I am new to Shotcut and there may be an obvious answer to this (keyframes?).
I am using a technique to animate my interstitials with two fixed images with simple text laid on them.
I set up the “from” image with no text
I set up the “to” image with the text laid out as I want it to appear.
I then lay the images adjacent to each other
I then overlap the “to” image onto the “from” image by click-hold-drag to the left
I use the resulting timecode to time the length of the transition
When I release the mouse button a nice transition is created for me
The problem I am experiencing occurs when I do any further editing NEAR that transition. At what seems (to me) like random times, the transition changes, becoming some mixture of the “to” image and video footage that appears before the “from” image (I think). This causes me to have to re-create the animated text over and over again - which I find incredibly frustrating.
Also, there are random crashes when working around the transition, which also risk hours of work and which have entrained me to obsessively press CTRL-S after nearly every operation, wihch causes me to wait for the file (which can become quite large) to save.
Q1: Is this happening to anyone else?
Q2: Is there a technique I don’t know about that can help me to avoid this?
Hi @GrahamLeach
It’s quite difficult to understand quite what you mean from your description although it’s detailed. A screenshot or even better a screen capture would help!
However I just made this very quick demo to try to explain how to do a transition of 2 images in SC, and the best way to add text - by putting a text clip on a separate track.
Thanks for the quick answer! Taking a cue from you, I recorded a short video of the bug/problem/feature that I am seeing. I am completely willing to admit I am not familiar with Shotcut, having only been using it for 2 days now.
Here’s what’s happening to me. Perhaps its a bug, perhaps it’s a BTCATC problem.
Please let me know what you think?
…and here’s an even longer form one with audio commentary that you might find more useful and information-rich to help figure out if this is a bug / feature / user error
I am using Shotcut 19.12.16 on Windows 7
Here’s a movie of the technique I am using to create text animation, which shows the full process I am using
I reproduced this, and it is a bug that was introduced in v19.09 as a side effect of a bug related to needing to fix the filters on the second clip in the transition after you split it. Most people have the transition flow into the same clip that is the second part of the transition, and the bug is that it assumes this. This bug occurs with the following combination specifically:
have at least one filter on the second clip in a transition
put a different clip (or sub-clip) after the transition than what appears as the second clip in the transition
split the clip following the transition
Shotcut is trying to move further away from transitions as being very independent clips and towards being managed as belonging to the clips before and afterwards. However, I think I can add a check that what is being split is the same as what is in the transition.
Update: Until the bug is fixed, I recommend you change your workflow to avoid splitting the clip following the transition. Rather, you can move the clip to V2, trim it, and then move it back to V1. Alternatively, before you add the clip that you were splitting to the timeline, while it is open in the Source player, trim it before adding it to the timeline.
Until it’s fixed it’s good to remove the text filter(s) from clips 1 and 2, make the transition, then add the text on a text clip on the track above. I made another quick demo. This includes a few tips which you may not know about (you say you are not too familiar with SC).
A couple of points:
Point 1 - no need to spend time using the timecode to calculate 2 seconds. Pressing Page Up moves the cursor back 1 second, so just press it twice. (Also in the demo I hit Alt +left arrow to move the cursor back to the previous cut point).
Point 2 - to add a quick fade in of the text, double click the top left hand corner of the text clip then select “adjust opacity instead of fade in from black”. Vice versa for a fade out.
