Easy and Free Video Editing

Need to create Videos for Work?

Many people agree that the current health crisis may well have changed working patterns permanently, with more people working from home, even after lockdown ends. Because of this, many organisations are looking at creating company videos that can outline company procedures or systems.  We here at Infero recently came across a video editor that can do most of things that a professional video editor can do, but is entirely free.

Shotcut User Interface

Shotcut

Shotcut is a free, open source, cross-platform video editor and supports hundreds of audio and video formats. It offers many standard video editing features, and with a little practice is not that hard to use

Shotcut can be downloaded for free and is available in a portable version, that can be run without being installed. It is also available for Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems. Unlike many video editors, it’s a small download of only 184MB. It is updated fairly regularly, even though it is an open source app, and the first time it is run the app checks if you’re running the latest version.

https://shotcut.org/download/

Interface

Shotcut’s interface is sparse when first opened. On opening a video file and click the timeline button, however, you will see source clips in a panel at top left, a preview window at the top right, and the timeline along the bottom. The panels are undockable, allowing the interface to be customised, especially useful if using multiple monitors.

There are three interface colour themes: dark, light, and system.

Shotcut can do most things from Basic Joining and Trimming, creating transitions between video clips and also adding Text to videos

To apply effects to videos, open the Filters panel, hit the plus sign, and choose an adjustment; lighting and colour, for example), filter. Other filters include Opacity, Colour Grading Blur and five Old Film effects. A  Rutt-Etra-Izer filter creates 3D extruded distortion from a video image.

Shotcut will even produce a Picture-in-Picture (PIP) effect for your videos PIP is considered a filter. The tool provides handles for resizing and moving the picture in picture.

Titles and text can be added, and as with other effects in Shotcut, these are also considered Filters. There is even a 3D Text option, with five font choices, something not normally available in a free application.

Adding Text

  • Select the video track you want to caption.
  • Click the Filters tab at the top left of the timeline
  • Type “TEXT” into the search box. then choose one of the three options: Text 3D, Text Simple and Text HTML

Fix out-of-sync audio

It is annoying when picture and audio in a video aren’t in sync. This is easily rectified in Shotcut:

Right click your clip on the timeline and select Detach Audio. This drops the audio on to a separate timeline where you can drag it independently of the video until the two are in alignment. (If you cannot see the detached audio, expand your timeline so it is visible.) For precise adjustments, zoom into the timeline using the slider.

Although there is not any help documentation as such, the Shotcut site has a number of video tutorials available. We suggest you start with the introduction video that is available here:

https://shotcut.org/tutorials/

There is also a lot of help documentation available for Shotcut at: https://guides.lib.uoguelph.ca/Shotcut.

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