I’m creating some text overlays and would like to give them specific durations, e.g. 10 secs or 8 secs, etc. How can I tell the duration of an existing overlay clip, and how can I set it to a specific duration without having to zoom in and drag it pixel by pixel with the mouse?
For example, I don’t see a way to find how long this text clip is:
The properties pane is not particularly useful:
(oops, can’t post 2 images in one post…)
And the Filters panel doesn’t have the duration either. Suggestions?
NB: it would be great if the beginning of the text were shown in the timeline, I now have a whole series of indiscriminate blue boxes there…
In the latest versions of Shotcut, just position the mouse cursor on a clip and wait for the info box to appear.
One way is to use markers.
Place a marker on the timeline
Open the Markers panel.
Set the duration of the marker. You can also use Ctrl + Drag to extend a marker with the mouse. Grab one side of the marker with the mouse, press & hold Ctrl and drag.
The same marker can be moved and reused if you need multiple text clips with the same duration.
When you trim or extend the text clip, it will snap to the ends of the marker. These long markers are called Range markers or simply Range by the way.
There’s no real way to do this. You can change the default length of new clips but that’s not really useful for you if your text clip are of different durations.
Another way to make a clip as long (or short) as you want is to watch the info box as you edit the duration:
In this example you can see the counter change as I easily extend the clip to 5 seconds:
