Hi. I’ve been using Shotcut for a few days, and I’ve also tried out a couple of other programs. I’m curious, if Shotcut has a rotoscoping feature, or if it will be added in future releases? If anyone could help out, that’d be much appreciated! Thank you!
Hi, a quick google search yields this rotoscoping tutorial for Shotcut and another great open source program called Krita. Assuming when you mean rotoscoping you mean animation, this should still work. Hope it helps 
That was quite helpful! Thank you for the article. The article mentioned marking in and out, how do I do that in Shotcut?
https://www.shotcutapp.com/howtos/keyboard-shortcuts/
Using keyboard shortcut index as reference, you can see that in/out points are only used when editing source.
When on timeline, use S to split the video two times, in effect in/out points and delete that part by i.e. click newly created part and hit X.
I split the video, then pressed I for input and O for output. I tried to export the file as an image, but it said failed during the conversion process. What should I do differently?
Sorry if this is a bit late. The recommended video only refers to using Shotcut to prepare a sequence of slides.The actual rotoscoping is then done in another program.
In general Shotcut cannot do sophisticated rotoscaping - if you mean having a whole series of mattes.
Yet in theory Shotcut could - at some time in the future do rotoscoping. If you think about it all that is
involved is having transparent regions - alpha channels and Shotcut has that. For example you might have a film made with many matters - background of city, second film of robots fighting (all regions but robots are transparent), third overlayed film of spaceships flying around in background (all regions but spaceships are transparent) and 4th film of glowing light sabre in robots hands (all regions of film but light sabres is transparent). So setting all the transparent films together gives a nice finished film.
But, so far Shotcut can only do 2 types of transparent regions… greenscreening (select area by color to make transparent) and box selection (put transparent photo on top of your film).
You should notice that Shotcut has no tools for other types of selection . It can’t do lasso type selection of complex regions on a film. Nor does it have painting tools for painting onto the film.
So all you can do (after selecting out a series of images from a film in Shotcut) is take those images to a photo program like Gimp. In Gimp you’d then add alpha channels and select regions on the film that you want to be transparent (or reverse transparent).
Then after you can bring those transparent images (images stores in boxes if you like - but that does not matter since the relevant areas, like a light sabre, are complex and opaque while the rest of the box shaped image is transparent) back into Shotcut
and set them on their own video track. in Shotcut BELOW the film you want to add the rotoscoping to (eg add light sabres on own track below other track of people fighting)
then move the transparent images around on the track to line them up to where they want to go on the film.
It’s a complicated proces but a work around for now. Until Shotcut advances to the ability to do more complicated selections to turn into transparent regions. Until Shotcut can do painting on the film.
But, for now it’s still a do able work around
It’s still better than the old fashioned rotoscoping where people drew by hand on glass and then filmed the images (glass area is see through or transparent) and composted that onto the main film .
And Gimp is free (open source) and is a program to use with Shotcut anyway.
Or use Natron, which also is free.
Always good to have a link 
► https://natron.fr/features/
And after the rotoscoping with Natron (great app)
you come back to Shotcut to
cut/paste your rotoscoped shots in with the rest of the film
and
add in audio backgrounds, audio voice over etc.
(since Natron don’t do no such)
you still need a video editor to get a finished video
Why not do it all in Da Vinci Resolve then? (Also free )
no app can do it all -it would be too big
shotcut for example can’t do dolby 5 speaker sound - mixes down to stereo
so you can have general-do-it-all apps who do lots… but not as well, or not as many detailed things
or specialist-do-one-job-very-well apps who do only a little but make a great job of it
and this is the age of the specialist,
that’s. why composotors (rotoscopers if you will) have split off as
a specialty from editors
however, remember the joke
(1) a specialist is someone who knows more and more about less and less
until ultimately they know everything about nothing
(2) a generalist is someone who knows less and less but about more and more
until ultimately they know nothing about everything
(smiling out loud)
This thread is about Rotoscoping, not about 'everything’.
Have you used DaVinci Resolve?
actually the thread is about
rotoscoping in Shotcut
and Shotcut does not directly do that, since it doesn’t do everything
and while references to other software are useful
it should be remembered that this is a Shotcut Forum
and we should not get too far off that Specialist reference
to Shotcut
OK, now you’re being belligerent without being helpful. Hardly charitable behaviour.
You should read the thread from the start. Lauren (a Shotcut Support Engineer) in post#2 suggested and linked to a rotoscoping tutorial for Shotcut and another great open source program called Krita.
Here’s the link again which Lauren posted:
Please.
now you get into personal attacks? (I could say the same words to you if I wanted a Flame war)
So can’t we Please
keep a civil tone here. .
But it is not “belligerence” to say that in a Shotcut Forum we should try to stick
to comments about Shotcut.
It is only common courtesy and a show of respect for the developers of Shotcut.
As I indicated in my first reply… the original link posted by lauren was not about rotoscoping with Shotcut.
It was only about using Shotcut to get a series of images from a viideo…
which were then to be taken to another app for the “rotoscoping”
…
and I mentioned that it could as easily be done with Gimp as with that other app
and the images then taken back into Shotcut.
and I gave the added useful info that “rotoscoping” revolves around the idea
of alpha channels and transparent regions in images
This was very helpful.
Especially since it refers to doing much more of the work in Shotcut.
In a Shotcut Forum this should be a priority since users are here to learn about Shotcut.
(Although, as I said, nothing wrong with useful links to other apps that
can do rotoscoping better, like Blender or Natron)
or apps that do audio better like Audacity)
But it is respect for Shotcut and those who put a lot of hard work into it,
to not go too far away from references to Shotcut. And to be civil to each other
while we are guests on their site.
Shotcut only does tweening between keyframes of a filter’s individual parameter. It does not do image or drawing tweening. For 2D animation, you can look to many apps but some free, open source ones are Krita and Synfig . I use my XP-Pen Deco Pro tablet with Krita .