Hello, this is Cristi in today's video i'm going to
have a first look at a video editor software called
Shotcut. This is a free, open source, cross-platform video editor it runs on
Linux, Windows, Mac and I can't believe I didn't know
about it until now. I was looking for a way to play a
video in reverse and I found this on Google, I thought
hey, this is probably free, this is probably not very good.
But from the screenshots and the reviews and the feature list on their website
shotcut.org, it seems like a very capable piece of
software. So in my channel I've been covering
Premiere Pro which is not free. I've been covering
Camtasia videos and other video editing stuff
and I haven't covered much free software. So in this video, I haven't actually
installed this yet so I'm installing it right now for the first time.
I'm downloading it. If you go to the download page here you can download it
and install it and let's see what it can do.
OK so I've downloaded the software now, I'm going to install it
as we can see the GNU general public license here, so it is free, it is
open source. I'm gonna just install with the basics, the defaults
and let's see how fast it works. Apparently, the underlying
rendering and conversion and editing engine is ffmpeg which is also free.
And if you look here in the feature list, I mean it's quite impressive,
it seems to support 4k, Prores, all these formats and 4k
resolutions, and you know, a bunch of audio filters
and effects and mixing and all that stuff and then video effects
and editing features. So you know, I mentioned before it works on these
platforms so let's have a look. So now I've finished
installing it, let's close this, and let's run it!
OK so the program has launched now let me resize this window
a little bit to fit my screen here. OK, so it seems that
I can do a new project here in the project folder, a project name
I'm just not gonna bother moving stuff so I'm just gonna call it
'first look video' and video mode, so the resolution and frame rate
based on the first file you add that is fine by me and um
let's say if we wanted to edit video for YouTube maybe, we could probably do an
HD 1080p at 29.97 or 25 frames per second - let's try 25.
So if I specify this here apparently it's going
to keep it at that resolution no matter what video clips I'm adding so
let's click start. OK so there is nothing here
very specific, let's see. So the interface seems to be
of course like most other editors it's kind of dark
gray so we have a toolbar at the top here
it's a peak meter, okay you can turn it on and off
properties, on and off so these panels appear
here. A recent playlist timeline the timeline is down here okay
so let's find a video clip and import this clip onto the project so let
me see if I can drag this what happens to it
OK
OK, so it starts playing but also I'm seeing the properties for my clip
here 'driving' and recent files used in this
right side panel here and we can see the controls
at the bottom here similar to the other software
like Premiere and Camtasia so you can have the play buttons here you can start
and stop the playback and you can have zooming or you can zoom fit and you
can have a grid, that's fine, that's great. So that's the source and this is -
there's two tabs here they seem to be the 'source' and the 'project', now
I'm just getting familiarised with this, I haven't used it before.
So let's see 'view layout' let's say timeline
project, clip only project, playlist project, player.
OK, let's try 'timeline project' so this is the layout
you can use, now if you use the plus here you can add filters to this video file
but, I'm curious how to add this to the
timeline.
OK so this plus sign here allows you to add
the append or you know, add the clip to the track to the timeline and then
you can shift it like this with this hand selection tool.
So now I am actually on the timeline editing.
I'm not sure if this can be resized - yes, you can pull this up okay so there you
go. So this is how you modify your layout, you have these little dots on the sides
so you can change the layout and the size
of the different elements like this, and if you need to do multi-tracks
you have very very similar to premiere and all
the other software you have 'v1' such as 'video 1' which has
audio and video in a single track, which is a bit different then.
You can split them if you right-click on this, you can cut, copy, remove,
lift, and so on - detach audio which will separate the audio and the video.
Yes, as I assume, so if I want my video to not have audio, I can probably just
delete this audio track. There we go, so now the video is playing
with no sound, that is fine. So you have the timeline here if i drag
another video in here let's see
okay this is the same video but it's a different color
on it so if i want to go now and add this here
i can add a video track right clicking on the timeline
and now i want to add this clip driving unprocessed i can drag it down
here or not this track no i can't maybe
clicking the plus sign yes so apparently you can't really drag
stuff around maybe i'm not i'm missing something here but um
you you cannot drag stuff in here so you have to use this plus um
button to append to the current track and then
you have all these uh all these controls here to do with the track so
like for example here you can zoom in and out
see more or less and then you can detach audio like this
so you can delete the audio if you want so now i have two clips
um on the timeline they are in sync so if i
move one of them then this one is playing and then
this other wipe shows up so this is the same principle the
video tracks that are above um appear above of course above the
stack so they would be in front of the camera so it's the same like in
premiere pro okay now let's see uh what happens if i
just zoom out here and try and put these clips okay you can drag them on the
timeline apparently and they will snap it seems
they do snap okay now let's see if i import an audio
file can i actually put an audio file as the background sound for this video so
i'm going to go and find an audio file okay this is quite annoying when
you drag a new file in there it starts playing automatically so i guess
that could be maybe one of the settings you can probably turn off somewhere and
now let's see if i just put the playhead somewhere random like this
and i go to the audio track i can only remove it from here there's
nothing to do so if i drag this down here
it doesn't seem to put it on the on the timeline which is quite annoying this
so i apparently i have to select the track audio track in this case
and just select the file i want to add and click
plus which then puts it in the file in the timeline and i can then drag this
around and change it so now let's see is it
playing with sound
yes so that's good okay this is basic editing i'm not trying to do anything
advanced in here i'm just trying to explore
the interface of this software so i have the audio track
on a separate track here i have the couple of video things so
let's see how we can add some titles if we can
okay so the filters apparently if you want to add some text you need to use
filters which sounds a little unintuitive for me because
you know text is not really filters it's more like a an asset or a title
so you need to go to filters here and then you click this plus sign
and then you have a lot of stuff in here you can add and you can have favorites
video and audio so if you go to video then you see all of these things they
apparently are filters so there's old film noise all of these
things which they do make sense to be called filters
but then there is a text element filter here so
there's two there's a 3d one and an html one which
apparently they are deprecated and now there is text simple now if i
click on this you can see here i can actually have a
text time code you can resize this it seems to create like a frame with the
the element i can resize and move from the center dot here and let's try
and put some text in here so welcome to shortcut okay this is my text yeah i
added the filter to the audio file by mistakes okay
beginner mistake um apparently these filters
they can be added to a specific element so i'm going to actually go to
the track here click on the track there's nothing
on this video track here and see look it's showing me the title
so these are the filters for this track now let's try again let's add this
next one you can search here for filters text
simple here it is and let's say welcome to
shortcut again so this is my this is my text apparently you can change the
preset for this element to be like a lower
third or slow move down like a bit of an
animation top left and it will move it automatically
top right this is the position of the element and
obviously if i drag this and resize it the position
changes the size changes so i'm going to put it in the
middle here like that so i've obviously added this to the
video track but the track doesn't have
anything so i'm curious if i move one of these clips in here
and now click the track i see the text on there so the text now appears on top
of the track it's probably because the track was blank the name
filter for the text is appropriate in that sense because
it seems that even if you add a filter with text on it
it doesn't appear until there's actual video in there
so that the filter or text can be superimposed
so yes this is what it happens so now i can actually see my text
i don't seem to be able to control the alignment here so
i'm not sure this is top right i suppose it respects maybe this
let's try bottom left yes that's where the whole thing goes
so if i make the container larger it enlarges the text as well let's see
do can we add new lines yes we can okay
and if i want to select a single word and make it a different color
that doesn't work so it makes the whole text that color
that's okay i guess uh limited um editing facility there for the titles
you can move it from here and now let's see can i align this
default okay default seems to be centered so i guess if you play with the
size a bit you can center your title like this
quite a cumbersome way to work with this um if i want to change
the color it changes the whole thing so yeah
that's not i'm not really impressed with this but
um anyway i guess to for a free tool to add quick titles and
annotations on your text on your video that is fine
okay let's move on so i have now video i have two video tracks here there's one
on top of the other so um and then there's an audio file
playing there so okay
i guess that's enough for now i'm gonna try to
export this video file now see how that comes out
what happens with that so to export let's try to go to file maybe you have
export video export an individual frame apparently edl
this is like a file to dictate the segments i believe
so export video let's see so we have all these presets now
so the defaults create an h.264 aac mp4 which is suitable for most users and
that is true now you can use a hardware encoder
and then you have these presets and let's try
h.264 high profile or maybe does it give you presets like premiere
does with your youtube and all those formats no they don't okay so
um i'm just gonna oh there it is youtube okay
so i'm gonna i'm gonna select this youtube
preset which is h.264 aac audio and an mp4 container for youtube
so let's see how that goes um it doesn't seem to ask me for any file
probably it's gonna ask me when i click export file down here
or if i click advanced then i can probably yes
i can configure the aspect ratio the resolution here
the scan mode and other things like interpolation
and uh you can change the the quality okay you can change the
quality the codec same thing for audio and there's some
sim flags here i'm sure these flags and
parameters are actually being passed to ffmpeg
so i'm not going to bother changing these let's click export file
okay it wants me to specify where i want to
save it so i'm going to go and select a folder
and i have clicked save it seems i don't have a lot of disk space that's not a
problem yes i want to continue so there's a
panel here that appeared called jobs which
shows me the progress of my encoding so there it is it's exporting my file
right now it's quite fast actually
okay so the export i believe is done i have this check mark on the right side
here that says it's done so let's see the quality of
the resulting video okay so the file uh seems to be 11.9
megabytes not too bad let's open it up so there is this is the
file uh quality wise it doesn't seem too bad
um definitely the title is big and red like
i did it nothing seems to have shifted and let's
play it
that looks good so the quality is good uh com you know considering the file
that i used in the first place to feed it into
it and the file size is obviously not very
large so that is great and you know apart from little things i
haven't explored this so i think i'm going to do a video a series
on how to do things with shortcut this is a
seems to be very promising tool and definitely for a free tool
it is far more advanced than i expected and i again i i think i've seen it
mentioned a few times in various places but um i didn't really
give it a second thought so today i was looking for a way to reverse
a video so this one came up in the google results
so there you go i've decided to install it and do a
first look for you i hope you enjoyed this and maybe it
makes you um you know consider using shortcut it is free after all and
for free come on it seems it is uh even slightly more
advanced than da vinci resolve at least the free
version the free version of davinci resolve they used briefly
and it seems a little you know limited in terms of what you can do with it but
this one seems a bit more advanced and for a free tool they have certainly
added a lot of features in here so i cannot wait to
explore these so thank you for watching if you enjoyed my tutorials
please subscribe to my channel and you know stay tuned for
more tutorials about uh shotcut if you have any questions or comments
let me know in the comments or requests you know like feature requests for
you know you want to learn how something is done in any of these
programs that i'm covering feel free to give me a comment
and i will see if i can do it for you so thanks again for your time see you next
time