Nwgat

Shotcut Video Editor Review

wiak -

Shotcut is a handy open source video editor.
Ive used it for a months weeks now and am suprised of how versatile it is. For example you can export a project from file or timeline

it also has a awesome amount of flexibility to exporting formats. Shotcut sends its projects to melt for processing/encoding, so if shotcut hangs/crashes. Your project is still encoding in the background independently of shotcut

Am currently doing CRF x264 with FLAC in a MKV container for my projects and they are playing back natively on Windows 10 and Linux (Mac is outdated and left behind!)

the fun thing with shotcut and melt is that you can
qmelt.exe -progress -verbose TheFireEscape.mlt -consumer avformat:TheFireEscape.x264.mkv acodec=flac vcodec=libx264 preset=slow crf=16 rescale=hyper
encode your project from the command line, handy if you need to convert your 4K project to 1080p or 720p final h264 file

The Good

  • Nice Layout
  • Interesting export options
  • Simple to understand and follow
  • Premiere-ish design
  • Free & Open Source
  • Multi-Platform

The Bad

  • Importing JPEGs from Nikon D5100 takes ages, its feels like it literally imports it sequentially not in parallel, dont matter if your SSD can do 500 MB/s or 3.2 GB/s
  • Crashes once in a while while editing (it does project backup so recovery is handy) on FX, Ryzen has been stable
  • Laggy interface when playing overlay/text etc from timeline
  • GPU Processing for the Preview is still experimental
  • Missing stuf like montages and such

Features

Wide Format Support
Support for the latest audio and video formats thanks to FFmpeg
Supports popular image formats such as BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, SVG, TGA, TIFF as well as image sequences
No import required - native timeline editing
Frame-accurate seeking for many formats
Multi-format timeline: mix and match resolutions and frame rates within a project
Webcam capture
Audio capture
Support for 4K resolutions
Network stream playback (HTTP, HLS, RTMP, RTSP, MMS, UDP)
Frei0r video generator plugins (e.g. color bars and plasma)
Color, noise, and counter generators
EDL (CMX3600 Edit Decision List) export
Export single frame as image or video as image sequence