Shotcut Video Editor Tutorial

hi everyone kevin here today i'm excited to show you how you can both get and use the free and open source shot cut video editor a few weeks back on my channel i asked all of you what video editor you want to see me pull a tutorial together for and shotcut came out at the top of that list and there's a good reason why it's a very versatile and powerful video editor when i look at all of the videos on my channel shotcut could produce and edit all of those videos we're going to start off with the basics of first off how do you even get shot cut then we're going to walk through editing we'll walk through filters and keyframes basically by the end of this video you'll be proficient in how to use shotcut if you want to follow along i've also included a link to all of the video files that i'm going to use in today's tutorial alright well why don't we jump on the pc and first off i'll show you how you can get shot cut to get the shot cut video editor head to the website shotcut.org once you land on the homepage downloading it is very easy there's large red text that says click to download click on that link this drops us on the download page and there are quite a few ads on the download page and some of them even look like download links make sure to ignore that and scroll down just a tiny bit where you'll find the actual download links now here on the site it automatically determines what operating system you're using you could install it on linux mac windows whatever operating system you have you can install the shotcut video editor down below you need to select whether you have a 64-bit system or a 32-bit system if you're not sure which one you have on windows you can go to the start menu and then type in system information within system information under system type you'll see whether it's a 64-bit or an 86-based pc 64 you're going to select the 64-bit installation and for x86 select the 32-bit windows installer go ahead and download and install shot cut and then rejoin this tutorial if you're interested in following along and this is by far the best way to learn how to use new software i've included a link in the description to all of the video files that i'm going to be using in today's tutorial i'm going to be pulling together a commercial for the kevin cookie company and i sure could use your help and who knows maybe you'll do an even better job at editing than i will and maybe i could use your commercial if you don't mind once you finish downloading and installing shot cut go ahead and open the application once you open it up you'll land on a screen that looks like this and at first glance it might appear a little bit daunting there are all these different buttons and all these different frames don't worry i'm going to walk you through step by step how you can use this video editor and let's first focus our attention right here on the right hand side under new project and recent projects now if this is your first time using shotcut we need to set up a new project first off you can define what the project folder is or where you're going to save the project on your pc i'm going to just leave this set to the default that seems like a good location next we can give this project a name i'm going to be working on a commercial for the kevin cookie company so i'm going to call mine the kevin cookie company official commercial next you could select the video mode now you could choose what the resolution is and what the frame rate is for your video if you don't select anything and leave it set on automatic it'll simply use the first clip that you bring into your playlist to set the video mode in most cases that should be good enough so you could just leave it set to automatic over on the right hand side if we already had a video in progress we could go back and jump to a recent project in this case i want to start from scratch so i'm simply going to click on start this now drops us in shot cut and we can start pulling together a video first off let's look at this section here called playlist in the playlist this is where we're going to add all of our video files our photos our music and we're going to use this to start building our video there are two ways we could bring content in you can click on open file up above this will open up a file picker where you can select your various media files that you want to use alternatively you can also drag and drop files in i personally prefer that so i'll drag and drop some files in i've now added all of my clips into the playlist so here i see my music file and i see all of my video files now once again if you want to follow along there's a link in the description with all of these video files now by default when you drop files in for the first time it'll show it in a list format if you don't like that view you can very easily change it if we go down below we can switch it from a detailed view to a card view you can also change it to a grid view and here i could change it back to the detail view now i personally like the icon or the grid view so i'm going to select that over on the right hand side we also have this menu of additional actions when i click on that i could also adjust the view mode here right now i have it set to icons if i go down to thumbnails currently it's set to small thumbnails but i could also view large thumbnails here if i select that i see larger versions of the thumbnail i prefer the small one so i'm gonna switch it back along with being able to adjust how you view your files in the playlist you can also organize your items in the playlist here once again if i click on the action menu i can go and i can sort by name or i could sort by date but i can also even just sort based on whatever order i want for instance i could click on a clip and then i could simply drag and drop it to where i want it to appear right now all my clips are in the correct order so i'm happy with where they appear over on the right hand side of the screen this is where we could preview individual clips that we pulled into the playlist and once we start pulling together our video on the timeline we can also preview the overall video that we're pulling together to be able to preview a clip i can simply double click on it and it starts playing off on the right hand side i have all of my typical media player controls i could jump to the beginning i could jump forward i could pause i could even zoom in or if i want i could add a grid to make sure my cup is centered and it looks like it's a little off-centered here down below you'll see the timeline and in a moment we'll get to what all of the functionality is on the timeline but before we do that i want to orient you to the overall experience that we see here up above on the toolbar once again you could open additional files onto the playlist we're going to get back to open other file types in a little bit we could save our file and especially if you're making a lot of edits i would recommend doing this every once in a while just to make sure you don't lose any of the edits that you've made now over on the right hand side we have all of these different buttons and these open up different frames for instance one of our frames is called the playlist if i click on that that would bring it back here i have my timeline i could bring up filters and that brings up another frame or pane over on the right hand side and i have a few others as well as we go throughout this tutorial we'll touch on what some of those can do when i click on one of these options you notice that it opened up a frame over here if i don't like this positioning i can click on this icon right here and this will cause the frame to float i could either leave it on top or i could position it throughout this interface so i can organize all of the frames how i want them to appear now i'll simply dock it right over here and let's say i don't want the filter view i could simply click on the x icon and that'll hide that frame if i want to bring it back again i could simply go over here and click on filters again and that'll bring it back so don't worry if you click on the x you don't lose it you could very easily bring it back into the experience up on top you have a few options here logging editing fx and so on and so forth depending on the task that you're doing shotcut has optimized views for those tasks so here for instance if i click on fx you see that it switches it up where filters are now the dominant frame with keyframes if i click on color it'll adjust it so my video editing and color functions are on the right hand side if i click on audio that'll bring my audio controls in so these are optimized views depending on what task you want to do today in this tutorial we're going to spend most of our time in the editing view which is the view that we just walked through that should give you an overview of the interface of shotcut but we have a commercial that we need to pull together so we need to get to work so first off let's start editing some video clips the first way that you could edit a video clip is simply click on the clip and once again it'll start playing in the preview pane over on the right hand side this clip is a little bit long for the commercial i open the oven i put it on top of the oven i don't want to include all of that so i want to trim the video clip shot cut makes that very easy to trim a video clip let's go down to the timeline view right here and we could drag the in point or the start point to where we want the clip to start and just the same way we could click on the end point or the out point and we could select where we want the clip to end now it's fairly easy to drag and drop the in and out point but we could also use shortcut keys to make it even easier instead let me play the clip and right before the oven opens so right at this point i want it to cut in once again instead of dragging the end point i can press the i key on my keyboard and that will set the in point now i can play it and here i'm going to pull the cookies out of the oven and at that point that's good and i want that to be the out point once again i could drag this to the out point or i can press the o key and that'll also set the out point now that i'm all done setting the end point and the out point i want to get it onto my timeline so i could start building a video there are a few different ways i can do this i can simply click on the video file up here and i could drag it down onto the timeline alternatively i could click on this plus icon and this will append it to anything else that's currently on the timeline currently there's nothing there so it'll simply place it at the beginning i could also click on this down caret and that'll overwrite what's currently on the timeline but once again there's nothing on the timeline so all of these at least right now are effectively the same i'll click on the down carrot and that'll pull my oven shot onto the timeline down below now that i've added my first item onto the timeline you see it appearing down here this is the first track and this is also the topmost layer if i want to give more space to my timeline i can click here on the interface and i could drag it up so once again the interface itself allows you to position things however you want so it has a lot of customization i can add another track by right clicking and i can add an audio track or a video track for now i'm going to just stick with this one track next i want to start adding some more content and i want to show you another way that you can edit your video clips this time i'm going to click on the second clip of my video which is milk pouring into a glass i'm going to click on this and drag it directly down onto my timeline and i'll position it here for now now that i've added a second clip onto the timeline i want to show you a few different ways that we could visualize the timeline right now you see the timeline start filling up if i want to zoom out i can click on here to view more of my timeline or i can zoom in if i want to make very specific edits on my timeline to the right of that i also have the option to have the timeline fit the entire space available when i click on this video clip right now there's some empty space between the two of them i can simply click on this clip and i can drag it to where i want it to appear in the timeline when i bring it close to the first clip that i have in the timeline you see that there's kind of a magnetic effect it sticks to it right up above there's an option that's toggle snapping it looks like a magnet because it pulls it in if i were to turn that off i could position it wherever i want but it won't snap on the clip i personally like leaving this on so i'm going to turn on toggle snapping and i'm going to adjust my first clip so it sits right up against the first one now that we have this clip on the timeline we can also edit directly on the timeline so you can edit on both the timeline or you could edit up in the preview pane it really depends on what your preference is and where you prefer editing i personally like editing on the timeline so i'm going to show you how you can do it down here now to play on the timeline you can press the spacebar key and that'll start playing on the timeline spacebar also works up in the preview pane when i hit spacebar here you see the milk start pouring now it's a fairly long clip of milk pouring and i probably don't want to include this whole thing so editing is going to help out here now if i go to the beginning of the clip i want to get it right when the milk starts pouring i think that's a good moment to do it now just like before in the preview pane we hit the i key to set the end point i can do that again here now when i press the i key you see that it cuts off the beginning of the clip or i trim the beginning except it leaves some empty space here now i could drag and drop and put it up against the first clip before but once again that's a bit of work i'm going to undo that change i could undo up here or you could use ctrl z which is a windows shortcut key i'm going to undo and now instead of just pressing i i'm going to press shift together with i when i do that it trims the beginning plus it moves the clip up against the first one so here now you see the milk pouring and i just need a moment of that and that should be good now i want to set the out point and just like before we can press o to define the out point now there was nothing after the clip so nothing else has to be pulled in however let's say i had another clip out here and i didn't want that empty space i could press shift and o and that will pull in all of the other clips now along with trimming the beginning and trimming the end of the clip i also want to show a few other shortcut keys that'll be helpful as you're editing let's say with this milk clip for whatever reason i wanted to split it in the middle now i can press the s key s for split and that'll split the clip in half and now you see i have two copies of the clip i'm going to undo that because i don't really need to split the clip but that's a very helpful shortcut key also if you were to split it and let's say you wanted to delete one of these pieces or let's say you no longer need this clip you can press the delete key or you could press the x key when you press the x key that'll pull in all other clips but for now i don't need to do that so i'm going to leave it as is but those are some of the core editing shortcut keys that you can use there are lots of valuable shortcut keys that you could use in shotcut and i've included a link in the description when you use shortcut keys it'll make you a lot more efficient and also fast at editing your videos now two other items that i want to show before we jump into pulling in more content i also want to show how you could very easily insert a transition let's say that between the oven and the pouring milk i want to have a fade it's extremely easy to do i simply click on the pouring clip and i drag it over so there's a little bit of overlap between the two clicks when i let go you see that it's now added a fade transition so if i play it now you'll see that as i pull it out of the oven it nicely fades to the pouring of milk the last item i want to show on the timeline is what if you want to move clips around and reorganize things so let's say that actually i want to start with pouring the milk into the glass and then i want the oven to come second i should be able to just drag and drop right well if i click on the pouring milk i could pull it up to the front but here you see that by default it overwrites my oven shot so it's removed some of that clip i don't want that right up here there's another button here called ripple trim and drop what that means is when i click on the pouring milk into the glass and i pull it up to the front it's going to do a ripple move what that means is when i insert something here all subsequent clips will be automatically moved so if you want to drag and drop things around your timeline and reposition things i recommend checking this option to ripple trim and drop now i don't need my milk at the beginning so i'm going to simply move it back behind the other clip and there too you see the ripple taking effect now that we've looked at some of the core editing capabilities we need to get some more content into our commercial you can't just have pouring milk there has to be more than that here i want to insert the rest of my clips i'm going to click on this clip right here i'm going to press the shift key and then select the last item so all of these items will be highlighted next i could simply drag and drop the clips onto my timeline here i could position them where i want them to appear and i want them to appear right after the pouring of milk so i'll let go right there and this will now insert all of my clips now that i have all of the clips on the timeline i'm going to go through and edit them this is a good opportunity now to practice some of the shortcut keys that we just walked through once again to start playing on the timeline simply hit the space bar and that will start playing here we see a glass of milk filling up and i want to start the video clip probably right about here when the glass is about half full now just like we covered a moment ago to set the entry point we press the i key now if i just press i alone that leaves a big gap here i'm going to undo that with ctrl z and if i press shift i it'll set that as the start point for the clip but it'll also remove the gap we're going to let the glass of milk fill for a little bit and that's probably about enough time that we need and once again i could set the out points by pressing the o key on my keyboard now if i just press o alone it'll leave that gap so i'm going to undo that and instead i'm going to press shift and o and that'll apply the ripple trim where it pulls all the other clips into that gap and i don't have to fill in that gap so it really depends on what you're trying to do next i want to go through and edit the rest of my video so here we see a stack of cookies and i want to get it right before the hand comes in so here i'm going to click on the timeline so right before the hand appears and once again i'll press shift and i to cut the clip here we see the hand come in and grab a cookie and then i want to stop so here i'll press shift and o next i see this nice close-up shot of the cookie we only need that for about a moment and i'll press shift and o to set the end point of that clip next we're going to have a shot of the cookie falling down into the milk i only want the very beginning part of this clip where the first cookie falls here i'm going to play it and there the cookie has fallen so i'll press the out point there next we see the glass of milk and the cookie falls in the milk i only want a few moments where we see the milk ripple a little bit and then i'll set the out point next you have your handsome narrator kevin here who's eating a cookie and we'll just do that for a moment and then i'll set the out point this next clip is one of my favorite ones but this is where the stack of cookies is growing and this is already edited so there's no additional editing needed on this next clip we have a flyover of the cookies where you see all of the detail i think we'll leave that for maybe a second or second a half and then i'll press shift and o to set the end point here we have another shot where the cookie is disappearing and it stays on a little bit long at the end so i'll hover over and let's press shift o there to set the out point lastly we have this shot of the cookies where it flies out over the cookies and then you see cookie monster followed by the logo now at the beginning i wanted to start in motion it kind of starts off stopped and then there the motion starts so i'm going to press shift and i and that'll set the beginning spot of this clip so it immediately jumps into the flying motion and then you see the logo at the end and really those are all of the edits i want to make to my video we've now finished all of the main cutting to our video now i want to show you how you can apply some filters to clips on your timeline when i go back to the second clip where we see me pouring milk it's a little bit dark especially when i compare it to this third clip this one's a lot brighter am i out of luck and do i have to re-film it no luckily i can use filters to increase the brightness to apply a filter let's click on this clip and then up on the top toolbar there's an option for filters let's click on that this opens up the filters pane over on the right hand side and you'll see that it's the milk pouring mp4 clip so that's the clip that we have selected to insert a filter let's click on the plus icon this opens up a menu of all of my filters that i can apply by default it drops me on the favorite view and here i can see some of the most popular filters to the right of that i have the option for video and this shows me a comprehensive set of all of the different filters i can apply if i want to make one of these filters a favorite i could click over here and this will add it to my favorites list there are all sorts of video filters in here you could do things like chroma key you could apply masks you could apply stabilization it's a very comprehensive list of filters over to the right there are also some audio filters and we'll come back to that in a moment when i insert audio into the timeline for now let's go to favorite and let's select brightness once you select brightness we see that the filter has been applied i can also apply additional filters if i click on the plus icon and you could also remove filters by clicking on the remove icon down below i can set the brightness level let's go a lot brighter on this that's already looking a lot better this now matches the next clip a lot better for many filters there are also presets but for brightness there's nothing else to set so all of this looks good i can now close out my filters and here if i go to the timeline and hit play you'll see now that the color of the second clip much better matches the third clip next i want to add some audio to my timeline it's not a good commercial if it doesn't have any audio now you see many of my clips already have some audio in them for instance when i'm opening the oven you hear some of that noise i don't want that to appear in my video so i can mute all of the sounds on this track or on my video track to add an audio track i'm going to right click down here and i want to add an audio track now that i have an audio track i want to bring some audio down to this track now i'm simply going to click on this audio and i could drag it down onto this track now currently it's set to insert so if i paste it here it'll move all of the video files to the end of the track because it inserted it i'm going to click on undo and here up above for now i'm going to turn off ripple trim and drop now i can click on the audio file pull it down to this new track and now it's going to overwrite whatever's here on this track when i drop it you'll now see that it appears alongside all of my video clips one thing you'll notice is that my audio file is a lot longer than my video file so i want to trim my audio file so it's only as long as the video luckily that's very easy to do let's zoom in a little bit to the beginning now you notice the audio doesn't start right away and i want it to kick in right when the video starts let's play it to see where a good spot to start is so i'm going to have it start right about here a moment before the drum kicks in here i'm going to click on s and that will split the clip i'll click on the beginning portion and then simply hit the delete key and that'll remove that part of the clip and now i can drag the audio file to the beginning so when we go to the beginning of the clip you now see that the music plays right at the beginning as i'm pulling the cookies out of the oven now at the end i want to set the end point for the audio file so i'll zoom in and just like we did before we can press o to set the out point now that we've inserted the audio i want to show you some of the audio filters and maybe the most useful one is to set a fade when i hover over the end of the audio file you see this circle icon appear i can click on that and then drag it to set a fade you'll see a little tool tip that tells me how long the fade will go on for here it's about a two second fade out if i release there we can now play and see how the fade works so there the clip fades out just like before we can also open up filters if we'd rather do it through the filter frame here when i have the audio clip selected i can go up to filters on the top bar and here you see that i have a filter applied i could also click on the plus icon click on audio and i have all sorts of different audio filters that i can apply including fade in and also fade out now along with setting a fade in or fade out one thing that might happen occasionally is maybe the volume is not loud enough there's an audio filter that allows you to increase the volume once again when you're in the filter view click on the plus icon and within the list there's the gain or the volume filter and that will allow you to increase the volume on your audio i'm done selecting filters for my audio so i'm going to click on the x up here and this will bring me back to the main editing view next i want to show you how you can bring text into your video and there are two different ways you can do it you can bring text directly into one of the video clips via a filter or you can bring in text so it sits over multiple clips first i want to show you how you could do it for an individual clip when i have a clip selected let's go up to filters on top let's click on the plus icon and if we go over to favorites down at the bottom of the list you'll see an option to bring in text you can then type in your text you could position the size and you could edit all of the details of that text alternatively we can add another track i'm going to add a video track i've now added a new video track and this is the top most layer up above i can click on open other and i can insert all types of things the one that i care about though is inserting text so i'll click on text this opens up a dialog where i can create my text i'm going to type something in i could also select the background color and once i'm done i'll click on ok i can now go in and i can modify details of my text and once i'm ready to bring it onto my timeline i'll simply click on overwrite if i go back now i see now that i have text inserted on one of my tracks and when i hit play you now see the text overlaying the video i don't want to include this text so for now i'm going to delete this track i could simply right click and then click on remove track next i want to show you how you can use key frames to zoom in or to zoom out here towards the end of my video i have a clip where i'm holding a cookie it'd be kind of neat to have a zoom in effect as i'm eating the cookie to do that once again let's click on the clip and this time let's go up to filters next i'll click on the plus icon and for this one this should be one of the favorites with zoom in and zoom out here i see size position and rotate as one of the filters i'll click on this one now that i've applied this filter i'm going to decrease the size of my timeline just to give me a little more space to see next we want to use keyframes to help with this so i'll go to the top and click on keyframes i've pulled in keyframes over here and then i have my filters over here with keyframes you could indicate when you want the filter to start you could also indicate when you want the filter to end for instance if i only want it to say zoom in for half of the clip i could set the start point to midway through but actually i want it to start right at the beginning so i can also drag it to start at the beginning i also have these black circles appearing i could also click up here but this is the first simple keyframe now i want this zoom effect to zoom in to about let's say 120 percent so i'll type in 120 percent here next i want this zoom in to happen throughout the whole clip so i'm going to use a simple keyframe and drag it all the way over so now if we play the clip you'll see that there's a nice little zoom effect using keyframes once i'm all done i'll close out of the keyframe view and i'll close out of the filter view and i think my video looks pretty good now i'm going to pull the timeline up again so i can see the timeline and once again i can click on zoom timeline to fit this all looks pretty good and i think the commercial came together really nicely hopefully you were able to follow along once we're all done and we want to export our video we go up to the option on top that says export once we click on that that'll open up a frame for export now right now it's a little small so i'm going to drag and drop this down just so we can see more of the details of export here i could choose what i want to export i could export the timeline that's what we pulled together down here with all of our edits but you also have the option of just exporting the playlist or an individual item or a source but i want to export the timeline so i'm going to select this option next we could select how we want to export it and there are all sorts of options on here i usually upload all of my videos to youtube so i'll select youtube as the option but you also have some other good options near the top in fact you can even make gif animations from your timeline view once you're all done simply click on export file next you need to choose where you want to export the file to i'm going to put this item on my desktop and then click on save this now opens up another pane on the right hand side and it lists out all the jobs that are currently being done here i see that it's pulling together and rendering my video once we're all done rendering the video here i now see a new video on my desktop let's open this up to see how it turned out [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Applause] [Music] all right well that was a quick look at how you can use the shot cut video editor it's amazing what you can pull together with it once again it's very versatile and powerful if you found this video helpful please give it a thumbs up if you want to see more videos like this in the future hit that subscribe button if you want to see me cover any other topics let me know in the comments down below alright well that's all i had for you today i hope you enjoyed and as always i hope to see you next time bye you

Channel: Kevin Stratvert

Views: 922,331

Keywords: kevin stratvert, shotcut, shotcut tutorial, beginners, shot cut, video editor, video, editor, editing, video editing, shotcut video editor tutorial, shotcut tutorial for beginners, shotcut video editor, shotcut transitions, shotcut effects, 2020, add text, review, download tutorial, audio editing, slow motion, export for youtube, youtube, youtube video, edit, video edit, edit video, free, gaming, app, game, cut, split, shortcut, download, install, help, walkthrough, guide

Id: PCMcyYAtRzw

Length: 31min 53sec (1913 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2020