Five Tips for a Cinematic or Filmic Look in Shotcut

In this tutorial, I'm going to give you five tips to make your video look cinematic or filmic in Shotcut, so stay tuned.

I'm just a normal person with no video editing background.

I wanted to start making YouTube videos and maybe cool transitions and effects.

I don't really plan on being a professional video editor, so I was looking for a free, easy-to-learn video editing software.

Luckily, I stumbled on Shotcut, a free, open-source video editing program that can do many of the tricks

you can do on more enterprise video editors like Adobe Premiere or DaVinci Resolve,

but with a much simpler and leaner interface, thus dramatically shortening the learning curve.

It just takes using your imagination. So let's learn together.

Before we get started, I'm doing this tutorial on Shotcut version 20.11.28.

Tip number one, change the aspect ratio of your video to 21:9.

Now, there are many aspect ratios for cinema, but for this tutorial, I'm going to focus on the 21:9 aspect ratio.

But first and foremost, I just want to warn you, never, never, never add black bars to the top and bottom of your video.

I can spend a whole video just explaining it, but there are already a ton of YouTube videos that explain why you shouldn't add black bars.

So watch those after you finish this tutorial or you could just take my word for it.

Nothing will make your video look more amateurish than adding those black bars.

Those bars are already automatically added by the monitor or screen you're watching in.

So if you really want your video to have a 21:9 aspect ratio, then save it at that actual ratio.

Here's one caveat. There are only a few exceptions to why you would artificially add those black bars.

One example is when you are toggling between a 16:9 screen and a 21:9 screen in a deliberate manner.

Like if you're switching between a vlog and a montage, but that's it.

Here are the most common video dimensions you can save them in.

The most popular video dimensions in the 21:9 aspect ratio are 1920 x 822, 2560 x 1080, 3440 x 1440, and 5120 x 2160.

In this example, since I'm starting out with a 1920 x 1080 video, I'm going to crop it down to 1920 x 822.

Also, don't forget to set your frames per second to 24 frames per second or more specifically 23.976024.

This is going to matter later when we change the speed of the video.

First, you go to Video Mode and you would actually need to create a custom Video Mode and so you click the add button.

Instead of 1920 x 1080, you would go 1920 x 822.

You then change the aspect ratio from 16:9 to 21:9.

Keep the frames per second at 23.976024.

For all intents and purposes, I'm just going to name this setting 1920 x 822.

Then click OK.

All of a sudden, it's going to resize it and it's going to have these black bars on either side.

What happens is that you made this thing a little bit longer and not as tall.

You would then need to go back to filters, click the plus button, look for what was formerly known as Rotate and Scale.

Now called Size, Position & Rotate.

I would then go into the zoom and I'll zoom back to 100% so that you stretch out the image to fill both sides.

And now you have managed to crop your original 1920 x 1080 down to 1920 x 822.

Tip number two, use a lookup table or LUT for short.

A LUT can dramatically change the look of your video.

It can set a mood based on the colors that you choose.

So if you don't want to spend a lot of time color grading, just slap a LUT.

One of the most sought after looks in cinematic videos is the orange and teal look.

Luckily, I've already created an orange and teal LUT you can download for free.

If you hadn't had a chance to download my free LUTs, watch until the end of this video for instructions on how to download them for free.

Using a LUT is actually surprisingly easy on Shotcut.

So all you have to do is select your clip, go to filters, click the plus button and type LUT for LUT.

Once there, all you have to do is load a LUT.

So you click the open button and for the orange and teal look, I have a LUT called Orange Teal Bluer, which you can download later.

Click open, all of a sudden it changes the colors.

And so I'm going to toggle back and forth just so you can see the difference in the colors.

And so I just immediately converted a video that was originally recorded at standard colors into the new orange and teal look.

Tip number three, slow it down.

To do this, you want to record your movies at at least 30 frames per second, even better if you can record at 60 frames per second.

If you can get it down to 120 frames per second, then you're a baller.

The higher the frames per second, the slower you can make your video.

A 30 frames per second recording can be slowed down to 0.8 times speed.

A 60 frames per second recording can be slowed down to 0.4 times speed.

And a 120 frames per second recording can be slowed way down to 0.2 times speed.

This video happened to be recorded at 60 frames per second.

So I can go to properties, speed, and set it to 0.4 times speed.

Now you have a nice and smooth slow motion shot.

Tip number four, bring focus to your subject by adding a subtle vignette.

Like I said, this is very subtle.

What you're trying to do is focus your viewer's attention on what you want them to be looking at.

And so that's very easy to accomplish.

So in this video, as you can see, it's a video of a forest.

But what I want to do is I want the viewers to focus only in this middle part right here.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a very subtle vignette.

So first and foremost, go to filters, click the plus button, and type vignette.

Now you can control the radius.

You can make it take up more of your video or less.

I think we're going to be around right there.

You can then control the feathering to make it more gradual or less gradual.

And finally, the opacity.

I think we're going to keep it right there.

And there you go.

You just created more focus on the middle part of this video by creating a vignette around it.

Finally, tip number five.

Once you've applied all those effects to your videos,

use cinematic transitions to move from one scene to another.

The good thing is there are tons of ways for you to transition between scenes.

Here are just a few.

Zoom transition.

Whip pan transition.

Blur transition.

Speed ramp transition.

And a standard dissolve.

If you want to learn how to achieve all those fancy transitions, fear not.

I've already created tutorials on this channel.

All you have to do is go to my page, scroll down to Shotcut tips, tricks, and tutorials,

and watch all the transition tutorials you want.

Don't want to take time to learn any new transitions.

That's okay too.

Luckily, Shotcut already comes with dozens of dissolved presets out of the box.

All you have to do is grab one of your clips and drag it right on top of the other clip.

It's going to create an overlap.

In that overlap area, there's going to be a box with an X.

Select that box, go to properties, and go to the transition dialog box.

Click the drop down and choose any one of the default dissolves and transitions you want to use.

The default transition for Shotcut is the dissolve transition.

Let's choose another one in the drop down box.

This one, let's choose Barn Door Vertical.

And this is what that looks like.

How about we choose the Iris Circle transition.

That's it.

These are the easiest transitions you can implement on Shotcut.

And there you have it.

Five tips to make your videos more cinematic on Shotcut.

As I mentioned earlier, if you haven't had a chance to download a free copy of my LUTs,

all you have to do are two things.

Number one, subscribe to my channel.

And number two, write a comment below saying, I want your LUTs.

And that's it.

I'll then reach out to you, ask for your email address, and I will email you a copy of those LUTs.

I just wanted to remind you that if you haven't yet, go visit my channel.

I'm sure you'll find tons of Shotcut related videos.

And don't forget to subscribe so that you know when I drop a new Shotcut related tutorial.

Every video on my channel was done on Shotcut.

So aside from examples of what Shotcut can do, you can also visit my playlist of tips and tutorials.

All geared toward the beginner.

Visit my Shotcut tips and tricks playlist and learn all the tips and tricks I've learned during my journey toward video editing.

So once again, please subscribe.

And I'll see you next time.