Editing videos with OpenShot

Image Sequence

A rather inconspicuous, but nonetheless powerful, feature is the ability to automatically import image sequences. You can use it to import numbered images and create a slide show with them.

The image files need to be in the same folder and have the same names that include consecutive numbering. From a practical viewpoint, shots from a digital camera are already consecutively numbered.

Click the File | Import Image Sequence menu item or press Ctrl+I. In the dialog that opens, choose the images to import along with the file name pattern (e.g., myfile_5d.png , to indicate files beginning with myfile_ and sequentially numbered with five digits and ending in .png ). The dialog describes the file naming pattern when you click Import Image Sequence (Click for Instructions) .

An even easier approach is to open the folder in a data manager, select the files, then drag them into the Project Files ; OpenShot recognizes the pattern automatically. Both methods have the same results and the image sequence appears like any other file in the project files. From there, you can drag it onto the track as usual.

Transitions

A special strength of OpenShot is handling transitions that connect two clips. On the Transitions tab, you will find more than 50 different transition effects to spiff up your video (Figure 3). To use an effect, all you need to do is drag the transition between two overlapping clips (Figure 4).

Figure 3: OpenShot provides more than 50 transition effects.

Figure 4: Blue boxes show the transition between clips.

OpenShot also lets you make detailed adjustments, even to transitions. By right-clicking a transition and choosing Move Transitions , you can move all of the transitions in millisecond increments. If you want to move transitions to the left, enter a negative value. Alternatively, you can call up the transition properties with a right-click to open the Transition/Mask Properties dialog to provide a tool.

The Type property lets you convert a transition to a mask. A mask covers only a section of the clip. This function is worth experimenting with to do some manual fine-tuning.