Cody Casterline: Post

Cody Casterline

Video Editing

Today I recorded a screencast demoing some of the features of FeoBlog. I'm excited to share it with the world, but first I had to brush up on my video editing skills. (... as if I had any to start with.)

If I were on a Mac, I'd probably have just used iMovie. But, since I recorded using OBS on my Windows PC, I thought I'd just edit the video there.

Windows Photos

So Windows used to have an app called "Windows Movie Maker". Apparently that's just been folded into the Photos app in Windows 10. After I used OBS to "remux" my files to .mp4 files, Photos was able to edit them. Basic trimming worked, but when I went to export things, the resolution was limited to 1080p, though I'd recorded in 1440p.

I was a bit worried about things becoming blurry since some text was unfortunately already a bit small, so I looked for alternatives.

Shotcut

I came across a nice video on YouTube that recommended Shotcut, so I gave that a try. But at first it seemed unable to play my video files.

After some googling, I found that I needed to go to Settings → Display Method → OpenGL (instead of DirectX). That seemed to let it render my videos, but despite having really beefy hardware, things were still really sluggish.

I briefly tried out OpenShot, which has a much nicer site than Shotcut, but it had even more performance issues. (At one point, it took ~15 seconds to close after I'd clicked the close button, and all it was doing was playing back video clips I had put into the timeline.)

Back in Shotcut, I was able to edit things into a somewhat nice state. Tips for any beginners:

  • If playing video/audio becomes choppy, save the project and re-launch the application.

  • Save often. I found myself accidentally pressing keys that mapped to shortcuts I didn't know about. Having a restore point is handy.

  • Though the app tells you it'll auto-detect your video size & frame rate from the first video you attach, it does not seem to do so for 1440p. You'll need to add a custom video mode in Settings → Video Mode.

    I'd neglected to do this, and my first export shrank my 1440p video to 1080p, then upscaled it back to 1440p since that was the export resolution I chose. Took me a while to figure out why just exporting my video had made it so blurry. 👎

Exports are still really slow, unfortunately. My 21.5 minute video is taking over an hour to export. It looks like a lot of operations may be CPU bound. I wonder if it would've been faster to just copy things over to my old MacBook Air and use iMove.