So, I checked out Shotcut, the open-source video editor, and honestly, I wasn’t expecting much. But it turned out to be really good—surprisingly good. The first thing that hit me? Customization. Every panel can be moved around, docked, or hidden. You can build a workspace exactly how you want it. If you’re used to Adobe software, you’d dig this. It’s a nice change from feeling like the software is dictating your workflow.
It doesn’t skimp on the basics either. You’ve got a multi-track timeline, ripple, roll, and slide editing—all the essentials are there, and they’re handled well. Trimming and splitting clips? Easy peasy. No buried menus for these basic things, which is refreshing. You can mute tracks, add markers—the stuff you actually do when you’re editing. And then, proxy editing is a huge asset. If you’re dealing with 4K footage on a not-so-great machine, this is a welcome feature.
Now, where it really shines? Effects. There’s a color grading filter—a decent one—with color wheels, HSL adjustment, even LUT support. It won’t replace DaVinci Resolve, sure, but it’s solid for quick tweaks and gives you a lot more than you’d expect from a free editor. And, it keeps getting more interesting in a good way. Keyframing for every effect; seriously, I didn’t expect this. Ten different interpolation types. Motion tracking? Chroma key? They loaded this thing up with features. I didn’t even know I needed motion tracking until I started playing with it.
The audio tools are good too. Pan, pitch, gain, reverb—all keyframeable. It’s not a full-blown audio suite, but the visual waveform is helpful for syncing to the beats. Lastly, it handles different formats quite well—a big deal. It even comes with presets for social media, which is nice. They’ve used hardware acceleration for rendering, so it doesn’t crash when you finally go to export something.
I’m not ditching my current editing setup, but man, I definitely regret not adding Shotcut to my rotation sooner. It’s a genuinely powerful little program.
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