Edit your videos using multiple timelines
What you need: Openshot Time required: Two hours
Watch any TV show – even the news – and you’ll notice that the camera angle changes every few seconds. Engaging video is rarely a single, unbroken shot, but an ever-changing montage that tells a story.
Achieving that with a basic video-editing tool, using one timeline, is a slow process – and making changes
later on is difficult. Why? Because when each shot presses up against its neighbour, you can only change its start and end points by deleting it, going back to your source material, pasting in a replacement and repeating the edit.
More advanced video-editing tools instead use multiple timelines, letting you position overlapping clips and then move each one without affecting its neighbours. This lets you build more dynamic montages, cut back and forth between complementary shots and work through your video more quickly.
This isn't as complicated as it sounds. Just follow our instructions for using the multiple timeline abilities of Openshot, a free open-source video editor.
1 Find your way around Openshot
Openshot (free from www. openshot.org) has an interface that follows industry conventions. Once you know your way around its panels, you can easily try something more ambitious. Even professional software like Final Cut Pro and Premiere, which are used for editing news reports, TV shows and feature films, bear a striking similarity.
It has three primary panels, which you can think of as your paints, brushes and canvas – see screenshot right.
The Project Files panel 1 is where you drag and drop the assets – still photos, video clips and so on – that you want to use in your video. Think of these assets as your paint pots, from which you’ll take the colours that will be mixed on the timeline.
Openshot has multiple timelines 2 . These are stacked on top of each other at the bottom of the window. Think of the timelines as your paint brushes. You’ll use them to position clips, just as you’d use paint brushes to place dabs of colour at specific points on the canvas.
The preview window 3 is the canvas itself. Watching your rough cut come together here is like taking a step back from your painting to see how it looks from a distance. Only when it looks good