Blog

I am proud to announce the release of OpenShot 2.1, which contains a huge number of new features, bug fixes, and improvements! Enjoy the release video, which by the way, was created with OpenShot 2.1 (of course)!

Animation Demo

OpenShot supports many important animation features, such as support for transparent image sequences, powerful keyframe support, and multiple layers. When combined properly, you can create some very stunning animations! In July, I attended Texas Linux Fest in Austin, TX with my 16 year old daughter, Madeline, who happens to be a very talented artist. She created an animation (using OpenShot) LIVE during the expo, while attendees watched and threw out suggestions and ideas. Take a look at her final animation (which we also debuted during my presentation towards the end of the show)!


You can check out more of her work @ DeviantArt.

Features & Improvements

Many stability and performance related improvements have been made, including multiple memory leak fixes, but we also found time to add some really fun and highly requested features, such as...

Audio Waveform Support

OpenShot now supports the ability to display audio waveforms on clips, swap audio channels, as well as separating audio into another clip (or multiple clips - one per channel). This opens up lots of interesting flows, such as adjusting the volume of individual audio channels, removing certain channels, or easily fixing audio drift.

Improved Property Editing

Editing advanced properties has never been easier! Simply drag your mouse on the sliders to change the value and automatically set a keyframe. The sliders keep your adjustments within a reasonable range. Right click on any value to change the interpolation mode or remove keyframes. As you move the playhead over the clip, the sliders will also move, revealing the animation values at that particular time. Green indicates a keyframe. Blue indicates a calculated frame. The icon indicates the interpolation mode.

New Selection Dropdown

A new selection dropdown has been added above the property editor. It displays the name of the current selected item (clip / transitions / effect), and allows the user to quickly switch the property editor to another item. It also displays the thumbnail of each item, as well as any nested effects. This is especially useful when there are multiple overlapping items, and it’s difficult to select the correct one by pointing and clicking the mouse.

User-Configurable Keyboard Mappings

Users now have the ability to see all keyboard shortcuts used by OpenShot, and even customize them. This also fixes some issues with Ubuntu and a long-standing bug preventing certain shortcuts from working with their unified menu bar. In addition, we’ve added new shortcuts for some common things like, Select All/None, Copy/Paste, etc...

Windows 64-bit Support

We have invested a ton of time on the Windows version of OpenShot, especially the dependencies (Qt, FFmpeg, Python 3), and I'm happy to report it works great now. We also changed the installer, and upgraded everything to 64-bit (which means no more 32-bit support for the moment).

Timeline Improvements

When initially dragging a file or transition onto the timeline, the user will now get full snapping support. This was actually pretty difficult, since adding a new item to the timeline is a much different flow than simply moving an item already on the timeline. We also added the ability to lock a track, preventing any dragging or resizing. Playback of the timeline now stops at the final clip on the timeline... instead of just playing black frames. New context menus have been added for alignment, slicing, and more. And finally, added a new track menu button, and updated some styles on the timeline.

New Tutorial System

When a user first launches OpenShot, a new tutorial system pops up some friendly messages instructing them how everything works. It can be dismissed with a single click (to prevent power-users from getting annoyed), but my hope is that is makes OpenShot much more welcoming for new users, and especially users with limited knowledge of video editing.

Slice All @ Playhead

I've extended the slice feature to work across all tracks, by right clicking on the playhead icon. You can use this to quickly slice all clips and transitions at the exact same spot, and keep the left side, right side, or both sides. And by using the new Keyboard shortcuts, this can also be done without using a mouse.

Huge Performance Gains with Effects

While we still have a few bottle necks on performance we plan on addressing soon, we targeted the very slowest parts of libopenshot and made some dramatic improvements in speed, especially on the following filters: brightness & saturation. These filters can be animated over time, creating some really cool effects.

Misc Improvements

• Custom Profile Support
• Improved 1.x Project Support
• Improved Translations (fixed many spots that were not being correctly translated)
• Improved Debug Support (in the Preferences you can enable debug mode, which dramatically slows down everything, but creates some great debug log files in the /.openshot_qt/ folder)

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a regression on the Split Video screen
• Fixed Animated Title screen regression
• Long timelines now supported (up to 48 hours). This was actually a pretty nasty bug, which was causing issues on any project with more than 1 hour of video.
• Memory Leaks - The largest leaks have now been plugged
• And lots of minor bug fixes

Want to Help?

There are many ways to help out with OpenShot, and we would be humbled by any amount of contribution: testing, translations, programming, documentation, marketing, or donations. In particular, we could use some help on GitHub, working through user-submitted issues (https://github.com/OpenShot/openshot-qt/issues), closing the ones which are now resolved, and helping improve the issues that are not yet resolved (adding log files, reproducing the crash, investigating a fix, etc…).

What’s Next

I still have a few loose ends to wrap up with the Kickstarter project, mainly some new titles and Blender animations promised to certain backers. I’ll be working on those features, and lots of other cool things, and hope to have a quick follow-up release with improved translations, more bug fixes, and more performance improvements. Thanks again for all the support! I really love working on OpenShot and trying to build something that is quite unique and helpful to lots of different people around the world!