A big part of splicing a lot of footage together is choreographing the order of the shots and filters applied on them. I want to plan out all this out before I have even collected the shots.
I’ve currently got a project where I have created some prototype PNG images representative of the shots that will later replace them, arranged them on the timeline, and applied filters to them. I did this with the rough plan of figuring out choreography first and later having to redo the whole file with the shots rather than images and reapplying all the filters including keyframes.
As the timeline got more and more complicated, and several filters with keyframes were added, I’m not really looking forward to having to redo it.
Any ideas on a best way to do this now with my current project or in future projects?
A few things that I am already aware of:
proxy editing with lower resolution videos is already a thing by default, I could maybe use dummy videos instead of dummy PNGs and replace videos with videos simply by replacing the dummy file in windows explorer with the intended source video. I’ll probably do this unless someone’s got something else that’s clever. I’d still appreciate any tips on doing it this way.
My filters may not look as expected going from dummy material to intended shots. In my case, I think the filters I am using and the way I’m using them should work out fine, but I shall see!
There is a “Replace” option when you right click on a clip in the timeline. I’ve used it to replace photos with other photos, but not photos with videos… Drag your final shot to the source, and then right click on your png clip in the timeline to see if it will replace it with the shot and keep all the filters and stuff
I hadn’t tried yet, but I anticipate there won’t be anything for Shotcut to go off of to set the in and out time for the final shot unless I manually tell it in the source… pain.
I wonder if I have the final shot placed in the timeline with the right timing, I can somehow steal a clip from it using the image’s in time and out time in the timeline. A graphical representation:
@TAZUTRA, replacing an image with a video works, but has the limitation I mentioned. You can trim your clip in the source before adding, but for me where I’m aligning video to music in time, this is an unwieldy workflow.
I had just found the feature where you can copy all selected filters (including their keyframes) for a selected clip and then paste them in a separate clip. This is really super handy! @MusicalBox made this tutorial about the feature.
In my case, I think that this works very well, and that I can easily
Split footage at the in and out time of the images and move to a visible track.
copy and paste all the filters
Still quite a bit of work, but I think I can automate steps 4 and 5 of the process with some code if I match images to videos by filename… or specify the source track and animated track by shotcut:name.
