Today Shotcut has decided that every new video clip dropped to the timeline will add another video and audio track. The clip still goes onto the track that I drop it onto, but it creates multiple empty tracks as well. This is fairly annoying as it quickly makes a mess of the timeline and I have to manually delete all the extras. I’m currently on 25.11.2 (Linux). I haven’t noticed this before so I’m not sure if this is a bug from a recent update or what.
Settings > Timeline > Automatically Add Tracks
It only adds another empty track when an empty track gets another clip. It keeps an empty track—audio and video each—ready to receive more without having to manually add tracks.
An empty track also facilitates either rectangle selection or scrubbing.
For a beginner, new, or infrequent user it makes some common needs more obvious. For example, “How do I add music?” Without it, need to learn that you must add an audio track and how to do that. With this, they might see the audio track and it becomes more obvious. Likewise, overlay an image or video on top of a video. A lot of video editors start with a few empty tracks and/or automatically add tracks as you drag a clip upwards or downwards.
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Hi Dan, I respectfully disagree, and @Saveitforparts has described the situation very well, because “it quickly makes a mess of the timeline and I have to manually delete all the extras”.
I also don’t think that this default setting is useful for beginners. Please keep in mind that beginners have to first grasp the concept of non-linear editing, learn about the various basic options for cutting, trimming, deleting, colour corrections etc. Working with multiple tracks, overlays etc. are advanced features and related skills.
Moreover, adding clips to the playlist and adding or deleting tracks are basic functions that need to be learned at the beginning. Automatically creating an additional track for every added clip to the same timeline is simply confusing for newbies (and unnnecessary), as well as a chore for users that don’t need another track.
I agree that there are use cases for that feature, but it shouldn’t be the hugely irritating default setting.
Consider it an experiment. But there is no data collection in Shotcut, and positive feedback is only about 1% of total feedback. Yours is not so relevant because you got the concept of a beginner wrong IMO, and this is not only about beginners. If this was not able to be turned off you would learn that once you stop obsessively deleting the empty tracks and learn to live with it, it’s no longer really much of a problem and actually rather nice. It is my decision, and people can learn to turn it off if they want.
Here’s my feedback: I also am annoyed at the extra tracks being created when I didn’t specifically desire them to be. If this isn’t reversed, then in the future I would like an option to turn off this feature.
It already exists
Settings > Timeline > Automatically Add Tracks
Perfect - thanks.