With my recent pickup of making short movies, I needed to find some software on the cheap to make it all happen. I tried using the Microsoft Movie maker that comes with Windows 7, but it felt limited, with no apparent track mixing or layering.
I’m a big fan of Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com), a popular free open source Operating system, and I’ve used it on and off since version 4. They’re up to version 11.04 now, wowser! They have a neat utility called WUBI that lets you install Ubuntu inside of Windows, so things don’t get too messy with your system.
After installing Ubuntu onto my computer, I sought out some of the free video editing tools that are available. One of them Pitivi, comes with Ubuntu by default but didn’t seem to have enough features, kind of like the Movie Maker for Windows. After a quick google search I found OpenShot Video Editor. I’ve been using it for all of my little movies so far, and it’s great!
It uses multiple tracks to let you merge multiple audio, video, and graphics streams at once. Take a look at the screenshot below, this is the latest project I’m working on, Friends Group Episode 4.
making a video in open shot with multiple tracks
You can also see in the screenshot the export process. This is where the magic happens! When you add all the clips, audio, and graphic slides and overlays together, the export encodes your video into one continuous file that plays each clip exactly where you placed it on the mixer. For overlays, like a graphic that you want to appear over some video, it goes in a layer above the video, so that it isn’t covered up by the video.
Now, I can’t do everything in OpenShot. The graphics I create are mostly made in InkScape, a very fun program to use for making vector based graphics, also Open Source (free!). And the audio I create is done in Audacity, another super useful Open Source program that lets you mix multiple tracks together and export into many different formats. I’ll have plenty of posts about these tools coming up, as they are crucial to making the whole process work together.
I’ll go into more detail about the editing process, but wanted to introduce you to a great software tool that I’ve been using quite successfully! Thanks for reading.