Okay, I have been working with Shotcut for almost two years now and I am pretty happy with it. In the beginning, it did crash often. Even with shorter videos but that got quickly smoothed out.
The app never felt restrictive in a sense and it always did what I needed it to do. Sometimes I encountered a problem that seemed to not be solvable but because of the filter-system you could always couple together something.
Now even those coupled together solutions have been implemented as features, for example, “full rotation” with the size-and-position-filter.
I just wanted to show a bit of my journey with this post so here we go.
This was the first video I ever made with Shotcut. youtube link /H3dwYPYgJc4
I still like the core but I did not understand anything but Shotcut gave me the tools to actually make something in a manageable way.
This is probably the first video I was actually happy with. https://youtu.be/zSurK2B22ic
I understood how the app worked and I was improving on every aspect of video making. I think I also upgraded Shotcut which made the app more stable.
I also used Shotcut to make videos with IRL footage. youtube link /KQJPpJbyBR8
It is probably a good idea to learn how to color correct bc those videos are always super bright.
Even with my crappy setup, I managed to do some chromakeying with a green sheet. youtube link /ANJ7yT4Pk7U
One of the downsides of the program is that long videos are a bit harder to edit. Especially when you make a lot of cuts and you want to zoom in and out quickly. https://youtu.be/sCG98vs-m_A
Okay, now that I praised the app for the bad sides.
Size and Position solve most of my problems but there is no yaw-option. This is a basic feature of every editing program. Yaw can turn the source in a 3d space either along the horizontal line or vertical line of the source. There is no yaw-option as far as I know.
The program is very jumpy. Whenever I try to cut, delete, move, etc. the playhed jumps around wildly for no reason. It is jarring and it always takes me 2 to 4 seconds to go back to the place where I was editing. You can imagine how much time this takes when I am editing a 20 to 30 min video. A lot.
Inconsistency in controls. Sometimes pressing enter in an input field for filter or any other input field makes the change happen, sometimes it jumps in the timeline and sometimes it just changes from timeline-view to keyframe-view. Same problem with the jumpiness.
Keyframing is a nightmare. I like keyframing but it is a nightmare. the keyframe points get pushed around the timeline for no reason whenever I try to move them. When I make a keyframe point at the end of the clip it just randomly moves it back a few frames. Putting a frame later in the timeline and after that earlier in the line will either break the keyframing or it will break the keyframing. My point is that keyframing is super fragile to use. I like it but it needs the most amount of work.
Zooming and zooming out got much better but it is still not there. Whenever I zoom in, it doesn’t zoom in on the play head It zooms in on a random place.
Sorry, these are things that have been plaguing the app for almost 2 years.
I really like Shotcut and I can do a bunch of cool stuff with it but it needs some work. If the devs want me to go in deep into the problems I am willing to write a more in-depth report.