I’ve been using ShotCut for a few months now and have hit an interesting problem I think is worth sharing. I’m probably missing something and the problem will evaporate when I know what that something is. So please feel free to shout out.
Fading a single clip to black is a breeze in Shotcut. But what if you have a couple of stacked tracks (the upper track a mask, perhaps) and want to fade them to black consistently together.
My instinct is to put a third track on top of these two tracks, add transparency to that track and fade the transparency to black.
But it seems that transparency doesn’t know how to fade to black. (It probably thinks its fading to black, but to a completely transparent black, so…)
I could probably use a black track as the third track and keyframe a fade from that…
LATER THAT SAME DAY
Or I could just cut that black track down to the length of the fade out only and fade in black, using adjust transparency.
Yes, that’s actually not a bad idea. Why didn’t I think of that?
Thanks, everybody. My first time here and this has been very helpful!
Instead of trying to FADE OUT all tracks to black, I would add an additional track on top and add black (Open Other > Color). I would then apply a FADE IN filter to that black color on the top track
@bentacular I agree this would save time if you have lots of track to fade to black. But for only 2 or 3 or even 4 tracks… it takes only a fraction of a second per track to apply a fade out. To me at least, it’s faster than creating a new track, then do Open Other, choose black, then place the black clip on the track, move the clip at the end, then adjust the length of the clip, then finally apply the Fade In.
Yup! This way is easier to scale no matter how many tracks you have underneath, and you don’t have to fiddle with match the fade keyframes for each one exactly…
IMO the simplest and quickest way to fade stacked tracks to black is to use the Master track. Add a fade out filter to the Master and it’s done.
6 tracks fade to black.
In this case the fade to black was a short sequence near the start of the project. I placed a corresponding black clip on the master track and faded that in with transparency. Putting a fade out filter on the entire master track would have done something quite different.
But I’m grateful to you for drawing my attention to this capability to apply a filter to the whole schmeer. I’d recently spent a lot of time adding audio gain filters one by one to every individual clip on a timeline!
Good point, sauron, and that would give me finer control over the fade. But I was looking for something simple for an essentially rather simple effect.
