Hey guys, today we’re going to go over installing and working with Openshot video editor on
Linux.
This is a simple video editor that is similar to Windows Movie Maker.
It doesn’t have too many complex editing features, but it’s really easy to use.
So the first thing we’ll need to do is get Openshot installed.
We’ll add the repository and install the program.
Type the following lines into the terminal.
We’ll also have these lines available in the video description.
The entire installation for this program took us about 15 minutes on our computer, but most
of that time was due to slow download speeds.
Now that it’s installed we can go to the launcher and open the program.
If it doesn’t come up just type in openshot.
So first we’ll do a little tour.
This first box is where all the project files you import will be sorted.
After they’re imported, you just drag and drop them onto the timeline.”
Then there’s the transitions menu.
These seem to work properly between clips, but don’t work right if you’re trying
to fade in from darkness.
We’ll come back to this later on.
As you can see, there’s quite a few effects.
Not all of them are completely useful.
There’s a lot that would honestly just decrease the quality of the video.
We’ll be sticking to the simple transitions, so we’ll switch to the common mode by clicking
the button at the top.
Now we can look at the video effects.
This program looks like it only comes with a few video effects.
If we had to do any audio editing though, we’d probably recommend just using Audacity
since it’s simple to use.
So we just have a few general effects here.
As far as usefulness, the brightness and contrast are probably the best.
The program does support the use of a greenscreen, but we wouldn’t recommend this on such a
simple video editor.
So to get started, we’ll import the files.
The import button is in the file menu at the top.
We’ve got a few stock videos in our downloads folder that we’ll use for this example.
Now that we’ve got the files imported, we’ll drag and drop them onto the timeline.
As far as order for the timeline, the videos that you place on the higher track number
will be shown first.
Therefore, a video on track 4 will cover up any overlapping videos on the lower tracks.
Now we’ll just drag in and trim these tracks.
We’ll want them to overlap a bit, and experiment with the fades.
Another useful feature is the Title menu.
We’re just going to add a simple title to our video, but there are also a few animated
titles that are worth taking a look at.
So we’ll make a sample title.
We’re changing the color of the background and the font.
Since we’ve changed the background it won’t be transparent anymore in the final video.
When the title is finished, openshot saves it as a scalable vector graphics file.
Then it opens it in our project files so we can drag and drop it wherever we want on the
timeline.
Another feature you’ll need to know about are the timeline options.
If we click and drag on this bar we can scale the timeline.
There’s also a little triangle that can insert markers at various ports on the timeline
and there’s buttons to jump between them.
The last thing we want to do is organize the timeline.
We’ll right click on the tracks and delete them.
Then we can rename the tracks we want to keep.
Finally, we just need to export the video.
We’ve been working with 1080p 30 fps video, and those are the same settings as our project.
We’ll export as an MP4, since these files work well with other programs, including YouTube.
The whole export process for this program can take a while.
It’s not quite as efficient as some of the higher end video editing programs so we’ll
just skip to the end of rendering and play back the video file we’ve created.
So now we’ll play the video back.
As we can see, the transition for the title didn’t work properly.
The good news is that the video retained a fairly decent quality after rerendering, so
we can safely say that Openshot is a pretty good solution to edit video for free.
Thanks for watching this video on Openshot video editor for Linux.
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