Wide Format Support

• Support for the latest audio and video formats thanks to FFmpeg

• Supports popular image formats such as BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, SVG, TGA, TIFF, WebP as well as image sequences

• No import required - native timeline editing

• Frame-accurate seeking for many formats

• Multi-format timeline: mix and match resolutions and frame rates within a project

• Webcam capture

• Audio capture

• Support for 4K resolutions

• Network stream playback (HTTP, HLS, RTMP, RTSP, MMS, UDP)

• Frei0r video generator plugins (e.g. color bars and plasma)

• Color, text, noise, and counter generators

• EDL (CMX3600 Edit Decision List) export

• Export single frame as image or video as image sequence

• Videos files with alpha channel - both reading and writing

Audio Features

• Audio scopes: loudness, peak meter, waveform, spectrum analyzer

• Volume control

• Audio filters:
  Balance, Bass & Treble, Band Pass, Compressor, Copy Channel, Delay, Downmix, Expander, Gain, High Pass, Limiter, Low Pass, Noise Gate, Normalize: One Pass, Normalize: Two Pass, Notch, Pan, Pitch, Reverb, Swap Channels

• Audio mixing across all tracks

• Fade in and out audio and fade video from and to black with easy-to-use fader controls on timeline

• Cross-fade audio and video dissolve transitions easily by overlapping shots on the same track of the timeline

• JACK transport sync

• Tone generator

• Stereo, mono, and 5.1 surround

• Pitch compensation for video speed changes

Video Effects

• Video compositing across video tracks

• 3-way (shadows, mids, highlights) color wheels for color correction and grading

• Eye dropper tool to pick neutral color for white balancing

• Deinterlacing

• Auto-rotate

• Fade in/out audio and fade video from and to black with easy-to-use fader controls on timeline

• Video wipe transitions:
  bar, barn door, box, clock (radial), diagonal, iris, matrix, and custom gradient image

• Track compositing/blending modes:
  None, Over, Add, Saturate, Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Darken, Dodge, Burn, Hard Light, Soft Light, Difference, Exclusion, HSL Hue, HSL Saturation, HSL Color, HSL Luminosity.

• Video Filters:
  Alpha Channel: Adjust, Alpha Channel: View, Audio Dance Visualization, Audio Light Visualization, Audio Spectrum Visualization, Audio Waveform Visualization, Blend Mode, Blur: Box, Blur: Exponential, Blur: Gaussian, Blur: Low Pass, Blur: Pad, Brightness, Choppy, Chroma Hold, Chroma Key: Advanced, Chroma Key: Simple, Contrast, Color Grading, Corner Pin, Crop: Source, Crop: Circle, Crop: Rectangle, Distort, Dither, Elastic Scale, Flip, Glitch, Glow, Gradient, Grid, Halftone, Hue/Lightness/Saturation, Invert Colors, Key Spill: Advanced, Key Spill: Simple, Lens Correction, Levels, 3D LUT, Mask: Apply, Mask: From File, Mask: Simple Shape, Mirror, Mosaic, Nervous, No Sync, Noise: Fast, Noise: Keyframes, Old Film: Dust, Old Film: Grain, Old Film: Projector, Old Film: Scratches, Old Film: Technocolor, Opacity, Posterize, Reduce Noise: HQ3DN, Reduce Noise: Smart Blur, Reduce Noise: Wavelet, RGB Shift, Rotate and Scale, Saturation, Scan Lines, Sepia Tone, Sharpen, Size and Position, Sketch, Spot Remover, Stabilize, Text: Rich, Text: Simple, Threshold, Timer, Trails, Vertigo, Vignette, Unpremultiply Alpha, Wave, White Balance

• 360° Video Filters:
  Equirectangular Mask, 360: Equirectangular to Rectilinear, 360: Hemispherical to Equirectangular, 360: Rectilinear to Equirectangular, 360: Stabilize, 360: Transform

• Speed effect for audio/video clips

• Reverse a clip

• Video scopes: Histogram, RGB Parade, RGB Waveform, Waveform, Vectorscope and Zoom

Editing Features

• Trimming on source clip player or timeline with ripple option

• Easy-to-use cut, copy, and paste operations

• Append, insert, overwrite, lift, and ripple delete editing on the timeline

• 3-point editing

• Hide, mute, and lock track controls

• Multitrack timeline with thumbnails and waveforms

• Unlimited undo and redo for playlist edits including a history view

• Create, play, edit, save, load, encode, and stream MLT XML projects (with auto-save)

• Save and load trimmed clip as MLT XML file

• Load and play complex MLT XML file as a clip

• Drag-n-drop files from file manager

• Scrubbing and transport control

• Keyframes for filter parameters

• Detach audio from video clip

• Presets for most filters and Export - both supplied and user-created

• Sort playlist by name or creation/recording date

• Multi-select items in the playlist and timeline

• Create custom name for clips and enter comments about it

• Low resolution proxy editing to improve speed of seeking and eliminate or minimize scaling

Cross Platform & Codec Independent

• Cross platform support: available on Windows, Linux, and macOS)

• Codec independent so does not rely on system codecs

• Can run as a portable app from external drive

• UI translations: Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Gaelic, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Nepali, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Occitan, Polish, Portugese, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Taiwanese, Thai, Turkish, Ukranian (not all 100%, but you can help

• Batch encoding with job control

• Encode/transcode to a variety of formats and codecs thanks to FFmpeg

• Stream (encode to IP) files and any capture source

• Video quality measurement (PSNR and SSIM)

• Perform integrity check of an audio/video file

• View detailed information about an audio/video file

Display and Monitoring

• External monitoring via Blackmagic Decklink card on NTSC monitor

• External monitoring on an extra system display/monitor

• UI themes/skins: native-OS look and custom dark and light

• Control video zoom in the player: fit viewable area (default), 10%, 25%, 50%, original (100%), and 200%

• Flexible UI through dock-able panels

• Detailed media properties panel

• Recent files panel with search

• Thumbnail and waveform caching between sessions

• Save and switch between multiple UI layouts.

• On-screen grid and safe areas with snapping.

• Low resolution preview (Preview Scaling) to improve speed of realtime effects.

Hardware Support

• Blackmagic Design SDI and HDMI for input and preview monitoring

• Leap Motion and Contour Design Shuttle PRO for jog/shuttle control

• Webcam capture

• Audio capture from system device (microphone, line in)

• Capture (record) SDI, HDMI, webcam (V4L2), JACK audio, PulseAudio, IP stream, and Windows DirectShow devices

• Multi-core parallel image processing (when not using GPU and frame-dropping is disabled)

• OpenGL GPU-based image processing with 16-bit floating point linear per color component

• AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA hardware encoding

From ShotCut (2020) some frequently asked questions -

What is the easiest way to install ShotCut on my system?

If you are on Windows or Mac OS, the simplest way is to head to the Download page, where you'll find several ready-to-install packages. If you are on Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu and some other distributions, FreeCAD is already included in the standard software repositories and you can simply install it with the software manager. On Ubuntu, the FreeCAD team also maintains its own PPA repositories. For further details about installation, refer to the Installing page.

Is ShotCut really free? Even for commercial use?

ShotCut is open-source software, and is free not only to use, for yourself or for doing commercial work, but also to distribute, modify, or even use in a closed-source application. To summarize, you are free to do (almost) anything you want with it. See the Licence page for more details.

Do I have to pay something to use FreeCAD?

No. ShotCut is totally free to use, to download, to redistribute, or to modify. It is open-source software, published under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License 2.1, which guarantees you those freedoms and, even more important, guarantees you that these freedoms will never be taken from you.

I have trimmed my video and/or created my project, now how do I save or share it?

If you just want to save your changes to re-open it later in Shotcut, you can save your project as a MLT XML file by clicking Save on the toolbar at the top of the window. If you want to upload the video to a web site or somehow share the result with someone as separate video file, then click Export on the toolbar, which opens or raises the Export panel. In the Export panel, there are 3 basic steps:

1. choose and click a Preset,

2. click Reload to load the current video settings, and

3. click Export File at the bottom of the panel.

By default, if you have made a playlist Export uses the Playlist unless you have put something into the Timeline, in which case, it uses the timeline. Otherwise, it will Export the clip or live source (stream, device, screen, etc.). However, you can control what is used for the source of the export using the From control at the top of the Export panel.

Which Export preset should I use?

It all depends; that is why there are so many of them! But here are some suggestions:

• Upload to a video-sharing web site: H.264 Main Profile

• Extract the audio: Ogg Vorbis or MP3

• Save to an intermediate file to use with another tool: DNxHD or lossless/ProRes - really depends on what the other tool accepts

• Put onto my own web site: WebM and/or H.264 Main Profile

• Screen recording (Linux only): lossless/MJPEG

• Capture from SDI/HDMI: lossless/ProRes if your system can handle it, otherwise lossless/MPEG-2

How do I add text? Is there a titler?

You must apply a filter to your clip or track. There are 3 suitable filters at this time: 3D Text, Overlay HTML, and Text. If you just want to use a simple background, you can use an image file, or to use a solid color choose File > Open Other > Color.

See the video tutorials for more information about the Overlay HTML filter. Shotcut includes a simply WYSIWYG (i.e. visual) HTML editor accessible through the Edit button on this filter’s control panel.

You can also create text with an external program as an image with an alpha channel and composite it. To composite, you add a video track to the Timeline to use as a layer. Make sure the C button in the new track’s header is “on” to enable compositing. Finally, you open an image, set its Properties to adjust duration or enable an image sequence, add it to the new video track, and further adjust its position and duration as-needed. You might also want to apply the Size & Position filter to the image clip. The image file formats that support an alpha channel are PNG, SVG, and TGA. You can also use Quicktime Animation format.

What are the minimum system requirements?

Operating system: 32- or 64-bit Windows 7 - 10, Apple macOS 10.10 - 10.15, or 64-bit Linux with at least glibc 2.19.

CPU: x86-64 Intel or AMD; at least one 2 GHz core for SD, 2 cores for HD, and 4 cores for 4K.

GPU: OpenGL 2.0 that works correctly and is compatible. On Windows, you can also use a card with good, compatible DirectX 9 or 11 drivers. We do not have a list.

RAM: At least 4 GB for SD, 8 GB for HD, and 16 GB for 4K.

Hard drive: yes, get one; the bigger, the better :-)

Network: Shotcut does NOT require access to the network to activate, check a subscription, or send usage analytics. However, some links in the Help menu do link out to this web site. If you have files on a fast (at least 1 Gb/s) network share you can access them from there through your operating system.

All I see is white or green instead of video, and I know there is video in this file….

First, use Properties to see if the Video tab is disabled. If it is disabled, then Shotcut is not compatible with this format or codec. If the video tab is enabled, more than likely OpenGL (or also DirectX on Windows) is not working on your system, or it is too old. First, make sure GPU Processing is disabled in Settings. GPU processing requires OpenGL version 3.2. When it is disabled, you only need OpenGL version 2.0 (or also DirectX on Windows). If you are on Windows, after ensuring GPU processing is disabled, try forcing the usage of DirectX by choosing Settings > Display Method > DirectX (ANGLE).

Can I have multiple versions installed at the same time?

Yes. Simply rename your existing program folder to put the version number in it or move it out-of-the-way to another location.

On Windows, the installer is mostly just a fancy zip extractor that also adds a start menu item. So, you can install the new version to a different location, or rename the existing folder to prevent it from being overwritten. Then, you can just navigate to whichever program folder you want in Explorer and run shotcut.exe.

On macOS, you do not need to copy Shotcut to the /Applications folder - that is merely a suggestion. Simply drag Shotcut out of the .dmg to wherever you like and rename the app bundle to put the version number into it. Or, rename the existing version to move it out of the way before copying Shotcut from the .dmg.

The same concepts apply to Linux, where Shotcut is simply delivered as a compressed tar archive. However, on Linux, it is important to understand that the launch icon always looks in Shotcut.app; so, either version the folder containing the launch icon or have multiple, versioned Shotcut.app folders and run the launch script that is inside of it.

How do I cut or trim a clip without encoding or transcoding it?

This is not supported, and there are currently no plans to support it. We recommend that you use VirtualDub or Avidemux for that.

How do I make subtitles?

If you are strictly asking about subtitles or closed captions, Shotcut does not read, make, edit, or pass-through subtitles. There is planned the ability to read, show, pass-through, and burn-in subtitles, but there is no estimated time of arrival. We recommend that you try the free, open source, cross-platform subtitle editor Aegisub.

However, if you are just asking about the ability to put/overlay text in your video, use the Text, 3D Text, or Overlay HTML filter. Since it is a filter, that means you need something to which to apply it. If you just want a solid color, choose File > Open Other > Color. You can also use a picture/photograph just like a video clip by opening it and adding it to your playlist or timeline.

How do I change the speed of the video?

This is implemented as of version 16.01. With a clip open in the source player or selected in the timeline, choose Properties and look for the Speed field. Shotcut only provides simple frame dropping or duplicating. However, if the frame rate of your source footage is higher than the Video Mode (under Settings menu), then you can achieve a fairly smooth slow motion. If you are looking for more sophisticated results using more advanced optical flow techniques, we recommend you try the free, open source, cross-platform tool slowMoVideo.

How can I edit the audio at the wave/sample level?

Shotcut does not offer that, but we recommend to try the free, open source, cross-platform tool Audacity.

How does Shotcut use the GPU (or not)?

Shotcut uses the GPU in three ways:

1. OpenGL for drawing parts of the user interface and showing video

2. hardware encoding (where available and enabled)

3. OpenGL for the hidden GPU Effects (filters and transitions) mode

Shotcut does NOT use the GPU or hardware acceleration for the following:

1. decoding and pixel format conversion

2. automatic (as-needed) filters to deinterlace, scale, and pad video and to resample or downmix audio

3. filters that you add

4. transitions

5. compositing/blending video tracks

6. mixing audio tracks

Thus, you cannot expect Shotcut to use close to 0% CPU and much % of GPU when exporting using the hardware encoder because the reading of files and decoding alone becomes a bottleneck to feed the hardware encoder. Also, if you have any decent amount of image processing, you should expect a significant amount of CPU usage especially if parallel processing is enabled (it is by default). Software from other companies may limit itself to one GPU vendor API such as CUDA in order to provide almost entirely GPU-based pipeline. Shotcut has not chosen to go that route because it is a cross-platform solution.

Why does Shotcut not use hardware accelerated video decoding?

The video stream always originates in system (CPU) RAM, and CPU-based video decoding is highly optimized and fast. Meanwhile, transferring full, uncompressed video from the GPU RAM to system RAM is a relatively slow. Thus, in the context of a video editor (not simply a player or transcoder), hardware-accelerated decoding should only be done when all video processing can also be done on the GPU. That alone is non-trivial. Shotcut does have an OpenGL-based effects system that is disabled and hidden currently due to instability. Even when enabled it is a small subset of all effects and does not include a deinterlacer. Next, assuming you do not need to deinterlace and agree to limit oneself to the GPU effects, there is a major technical hurdle to transfer the decoded video in GPU RAM to OpenGL textures due to multiple APIs for multiple operating systems. Likewise, the complexity to convert OpenGL textures to hardware encoder frames for the various hardware encoding APIs. Any tool that claims to do all of these but does not ensure the video stays in GPU RAM is going to have limited performance gain if any.

Even if made available (integrated) there are major hurdles to handle resource limitations (number of simultaneous decodes) in a robust fashion and to handle incompatible video streams with many permutations of encoding profiles/parameters, APIs, and devices. That would result in a huge source of unreliability and support issues.

If you want to help with this, please feel free to contribute. We have not made much progress here due to higher priorities: fixing bugs, rework on some features, adding basic expected UI features, upgrading dependencies, providing support, making documentation, and stabilizing GPU Effects.

How does Shotcut use multiple CPU cores and threads?

Shotcut’s engine (MLT atop FFmpeg and other libraries) uses multiple CPU cores/threads for:

1. decoding video on many (most?) video codecs

2. image slice-based multi-threaded processing in some processes

3. frame-based multi-threaded image processing in many processes

4. encoding video when not using the hardware encoder on most video codecs

When any of the above is not enabled, a bottleneck is introduced. Some of these are minor and others major depending on the weight of the operation.

Shotcut’s interface - in addition to the main UI thread - uses multiple background CPU cores/threads for:

1. generating video thumbnails

2. generating audio levels for waveform display in the timeline

3. the engine itself (see above)

4. sending video to OpenGL for display

5. exporting