I’ve been trying to edit a pixel art video in Shotcut, but have encountered a number of issues with the program. I’m currently super frustrated and am wondering if fixes exist for these issues. For background, the main thing I am trying to edit is a still image (256 x 144) with a animated overlay (500 x 500). I want to make the background of the overlay clear and reposition it, then add some text (which I want to appear pixelated).
1: The Chroma Key filter does not seem to be able to exactly remove a color. For example, if I color pick (0, 0, 0), a range of colors around the black pixels are removed, which messes with dithering as well as the overall crispness of the pixel art. Is there a feature that allows me to selectively remove a single color? Also, is there a way to swap all pixels of one color with another color?
2: The main Project view window is always blurry, and doesn’t seem to be rendering the individual pixels correctly. When i did a text export, the pixels were warped, with some of them larger than others. Is there a way to fix these problems? I tried setting interpolation to nearest neighbor with no success.
Is there an option to make the overlay have a transparent background in Photoshop or GIMP, then export it in a format that supports transparency like PNG? If this option is available, then the Chroma Key filter becomes unnecessary and the borders will be perfect.
The preview uses YUV 4:2:0 pixel format and by default scales (with interpolation) to fit the video within the GUI. 4:2:0 means sub-sampled (lower resolution) chroma, which means, when converted back to RGB by the GPU, the color is interpolated. A lot of game devs and I guess pixel art makers don’t think in terms of video. Video is usually delivered in that pixel format, and in Shotcut this is much less data to transfer to the GPU on each frame making playback more efficient. There is no control over this in Shotcut; don’t rely on preview for pixel accuracy with RGB input. If you export in RGB (requires special care) the preview is inaccurate. If you export as a typical video, then it is more WYSIWYG. If you export in RGB or YUV 4:4:4 and upload to any web video service, they will converted it to YUV 4:2:0; so, it does not really matter in the end.
And for the export, you need to set the Video Mode and not Export > Advanced > Video > Resolution.
I see. Thanks for the useful info; I’ll keep it in mind while I am working in video editing. I think it’s probably best for me to use a different video editing software (i have found several that provide a clean preview, but do not have good resizing settings for pixel art), and then resize/finalize in Shotcut.