have you ever wondered how to edit videos that you wanted to post on youtube or anywhere else
and you wanted to do that by accomplishing three important things
one that the videos came out looking good because you were using a powerful program not some cheap
app two that it was easy to figure out and three that it was free well today i'm going to walk you
through the solution i decided upon when starting my first channel and that solution was shotcut and
i'll share some of the things that i had to figure out as a complete novice to video editing software
so that you can get started with doing the basics in no time at all
but first of all i want to welcome you to how to with kevin and of course i'm kevin and like all
of you out there things come up that we have to deal with or there's new things out there
that we want to learn more about so i made this new channel to share some of the things
i've either learned or figured out to either make things easier or save a lot of money for myself
and hopefully you find it helpful and one of those things i figured out was how to edit videos
and i needed to figure something out because i was looking to start a youtube channel
not this one but my healthy wealthy and wise channel that focuses more on personal finance and
diy investing or what i like to call financial wellness anyway a lot of the things to start a
youtube channel are pretty easy to figure out like what you're going to record with using a
microphone and figuring out lighting the biggest thing that i had to come up with was how to edit
a video and to make it look at least good enough so as not to cause viewers to hurt their fingers
slamming on the dislike button but being that i was new to youtube and just learning all about it
i didn't want to go crazy spending a lot of money on software or a software subscription
for a channel that might just totally flop so i was hoping to find something free to use but
the things i was finding were pretty ineffective for what i wanted to do luckily my fiancee who is
super smart and was really supportive in helping me in making that first channel she came through
for me by searching on her own and she's the one who found shotcut as an option for me to use
now shotcut is an open source cross-platform video editor that you can download completely
for free from their website shotcut.org and it works on windows mac and linux computers
and when i say free it's really totally free not just a free trial there's no premium features you
have to pay extra for and get this there's not even any ads so anyway she really hit the jackpot
for me but here's where the story takes a turn i had no experience with video editing software
and when i would check out those other videos or instructions most of those resources probably
assumed i knew something about how to edit videos and i did not so it took me a while
to figure it out and get better with it over time and now i feel pretty comfortable with
it so if you're someone who is wanting to learn how to edit youtube videos for free with shotcut
and want a beginner's guide to get started with it i'm going to show you some of the basics today
and i'm definitely open to making more videos on shotcut with some how-to tutorials on more
advanced features so if you're interested in seeing that please let me know in the comments
and then remember to subscribe to the channel so you don't miss them when they come out
but first let's get to the basics on starting out with shotcut so this is shotcut opened and there's
a few things i want to show you before we get started one is if you go to these tabs here you'll
see playlist filters properties and export we want to start with this being on playlist if you get it
on filters you're going to have trouble finding or getting started so make sure you go down again
about two thirds down the screen on the left hit playlist you can also hit playlist up here okay
but make sure it's on and then we're going to do is and this is going to be where the one part the
video doesn't look great so just hang in there with me so you're going to want to open up the
folder with your file and take the actual file you want to edit and just drag it right onto
the playlist okay give it a second it'll pop up and you actually will see it here and this is
from my most recent video on my other channel about uh one thing about the rivian ipo and so
once it's over here you can start working with it but the thing that it took me a while
to figure out is you need to actually take it down into the timeline so the timeline is down
here this is where you edit everything so what you'll do is you'll just grab
from the playlist and put it in and it'll create a video track
and get got to give it a second and there it's there it is so the first thing i usually do is
i go to the end of the video and then i work myself back because typically
when you're making a video you have some edits and your last take is probably the best one so
you want to get rid of the ones before so what you have to do is you can grab the playhead
and what i usually do here is i make the screen a little bit bigger so i can see this playhead here
because again you can play you can watch what's happening on the actual videos you're editing it
okay so there's me trying to get everything set up but i'm going to actually again take this all
the way to the end and there's ways you can do this with this to make this a little bit easier
it takes a while because this is about an 18 minute clip
okay so i'm at the end of the clip here and i'm going to want to i want to end my video
so what i do is and you can see where this is where the words are spoken so you can see
like the wavelengths all right so i'm going to let it play to stop where i want it to stop
anyways thanks so much for watching and we're watching this
and until next time have a great day is say i want to stop here okay now with everything i'm
going to show you on this video to make it easy is i'm going to right click and you're going
to have you're going to have different options here the one of the biggest one i use is split
at playhead and you can see in the parentheses that there are is a little s so that's a shortcut
you can find a whole list of shortcuts shotcut shortcuts up here in the help button
if you want to check those out it can make it a little bit quicker there's a couple that i use a
lot for this video i'm going to do a lot with just the right click so you guys can see everything
so here what i want to do here is i want to just right click it we'll hit split okay and you'll see
that there becomes two different areas here now to get it to work where you want to go all right
you can click on video this is what you're working on this clip or this is where you're working on
this clip and you'll see be highlighted with red okay so because i want to get rid of what's the
red here i click on it i right click and i can see here that there's some options and
what i want to do here is i just want to cut it i want to get rid of that so at this point my video
ends right here so all that stuff at the beginning that i didn't want to have
is now gone okay so again this is one of the most basic things that you probably will need
to do as you're starting is just finding out what you don't want and you can clip it out
so let's say it's more in the middle of the video and how i usually find this is by going backwards
the issue where i usually find where i have a problem is where there's a gap because i've
stopped and i need to restart again okay so let's look here and and not just as i'm getting ready
and i say oh i want i just missed this to go slowly back to get exactly where i want it
you can either move the playhead like this but you can also use these little arrow buttons okay
and this is here again where i want to stop so at this point i want to get rid of this big gap here
and so again i could hit the s and again you want to make sure the video is highlighted by being red
and i'm again for the sake of this video i'm going to right click so you can see i'm going to
hit split at playhead and i know i need to get rid of this big gap here see there's me trying to move
things around so i'm going to get rid of that okay and let's say this is where i ended
the last clip so look at me i don't look too good there um but i want to get rid of all that gap in
between so for the sake of this video i just want to show you i'm not going to get too specific
because those i have the sound down for myself but i'm going to hit the split or the s button
and what i'm going to do is i'm going to cut this out okay what it does it sort of takes it out
now there's other things you can do and i'm going to really quickly show you say i wanted
to put something in between here i could take this clip because it's going to split and just move it
and add something in here i am not and you can see there's nothing here at this point because
i don't have nothing in there and then it plays okay so again for the sake of this video i'm not
going to spend time on this if you are interested in seeing more with shotcut and wanted where i can
show you more with this just let me know and again we can make some more videos and talk about what
you might do this for but for the sake of this so i want to get rid of this i can just easily
hit remove for this gap and it goes away okay so let's say you want to do some different things
with the clip that you have some of the basic things are you might want to change
the brightness of your video or you might want to add some words to it
so what i'll do here is i'll show you both of those they're both done in the same place
the one thing you want to make sure that you that you again are doing is have the clip that you want
to work on being highlighted in red sometimes that comes off so definitely make sure it's highlighted
and then you're going to go back to this little tab area here and you're going to click on filters
and again you can click on at the top too but i tend to work down here
so when you first click on it you see that there's nothing here but if you hit this little add button
there are different tabs of different filters and the most common ones are listed in the favorites
okay so there's a couple that we're going to use just again for this intro video
let's say you wanted to increase the brightness of your video okay so you click on brightness
and you look at it and you say okay a lot brighter now i'm making this exaggerated so
you can see this but just to show you what happens is if you go back and you're playing through here
you can see how that clip is brighter you were better okay so that's one thing
um another thing we talked about if you wanted to add some text or words to your video
to do that again make sure this is still red which it is you're going to hit the
plus button and you're going to go to text simple okay and on text simple you will see
some default text here and what you want to do
is for the sake of this video again it's pretty bright i'm going to change the color of the font
and we're going to make it red so we can see it a little bit easier okay
and let's say i just want to put thank you for watching so you go into where the text is
and just type in thank you for watching okay but let's say this isn't exactly where i want to have
this or it's too big or whatnot so with the text button you can see there's a box around here and
you can actually resize this okay and let's say this is where i want it but boy it's sure small
what i could do to make this a little bit bigger is go up here make a second line gets bigger
and then i can just resize it and there's more things you can do with this um you can make this
horizontally aligned center aligned whatever you want to do again for the sake of this video
just want to show you some of the real basics and again this is how you can get some text on there
but once again once you go back to before you split the video
you'll see it's not on there and then once you're on here we have the brightness filter working
and we have the text okay i'm going to pause this now this will go on to the length of this video
now one easy way that you could do to stop this without going into some more in-depth things
which again i can show you and they're not hard it's just trying to make this as basic for this
video you can split your video again okay and see right now nothing's highlighted so if you
go to the filters it says nothing selected if we go to the part we just split the playhead at and
we want to get rid of that text all we simply have to do is go into the filters and click it and it's
gone let's say we want to get that brightness away too okay click on brightness and it's gone
so when if we were just to watch this again previously you see this little part is the
better than the filters are working and then this part is where they're not okay so again these are
some of the most basic things you can do with shotcut and there's a lot more you can do it's a
pretty powerful program for free but again just want to show you some of the basics let
me show you one last of the basic filters you might want to do which is zooming in again you
see this a lot in youtube so really simple again you're also in the filters okay and you're going
to add another one and again this one's also in the favorite again there's so many filters
and again we're not spending all our time on that we're just going to talk about some of the most
common ones you'll use and so in this case if you want to zoom in you go to size position and rotate
and it's pretty simple and again you make sure that the clip that you have is on the red part
and you can do it to one of two ways here you can use the box so let's say i wanted to make this
smaller which is probably not what you want to do you want to zoom in right
you can also go bigger than the area okay or you can bring it back
you can also do that from here so you can zoom in here you want to see my face real big but you can
zoom in from there and then you can also once you're zoomed in you can move it a little bit
just by grabbing on to this middle bar here okay so let's say i wanted to be here because
at this point for whatever reason i wanted to be here so again just to sort of show
you again the differences between the clips this one is still bright has the words we hit
play it gets to the next part and all of a sudden i'm big and all those other ones are gone
if i wanted to see the brightness again i could just go back here
and click the brightness and again you see it getting bright again all right so that's the some
of the most basic things you can use with shotcut but let's talk about you need to save the file
so at this point you want to process your video into a file that can be used whether
you want to upload it on youtube or whatever just to get a basic type of movie file format
what you do is and to make this a little quicker to save us some time here i'm going to delete
all of this and again this is all the previous part of the video and just remove it okay so now
our video is all of what is it one minute and 20 seconds long so this will make it quicker
and all you have to do is go back to your little tabs here so again you have your playlist your
filters well this point you want to go to export so at this point the defaults for me is youtube
and again this is so you can upload it in youtube but it can also pretty much be your standard type
of movie file so for this you just hit export file and we're going to switch back over to
the camera here and we're going to just call it let's say we're going to call example one
okay i'm going to hit save at this point over here you'll it starts the process
it should not take really long because it's a pretty short clip once it processes you'll be able
to go back to your folder and go ahead and open it and again you have a video okay so that was
some of the most basic things you need to know to get started on editing videos for youtube on the
free shotcut platform again if you're interested in seeing more in-depth tutorial videos on shotcut
definitely let me know that you're interested by liking the video and leaving a comment in the
comment section so i know i should prioritize putting together more of these types of videos
and if you haven't already subscribe to the channel and turn your notification bell on so
you know when those videos come out plus on this channel you'll see me doing completely different
things here as well so far i've had videos on replacing a mailbox post without digging
removing a computer hard drive how to prevent getting holes in your shoes
and even turning a laminate countertop into a concrete one all things i had never done before
but like with shotcut all things have turned out pretty good for me and if you're interested in diy
investing and financial types of videos check out my first channel healthy wealthy and wise
i'll link it for you in the description thanks so much for watching and have a great day you