Hello, this is Cristi. I'm going to show you a very quick and easy, and free way to create
quick slideshows from photos, using Shotcut. Shotcut is a free video editor, it's open-source.
This is the version I'm using right now - 21.02.27.
You can download it from Shotcut.org, you may get a newer version which is great.
So let me show you how to quickly create a slideshow from a bunch of photos. You
don't have to do any manual stuff, adding transitions yourself and all that stuff.
Let me just show you, this is a tool that was added recently.
I have a new project here, this is the new project window in Shotcut.
I need to just change my settings here, it's HD, 1080p, you can change that to be 29, 30 frames,
whatever, HD screen before you start. Let's give it a name here, slideshow,
and start the project. In Shotcut, before you can
use some assets like videos and photos and other things, you need to bring them into your playlist.
This is like the media bin, if you want, in other programs.
So I have here on my hard drive, a few photos that I downloaded and they are very nice nature photos
and I want to make a slideshow from these photos. All I have to do is just select all of them.
You notice I have an audio track here. I will import that later and I'll show you
how to put music to this slideshow. So just select all the photos,
drag them on top of Shotcut here, in the playlist window. Let Shotcut analyse them
for a second and here is the great stuff. You have the timeline at the bottom here,
I do not have any clips on the timeline right now. I want to use these
photos for slideshow. If you want the photos to be in a specific order,
you could maybe bring them into your project with different filenames, numbered in order you want,
or you can simply re-arrange them here in the playlist, you know, in any order you want,
before you can add them to your slideshow. If you don't like this view, you can change the
view mode here, from this line, or to grid like that, depends how you want to look at the photos.
So when you are finally decided what the order is going to be, just select all of them, so click
the first one, hold down the Shift key, click the last one. You can see all the photos are selected,
and to create a slideshow, this is really simple. All you have to do is go down to this menu here
and open it, and there is an option here that says Add Selected to Slideshow.
This is going to ask you first how long do you want each photo to stay for a slide,
and by default you have 10 seconds here. I'm going to put 5 seconds on each photo. Then, the second
option is asking you how do you want the images to convert, if they have different aspect ratios.
This is a nice tool here because if I created slideshows in other software,
I always had to kind of manage each slide individually. If I was using photos that
were different aspect ratios or some of them were HD, some were 4:3 aspect or whatever, so I always
have to kind of check each slide to make sure it does not leave blank margins or edges and so on.
But this is nice because you have some options here to crop, center, crop and pan, pad blur,
bad black, so this is going to dictate what happens to each photo if it needs to have,
if it doesn't fit exactly on your screen. So I'm going to leave it to crop center,
and you can see a preview down here of the entire slideshow. Shotcut is going through
the slideshow as you are changing the options and it's applying it in this preview window.
The next question is, what is the zoom effect. So you can actually add a 10% or 20% zoom in effect
so that the images kind of zoom in. As you can see a bit of a Ken Burns I think it's called.
This controls how much you allow the photos to scale in your slideshow.
I'm going to leave it to 10% right now. The next question is: transition duration. How long do you
want the transition to be between the slides. I'm going to leave it to 2 seconds right now,
this is really cool. You have a transition type here and by default it's a dissolve, which is like
a fade in and fade out of the next slide. But you can change to any transition you like here
and it also includes a random mode, which just chooses one of these transitions for every slide.
So you could have 10 slides or whatever, and each one's going to have a different transition to it.
I'm going to just leave random so now it's generating another preview here, and
also there's an option here for transition softness, how you want it to be
sort of the fade in and areas. When you're finished with these options,
you're about to create your slideshow. All you have to do is click OK and now Shotcut is going
to actually generate your slideshow for you, put all the photos in place,
put them in the order you specified, create the transitions between them and everything else.
There you go. The slideshow is done. So this has been so effortless.
If I play it now, you can see the slideshow is running, it's very nice, the transition
is running fine, it's a random transition so there you go, you are ready to export this.
Before exporting it, I would like to add some music to this slideshow.
This is very easy as well. I'm going to open the slideshow folder and
this is the audio track. I'm just going to put this in my playlist here, there it is.
So now I want to put this onto the timeline to play alongside the slideshow.
So the way to do that is, of course, by default you will probably not have an audio track here,
so you can use this menu right here to click and say Track Operations and
Add Audio Track, or you can press Ctrl+U. So this adds a blank audio track called
A1. And all you have to do is just take the song, the track file from your playlist and
just drop it in here using Insert or yours may say Overwrite. If you have this option here of
Ripple Trim and Drop, if you turn this off it's actually going to say Overwrite.
What you notice here is if I zoom in a bit with these controls,
you can see that my track actually has a bit of silence at the start, so move your
play head right at the ending of the silent area, and you have your audio track selected,
your audio clip selected, and you need to actually cut the first part of the clip.
To do that, you need to press Shift + I, which means I'm going to Ripple Insert an IN point,
which means it's going to cut everything before my playhead and move the track
to the start. Shift + I - there you have it. So now my track is starting.
You can hear it playing. So now I would like to move to the end of the slideshow and of course, my
audio track is longer than the slideshow, so I want it to stop right here. So I'm going to go
to the end of the slideshow, right here. You can zoom in if you want, CTRL + mouse wheel
zooms you in to where the playhead is, and you can select precisely where you want to be,
and this time again, with the audio track selected,
press SHIFT + O, which means setting the OUT point. SHIFT + O, that's going to cut
everything after the playhead, and now I have an audio track with my slideshow.
One more thing, you want your audio track to probably fade out at the end
of your slideshow. To do that, if you move your mouse over on the corner of the audio
track here, you will see that pulsating circle. That is your audio level or audio fade point.
Just click on that and drag it to the left. You notice there's a bit of a highlight there
and the dark area means the sound is going to fade out over how long your want it to be. So
let's say over the course of the last slide, we're going to fade out. Let's see if that works.
So it is fading out, there you go, so I'm ready now, my slideshow is done, it didn't take me long.
It took me longer to explain it, really, and now you're ready to export this to your hard drive.
All you have to do is go to the export window here, and choose your format, your desired format.
If you want to upload it to YouTube for example, you can choose YouTube from the list
here and click Export file. You can change the filename. I'm
just going to leave it to Slideshow and save. And this is going to start a job, if you look
in the jobs window, right here, a job with the export operation, creating my slideshow to disk.
So my file has now been exported, let me just see if it plays, the file is 24 MB, double-click...
So that was it, thank you for watching. I hope you enjoy this tip.
I didn't know that Shotcut had this tool, I just discovered it recently and I thought I
would share with you. If you find my tutorials helpful, feel free to subscribe to my channel,
like it and share it, and if you'd like to tell me what you'd like the next tutorials to be on,
please feel free to leave it in the comments. If you have any questions about this video, leave
it in the comments and I will get back to you. Thanks again for watching, see you next time!