Video Editing Made Easy: OpenShot for Absolute Beginners

1. Introduction Video: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Video Editing Made Easy with OpenshotF Absolute Beginners. I'm Dan Vincent Canelo, and I'm so excited that you're here, whether you're a total beginner or someone curious about how video editing works. This course will help you feel confident creating your very own videos. Using open shot, a free and beginner friendly video editing software. In this class, we'll go step by step through everything you need to know. First, we'll learn how to import video clips and get organized. Then I'll walk you through understanding the timeline, your main workspace for editing. We'll move on to the basic editing tools like trimming, cutting and rearranging clips. You'll learn how to add titles, overlays, and texts to make your videos more engaging. We'll also explore some basic effects to enhance your visuals. And finally, you'll learn how to export your video in the right format for sharing, whether that's for YouTube, social media, or a class project. The end of this course, you'll have all the skills you need to edit your video project with confidence and even share it in the class project section. So grab your clips, open up Openshot and let's get started. I'll see you in the first lesson. 2. Importing your video: If you launch Openshot for the first time, you will see a very simple workspace. You have your timeline down here, your project window, and your preview window on the right side. By default, the timeline will provide you with five tracks for your video and audio. I only need two for now, so I'm just going to delete the tracks by right clicking on the tracks area. I will do this three more times. Right up here are your toolset. Very simple. You also have a wide selection of transitions, effects, and Imoges. Let's go back to the project tab. There are two ways to add or import a file in the project window. Either you right click on the empty space or go up here and click on the plus icon. Download the project file and just look for it in your computer's directory. My case, it's inside the project file download folder. I'm going to select that and click Open. To add the video to your timeline, right click on the thumbnail and select Add to timeline or hit Control W on your keyboard. Another window will appear. In here, you can set the location of the video on the timeline, or if you want a fade effect on the beginning of the video, don't want to change anything here, so I'm just going to click Okay. I always check my video by scrubbing the playhead back and forth and looking at the preview if there are some weird black spaces around the video. That is why before you import the video in open shot, I think it is better to set your video preview. You can set it in the preference window under edit preferences, then go to preview. Inside the preview tab, you have to set the profile to the closest preset that you can find on the list. The playback audio is set to default, but you can set it if you have multiple audio device installed. I set the sample rate to 44, 100 and channels to stereo. But how do I know all this stuff? Okay, a little disclaimer, everyone. I'm not an expert on this, but let me show you where you can find the details for your preview preferences. Let me just move it up here and show you the video file in my Windows Explorer. You can see that if the file is selected, the metadata will show up with details like frame size and frame rate. If the metadata shows you that the size of the video is 1920 by 1080, then you can select the preset here in the same exact size. You can also view the properties of the file by right clicking on the file and choosing properties. I'll just move it up here. Then click on the Details tab and look for the details that you need to set the values of the preview preferences. Okay, so again, before you import your file, it is a good idea to set the preview by going to edit preferences, then go to preview. Okay? That's all for this lesson on how to import your video in Openshot. 3. Undestanding the Timeline: In this video, we are going to try to understand how the timeline of Openshot works. I saved this file as Openshot demo, as you can see right up here. If you want to add the video to the timeline, you have to right click on the video, then click the add to timeline or Control W on your keyboard. A dialog box will appear, and right now it is set to go to Track two. I'm going to click Okay. Whenever I edit my video lecture, I usually separate the audio from the video. I'm going to click and drag this clip to the first track because I want to show you what will happen if I separate the audio with the clip placed at the first track. I'm going to right click on Track one and choose separate Audio. Now, there are two choices here, but I will just go with single clip. Nothing happens, but you can see the waveform faded in the background of Track one. To separate, just click and drag the video to Track two. You now have audio on Track one, so you can edit them separately if you need to. Let me show you another example. I will delete the tracks by selecting them and hitting delete on my keyboard. Then I'm going to add the video again to my timeline. The video will go to Track two, as you can see right here, I'll click Okay. Then I'm going to right click and separate Audio. Then I will select single clip. Because there is an empty space in Track one, the audio will now go to Track one. If you want to add more tracks, just click this arrow down icon right here. You can add tracks above the current track, and you can also add tracks below. Okay, let me just delete this if you don't want to accidentally edit the tracks, you can also lock it from here. Okay? For additional organization of tracks, it is also a good practice for any editing software to rename the tracks as much as possible. For Track one, this will be for my audio. For Track two, this will be for video and track three for my titles. Another way to add a track is from our toolset right up here. Just click this plus icon to add tracks to your timeline. Although you have similar icon up here, but this one is for importing files. We also have a timeline slider right up here. Have handles on each side to zoom in and out of the timeline just by dragging it. The plus and minus signs are also for zooming in and out of the timeline. By right clicking on the tracks, you can set the display for video and audio. You can also see the properties and delete the tracks. We can see all of this option in action as we go through the process of editing our video lecture on the next lesson. 4. Basic Video Editing OpenShot: Let's start with the very basic of editing. When I'm editing my video in any editing softwares, I always show or enable the visibility of the audio waveform. This gives me a visual cue on where to cut on the timeline. I'm going to click the arrow down icon here and go to display and then show waveform. You can also zoom in and zoom out of the timeline by holding down the Control key and rolling the Middle Mouse button. One thing you'll notice here is there is a dead air at the start of the recording. Or there is a few seconds of silence before you see the spike on the audio. This is where I start talking. We're going to cut on the position of the timeline. But first, let me show you the shortcut keys for slicing the clip. Go to edit preferences, then go to keyboard. The list down here is alphabetical. So you go down to letter S because we are looking for the word slice. You have here slice, meaning it will slice elements along the position of the playhead. The shortcut for this is Control K. Also have slice, keep left side, meaning it will cut anything along the playhead, delete the right side of the clip and retain the left side. And next is the slice that deletes the left side and retain the right side of the clip. Down here are four selected track or clips that slice both sides. Next is slice deletes and retain either left or right side of the clips. You will also notice that these keys are right next to each other on the keyboard. Let's put these shortcut keys into action. On the timeline, you can select clips by clicking and dragging, or if you are planning to use the slide all shortcut, you can click outside to Diselect and hit Control K. This will cut along the position of the playhead, but the only tracks affected by the slice is the video. Reason for that is the audio track is locked. Let me unlock the tracks and click again Control K. I will show you another way to cut the clips. Then let's undo all the actions by clicking this icon up here several times. You just have to wait for it to undo. Unlock the tracks again. Click Control J on your keyboard to keep the right side of the tracks and delete the left side. Okay, let's undo first, enable the visibility of the waveform, so we know where to cut. Then let's try Control L, which retain the left side and then delete the right side of the tracks. Okay, let's undo the action. Turn on the visibility of the waveform again. Let's do a single cut by selecting the video clip and hitting the letter S. This will just slice the clip into two. Then for the audio tracks, I'm going to click A to keep the right side of the clip while deleting the left side at the same time. Then I will select the video clip right here and then delete. If you move the video clip, you can see that it is snapping along the line of the playhead. If you enable snapping, it will be easy for you to move the clip at the exact position on the timeline. If I turn off the snapping, it is the little magnet icon up here, and then move the clip. I will not snap at the playhead and even go off track. I disable snapping whenever I want to have a precise cut. For now, I'm just going to enable snapping and snap the clip to the playhead. I'm going to click and drag and select the two clips and then click and drag them to the start of the timeline. And then I will move the playhead to the start of the timeline and hit the space bar to play the video. I want you to listen and look at the wave form because it will show you when and where to cut on the timeline, okay? Play it. Hey, everyone. In this course, we are going to explore Google sites. Okay? Google Sites is an app that I use. You can see the waveform has a long flat line, which means no audio was recorded except when I say, Okay, right here, you see the spike. So I'm going to click over here on the timeline to snap the playhead at the position of my pointer. And then I'm going to click and drag to select the audio and video and then hit the S on my keyboard. Then I'm going to slide the playhead to the end of the flat line on the audio, giving it just a little space for the spike on the audio, where I start talking again. Then I will mark select and hit a again on my keyboard. Then I'll make sure that the unwanted clip is selected. Then I'm just going to right click and remove clip. Then I'm just going to select both clips on the tracks and move it here to close the gaps. Make sure that snapping is enabled, so you can easily snap the clip to the end of the first clip. Let's check the cut. I will place the playhead a few frames before the cut, then play the video. Explore Google Site. Google Sites is an app that one thing you'll notice the cut is too tight that there is no natural breathing space. So I'm just going to move the clips to add a little bit of a space. To fill that gap, we need to pull the deleted frames back. It is also worth knowing that when you delete or remove a part of a clip, you are not really deleting, but you are just hiding the frames. So every time you are in these kind of situations, you can pull out the frames to bring back the deleted clips. Let's move again the playhead before the cut and play the video again. But this time by clicking the Play button over here. Explore Google Site. Google Sites is an app that I use, and there it is. As you can see, visually, there is a flat line on the waveform indicating that there is a little gap. Now, let's cut the clips. This time using Control K to cut but retain both sides. Then let's move the playhead just before the next spike. Time, we are going to use the Razor tool. Just go over here and click this CSR icon. We are going to place the razor tool along the red line and then click to cut. We will also do that cut for the audio tracks. Okay, let's delete the unwanted clips. Then select and move to close the gaps. That's all for part one of our basics in video editing. I'll see you on the next one. 5. Video Editing 02: For our Part two in video editing, we are going to edit the video and audio separately to synchronize the audio narration to the action or what is happening on the video. This could be the movement of the pointer and the clicks and also removing waiting time and more. Let's play the video first. Click the Play button because all you need to do is to go to this Candy box icon right up here. Okay, do you see the delay on the video? Now, this is intentional, but sometimes I do this and make two to three more recordings for the audio. And then I will review the clips on post and choose the best, at least for me, the right audio for the action on the screen. You can see, there is a delay in terms of the movement of the pointer. It doesn't sync with the audio. And also, please take note on the distance of the pointer going to the Candy box icon, because that would be our reference when we edit the audio and video for synchronization. I'm going to move the playhead, and let's play that again. This candy box icon right up here, I will reference this distance to cut the video to sync with the audio. We are also going to move the playhead along the timeline so we know where to cut. Let's continue playing. Click that and go down to sites. Okay, the video and audio, as you can see, the movement of the pointer and the audio narration is synchronized. But if I continue to play this video and look for the sites icon. I'll just click And right up here, there is another version of what I had said. This is also one of my techniques in some of my video recorded lectures. I do two to three versions of the audio recordings of the same action, and then edit it in post. Okay, let's start editing. First, I will move the playhead somewhere here, then hit Spacebar to play. I can write up here. I am now looking for my first cut. If you look at the pointer, as I move the playhead, it is not moving on the screen. Let's hit the play button. Because all you need to do is to go to this Candy Box icon. Let's move the playhead again in the middle of the web form, then play this again. Icon write up here, move it one more time, then play again. Candy Box icon. Based on the waveform, I think I know now where in the timeline I need to cut. I will be selecting the video tracks for this one, and I'm going to click S to slice. Then I will move the playhead back and forth to see the exact moment where the pointer starts to move. When editing, well, you really need to have patience. And it is right about here. If you look at the position of the playhead, it is right after the audio wave form right here. Make sure that the video track is selected, then click S. Then select the unwanted clip and then delete. I'm going to select this clip and slide back to fill the gap. I will move the playhead just before the cut, maybe just before the waveform to give me more reference. Of course, I need to check the synching of audio and video. I'm going to play the video again by hitting the Space bar. Because all you need to do is to go to this candy box icon write up here. Click that and go down to There's a delay in the movement of the pointer because of the previous cut that I did. A lot of frames were deleted and the whole video tracks was moved back. Right now, I'm slowly moving the playhead, and I'm looking for the right spot to cut on the video. But my plan is to slice where the pointer is over the candybx icon on the screen. I'm going to click S to slice the video, but I think I need to check if I need another cut. Because I really need that movement of the pointer before it reaches the Candy Box icon, and I think this is the precise position for that. So I'm going to cut right here. I'm going to click S. Then I will select and delete the unwanted clip. Then I will move the clip back to fill the gap. Then I will move the playhead to check my edit and then play the video. Because all you need to do is to go to this Candy Box icon right up here. Click that and something is not right because I said, click that, but the video is not doing what the audio is saying. Again, this is caused by my recent edit. So to solve that issue, I'm going to play the video again. Go right up here. I know I cut this area, but I think I need to pull back the deleted frames. I'm just going to move the playhead here. Make sure that snapping is enabled because I'm going to move this clip again at the position of the playhead. As you can see, it will snap. And then I will place the pointer at the edge of the clip. The moment the pointer turned into this with arrows pointing at different direction, all you need to do now is to pull out the deleted frames. Then I'm going to move the playhead before the cut to check my edit. Let's play the video again. Go to the Candy box icon right up here. I'm going to move the playhead back here. Choose the audio clip. Maybe just move the playhead a little bit, and then I'm going to click S to slice. I'm now editing the audio and removing the silent part of the clip. Again, I'm referencing the web form. I will select the track and then click the S to slice right here, delete the unwanted clip, and then move this clip to fill the gap. Let's check our edit by playing the video. To go to this Candy box, icon write up here. Click that and go down. I think I can still sync this with the audio, so I'm going to move the clip and align it to the cut of the tracks below. Then I will pull out the frames from this clip and then play the video. Icon write up here. Click that and go down to sites. Okay, I'm going to stop the demo right here. I hope you learn about how I edit my video lecture. It is also a good idea to rehearse your lecture before recording it and refrain from moving your mouse while recording. This will prevent the pointer to do unnecessary movement on the screen. It is very hard to edit a video and sync it to the audio if your pointer is all around the screen. If you want to repeat something during the narration, move your hands away from the mouse to prevent it from moving. Okay? Practice editing with open shut, and on the next lesson, we are going to add titles to our video lectures. See you on the next one. 6. Titles Part 1: Adding titles in Openshot is very easy. But you also need to remember that adding titles here is a little different from other editing softwares. Openshot also needs the help of Blender to their three D titles. That's why I included the website of Blender in my introduction. Openshot also needs a program called Inkscape for some of the advanced options in the titles properties. You can use Openshot without these additional softwares, but I still recommend downloading blender and Inkscape because they also have their own course, which you can use for your teaching materials here at EnTech Basics. As I've said, adding titles is very easy. Before I explain how to add text, let me just place the playhead right here and play the clip. You will not hear anything even if you see the audio wave form. There's nothing wrong with the audio of open shot. It's just that I disable the system audio so you can focus more on the demo. Okay, I will place the playhead right here, giving a little space, just a few frames. So the title will start to appear after maybe a second or two. It really depends on your style on when you want the titles to appear on the screen. Let's go up here on the main menu, click on Title. Down here, you have two options. You have the regular title, and the second one is the animated Titles. And you will also notice, if you look closely, the icon of Blender is visible because Openshot is taking advantage of the three D capability of Blender for their animated titles. For this lesson, we are going to focus on the first one on the list, or you can just click Control T. A floating window will appear showing you different templates to choose from. I'm going to choose the most common, at least for me, is the lower third. I'm going to click gray box four. The property for this template will appear right here. We can give this a file name. I'm going to call this name plate. For line one, which is the main title, I will type in my name, and for the next line, I'm going to type in instructor. You can experiment by changing the font, text, and the background color. If I click on this button for the Advanced option, right now, this is not available because you need to install Inkscape, which is also an open source software like blender. For now, I'm just going to click Okay. You are satisfied with the details, then that is the time to click Save. The title will go to the project window. To add your title, just right click on the title and click on add to timeline or Control W. This will go to track four, but I have already a track for all my titles. So I'm just going to choose titles down here. I think that's it. I'll click Okay. Move the playhead to show you how big it is on the screen. I will move the playhead again right here. Then I will select a clip title so you can see the bounding box on the edges of the screen. Holding down the Control key, I will click and drag on the corners to scale the title. Then drag the title on the lower right side of the screen. Let's go down to the timeline. You will see these two dots right here. This means that you have an animation for this title. These are keyframes that was automatically added because we changed the position and scale of the title. The second dot or key frame is at the exact position of the playhead. Let me move the playhead right here. You will see the title will return to its original size. Now, I will play the video so you can see the animation. If you want to see the properties of these keyframes, just go up here to the main menu. Then click on View, go to Docs. In here, you have a list of window panels that you can activate. But sometimes all of these are grade out. If that happens, you can go to Views and make sure that freeze view is turned off. Okay, so let's go back to Doc and check the box of the properties. Okay, as I've said, the frames between these two keyframes is where the animation is happening. If we go into the properties panel over here, the highlighted properties here are the ones with animation. Like the location and the scale, you can see these properties change its values as I move the playhead back and forth. If you want your playhead to snap at the position of the keyframes, you can click these two buttons right here. This will go to different key points on the timeline. If I click this icon, which means previous keypoints, it will go to the first keyframe or at the start of the clip. And if I click this icon, it will go to the next keypoints or to the next keyframe. Remember that keypoints does not only mean keyframe, but it can also mean the start and end of the clip. So if I click this icon again, it will go to the end of the clip. I will go to the keyframe again. I'll just click this previous keypoints button. So this keyframe is the last part of the animation. So if I click S to slice at this point and delete the frames with the animation, and then click Play, you will see that there will be no movement on the screen because you are only using the side of the clip that has no animation. Now, this process will take a lot of time, and it is only used if you forgot that you don't need the animation for your lower thirds or any other titles that you put on the screen. So let me show you a more efficient way to add a title with no animation. I will move the playhead a little bit, and let's add this title to our timeline again. And before you hit the Okay button, you have to change the track. This title will go to, of course, titles. For my second example of adding titles, you have to make sure that the playhead is at the start of the clip. This will ensure that there will be no animation when you change the position and scale of the title on the screen. If I move the playhead in the middle of the clip, and let's say you want to snap the playhead at the start of the clip by clicking this icon, you will see that it will just go to the start of the whole movie. And if I click the next one, it will just pass through the clip. So if you want to snap the playhead to a specific clip using these buttons, you have to make sure that you select the clip first before choosing the right go to keypoints button. So if I click, let's say, I want to click Preview KeyPoints and because the clip is selected on the tracks, it will now snap at the edges of that clip. So when the playhead is at the start of the selected clip, then that's the time to change the position and scale of the title. Just select the corners of the bounding box and then make sure that the pointer looks like this because if not, you might get some skewing when you pull this down. Okay? So holding down the Control key scale down the title until you are satisfied with the size, and then select and drag this down to the lower right side of the screen. You can see, because of the position of the playhead, no key frames were added. So let's go ahead and click Play. You can modify the position of the title anywhere on the screen. And that's it for this course. On the next movie, we are going to explore the animated version of titles. So see you on the next one. 7. Titles Part 2: Our next lesson is about animated titles. If you want to have an animated title on your video lecture, the first thing you need to do is to install Blender, because the open shot titles are powered by blender. And also, when you add an animated title, you need depending on your machine, a lot of patients, especially for the more complex animated titles. Okay, so let's go ahead and add an animated title. In here, you can choose a template for your title. You have blur, a title flying towards you. They also have titles with glare effects, Magic Wand, Non curves, and they also have picture frames flying around the screen. Using a title will depend on how much time you need to allot for your video lecture. It also depends on the computer you are using. That's why if you want to add titles with complex animation, you also have maybe to have a lot of patients. For this demonstration, I will use a simple text animation like this one. Have a single frame preview on the right side. Right now, it is on frame 125 out of 250 frames. Now, this section here is very important because this is the number of frames for the duration of your animated titles. Let's give this a file name of intro, and for the title, I will type in welcome. And for the subtitle, I will put animation class. Now you can experiment with different values for the properties that you see in here, but not too much. For this demonstration, I will just change the diffuse color. Just click on the color bars right here. A window will appear where you can change the color. You can choose from basic colors. You can enter a value for the exact shade that you want and add a custom color. I will set this to red. You can play with color values in this section. Then I'm going to hit Okay and go to the next one, which is the specular color. And maybe I will turn this into blue, and then I'm going to hit Okay. As you can see, nothing is happening in the preview monitor. It's still title and subtitle and the same grade out color. But the moment I hit the render button, you can see that the text color changes and the slider of the frames will move to the starting point, which is frame one. Now, it has to complete the whole duration of the 250 frames. The rendering progress bar is a bit faster because we had chosen a simple text animation. Rendering will slow down if you choose, let's say, titles like this one, Non curves, magic one will also slow down render time, lens flare and glare is also heavy with effects. Okay, fast forward in three, two, one. After the rendering process, your title will go inside your project panel. Let's add this to our timeline. Just make sure that you place the playhead to the position you want the title to start on the timeline. So let's add this to the timeline and place this to Titles Track. Okay, and let's play the animation. And that's it. Experiment with different titles, explore the properties of each templates. And while waiting for the rendering time of each title, maybe have a cup of coffee and plan your next lesson. 8. Basic Effects: In this lesson, we are going to explore selected effects. In the effects panel, there are many effects on the list. By default, it is set to show all. You can also filter it by clicking the video button to show only the effects for video. That goes also with the audio button next to. This lesson, we are going to explore some effects in the video section. I'm going to choose the first one on the list. It's a little different unlike the clips inside the project panel. In here, if you right click on the effects, it will just give you an option to change how you want to view the effects on the panel. Do you want it on thumbnail view or you want it on a detailed view? I will apply the effects on the video, but first we need something on the timeline. This example, I have here two images that I will use. Let me add the first one. This will go to the Titles track. These are just images, and there is no relation to the video. I just want to show you the effects. I'm going to add the second image. This one will go to track four. I will put the effects on this image. So I'm going to open up the effects panel. The selected image is a little small, so let's resize it using the bounding box at the corner of the image. Then I'll just place it at the center. Now, I have a feeling that the size of the first image below this one has the same size. So I'm just going to change the size of it. Selecting the image will show you the bounding box on the video preview. I'm just going to click and drag until it covers the whole video. Then I will drag the effects from the effects panel down to the second image. Then I will click to snap the playhead in the middle just to show you that there are no visible effects. There is a little indicator right here that this clip has an effect. I'm going to right click on that icon and then I'm going to open up the property of this effect. I will change some properties for these effects. For the source, I will choose the image below. You can already see the effects. Now, do I want to replace the image? For now, I will say, yes. The preview for this effect is a little washed out on the preview window. And if I play this video, nothing will happen. No movement or changes at all. To see some changes, you go up here and slide the brightness value right here, and it will blow up the effects. So if I change the replace image with no, you will now see the changes, especially if I slide the value of the brightness back and forth. So I'm going to set this to negative one. I will position the playhead slightly to the start of the image and then I'll go back to the brightness property, and I'm going to right click and insert a keyframe. If I scrub the playhead, the effects is a little abrupt. I need the transition to be more smoother. So I will snap the keyframe using this button over here. Now that we are on the right keypoint, go back to brightness and slide the value to one. Let's preview the effects, hit play. The next effect that we are going to try is the bars effect. Let's click and drag this to our video. This will add black bars on top and bottom portion of the video. Let's add another effect. I will drag in the blur effect. This will blur the whole screen. You will see these two added icons right up here on the video clip. Again, this is an indicator that you have an effect applied to your video. The properties panel is open, you can see the contents of these effects just by clicking them. You can also see that you are inside the blur effects right here. You can also right click on the icon down here to remove the effect. The 2 bars right here is really for demo, so I will delete it as well. And that's it for this lesson. Again, this is just an intro. So if you want to experiment with different effects, just click and drag the effects to your video and play with the properties to see the result. Okay? Thanks for watching, and I will see you on the next one. 9. Exporting image and video: If you want to have a snapshot of the current frame, like in this example, the playhead is right here. To take a snapshot, you can go to this camera icon right over here. Just click that and look for a place inside your directory to save the image of the current frame. Just don't forget to change the filename. You want to export your video, the icon to look for is a little different. This button up here is not a record button, but an Export Video button. Click this and a dialog box will appear. In here, you can enter a file name. Next is a place to store your video lecture. If you want to change a different path, for your video, you can use the browse button. Right down here is where you can set the profile. There are list of options like DVD, Device, and web. For now, I will leave it as all format. You can also set the target format of this video, I think, P four, h264 will be just fine. My video profile was set before I even imported this clip, but you can experiment with different profiles as well. For the quality, I always set this to high. And that's it. Thank you for watching this course. So the next time you record your lectures, consider editing it in openshot.