Hi, and thank you for shotcut!
I’m assembling reels, one reel per track.
I export each track as an individual video file, by leaving only the to-be-exported track visible and hiding all others. However, if one of the hidden tracks is longer than the one to be exported, shotcut will export black screen until the duration of the hidden track is reached. To me it would seem more useful if shotcut recognized that only the visible tracks will contribute something to the export and stop exporting after the last visible track ends, but maybe I’m missing something?
Option 2
Find the exact spot where you want to stop at.
Copy Timeline to source (loads your current saved MLT in the source viewer)
Adjust the right slider where you want to stop or type in the actual spot in the source viewer.
Make sure it’s set to Export from Source (instead of Timeline)
That’s one neat explanation Hudson, thanks a bunch!
Option 1 doesn’t work for me, because I want to leave the hidden track as is.
Option 2 is a workaround that might work for me, I will try it asap.
Wrt my suggestion: is there any use case where you would want the extra blank space at the end of the export because of a hidden track? If not I think my suggestion is still valid (even though there are the cited workarounds)
I’m not following the logic of the reason why you’re hiding the track to begin with. You say visible tracks as people might hide the video only to have the audio be heard. Hiding the track only hides the video, and doesn’t mute the audio.
You might want to take full advantage of the “Save As” feature and just simply rename the file, then just delete the tracks/clips you’re not going to use.
Instead of rendering each each track as it’s own file, just Save/Save As each track as it’s own MLT project file, then Open MLT XML as Clip, it opens in the source viewer. Then you can bring them into the timeline. This way everything renders at the same time.
Okay, that seems like an advanced solution. I’m not there yet skillwise / understanding of the product, but I’ll definitely try.
The reason for my workflow is that I am assembling one video per track to avoid having multiple projects with the same source files.
My sources are interviews with people. I load the sources to the timeline, one track per interviewed person. I have additional tracks open that are supposed to be exported later one by one, all other tracks being hidden and muted. This comes down to having n tracks with input and m tracks for output in the timeline. Each output track is one interview topic, and contains what interviewee 1-n said about the topic. To get there I watch the source files in the timeline. When it contains a comment of the interviewee about one of the topics, I perform splits around it, and move it to the relevant output track.
The hiding of the video and letting the audio play is indeed a use case I have not considered. But I’ll still stick with my original suggestion: don’t export empty video just because there is a longer track that is both hidden and inaudible
This is when you would fully utilize the Playlist feature. From the source you would select clips and store those into your playlist. Then add playlist items to your timeline. If you are not using transitions, you can export from the playlist.
O realize that the description of my workflow was not clear enough in the previous post, so I edited it for clarity.
The selection from the source is not precise enough for me. I need to see the audio waveform to be able to cut into the silences. So my workflow is to load the sources into the timeline, watch them in their entirety, cut out the pieces I need using splits as I go, and move these to another track, from where I export it.
Just to feed back, I’m using your second suggestion (Copy to source, ‘out’ at approriate moment, export) now. It’s a workaround with some inconvenience, but it allows me to reach my goal! Thanks for your help!
I second the requested functionality here. My workflow is the following: I add individual tracks and populate them with gopro video files, copy small clips from the files, and paste the small clips into a new working track that I keep at the top. I then edit the clips in the top track - text, fades, zoom, etc. When I am done, my working track is shorter than the source tracks. I mute and make invisible all the source tracks, but when I export there is blank space at the end until the invisible tracks run out. It really seems like export should only make the resulting video the length of the visible tracks. My solution is that I save the project as “xxx for export”, then delete all the source tracks. This seems like a jankety workaround. There isn’t a case where a user would want that blank space at the end of the video. How does one request a change to shotcut? Is this the best way?
