Joining Projects

Help/How To
1

I have been using Shotcut for a few months now and I just love the control it gives me without being dependent on a commercial enterprise.

My question is that I have two separate projects (so two separate mlt files) and I would like to concatenate the clips from one to the clips from the second and create a single mlt file for further editing. Is there any way of doing this please?

Thanks Bill

2

Load your first project, whatever mlt file you want to play first, then go to file > Open MLT XML as clip, and navigate to and select your second project file, and it will load the project in the source player. You can then add this to the timeline and continue working from there.

However this will remove the ability to edit existing filters/transitions and such on the second project, since it’s reading it as a clip and not a whole project. You can still add new effects to it, but can’t change the ones loaded with it.

2 Likes
3

At the first step “load 1st project”, I would add “save it as a new project”.
Or using mtl copies done before starting.

Just in case it mess up and crashes all the work done !

4

@Keno40 Yes, that is a good idea to keep backups of important project files. :slight_smile:

5

Thank you for your help, lauren and Keno40. The ‘insert as a clip’ will solve some of my problems, but doesn’t give me quite what I am looking for. Perhaps an example will help.

I have videos of a number of my daughter’s soccer (football outside the US) matches. I have a separate project for each match that I have already edited in Shotcut to contain the clips of her I need. For a new video I am putting together for her scholarship application, I now need to get all clips into one project and do a NLE to group all the passes together, all the shots together, all the tackles together etc. I would also like to further trim a number of the clips and remove others entirely.

I don’t think there’s a way to do what I want in Shotcut at present and maybe no one else has a need for this feature. I have written some python scripts in the past to modify the mlt files and I suspect I may need to do this again here.

Perhaps melt is able to help, but I guess this is the wrong forum for such a question.

6

I think this is still a valid topic as i couldn’t find any changes to mlt XML usage.

I’m having the same situation with my worldtrip video and all the countries as sub-projects.
My biggest challenge here is to overlap the audio clips of two concatenated video projects as i first syncd all my cuts to the beat of the music.

Maybe there is a way to modify the xml tree inside the mlt to insert multiple tractors from single mlt files into one big project, allowing to edit the single clips and their filters again.
Or maybe there is a way to get all clips from a projects timeline (with their start/end point an filters) appended into another projects playlist…

Does someone know an easy way to do that?

7

Use the concatenate feature on ffmpeg to combine and save as one full video then bring into Shotcut to further trim.