14 DAY TRIAL // Shotcut is a video editor that aims to offer a clear interface and a powerful set of tools. It's definitely not the application you would expect. It's far more complex than it lets on at first sight, and it has a steep learning curve.
The Linux platform is not exactly lacking video editors, and you can find something for everyone. Some users prefer something that can be used to convert and make some minimal changes to a video, others want something that can rival commercial applications. Shotcut is somewhere in the middle, but each new update brings new features and functions.
Shotcut is a rather young application, and users should not be fooled by its version number. It's simply showing the year, 2015, and the latest month with a release, in this case, August. Developers are very proficient, and they tend to have one or two releases each month. If they release something in September, the version number will be 2015.09.
Installation
I tested Shotcut 15.08 in Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet), and I didn't encounter any kind of major problems. The developers provide binaries for Ubuntu, Debian, Fefora, Opensuse, Arch Linux, and pretty much anything in between. It doesn't require installation, and all you have to do is extract the files and run the executable inside the folder. It's also quite likely that your distribution will already have this version in the repositories.
For Ubuntu, there is a third-party PPA available, but it's not maintained by the developers of the app. The Shotcut maintainer is making this very clear on Launchpad. He seems to keep the packages up to date, but it's your choice whether you want to use the PPA or not. The advantage of using a PPA is that you don't have to worry about updates. Just add the PPA by entering these commands in a terminal near you:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install shotcut
Usage
For the most part, Shotcut works just as you would expect. Users load the video, and it shows up in a window on top. The weird thing is that the Timeline tool is not shown by default, and this is probably one of the most important aspects.
It uses the same layout as many other apps of its kind, with a single difference. Many of the tools that are implemented are not displayed by default. For example, if the user wants to apply some filter, they need to right-click and select filters. From there, it's pretty simple to apply them and they work on the fly, which is a great plus.
Also, if you don't have a large screen, making the application work in full screen is a good idea since it provides a lot more space for everything that you might need.
The Good
Another cool feature of Shotcut is the way it lets users move the windows around inside the app. They fit almost anywhere, and this is very helpful if you want to customize the experience. It might not seem like a great feature, but if you're used to another workflow, this is the best way to emulate that.
Shotcut is also able to import 4K videos, all sorts of image files, and basically anything that is supported by FFmpeg. It's also worth mentioning that the seeking function works very well, the application is capable of managing screen, webcam, and audio capture and export the project to any kind of file format (almost anything).
The Bad
For example, I can't seem to find a simple function, and I don't think it's missing. I loaded a video clip, and I wanted just to strip the sound from it, but I couldn't find a way to do that. It's possible to add multiple videos and audio tracks to the timeline, but not to remove or split the one that's in the source file. I'm not asking a lot, but if there is a way of doing this, I can't find it.
