EDIT VIDEOS WITH SHOTCUT
Create a picture-in-picture effect
Creating a picture-in-picture (PIP), where a smaller video floats on top of the main video, is useful if you’re producing an instructional film or simply want to provide commentary on a home video you’re sharing with friends. Initially, it’s not clear how you create a PIP in Shotcut. Simply stacking up videos on your timeline obscures everything on the lower layers, but PIP can be achieved using filters.
If you’re new to Shotcut, click Open File at the top to select and import your videos, then click Playlist and drag them to your timeline at the bottom. To create a PIP video, position your main video – the one that will occupy the full screen – on the timeline, then press Ctrl+i to add a new video track. This will appear above the existing video. Now locate the video that you want to appear in the PIP and drag it on to the new timeline, positioning it at the point where it first comes into view.
Click the uppermost video to select it, then click the Filters tab (at the top left of the timeline). This will contain a block bearing the same name as the filename of the overlaid video on your timeline. Click the ‘+’ below that block to add a new filter, select Video at the top, then select the ‘Size and Position’ filter. In the preview window, drag the corners of your video to resize it accordingly (see screenshot above right).
Once that’s done, you can export your finished PIP video (click Export at the top, leave the format as Default, then click Export File).
Fix out-of-sync audio
It can be horribly distracting when the image and picture of your video aren’t in sync – and it’s particularly obvious when the film shows someone talking, and their words are half a second or so ahead of or behind the movement of their lips.
Fortunately this is one of the easier problems to rectify in Shotcut. Rightclick your clip on the timeline and select Detach Audio (see screenshot below left). This drops the audio on to a separate timeline where you can drag it independently of the video until the two are in alignment. For precise adjustments, first zoom into the timeline using the slider (top-centre of the timeline).
Add text and on-screen graphics
Basic video editors let you type text directly on to your video to create captions, but with Shotcut you get much greater control. First, select the video track you want to caption. Click the Filters tab at the top left of the timeline, type text into the search box, then choose one of the three options: Text 3D, Text Simple and Text HTML.
If you want to make the text stand out, select Text 3D, type your caption in the Text box, then use the sliders to adjust its appearance (see screenshot above right). Alternatively, to spice up a home video with rolling credits, choose Text HTML, then click Simple Scroll in the list of templates. This opens an HTML file that will contain the credits roll. Don’t worry if you don’t know how to use HTML - the editor opens in a simple mode that’s as easy to use as a word-processing program. Type or paste your credits in the window, press Ctrl+s to save, then close the editor. Choose whether you want the text to scroll up, down, left or right by picking your favoured option from the Direction dropdown menu in the Filters pane, then preview the result by playing your video. On page 56, we explain how to use keyframes to set text to only appear for a certain duration.
Bring colours into line
Every time you shoot a new piece of footage, your camera re-calculates the correct exposure and colour balance, as it does when capturing photos. With photos, it doesn’t matter if one picture is significantly different to the next, but inconsistencies like this in a video can be jarring – particularly if brightness levels suddenly change when filming a landscape, for example.
To compensate, Shotcut lets you use a process known as colour grading. Select the shot that doesn’t conform to the tone
of the overall video and, in the Filters panel, select Colour Grading. Now use the controls for Shadows, Midtones and Highlights to adjust the darkest, median and lightest tones in the image – the vertical slider beside each colour wheel sets how bright or dark they are.
Don’t worry if you take your edits too far – you can press the back arrow above each one (see screenshot right) to revert to its original position.
Use keyframes to make things happen on cue
The secret to a good edit is making things happen exactly when they have the most impact – even if what’s happening is just a fade, zoom or the appearance and disappearance of a caption. Shotcut lets you control the timing of any event through the use of keyframes.
For example, in the ‘Add text and on-screen graphics’ tip on page 55, we let the scrolling credits last for the duration of the clip to which we’d applied it. However, what if you only want to show a brief caption or subtitle for, say, three seconds? This is where keyframes can help.
With the video clip you want to edit already on the timeline, add a new text filter by clicking the Filters tab above the timeline, searching for text, then clicking ‘Text: Simple’. Type the text you want in the box, and (optional) drag the corners of the frame around the text on your video clip to resize it.
Next, click Keyframes on the toolbar at the top of the screen. This will isolate your selected clip and put a green bar at the beginning, and a red bar at the end. These represent the points where the text appears and disappears.
Drag the green bar in a little way from the left, and the red bar in from the right to make the text appear a couple of seconds after the clip starts, and disappear a few seconds later for a more professional result. Now click Timeline on the toolbar again to return to the general editing view.