Get started with Lightworks
Alex Cox shows how to improve your vids with post-production software.
It’s truly amazing what we all carry in our pockets. Never forget that your cell phone is a modern marvel, packing in a closet’s worth of tech and tools, particularly when compared to the equivalent from 20 — or even just 10 — years ago. And it’s great for on-thefly productivity. Complete albums have been made from scratch on mobiles, people have written novels and scripts, and to get to the point, entire movies have been shot on iPhones, and received cinematic releases. So that’s one piece of the puzzle — you have everything you need to collect footage.
To splice it, tweak it and give it that professional shine, why not lean on a tool that’s legitimately been used to put together Hollywood blockbusters? Lightworks, matured for 25 years in the movie industry, was part of the toolchain that produced the likes of Pulp Fiction and The Wolf of Wall Street. Its basic version is available for nothing, and while this free edition lacks a few more advanced features, it’s still plenty powerful, and there’s lots tucked away in its interface that’ll change the way you make home movies in the future.
1 INSTALL AND COLLECT
It’s the first step — you know what that means: Download Lightworks from www.lwks.com and get it installed. It pulls in any dependencies, such as Visual C++, for you, so you can get away with just clicking ‘Next’ until you’re done. There’s a step that asks you to assign a machine number, but this is only really relevant if you’re running multiple editing stations, so you can leave it at ‘1’.
Now is also a good time to collect your footage together into a single folder, presuming you’ve already taken it. If not, film at the highest resolution you can, and be aware that while we’ll take some steps to improving the end product, there’s nothing Lightworks can do to make bad footage good — check your focus carefully, try to keep your camera steady, and do arty things, such as blurring the background in-camera, rather than presuming you’ll be able to rely on software.
2 FIRST STEPS
Oddly, Lightworks didn’t install a ’Start’ menu shortcut on our test machine, so you may have to hunt its executable down in the ‘Program Files/ Lightworks’ folder to get it running.
Click ‘Create a new project’ on the initial splash screen, give it a name, then select the frame rate. This needs to match the frame rate of your footage, unless you want it sped up or slowed down; if you have footage with mixed frame rates or odd codecs, try a tool such as EyeFrame ( eyeframeconverter.wordpress.com) to normalise it before importing.
Alternatively, you can opt for a mixed rate project, but standardising everything is a far better option. Finally, click ‘Create’ when you’re happy.
3 INSERT VIDEO FILES
Lightworks opens to its project management window, labeled ‘Log’. Assuming you’ve collected your footage together in a single folder, head to the ‘Local files’ link at the top of the window, and navigate to that location. Video that’s not compatible with your project is greyed out — check the red markers in the info columns to discover why it won’t work. In this case, we’ve slipped some 20fps footage into our folder for a 30fps project [ Image A]. Double-click any file to both open a preview in the right-hand pane, and add it to your working library of clips,
which can be found under ‘Project Contents’. This can be further sorted into bins, if you’re working with a lot of clips. Click the plus icon next to ‘Bins’ on the left, enter a name, then drag videos from the ‘Clips’ folder into the appropriate bin. This is all nondestructive; it just keeps you organised. If you’re seeking inspiration or something particular for your movie, you can use the top links to dig through the Pond5 and Audio Network libraries of pre-cleared music, sounds and stock footage, though this usually incurs a fee.
CUT AND SPLICE 4
Click ‘Edit’ at the top to enter the editing suite. The footage you pulled in is in the top-left pane. Drag a clip into the bottom pane, and you add it to the current sequence. Drag another clip into the timeline overlapping it [ Image B], and you’ve created a basic cut between them; grab the red transport control line, place it at the start of your timeline, and hit ‘Play’ (or drag the transport control) to see a preview of what you’ve just done. We’re working non-destructively, so your original clips won’t be affected by anything we do from here on, and you can treat sequences in exactly the same way that you’d treat individual clips when you’re compiling your final video.
TOP AND TAIL 5
Let’s delve a little deeper into Lightworks’ editing interface, which is probably the most easy-to-comprehend video editor we’ve ever worked with. Hover your mouse over the end of a clip in its timeline, and you’ll see the edges of the video and audio portion light up white; drag this to trim the clip or lengthen a pre-trimmed clip. Hover over a transition so that the end of one clip and beginning of another are highlighted, and click. With both elements now highlighted yellow, you can drag this transition to affect precisely when the cut takes place, leaving each individual clip in exactly the same place; if you’d rather move the clip, deselect everything and simply drag it. Double-click the beginning of a clip and drag, and you move that and
subsequent clips, keeping the original transition point and any transitions you’ve made after it. If you want to edit video independently from audio, deselect the track you’re not interested in by clicking its title on the left of the timeline. A few minutes of play, and it’s a second-nature interface.
6 GOING BETWEEN
Straight cuts are the most frequent tool you’ll use to splice your clips together, but they’re by no means your only option. Overlap a couple of clips, right-click the intersection between them on the video track (the uppermost of the three, labeled ‘ V1’) and click the ‘Add’ button below ‘Transitions’ to see a selection of five basic effects, which can be applied between clips. Select one — we favour the Star Wars- esque ‘Wipe’ move — and it’s added as a new element. The default length is 30 frames; if there’s not enough overlap, Lightworks shortens the transition [ Image C] and lets you know. Transitions can be tweaked just as you’d alter a clip, so you can reposition them, or drag their edges to lengthen or shorten them. You can’t add a transition to the beginning or end of a transition (that would be mad), but if you want to try a different effect, you can rightclick and replace it with something else, delete the transition and start over, or select ‘Settings’ to go a bit more in-depth.
7 TRANSITION SETTINGS
Tweaking the settings of our transition takes us on our first foray into Lightworks’ VFX editor. Ignore the colour grading options for now, and look at the lower portion of the left window [ Image D] to find the controls specific to your transition. If you’ve chosen the wipe, for instance, you’ll find pattern options — bear in mind that the default has been selected, because it’s by far the most tasteful, so don’t go too mad here — as well as sliders, which affect the specific variables of the transition. If you’d like these to change over time, look for the pie chart icon to the left of individual sliders, which makes that particular setting respect keyframes. You get two by default, at the start and end of your transition, and you can add a new keyframe at the current transport point by clicking the ‘Plus’ button, and reposition it by dragging. Click one keyframe, adjust a linked slider and repeat for each one — if you now drag the transport control, you’ll see the slider change, proportionally, over time.
8 MORE TRACKS
Before we turn our mobile footage into gorgeously graded movie gold, which is surely what you’ve come for, let’s bury the lede even further, and show you a final few timeline tips. Head back to the ‘Edit’ window, and right-click the preview window above, to bring up a list of actions you can perform on the current sequence. This is where you can add new video tracks and audio tracks — though it’s often much easier to edit individual sequences with a single set of tracks, so think carefully as to whether you need this. Check out the ‘Remove’ submenu [ Image E], which is handy if you’re just sketching out a sequence: You can use it to automatically trim out any gaps in your timeline or remove unnecessary cuts. Speaking of which, splitting a track on the timeline requires a bit of roundabout trickery. Below your preview, you’ll see two blue buttons, which enable you to mark the start or end parts of a section of footage for