Ability to set default playback speed per clip

[nickjanetakis]

I edit a lot of screencast style videos where I record my screen with a webcam and then edit them. These videos are sometimes 2 minutes or 2 hours.

It would be great to be able to set the default playback speed to 2x or some value that persists in the settings so when I play any clip it uses this speed by the default. Editing at 2x speed saves a huge amount of time. Then you could override this setting per clip if you needed.

The current behavior is every time you stop a clip from playing and play it, you have to tap the l key to make the playback speed faster. Given every time you make a single cut the video stops, you need to press l a ton of times. It becomes something you need to micro manage potentially hundreds of times per edit session.

Other editors like DaVinci Resolve allow you to set the playback speed on a per clip basis which persists, it’s really handy.

Also a side note, DaVinci Resolve, YouTube, VLC and MPV can all play audio back at 2x speed crystal clear on my machine but Shotcut heavily garbles the text to where it sounds jittered and robotic. It’s still ok enough for editing for my use case since I know my own voice but it would be nice if it were clear and smooth like every other video editing tool I tried at 2x speed. Happy to provide more detail (hardware, etc.) if you need it for debugging purposes.

[shotcut]

At 2x playback Shotcut simply discards every other frame including its audio. If you want, you can use Properties > Speed to adjust the speed in a manner that does not discard audio. You can do that to the clips in Playlist, and it will persist for that playlist clip within the project. Then, when you want to add that clip to the Timeline:

• right-click the playlist item and choose Copy
• it opens in the Source player
• change Properties > Speed back to 1
• now drag-n-drop or execute an action (menu, toolbar button, shortcut) to put it in the timeline

I am telling you how to workaround because this (like most suggestions) is very unlikely to be added to Shotcut in any near future timeline.

[nickjanetakis]

change Properties > Speed back to 1

The goal of this feature request was to be able to play the clips back at 2x during the editing process while the rendered video played back at 1x speed.

If you change the play speed back to 1, then it would be back to editing at 1x speed, or am I misunderstanding something?

[shotcut]

I better understand the request now. It is interesting. My suggestion work only work for 3 point editing

Three Point Editing

Three-point editing is a technique used in video editing to manipulate footage by using three reference points: an in-point, an out-point, and a cut point. It’s particularly useful when you need to extract a segment from a source clip and insert it in your Timeline. The segment can also be inserted into to the Playlist. The Three Points In Point This is the starting time of the segment you want to insert into the Timeline. In the Source player, you set the in-point at the specific frame where y…

[nickjanetakis]

Yep.

If you edit ~8 hours of videos a week, being able to play them back at 2x speed for editing saves you 4 hours of real life time.

I edited around ~250 hours worth of podcasts with DaVinci Resolve a few years ago where I had playback configured at 2x while it was rendered at 1x. That 1 feature alone saved me 125 hours of real life time.

From a feature implementation perspective, the clip speed for rendering is a separate setting than the clip speed for editing playback. Both could be attached to a clip. You could also have a global setting that lets you set the editing playback speed so you don’t have to do it for every clip, but if you did define it on a clip it would override the global.

The `l` behavior could work the same and let you modify it at “runtime", the only difference is its default speed would be controlled by the clip or global playback speed.