MASTER OPENSHOT
Professional video editing that’ll cost you nothing
JUST HOW MANY PHOTOS AND VIDEO CLIPS have you accumulated over the years? Whether you’ve got dedicated equipment or just love snapping and videoing on your phone, now is the time to do something creative with them. OpenShot is a brilliant video-editing tool that’s relatively simple to learn, yet packed with features that enable you to turn last holiday’s rough video footage into a polished movie you’ll be happy to show to friends and family. In this tutorial, we run through the program’s main features to help you bring your footage together, edit it, add special effects and titles, and finally export it for sharing with others.
The tutorial has been written for Windows users, but can be easily adapted to work in Linux, too—we recommend downloading the latest 64-bit appimage and running that directly, rather than installing the outdated version of OpenShot through your package manager.
Note: If you’re running the current stable version of OpenShot (2.4.4), you need to download Blender 2.79b ( www.blender.org/download/previous-versions) if you want to create animated titles with it. If you’re running the daily version of OpenShot, it should work with the latest version of Blender (2.80 or later). –NICK PEERS 1
COLLECT AND ADD YOUR FILES Start by dragging and dropping videos, pictures, and audio to the Project Files pane—a range of formats is supported. Use the “Video,” “Audio,” and “Image” tabs of the Filter box to filter the view as required. Press Ctrl-S to save your project.
>> You’re now ready to start putting your movie together using the Timeline pane at the bottom. Five tracks are set up by default—Track 5 at the top, Track 1 at the bottom. Think of these as layers. Anything placed on Track 1 is your “background,” with all other elements appearing on top of it—more on this later.
>> For now, we’re going to start with two simple tracks: one video stream containing your video clips (including any sound) and still images, and a separate audio stream for background music. Right-click “Track 5” and choose “Remove,” followed by “Track 4” and “Track 3.” Click “V” next to a track and choose “Rename Track” if you want to make it more identifiable.
>> Now drag your first clip or image from the Project Files pane on to the video track and place it right at the start of the timeline. Your clip appears as a draggable object, its length corresponding to the duration of the track. The play-head/ruler above the track helps indicate the length of each track, as well as your overall movie. If you’re working with short clips, you may wish to adjust the magnification of the ruler; click the “+” and “–” buttons (or drag the slider) to adjust the intervals up or down from the default 15 seconds [ Image A]. 2
PREVIEW AND TRIM CLIPS Use the Video Preview window to see how your editing is progressing, providing a rough view of your video and audio tracks, plus any additional effects applied. Use the playback controls underneath or adjust the playback position precisely using the play-head/ ruler. Some clips may be perfectly formed, but chances are one or two need trimming, while other, longer files might benefit from being split into separate clips. Why choose the latter option? One reason is to introduce fades or other transition effects within a single clip.
>> It’s possible to edit clips directly on the timeline— just position the play-head at the point where you’d like to split your clip, right-click the clip, and choose “Slice > Keep Left Side” to end the clip at that point, “Keep Right Side” to start the clip at the play-head point, or “Keep Both Sides” to split the clip in two. Note that the original clip is left untouched.
>> You can also trim clips from the Project Files pane—a trimmed copy appears next to the original here—enabling you to produce multiple clips from a single file. First, right-click your chosen clip in the Project Files window and choose “Split Clip.” Use the slider or click “Play” to locate the exact point where you’d like your edited clip to start. Click “Start” and you
see its thumbnail appear inside the “Start” button. Now position the slider where you want the edited clip to end, and click “End.”
>> If you make a mistake or want to change your start and end points, click “Clear” to start again. Give your edited clip a suitably descriptive name to help identify it, then click “Create” [ Image B].
You see it appear as a new entry in the Project Files window. The “Split Clip” window remains open, enabling you to create more edited clips from this video file if you need to. Once you’re done, simply close the window. 3
ADD MORE CLIPS (AND PHOTOS) Now add your second clip by dragging it into place on the timeline. Drag it so it bumps up to the clip or image on its left. Play back your movie and you’ll see one clip goes directly into the next. Sometimes this can appear a little jarring. To smooth the switch between each clip, drag the second clip left so it overlaps the first clip slightly—for a couple of seconds, say. OpenShot now automatically applies a fade effect—look for the semi-translucent blue object with a small “V” at the top appearing over your second clip—to ease the transition between scenes. Play back the clip and you should find clip one fades seamlessly into clip two. More on transition effects later.
>> You can now quickly stitch together a rough edit of your basic movie by dragging and dropping clips into position as outlined. Again, use the preview window to
see how it’s progressing—you can use the play and forward/ rewind buttons underneath it, or click and drag the play-head (the red vertical line) on the timeline into your chosen position. 4
MORE ADVANCED TRANSITIONS We’ve already seen how you can quickly create a basic fade effect between scenes or images by overlapping clips. But OpenShot offers a veritable smorgasbord of different transition effects—hundreds, in fact—all lurking on the “Transitions” tab of the Project Files pane. One way to add these to your movie is to simply select one from the list and drag it on top of a movie clip on your timeline. Too much choice? Click the “Common” button to hide them all apart from a handful of understated wipes, circles, and the previously mentioned fade.
>> That’s all well and good, but what about the fade effect you created earlier? Thankfully, you can change its transition type without having to delete it and start again from scratch. Click the “V” button next to your first transition and choose “Properties.” Right-click the “Source” property (currently set to “fade.svg”), and expand the “Transitions” menu to reveal the common options mentioned earlier [ Image C].
>> Select one of these, then watch a preview on the preview window. Still not what you’re looking for? Right-clicking “Source” and opening the “Transition” menu again now reveals all available transitions, split into 18 submenus, ordered alphabetically. Once you’ve selected a new effect, you can fine-tune it further with all the other available properties. Perhaps the most important one is “End,” which sets the duration of the effect. They’re 10 seconds by default, so try reducing this to three to five seconds, then previewing the effect. 5
TRANSITION TIPS While it’s tempting to go overboard with these transitions, consistency and simplicity always pay dividends, so find an effect you like, take the time to set it up carefully, then apply it to the rest of your movie. To do this, first delete any other transition effects you’ve put on the timeline (right-click the transition and choose “Remove Transition”). Now select your original carefully configured transition, and press Ctrl-C followed by Ctrl-V to duplicate it. Drag this new transition into position at the start of the following clip, then repeat the process for all the clips in your movie.
>> Generally, one transition is fine, but you can bend this rule for longer movies by setting up a more elaborate effect (a wipe, say) to signal the end of a major scene. 6
ADD EFFECTS TO YOUR CLIPS When it comes to injecting effects into your video clips, use the “Time” option on the right-click menu to reveal a host of options for speeding up or slowing down the clip, plus running it backward. You can also temporarily freeze (or freeze and zoom) the clip for up to 30 seconds—make sure you’ve positioned the playhead at the point you want this freeze to happen before applying the effect.
>> OpenShot also provides a selection of special effects via the Project File pane’s “Effects” tab; 14 are available, including Blur, Color Shift, Hue, and Pixelate. Just drag the effect on to your clip and you’ll see a small letter appear next to the filename or clip name—click this to configure it via the Properties pane. Available options vary according to the effect you’ve chosen.
7
ADD YOUR AUDIO TRACK If your video comes with its own audio track, this is combined with it on Track 1. You can adjust its volume via the Properties pane—scroll down and experiment with the “Volume” setting. Set it to 0.5 or 0.7 to reduce the volume, or increase it to 2, 3, or 4 if it’s too quiet. This should be enough, but it’s also possible to extract the audio as a separate clip.
>> Right-click the clip and choose “Separate Audio.” You’ll see two options: A single clip combines all audio channels as one, while if your clip has more than one audio channel (typically left and right), choose “Multiple Clips (each channel).” The audio clips sit on top of the current video clip, so now is the time to drag them off to their own separate tracks. At this point, you need to create new tracks. Click the green “+” underneath “Timeline,” then rename the track accordingly. A black square appears over the top of your video—that originates from the audio track. Open the audio track’s properties and set its “Scale” property to “None” to remove it. Once done, you can manipulate each audio track independently of the main video track.
>> You can also add additional audio tracks—such as a piece of music—to play over your movie. Drag the music file into the Project Files pane if you’ve not done so already, then switch to the “Audio” tab, and drag the file on to its own track. Preview your movie and you should hear the music track playing over the top of any audio in your original clips.
>> Again, you can adjust the volume of your music track using the “Volume” property, but manually tweaking different audio tracks can be awkward, particularly in relation to other tracks. A semi-automated solution is available in the form of the “Volume Mixing” property. For example, to give your soundtrack prominence over the background audio, set its “Volume Mixing” property to “Reduce” [ Image D ], then select each video clip on Track 1 in turn, and set its volume mixer to “Average.” If you’d prefer the music to be in the background, reverse the settings. 8
FINISHING TOUCHES Thanks to OpenShot’s support for multiple tracks, you can experiment with placing images, captions, or video clips on top of other clips—create a new track, drag your content on to it, and watch as it blocks out the video track completely. You can adjust its transparency using the overlaid element’s “Alpha” property (try 0.5 for a semi-transparent effect), or experiment with other settings, such as adjusting its size or position. Alternately, the Chroma Key effect is a rough and ready way to introduce green-screen effects by removing plain backgrounds. Just select your “Key Color” from the effect’s Properties, and use the “Fuzz” property to refine the edges [ Image E].
>> If you want to add text to your movie—in the form of a title, subtitles, or explanatory captions, say—check out the box opposite on adding titles. Use the static title tool to generate captions—most come with transparent backgrounds, enabling you to lay them over the top of your video clips without blocking them out. 9
EXPORT YOUR FINISHED VIDEO Once your movie is complete, choose “File > Export Video.” Most of the options here are selfexplanatory—choose a file format (the universal MP4 with h.264 codec in most cases), video profile (frame rate and resolution size), and quality setting. For best results, try to match the initial resolution of your video clips—failing that, try a lower quality setting. Finally, click “Export Video” and sit back. This can take some time to complete, even for a relatively short video, and depends on the speed and spec of your PC. A progress bar and estimated time until completion tell you how long you’ve got to wait, but the conversion rate will vary at certain points in your movie.
>> The progress bar speeds up and slows down during points of the conversion based on the number of tracks being processed, but in all likelihood, you’ll need to make a cup of tea for even a relatively short clip. If your exported movie experiences playback issues, try exporting again using different presets. Still no luck? Scale back the number of effects, or investigate upgrading your PC to handle the demands of video editing better. Look for a modern multicore processor, a minimum of 8GB of RAM, and a fast SSD drive.