When I drag a clip from the playlist to the timeline area Shotcut creates a new track in the timeline. Another trick is to zoom out on the timeline so that the whole clip is visible. One of the things that has helped me get a handle on Shotcut was to enlarge the timeline area by pulling up the drag handle in the middle of the screen. Be prepared for Shotcut to take some time to ingest a file and don’t panic if nothing seems to be happening. One of the tutorial videos I watched suggested that I should use the playlist as a media bin. Shotcut starts up ready to go to work, and I get started by dragging my audio and video files from a File Explorer window into the Shotcut playlist panel. Since my hardware won’t handle Resolve and Hitfilm is strongly oriented toward special effects, I’ve been putting together a test video using Shotcut. And good old Shotcut has either gotten more solid, or I’ve finally absorbed enough to avoid crashing. Hitfilm Express is also available for free.

For folks with a big hardware budget and a willingness to learn, DaVinci Resolve is available as a free download. Lately, though, things have changed a bit. Until recently those of us in PC land have either opened our wallets, struggled with the Microsoft offering, or struggled with some open source alternatives.

I hear Mac users have it easy when it comes time to edit their Look At Me Play Guitar videos – their free iMovie application handles trimming heads and tails, syncing external audio, and rendering high quality video.

Shotcut cut video