A Priori editing in Shotcut

@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

  1. acquire all my footage,
  2. add them to separate tracks,
  3. align them in time (maybe with this),
  4. Split footage at the in and out time of the images and move to a visible track.
  5. 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.