Shotcut tutorial · companion page
Find a light leak clip, drop it on a second video track so it straddles a hard cut, then put one filter on it: Blend Mode, set to Hard Light. Nothing is split, nothing is trimmed, nothing is keyframed and the sequence does not get any shorter. It is the least technical transition in the whole series — and the only one that needs a file you do not already have.
Reading in another language? Use the translate picker in the header, or your browser’s own translate command — the Shotcut filter, control and value names are marked to stay in English so they still match what is on your screen.
The other flash-across-a-cut tutorials in this series manufacture the light out of the footage itself, with a colour filter ramped up and back down. This one does not manufacture anything. It imports a clip that is already a light leak and lets a blend mode decide how the two pictures meet.
The bright part of this transition is a downloaded light leak clip — a real piece of footage of light spilling across a lens. Shotcut contributes exactly one filter to it. If you have no leak clip, there is nothing to build.
The two shots stay end to end on V1 with a plain hard cut between them. The leak goes on a new V2 above, positioned so its brightest moment sits over that cut. Nothing on V1 is split, moved or shortened.
Blend Mode has a single control and no stopwatch. You pick a value from a list and that is the entire configuration. The ramp up and back down comes from the leak clip’s own brightness, which is already animated because it is footage.
The dropdown offers eighteen modes and the default, Over, simply covers the picture below. Ben tries six on camera and lands on Hard Light, which keeps the leak’s warmth while still letting the shot underneath read through it.
[ Really, that’s all it takes to create a Light Leak transition between two video clips ]
Ben Espanto · 4:54
This video carries no chapters. Ben did not divide it and the description holds none, so every heading and boundary below was derived here by reading the frames and matching them against the spoken track. They are a reading aid, not Ben’s own structure — do not expect to find them under the YouTube scrubber. Click any screencap or timestamp to play that moment right here in the card.
“In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to do the Light Leak transition using Shotcut, so stay tuned.”
0:03 · the opening seconds play the two clips the build will use, already joined by the finished effect. The channel introduction runs to about 0:45 and is the same one on every tutorial in the series.
“This Light Leak transition tutorial will be done using Shotcut version 22.12.21.”
0:52 · Help → About Shotcut is opened on screen and the dialog reads Shotcut version 22.12.21, Copyright © 2011-2022 Meltytech, LLC. The spoken version and the dialog agree, which is not always true in this series. An April 2023 upload on a December 2022 build.
“To execute the Light Leak transition, we’re going to need one, the Before video clip, two, the After video clip, and three, the Light Leak video clip you’ll use as the transition video.”
1:08 · the before and after clips are shown full screen in turn. In the Playlist they are named Light Leak 01.mp4 and Light Leak 02.mp4 — named for the project, not because they contain any light leak themselves. The leak itself is a separate file called Light Leak.mp4.
“Where would you download a Light Leak clip? Well, there’s a myriad of clips you can find all over the internet. Just choose the one that best fits the effect you’re going for.”
1:24 · the answer is a web search, shown on screen: a Google query for light leak video. The visible results are Motion Array, Vecteezy, Videvo, RocketStock and StudioBinder. No site is opened, no clip is downloaded and no file path is ever shown — the leak clip simply exists in the Playlist by the next section. This page will not invent a download link for it.
“To start, I’m going to drag the Before video on the timeline, and then I’m going to drag the After video on the same track in the timeline.”
1:40 · both clips are dragged from the Playlist onto V1, one after the other, with no gap and no transition between them. This is an ordinary hard cut and it stays an ordinary hard cut for the rest of the video.
“And then I’m going to add another video track on top of it. And on that track, I’m going to drag the Light Leak video.”
1:52 · the track is added from the Timeline menu: Track Operations → Add Video Track, shortcut Ctrl+I. Light Leak.mp4 is then dragged from the Playlist onto the new V2. Above means on top: in Shotcut a higher track number composites over the ones below it.
“And so I’m going to click this icon here to make the Light Leak video invisible, and I’m going to begin laying out my transition on the first track. And so here is what the first track looks like without the transition. Pretty simple.”
2:05 · the icon is the eye on the V2 track head; its tooltip reads Hide and the same command lives at Track Operations → Show/Hide Selected Track, Ctrl+H. With the leak hidden the cut plays bare, which is the honest before picture for the rest of the build.
“Now I’m going to make the Light Leak video visible again. Let me drag it over here a little bit. So that we can play it from the beginning to end. And what I want is this one here when the white basically covers the entire frame to be the midpoint of the transition between video one and video two.”
2:48 · the leak is dragged out past the end of V1 so it can be watched on its own, start to finish, with nothing underneath it. It builds from a warm orange bloom to a near-total white-out and falls away again — that white-out is the frame that has to land on the cut.
“And so I’m just going to go over here and drag it over and try to position this white area right in between video one and video two. And so without any transitions right now, this is what it looks like.”
3:16 · the positioning is done by eye, not by a number. Reading the timecodes off the screen, the cut is at 00:00:03:15 and the leak runs 00:00:02:16 to 00:00:04:20 — so it opens a little under a second before the cut and closes a little over a second after it, and the cut falls a shade before the clip’s own midpoint rather than exactly on it. The sequence total stays 00:00:06:15 throughout: overlaying costs no running time.
“With all the videos positioned in the right place, all I need to do is select the Light Leak video on the top track, go into filters, and choose blend mode. Right now the filter defaults to over. And let’s see what that looks like.”
3:44 · Blend Mode is picked straight off the Favorite tab of the filter chooser, where it is the first entry. The Filters panel header reads Light Leak.mp4, the filter is filed under Video, and it contributes exactly one row: Blend mode, sitting on its default Over. On Over the leak simply covers the shot underneath it, which is not a transition — it is just the leak playing.
“I’m going to want to choose Hard Light. But you can also choose all the other blend mode options like saturate. So this is what saturate looks like, which really does nothing. You can choose multiply. Darken. Again, I don’t have all these effects memorized, so I just play around. But for the most part, I usually choose Hard Light.”
4:00 · reading the panel rather than the audio, six values are actually shown: Over (the default), Hard Light, Saturate, Multiply, Darken and Dodge, before it is set back to Hard Light. Dodge is on screen but is never named aloud. Saturate genuinely does look unchanged; Multiply and Darken turn the shot muddy because a leak is bright and multiplying by bright darkens everything else.
“And so let’s play it. And that’s it. Really, that’s all it takes to create a Light Leak transition between two video clips.”
4:50 · in playback the beach shot warms, blows almost fully white across the cut, then resolves into the sunset shot with the last of the leak still burning off the top of frame. The sign-off and channel plug run from about 5:04 to the end.
Every value below was read off the screen, not off the audio. Where something was never shown — and on this tutorial several things never are — this page says so rather than filling the gap.
This is the one prerequisite and it is the only part of the build that happens outside Shotcut. What is shown on screen is a plain web search for light leak video, returning stock libraries: Motion Array, Vecteezy, Videvo, RocketStock, StudioBinder. Ben does not click any of them on camera.
What matters in the clip you choose is its shape: it has to build to a genuinely bright moment and then fall away again. The one used here goes from a warm orange bloom to a near-white frame and back over about two seconds. A leak that only glows faintly will not read as a transition.
No specific file, site, licence or download is shown, and no folder or file path appears anywhere in the video — so this page names none.
Three items, and the Playlist is never bigger than three for the whole video. Note the naming: the first two are the shots, named after the project rather than after their contents. Only the third is an actual light leak.
The title bar reads Light Leak Source.mlt* throughout, with the asterisk that means unsaved changes — the project is never saved on camera.
Drag the before clip to the timeline, then the after clip onto the same track immediately behind it. No gap, no overlap, no transition object. The join between them is a plain hard cut and it never changes for the rest of the build.
Open the Timeline menu — the hamburger at the left of the timeline toolbar — and choose Track Operations → Add Video Track. A V2 appears above V1. Drag Light Leak.mp4 from the Playlist onto it.
Click the eye button on the V2 track head. Its tooltip reads Hide, and the same thing is available as Track Operations → Show/Hide Selected Track at Ctrl+H. With the leak out of the way you can lay out and play the cut on its own.
Turn V2 back on and drag the leak clip out past the end of V1, where nothing sits under it. Play it from beginning to end and watch for the moment the white fills the frame. That single frame is the anchor for the next step; everything else about the clip is irrelevant.
Drag the clip left along V2 until its bright section straddles the join on V1. Ben does this by eye and says he wants the white at the midpoint of the transition. Measured off the timecodes on screen, the result is close to that but not exact — and it does not need to be.
Roughly a second of leak runs before the cut and a little over a second after it. Because the leak lives on its own track and nothing below is trimmed, the sequence is exactly as long after the transition exists as it was before — which is not true of every transition in this series.
Click the leak clip on V2 — not V1, not the track head — and check that the Filters panel header reads Light Leak.mp4. Press the plus, pick Blend Mode from the Favorite tab, then change the one control it gives you from Over to Hard Light. That is the build finished.
Read directly off the frames. This is a short table because it is a short technique: one filter with one control, and a handful of timecodes.
| Setting | Value | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Shotcut version | 22.12.21 | Help → About Shotcut, opened on screen at 0:52 |
| Project file | Light Leak Source.mlt | Title bar — shown with an asterisk, never saved |
| Project video mode | never opened on screen | Timebase derived below, not read from a dialog |
| Playlist #1 — the before shot | Light Leak 01.mp4 · 00:00:03:15 | Playlist |
| Playlist #2 — the after shot | Light Leak 02.mp4 · 00:00:03:00 | Playlist |
| Playlist #3 — the leak | Light Leak.mp4 · 00:00:02:04 | Playlist |
| Track layout | V1 and V2 | Timeline |
| V1 contents | Light Leak 01.mp4 then Light Leak 02.mp4 | Butted together, no gap, no transition object |
| The cut | 00:00:03:15 | End of clip one — a plain hard cut |
| V2 contents | Light Leak.mp4, 00:00:02:16 → 00:00:04:20 | Straddling the cut |
| Sequence total | 00:00:06:15 | Player duration field — unchanged by the effect |
| Splits, trims, transitions | none of any kind | — |
| Filter, the only one | Blend Mode | On Light Leak.mp4, the V2 clip |
| Filter category | Video | Filters panel heading |
| Control name | Blend mode | Lower case m, unlike the filter name |
| Default value | Over | Blend Mode |
| Value settled on | Hard Light | Blend Mode |
| Keyframes | none — no stopwatch exists on this filter | Only a reset button sits beside the control |
| Preset row | this filter has none | — |
| Filter chooser tabs | Favorite / Video / Audio / Time | Plus a search box — see the note below |
| Filters toolbar | seven buttons, no save-a-set button | Add, remove, copy, paste, up, down, close |
| Timebase | 24 fps | Derived: frame counters reach :23 and roll over |
| Export | never opened | — |
| # | Mode | Shown in the video? | What it did here |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Over | Yes — the default | The leak simply covers the shot below. No transition, just the leak playing. |
| 2 | None | No | — |
| 3 | Add | Listed, not applied | Highlighted in the open dropdown while scrolling; never settled on. |
| 4 | Saturate | Yes | Ben’s words: “which really does nothing”. The frame looks unchanged. |
| 5 | Multiply | Yes | Heavy, muddy orange. A bright leak multiplied into the shot darkens it. |
| 6 | Screen | Listed, not applied | — |
| 7 | Overlay | Listed, not applied | — |
| 8 | Darken | Yes | Named aloud and shown in the panel. Similar territory to Multiply. |
| 9 | Dodge | Yes — but never named | Blows the frame out hard. On screen in the panel; not mentioned in the narration. |
| 10 | Burn | Listed, not applied | — |
| 11 | Hard Light | Yes — the choice | Keeps the leak warm and bright while the shot underneath still reads through it. |
| 12 | Soft Light | Listed, not applied | — |
| 13 | Difference | Listed, not applied | — |
| 14 | Exclusion | Listed, not applied | — |
| 15 | HSL Hue | Listed, not applied | — |
| 16 | HSL Saturation | Listed, not applied | — |
| 17 | HSL Color | Listed, not applied | — |
| 18 | HSL Luminosity | Listed, not applied | — |
On the order of the demonstration. The panel readings and the narration do not line up perfectly. Ben says “saturate”, “multiply” and “darken” aloud, and the panel duly passes through Saturate, Multiply and Darken in that order — but it then shows Dodge, which he never names, before returning to Hard Light. He says as much himself: “I don’t have all these effects memorized, so I just play around.” Where the audio and the panel disagree on this page, the panel wins.
| Point | Light leak · Apr 2023 · 22.12.21 | Light burst · Oct 2020 · V20.09.27 | Glitch · Sep 2020 · 20.07.11 | Flash transition · Feb 2024 · 23.12.15 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Where the effect comes from | An imported clip — real footage of a light leak | Made from the footage by a filter | Made from the footage by a filter | Made from the footage by a filter |
| Skeleton at the cut | A whole extra clip on a second track, laid over an untouched hard cut | 12-frame slivers split off each side of a hard cut | 8-frame slivers split off each side of a hard cut | A 12-frame overlap turned into one transition object |
| Filter | Blend Mode | Color Grading | Glitch | Color Grading |
| Filter instances | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| Keyframes | none | 4 | none | 3 |
| Video tracks | V1 + V2 | V1 only | V1 only | V1 only |
| Splits or drags needed | None — one clip dragged into place | Two splits | Two splits | One marker, one drag |
| Cost in running time | None | None | None | 12 frames |
| Needs spare footage at the join | No | No | No | Yes, both sides |
| Colour of the flash | Warm — orange and gold, whatever the leak clip is | White | n/a — a digital tear, not a flash | White |
| Needs an outside file | Yes — the leak clip | No | No | No |
| Saved as a filter set | Not possible on this build — see below | No | No | Yes — Flash Transition (12 frames) |
Which to reach for. This is the easiest of the four by a distance: no counting frames, no splitting, no keyframing, no stopwatch, and nothing to get wrong except sliding a clip a bit too far. It is also the only one that gives you a coloured flash with organic texture in it, because it is real footage rather than a lifted black point. The price is that it needs a file from outside, a second track, and a clip whose brightness curve happens to suit your cut — and because there are no keyframes, the only way to tune the timing is to move the clip, and the only way to tune the strength is to pick a different blend mode. Where the flash-transition build asks you to spend twelve frames of footage and hands you back a saveable, reusable set, this one spends nothing and hands you back a clip you have to place by eye every time.
Filter sets do not exist yet on this build, and that is new information for the series. On 23.12.15 the flash-transition tutorial saves its whole configuration as a named filter set through a fifth Filters toolbar button, and recalls it from a Sets tab in the chooser. Neither exists here. On 22.12.21 the Filters toolbar carries seven buttons — add, remove, copy, paste, move up, move down, close — with no save-a-set button among them, and the chooser shows four tabs: Favorite, Video, Audio and Time. So the feature arrived somewhere between December 2022 and December 2023, later than the 2020-only rule the earlier pages in this series use. Note also the Time tab, which is present here and is not part of the four-tab set the later page describes.
What this video does not show, and this page will not guess. No specific light leak clip is downloaded, so there is no source link, licence or file path to give. The Properties panel is never opened on the leak clip, so its resolution and frame rate are unknown. The video mode dialog is never opened, so the 24 fps above is derived from frame counters reaching :23, not read from a setting. Nothing is exported. And the positioning of the leak over the cut is done by eye with no numeric target — the timecodes in the table are what the placement happened to land on, measured afterwards, not values Ben typed in.
Machine transcribed from the video audio. Spoken phrasing is left as-is; only the Shotcut names the transcriber mangled have been corrected. Every timestamp plays the video in the hero from that second. Nothing numeric on this page comes from here — all of it was read off the pixels.
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to do the Light Leak transition using 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.
This Light Leak transition tutorial will be done using Shotcut version 22.12.21.
This is a relatively simple transition using only three components.
To execute the Light Leak transition, we’re going to need one, the Before video clip, two, the After video clip, and three,
the Light Leak video clip you’ll use as the transition video.
Where would you download a Light Leak clip?
Well, there’s a myriad of clips you can find all over the internet.
Just choose the one that best fits the effect you’re going for.
To start, I’m going to drag the Before video on the timeline,
and then I’m going to drag the After video on the same track in the timeline,
and then I’m going to add another video track on top of it.
And on that track, I’m going to drag the Light Leak video.
Let’s make it a little bigger.
And so I’m going to click this icon here to make the Light Leak video invisible,
and I’m going to begin laying out my transition on the first track.
And so here is what the first track looks like without the transition.
Pretty simple.
Now I’m going to make the Light Leak video visible again.
Let me drag it over here a little bit.
So that we can play it from the beginning to end.
And what I want is this one here when the white basically covers the entire frame
to be the midpoint of the transition between video one and video two.
And so I’m just going to go over here and drag it over
and try to position this white area right in between video one and video two.
And so without any transitions right now, this is what it looks like.
With all the videos positioned in the right place, all I need to do is select
the Light Leak video on the top track, go into filters, and choose Blend Mode.
Right now the filter defaults to Over.
And let’s see what that looks like.
I’m going to want to choose Hard Light.
But you can also choose all the other blend mode options like Saturate.
So this is what Saturate looks like, which really does nothing.
You can choose Multiply.
This is what that looks like.
Darken.
Again, I don’t have all these effects memorized, so I just play around.
But for the most part, I usually choose Hard Light.
And so let’s play it.
And that’s it.
Really, that’s all it takes to create a Light Leak transition between two video clips.
Let me know in the comments how you would use this transition.
In any case, thank you for watching this quick video tutorial for Shotcut.
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.
Thank you.
