Can "projects" be easily moved from laptop to a desktop

[eager]

On a different free video editor, you can’t just open a video project you were working on from a laptop migrate it to a flash drive and then open it on a desktop. You have to point things in certain directions and must copy whole parent folders - complicated. In shotcut, can you simply save a project (like you would in Libre Writer) and then open that saved file with a different PC running shotcut? Thank you.

[Hudson555x]

It all depends on how you store your files.
Shotcut doesn’t move any files you use, and depending on how you store your media files will determine how Shotcut will save your project with either absolute or relative file paths in the project’s MLT file.

You can read more about that here:

Project Management

Introduction Shotcut does not provide very much in the way of project management at this time. Rather, you are required to manage many aspects of this. There are a few things you should know: Shotcut saves to a project file in a text format called MLT XML. (Technical detail on that format can be found here.) The project file does not contain any of your media. Rather, it only links to your media files by file system path and name. There are 3 different kinds of projects: Clip If you put a…

[Elusien]

It is (reasonably) easy to move a Shotcut project between a laptop and a desktop. I have done it several times. The new system needs to be able to access the media (if it is in a different folder you need to either edit the .mlt file to access the new folder or tell Shotcut where the media is once it realises it cannot fond them. Apart from that everything should work fine.

[Derbydog]

On my pc, I created folders like this:

Desktop\Editing projects"project 1".

Then under Project 1, I had subdirectories:
01 Raw Media
02 Processed Media (anything from Raw Media that I altered, pics etc)
03 Audio files
04 Exported files
Setting up specific directories for specific types of files makes it much easier to find things later. Add as many sub directories as you need.

Then, I can copy the entire Project 1 directory to my laptop (or reverse) and save under Desktop\Editing projects\

Its worked fine for me so far.

[eager]

It’s really important to know that and set that up even before one starts using the program. There’s not much support for this other video editing software online (no forum like this good forum) and the YouTubes don’t stress organization like they should. Interestingly, I think this other software should work the same way but when I’ve copied the whole parent folder from my laptop with sub-folders including the native file for the project itself. Ex. C:\Programs\How\Video Projects\Video\name of file working on in the video editing software. I copied that all over to a flash drive and then copied all that form the flash drive to a desktop but that file I was working on won’t open in the same version of the video editing program as my laptop will. Thanks for sharing that.

[Hudson555x]

@eager

I copied that all over to a flash drive and then copied all that form the flash drive to a desktop but that file I was working on won’t open in the same version of the video editing program as my laptop will.

All you need to copy is the installer program file you downloaded from Shotcut, or download a fresh copy from the download tab at the top of this page.

You can install multiple versions of Shotcut if you wish on any computer, but using one version to the next with projects may get mixed results. By default Shotcut will not install multiple versions.

Concerning your project MLT files and all of your media files, all of those will copy over just fine.