With the popularization of YouTube, video content has reached a new level. It started with funny videos, but now it includes everything from recipes to observations of chicks’ lives.
In just a few years, video has become a powerful marketing tool capable of impacting people’s emotions just as much as, or even better than, text. But there is a feeling that it is easier to write a text than to shoot and edit a video. To some extent this is true, if there is no skill to work with the right tools. It is this skill that we are going to master today.
This guide will not be a theory about video formats, codecs and other technical stuff. This knowledge is useful, but will do very little for a beginner who has never worked with video. We’ll go straight to the practice of video editing, so everyone can get some useful tips from this guide and apply them to their own projects.
We use other tools to edit videos that go to TV and major branded channels:
- Adobe Premier Pro;
- Sony Vegas Pro;
- DaVinci Resolve
- и другие.
And most often it is not a choice of either/or – but several programs at once. You will come to them too, but we recommend that you start with other programs.
Choosing a program for editing
If you are new to video editing, there’s no need to install Sony Vegas or Adobe Premiere – it’s better to start with something simpler. I suggest that you explore the functionality of the free program Shotcut, which is ideal for beginner video makers.
Admittedly, I myself started with Vegas, but 99% of its features I did not need at the time. You can use Shotcut to edit a screencast, a simple YouTube video or an amateur video.
The general principle of these programs is similar, so if you start with a simple editor, later you can easily switch to a professional product. Shotcut (official website) is a completely free cross-platform open-source video editing program.
It’s not the only free video editor, but of all the existing options (which I reviewed in the article pro-free analogues of popular programs), perhaps the most versatile. Not too primitive and not too complicated. In addition, it is not very demanding of the hardware.
Getting to grips with the Shotcut interface
The program is completely in Russian, there are not many options and settings, the interface is not particularly busy, so it’s easy to understand here. But it is desirable to spend a little time to get the hang of it before you start editing.
To make it clearer, let’s start by creating a new project. If this is not the first time you work with the program, you will see a list of recent projects on the right of the New Project window.
Now let’s add new files. The most standard way is the Open File button. You can select and load several files at once.
After that, the files will appear in the playlist and the player will be displayed. Now let’s deal with the interface.
The interface is presented as a set of panels, which you can turn on and off at will. To do this, there is a set of buttons with icons at the very top. To remove the panel, you need to click on the cross. The size of each panel is adjusted by dragging a line of five dots (as shown in the screenshot).
Some panels are grouped and can be switched using tabs.
Let’s look at these panels individually. Let’s start with the simplest – the groups on the right: Recent, History, and Tasks. The most useful tab here is History. It’s just like in Photoshop, every action you perform is shown here. You can go back a few steps or just cancel the last step (it’s easier to do this by clicking Cancel or by pressing Ctrl+Z). Recent lists all previously opened files. In the Tasks tab you can see how the video rendering process is going (i.e. saving the finished file).
To the left, in the middle part of the interface, there is a preview window. Here you can see or listen to both the source file (Source tab) and the project in progress (Project tab). If you activate the level meter, next to the video player, you can see how the sound volume changes in real time.
You can activate the grid right in the player by selecting the desired size. This is useful when, for example, you want to overlay text or some other object on the video and align it.
