rearranging your edited projects what if this clip needed to start before this clip how do i do that this is one thing that professionals editor don't do and this does so be careful with this if i grab this and dump it on top of the first clip here it just erases that part of that clip right so it does start with the sunset clip now but it completely messed up my edit that's not what i wanted to do so let me go ahead and press undo here and what i want to do instead is i'm going to grab these two or this clip here bring it here and then this clip i want it to be last so i'll bring it here and then i have this black area right here and again if i right click on a black area and remove it it brings everything back okay so if that's too confusing let me just undo that you can always grab let me go ahead and grab this i'll hold down shift to gla grab multiple clips and then just move them by myself here where i want so right here so the same thing i just did before i prefer right clicking and choosing x or remove but you can grab and drag and drop whatever you want over here but just make sure when you go on top of another clip sometimes you will do this which is a transition here so i'll talk about that in a second or sometimes you will just remove your clip like this okay so be careful with how you move things around but it is very very possible to move things around and you have a way to zoom in and out so you could get a better preview and a better duration of your clip so if you look up here this is kind of why this is called the timeline because it starts at zero and this is about 10 seconds and if i keep going it's about 13 seconds long is my whole edit right here and you can always add more tracks so video track number one but if i right click i can add a different track like a video track number two this is going to come in handy when we want to add text for example on top of our video we need two different video tracks one for video one for text okay the next step is going to be adding music because once we're done with our edit before we do any transition and effects and things like that we want to just make sure our music is laid out so i already imported music again to import remember just drag and drop into this panel double click your music will play over here let me go ahead and just pause it and this is another thing that's kind of frustrating with this app is if you grab this and bring it down here and let go it actually overrides your video track it is not supposed to do that on other editors it just creates an audio track instead so let me go ahead and undo that and instead to bring in music let me do another thing let me just go ahead and right click over here and i'll add a track for audio so audio track there we go so this is called a1 for audio v1 for video now if i select my music again i could go ahead and grab it and put it in the audio track this time in the beginning of it there we go so now we got music playing underneath so you see music has these audio waveforms here that's what these lines are basically showing you the level of the audio and let's say i need the edit to end here but you see my audio keeps going my music file is too long well same thing as i showed you before just split at playhead so i'm at the end here now i have two i could select the second part press delete now my music ends where i want let me just go ahead and mute this so i don't keep playing that there you go so i have music and i have video on top of that you add any voice over and things like that the same way or if your video clip has audio with it these did not have audio with it they will just appear like this already so you will have a video one and audio one but make sure you put your music in that case in audio track number two so make sure you create a new audio track and audio two will be music so you could even name it that if you want music and then audio one is gonna be what you're saying on camera now i need to show you one thing here that comes in really handy that's kind of confusing and it should be a lot easier but if you want to add music and you're talking you need to bring the audio level of the music down otherwise it's gonna interfere with what you're saying so to do that it's a little bit complicated but let me show you all i have to do is i have to selected my audio here and i need to click filters right here this filter tab this should open and i need to add a filter with the plus sign so filter plus sign and there's something over here called gain and volume if i select this this right now is at zero and if i lower this to like 28 or 30 something like this and i press play see now you could barely hear it so let me bring it up a little bit you could see it's much much lower so you could look at this audio level here so i started here you see i'm down here now but if i was at 0 if i bring this up to even higher i could increase volume this way too you see it's up here now okay so this is really really useful except in professional editors there's just a line here you just grab and bring up and down here you have to add a filter we'll talk more about filters in a second all right let's go to transition and effects i'm going to mute this again transition and effects transitions are what happens between each clip so if i want to go from the first clip if i press spacebar it cuts to the next clip so that's just called a cut when there's no transition in between but what if i want to do something in between these like a fade or something like that well what i could do between these two is i could add a transition now one of the easiest way just to add a transition here is you could just select this file or this video clip and drag it over a little bit on top of the other one like this and it creates this kind of a transition this is just a fade so let me go here and press play to show you what it looks like and let me go ahead and right click on this and i'm going to click properties here so it will show up over here and this lets me actually change the type of transition so it's set to dissolve dissolved transitions are very very useful and you could change the duration cut was the one it was on before and you have a ton of other ones but don't get carried away on transitions keep it simple so dissolve here let's say i want to just go ahead and increase the softness of it i could go ahead and adjust this for example go ahead and press play on it now and i could extend it out a little bit too you could see if i just grab it i could make it a little bit longer so that's a lot better so that's a transition and again i usually just keep with dissolve a lot of these like barn door here let me just show you for most cases they're not going to be very useful oh actually that was pretty nice yeah they're they're pretty nice so play around with transitions and they could go between any clip just make sure again because i moved that i created a black area right here so make sure i snap this back and shorten my music here too to fit okay now filters let's talk about filters let me select this clip and i'm going to go to filters here and press plus to add a filter this time and filters you have video and audio filter i showed you audio for example for changing volume but you do have ton of other more advanced filters and you could google any one of these to see what it does for the most part i don't do much besides maybe fade in audio and fade out audio over here and that's really really useful for ending your music track for example but for video there's bunch of them available to you so i'll just show you saturation right now and you can see i could boost the saturation of a clip you see how it's making it black and white if i go this way or if i go to the right it's really giving us some color so ton of different video filters available again press the plus sign and you could add any of these that you like video effects video transitions what's next next let me show you color correction now this is a little more advanced but if you look over here there's a color panel that brings up this entire color correction with more advanced tools like rgb parade and video vectors and i'm very knowledgeable of these with advanced video editors but it's really not something you should really worry about if you're new to video editing i will worry about this much later i didn't use these for the next couple years of editing really and didn't even know what they were but they are tools for color correction now with color correction too you could do the same thing you did before you could just go ahead and apply a video filter and there's a bunch of them for color so if i go down for example contrast will change the contrast which will affect your color in some ways and let me see there is one let me search for color here there we go color grading let me go ahead and double click that and here is if i resize this your color wheels and basically what these do is they change how your video looks if you move this around so this is all the different colors if you want to make it green you go this way if you want to make it blue you go this way but definitely something subtle is what's needed here and not major shifts like this unless you're making some kind of a special music video same thing with your shadows you could move those colors around and there are some more options available here with these sliders too so let me just show you if i want to bring the highlights down or up i could go ahead and change that if my clip was too bright or too dark and as you could see these things are moving around so if you want to learn more about them go ahead and google them this is more advanced training that i cover in my more advanced editing tutorials but these are available for you as you can see as i make changes to them they do move around all right i went back to the editing window let me show you how to add text because that does come in handy as well again it's a filter so make sure you click on filters here and go to the filter tab press plus and let's change or search for text i'll do rich text here and here's my text box okay that appeared and let me go ahead and type out my text let me see if i could type it over here it's really really small you can't really see it let me go ahead and change the size 600 there we go or 800 because i'm working with 8k video or 4k video here and there's my text i could select it all make it bold italic underline and i have some font options from my system here and let me go ahead and center the text right here and there you go there's my text if i want to move it around i could go go ahead and grab it from here and like put it over here so i'll actually change this to florida that's how you add text and it will appear on top of your video as a filter now that's a little bit limited and i'm not a big fan of how you add text here but it is available to you and another thing i should know redo and undo don't work for text they will just do the redo and undo to your edit if you press them up here so let me go ahead and delete that text file and let's go to the final step which is exporting your edited video that step is right here export press this your timeline here is what is selected it says from timeline so that's what i want to choose and it's going to actually give you all these different options for type of exports now again if you don't know anything about what these file formats are if you're going to youtube or really for any video purposes youtube is not bad h.264 compression aac audio compression and mp4 those three things are what this is choosing for you so again i've been doing this for a long time so i know very well what all of these are but for the most part i choose youtube here or i choose h.264 here like this one for example but i'll choose youtube here and go ahead and press export file you could actually configure some more advanced options over here too well i'll press export file it's going to ask me where i want to put it let me just go ahead and put it in the movies folder that i designated in the beginning i'll press save and you can see over here is showing you how fast it's exporting again this is 13 seconds so it should go really really fast and here the export is done over here in my movies folder i'm gonna press spacebar and there it is there's my three clips edit it together and export it and i could upload it to wherever i want from here so there were a few things that i had a really hard time with as a professional editor just because i'm used to a different workflow but if you're just starting out i think you're gonna be really pleasantly surprised with what you could do here the few things the way you work with audio and music was a little bit uh not as simple as it should be and the way the text were a little bit limited i think that could be improved as well but i think they update this all the time so hopefully those do improve over time as well that's shotcut video editor simple tutorial again make sure you check out some of the resources i mentioned in the description like other tutorials and other video editors i do try to make video editing as simple as possible and i have ton of tutorials on it on this channel and howfinity.com thanks again for watching please give it a thumbs up and i'll see you next time

Channel: Howfinity

Views: 56,751

Keywords: how to use shotcut video editor, How to Use Shotcut Free Video Editor, shotcut tutorial, shotcut video editor tutorial, how to use shotcut, shotcut video editor, shotcut tutorial for beginners, free video editor, video editor, how to use shotcut for beginners, shotcut 2021, best free video editing software, free video editing software, best free video editor, shotcut tutorial! super easy video editing!, howfinity, how to

Id: nIlxJqtnTtU

Length: 26min 19sec (1579 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 20 2021