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Sometimes, in the process of working with certain videos, students have trouble editing them in programs like Shotcut because they do not playback smoothly. This may be due to insufficient hardware resources on the machine being used to do the editing. In other cases, it is due to the video file having an extremely high resolution. You can find the resolution of any video by opening it in Shotcut and clicking the Properties
button (located about half-way across the Shotcut button bar at the top of the screen). The video in Figure 3 (below), for example, is commonly referred to as a "4K" video because it has a width of approximately 4,000 (i.e., 4K) pixels.
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Figure 3:
The image below shows the Shotcut Properties window with the (original) resolution of the currently-open video highlighted in red
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The best way to handle this problem, of course, is to prevent it from happening in the first place. If your camera/phone/tablet allows you to adjust the resolution prior to recording, try setting it to some intermediate value. If that is not an option, and you are sure your computer is up to the task, you can use Shotcut's Export
function to generate a lower resolution version of the video that should not only be easier to edit but also have a file size smaller than the original.
To reduce the resolution of a video that is already open in Shotcut:
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Click the Export
button (on the right of the Shotcut button bar at the top of the screen).
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Enter new values for the width and height of the
Resolution
field. When deciding what values to use, it is very important that we
decrease both the width and height by the same percent
. (If we neglect to do this, we run the risk of creating a video that either looks stretched or squished.) In addition, try to pick a percentage value that will yield videos with a significantly lower resolution than the original, but not so low as to produce widths less than 320 pixels or heights less than 240 pixels. (See Figure 4
, below.)
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As an example, the original resolution of the video in
Figure 3
(see above) is 4096X2304. If we decide to reduce the width to 25% of its original value of 4096, we must also reduce the height to 25% of
its
original value of 2304. Since 25% of 4096 is 1024, and 25% of 2304 is 576, we would type those (modified) values for the Resolution
into the
Export
window.
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When finished, click the Export File
button (at the bottom) and save the lower resolution video to the desired location.
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Figure 4: The image below shows the Shotcut Export
window with the (modified) Resolution of the currently-open video highlighted in red.
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