video editing for beginners. it was very use full to earn money by editing and upload it on social medias also and video editing job is demanded nowadays, so this notes will be very helpfull.
, Table of Contents
About This Guide ................................................................................................... 3
The focus of this guide, and its wider applications .................................................. 4
Video (and Audio) Editing: A Bit of History ................................................................ 6
Audio: from Wax to Bytes ................................................................................... 6
Video Editing: From the cutting-room floor to Shotcut ............................................. 7
Installing Shotcut .................................................................................................10
Installing on Windows ........................................................................................10
Installing on Mac OS ..........................................................................................13
Getting Oriented: The Shotcut UI and Panels ...........................................................21
Open File .........................................................................................................21
Save ................................................................................................................23
Undo ...............................................................................................................24
Redo ...............................................................................................................24
Peak Meter .......................................................................................................24
Properties ........................................................................................................25
Recent .............................................................................................................26
Playlist .............................................................................................................27
History .............................................................................................................29
Filters ..............................................................................................................30
Timeline ...........................................................................................................33
Export .............................................................................................................36
Getting Started: Opening a file and adding it to the Playlist and Timeline .....................37
Basic of single-track editing: Cutting, pasting, appending, transitions ..........................45
More Editing Basics: Edit-Friendly formats, Intro Titles and Floating Captions ...............52
Edit-Friendly formats .........................................................................................52
Introductory Text Titles ......................................................................................56
Floating Captions ..............................................................................................64
Audio and Video (I): Post-Recording Cleanup, Muting and Separating Audio Tracks .......71
'Cleaning Up' a Recorded Voiceover Narration .......................................................72
Muting part (or all) of an audio track ...................................................................74
Splitting a pre-recorded audio track from its video track ........................................76
Audio and Video (II): Adding and Mixing in Musical Tracks .........................................79
Adding background music (and some benefits of exporting your work in stages) .......79
Mixing .............................................................................................................81
Audio and Video (III): Recording a voice-over narration ............................................93
Release Notes .................................................................................................... 104
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, About This Guide
Video cameras, computers with web cams and screen-capture software, and video-
capable mobile phones now make it possible for a vastly wider group than ever before to
capture raw video footage -- of political events, computer software demonstrations, a
concert, a trip to Iceland, your cats, or anything else under the sun conceivably worth
preserving and presenting in video. 20 minutes spent on YouTube, or any other social
media platform, should convince you of this explosion in videography in the present
digital era.
However, raw video footage is very often less than useful or effective in its immediately-
captured form; it typically needs to be (or could benefit from being) edited. Raw
segments can be shortened, excerpted or joined together with appropriate transitions;
opening titles and captions can be added; often a voiceover narration or a musical track
is appropriate for information or atmosphere. When available, shots from different
perspectives can be intercut, as in classic film and TV production. Video clips from
entirely separate sources can be intercut to help make a point or tell a story. And beyond
this there is a galaxy of 'effects' and enhancements that can be applied to video footage,
just as we have come to expect in editing digital still photos with tools like Photoshop.
Video or motion-picture editing used to be the domain solely of professionals, a highly
labor- and skill-intensive craft that typically entailed extensive equipment and training;
and in its more sophisticated forms video editing is still a high-skill professional
occupation. But the good news is that the basics (and even many advanced aspects) of
video editing are now accessible to everyone, thanks to an abundance of digital video
editors that are relatively easy to use, and can run on relatively lightweight home
computers. Best of all, many of these editing tools are free and a number are open-
source.
In this guide, we will learn the basics of video editing using one particular open-source
software tool, Shotcut, which is available for free download at Shotcut.org. Originally
written (like much open-source software) for Linux, Shotcut now runs equally well on
Windows and Mac OS.
If you have read this far, you may already have decided that Shotcut is the best video
editor for your own needs, or is at least worth checking out. For our part, we did a fair
amount of research into current 'best-free-video-editor' reviews from various established
tech-review sites, and concluded that Shotcut well worth the effort to document in this
way. Among the chief considerations here were:
• We wanted a free editor. An expensive tool may be perfectly appropriate for video and
film-editing professionals, but the general public needs access to free editing tools to go
along with our access to free video-making tools and easy sharing platforms.
• We wanted an open-source tool. Open-source software is worth supporting for lots of
reasons, and some of them are very practical. Many ostensibly 'free' media authoring
and editing tools are really just the free or teaser versions of commercial (paid) software:
this would include video-editing tools like Lightworks, DaVinci Resolve, Hitfilm Express,
Avid and others. In every such case, the 'free' version offers some incentive to upgrade
to the paid version: typically this means restriction on features that you would like to use
(range of exporting options, for example), or the mandatory inclusion of a brand
watermark, or other annoyances. Open-source tools are as full-featured as possible from
the start, with no motivation to force an upgrade.
• In addition, paid software tools are almost invariably much heavier in their system-
resource requirements than their open-source counterparts, for many reasons including
the open-source movement's primordial association with lightweight (and also open-
source) operating systems. Very often, even the 'free' versions of commercial software
will have essentially the same heavy CPU and memory needs as the paid versions,
because they are essentially the same software, just with some features restricted.
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, Shotcut and other open-source tools are much lighter in their resource requirements,
typically quicker to download/install, much quicker to start up for each session, and can
generally be run on far more modest (and thus less expensive) hardware than most
commercially-based tools.
• All of the above considerations still leave a range of good-to-excellent open-source video
editing tools, prominently including (but not limited to) VSDC, OpenShot and KDenlive
in addition to Shotcut. Each tool has its particular strengths and weaknesses. We feel
that Shotcut is unusually lightweight as a download/install and a running program, even
in comparison with other open-source editors with a comparable feature set. But each
tool has its strong proponents; and indeed there is an excellent Floss Manual for Kdenlive
(see flossmanuals.net/kdenlive/), which also serves as a general introduction to
videography with a social-action focus. It may well be worth checking out several such
tools before you settle on one, since it's free to do so.
• Finally, the Floss Manual framework in general is intended to address gaps in existing
software documentation, and Shotcut is strikingly under-documented even by open-
source standards. The Shotcut development team is quite small, and has clearly
decided to focus their efforts on building and constantly improving their editor, rather
than on documention. It therefore seemed appropriate to use the Floss platform to help
promote and facilitate further use of this excellent tool.
With those considerations in mind, this guide will be an introduction to Shotcut in
particular as well as the basics of video editing more generally, and all tutorials here will
make use of Shotcut software, for the most part running on Windows, in its most recent
general release as of this writing (Shotcut 18.01.x, ie the first version released in 2018).
The focus of this guide, and its wider applications
This manual offers a beginner (or perhaps beginner-to-intermediate) guide to using
Shotcut for video editing. We have neither the space, time nor expertise to exhaustively
examine all of the more advanced features of this software (which are multiplied by the
incredibly wide range of video and audio file formats this tool is capable of importing and
exporting). Our goal is to get you started. Moreover, while this manual borrows at times
from the structure of the Floss Kdenlive manual noted above, where appropriate, we do
not intend to offer, even to the extent that they do, a general guide to the wider world of
video making as such [Beyond the Kdenlive manual, there is also a separate Floss Manual
devoted to videography as such, at en.flossmanuals.net/video-production]. Some of our
how-to examples will focus on the specific use case of editing video tutorials, such as
tutorials for using other software. We believe that video tutorials, which can now be
found extensively at many software developers' own sites as well as 'in the wild' on
YouTube, are one of the more important and useful practical applications of the new
digital videography. Indeed, this manual itself could as easily have been done as a video
tutorial series, but we recognize that many users are still more comfortable with a written
text-and-screenshot reference, as a jumping-off point in using a new tool like Shotcut.
This guide will also walk through the features of the Shotcut UI in a systematic and
referenceable way that is not really possible in video. But the general editing techniques
that can make a how-to video more watchable and useful will also apply to most other
uses of video, and we will be sure to include Iceland-trip and perhaps cat-video examples
as well. We would also add that how-to tutorials themselves need not be restricted to
software tools; on YouTube one can find outstanding tutorials on the basics of playing
various musical instruments, home and auto repair, making pop-up greeting cards, and
really any step-by-step process that can be captured in video and usefully shared with
others. And, of course, many of these same basic video-editing techniques would apply
as well to the use of video for any other kind of 'story-telling' as well, including
documentary and purely fictional stories.
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