Just wanted to post positive feedback on something Shotcut.
I took the bull by the horns today and delved into proxies and I’m so glad I did and so thankful to Dan and his assistants.
I’m constantly looking for an editor that can play smoothly. A couple come close including Shotcut. I’ve always attempted proxies on almost every editor I use, but they took so long that I gave up on them, and when they had worked I didn’t notice an improvement. It was looking at an editor yesterday which I’d never heard of before that turned me on to proxying my media in a new way.
This video editor proxies the media whilst they’re being imported. I sighed as the clips took ages to load and was in a mind to uninstall it, having just downloaded it. I got distracted by something on TV and forgot about the import, and when they’d finished, it didn’t seem that long. I knew some editors that take as long just to start.
My mind was blown.
I went to edit the first clip and the playback… The playback…was smooth. Normal. And these were 4K clips. The 2160p had dropped to 540p to make this happen but it was okay for an edit.
Next was to ramp up the speed by three. It was incredible. This editor was now playing a 4K clip at three times the speed inside a video editor!
So, I thought, I am more experienced in Shotcut than this “new” editor and what if Shotcut could proxy the media at the beginning automatically.
I read up on Dan’s post on proxies elsewhere in this forum and set about doing that.
Each clip appeared on the Job page and I thought my hopes would be dashed as I would have to wait hours for my six 4K clips, each over a couple of minutes long, to render. It took 26 minutes in total, thank you hardware encoder, and h264_qsv, too!
Even if it hadn’t taken 26 minutes, I realised that Jobs run in the background whilst you got on with doing something else in Shotcut, like working on the first proxied clip, and as my edits take hours to finish, I knew during the edit the rest would have proxied.
So whilst the first clip was proxying I put the kettle on and made a cheese and salami roll.
I did not finish my coffee and roll because the clip had proxied. However the playback wasn’t great but I remembered the Preview Scaling defaulted to 540p on proxies and there was still a lower one. 360p was the one I selected. The playback, on a 4K, was real. I cut it and made one half x3 the speed, and it actually played at x3 speed. Why 360p worked better than 540p is a bit of a puzzle, but who cares?
The playback was so smooth that I carried on editing a video I had already made on another editor. I was more creative between scenes now as I have real time playback. Even playing backwards was great now and I could even hear the audio as I scrubbed. Every time I hit the J or L keys I’m watching it actually play faster.
Adding music did not hinder it either.
I felt like a professional editor. Actually editing with normal playbacks.
So, well done and thank you for the proxies, for converting media right at the start automatically, for hardware encoding for people like me who don’t have Nvidia or vaapi to make the process quick and for the selection of previewing scales. The whole package has now made such a big and pleasurable difference to my future edits with Shotcut.
