Cropping and Slow-mo
In this exercise, you will create and edit a movie in OpenShot Video Editor, including using splitting and duplicating a video clip, making a slow-motion video clip, cropping a video clip, and importing audio to overlay your clip. If you have any questions or get stuck as you work through this, please ask your instructor for assistance. Have fun!
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Let’s start by downloading the Mountain biking video and save it to your desktop.
Note: If the video starts playing in your browser you will have to right mouse click on the video and select Save Video As… -
If you don’t already have the software running, open OpenShot Video Editor by clicking on the icon that looks like a globe (as seen on the top right of this activity) on your desktop or in your programs menu.
- Select Project Files tab on the left middle of your screen.
- Next click on the “+” button at the top of the OpenShot Video Editor screen.
- Select “Desktop” on the left navigation pane and then select the “bike.mp4” file.
- Click on the file and select “open” on the bottom right of the dialog box.
- Drag the “bike” video clip into the timeline below.
- Make a slow-motion video clip with the “bike” video:
- Now let’s isolate a short clip to slow down. Select the bike video clip, and then scrub through it (by moving your mouse over it), and click on the clip before the bike goes over the jump.
- Right mouse click on the vertical line on the clip (or a 2 fingered click on a mac) then select Slice clip from the menu and then Keep Both Sides.
- Next, scrub through to the point of the video where the bike lands, and click on the clip at that point.
- Right mouse click on the vertical line and right mouse click (or a 2 fingered click on a mac) then select Slice from the menu and then Keep Both Sides.
- Let’s make a copy of the isolated clip by right-clicking the isolated clip and then select Copy and select Clip.
- Move the mouse to the very end of the bike video and click there, then right click and click “Paste”. You should now have 4 video clips in the timeline.
- To slow down the clip you just pasted, right-mouse click it and then select Time from the pop-up menu then select Slow, then select Forward, then select 1/4X.
- Add a transition between your regular and slow-mo clips, by Right mouse clicking on the first video in the timeline, and from the pop-up menu select Fade and then End of Clip and then Fade Out (Fast).
- Right mouse click on the second video clip, and from the pop-up menu select Fade and then Start of Clip and then Fade In (Fast).
- Crop or zoom in on a video clip:
- Right click the slow-motion video clip in the timeline, and then press the “Properties” button (you can also access the properties feature by right clicking on the “New Project” icon and selecting “Properties”.
- Now you can modify the “Scale X” and “Scale Y” values (to zoom in)
- NOTE: to make the scale smaller you can move the bar under the scale section and within any property, but in order to make the scale larger or to zoom in you must type in a quantity
- Add a Sound Effect to your video:
- Start by downloading the following Audio file - ocean waves mp3
- Next add it to your project, by selecting the “+” button at the top of the OpenShot Video Editor screen and repeating step 3 but now with the ocean waves file.
- Next drag the audio file down
- This audio clip is quite a bit longer than your video clip. To fix this:
- Select the audio clip, scroll to the far right to find the end of the audio clip.
- Grab the handle at the end of the audio clip and drag it to the left until your video and audio clips are the same length (pro tip: scale your timeline by moving the slider in the middle right of your screen. - If you want to make the audio louder or softer, simply right click on the clip, select “Volume” and then “Entire Clip”, Finally select the percentage you want “Level 50%” volume seems pretty good.
- Congratulations, you’re done! Feel free to add a title & credits to your video if you want. Your video should look something like this