Shotcut tutorial · companion page
Three clips, three video tracks, and one Mask: Simple Shape filter on each of the top two. Four numbers per mask put each clip in its own third of the frame — and one more number tilts the whole thing into a diagonal.
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.
Stack three clips on three tracks and you see only the top one. Cut a rectangular hole in the top two and the tracks underneath show through — that is the entire split screen.
Layers behave the way they do everywhere else: V3 covers V2, which covers V1. Nothing is composited until something is masked away.
Mask: Simple Shape set to Rectangle is the only filter in the build. It goes on the top two clips; the bottom clip never gets a filter at all.
Turn the 3×3 guide on and every number has a target. Width is measured from the centre outward, so 16.73 % makes a panel exactly one third of the frame wide.
Rotation on both masks, set to the same value, tilts the seams together. Everything after that is re-stretching the panels so nothing shows through at the corners.
[ that’s why these guides are amazing, because it’s a lot easier to figure out your thresholds and your measurements ]
Ben Espanto · 15:00
Click any screencap or timestamp to play that chapter from its exact second, right here in the card. YouTube’s own chapter list stops at 11:05; the last six cards are read off the frames. Quotes are transcribed verbatim from the audio.
“In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to do one of those cool split screens that you see a lot on commercials, music videos, and a lot of cinematic videos out there.”
A finished three-way split screen, shown as the opening example. No interface yet — this is the result the rest of the tutorial builds.
“Today’s tutorial will be done on Shotcut version 21.05.18.”
The About Shotcut dialog on screen: version 21.05.18, the build this tutorial was recorded on. Panel layout and filter names below match that release, not the current one.
“So the first video I added is on the bottom track. The second video I’m going to drag into the middle track. And then the third video I’m going to drag to the very top track.”
Three clips, three video tracks, all trimmed to the same length: V1 holds video.mp4, V2 holds video2.mp4, V3 holds video3.mp4. The eye icons on V1 and V2 are switched off so only the top track is visible while the first mask is built.
“So the first thing I would do is I would go into softness and I would take the softness all the way to zero because I don’t want that blurry edge. I actually want a hard edge.”
The first Mask: Simple Shape being shaped into the left panel, with the 3×3 grid on as a guide. Softness is already at 0.00 % and Height at 50.00 %; Horizontal and Width are still being nudged toward the left third.
“And we’re basically going to do the exact same thing we did to this one here. But this time around… let’s reselect the middle track.”
The second mask, on V2, pushed out to the right third — Horizontal 83.67 %, Width 17.05 % at this moment. All three clips are now visible at once, which is the point of the build.
“In the mask simple shape filter, there’s also a kind of a lever for rotation. And so we can actually rotate this a little bit.”
Rotation on the top mask has been taken to −14.6 deg. The panel tilts, and the top and bottom corners immediately stop reaching the frame edge — which is what the next few minutes fix.
“So now we can go into the height measurement and extend it all the way. That might as well extend it to 100%. You’re not going to see anything past that anyway.”
Height typed to 100.00 % on the rotated mask. Overshooting vertically costs nothing because anything past the frame edge is never rendered.
“And then we need this panel now to be a little bit wider so that this little thing that’s showing through is covered up.”
Width opened to 19.90 % and Vertical moved to 71.43 %. Once the mask is rotated, Vertical slides the panel along its own tilted axis, not straight up and down.
“I’m just going to remember that this was negative 14.6. Go back into this clip right here, go back to mask simple shape, immediately go into the rotation and I’m just going to type negative 14.6.”
The middle mask on V2 now carries the same −14.6 deg. Both masks must hold the identical angle or the two seams will not stay parallel.
“Drag it until — this is what I’m targeting — this intersection here, this crosshair here.”
The middle mask mid-adjustment: Width 23.47 %, Height 100.00 %, Vertical passing 19.39 % on its way to its final value. The grid intersection is the aiming point.
“And now you have a split screen that is diagonal. And you see you actually see this in some of the cinematic travel videos.”
The Grid toggled off and the result played full screen: three clips, two rectangular masks, both rotated −14.6 deg.
“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.”
End card — the channel page and the Shotcut tips and tricks playlist, plus a pointer to the bentacular travel and food channel.
Every number below was read off the screen in the video. This build is pure geometry, so the numbers are the tutorial — if a value is not stated, it is because it was never shown.
Any three clips will do, but they read best when they share a palette. The three used here are beach shots of roughly the same exposure, which is what lets three unrelated frames sit side by side without looking like an accident.
Drag the first clip to the timeline, then add two tracks: right-click, Track Operations → Add Video Track, or press Ctrl + I twice. Drop the second clip on V2 and the third on V3.
The shortest clip sets the usable length. Here that is 00:00:12:06, and all three are trimmed down to match it.
Click the eye icon on each of the two lower tracks. With only V3 visible you can see exactly what the mask is doing instead of guessing at a composite.
Select the clip on V3, open Filters, click the plus, type “mask” and pick Mask: Simple Shape. It lands on its defaults: a small soft rectangle dead centre.
The Grid button sits in the player toolbar, to the right of the transport controls. Open its dropdown and choose 3×3. The guides do not render — they only give every mask edge a line to land on.
Four values, in this order. Take Softness to zero first — a soft edge is wrong here, the panels need to meet in a hard line. Then push Height to 50.00 % so the panel runs top to bottom, and finally walk Horizontal and Width onto the left third.
Width and Height are measured from the centre outward. Horizontal 16.72 % with 16.73 % puts the panel's left edge on the frame edge and its right edge at 33.45 % — the left third, overshot by a tenth of a percent to close the seam. Height at 50.00 % spans the full frame height.
Use the mouse scroll wheel over a value field rather than dragging the slider. Dragging moves in whole percents; the wheel moves in hundredths, which is the difference between a seam and a visible sliver.
Un-hide V2, select its clip, and add a second Mask: Simple Shape. Same sequence, mirrored: Softness to zero, Height to 50.00 %, then Horizontal out to the right third.
V1 never gets a filter. The middle third is simply what is left over once the other two panels have been cut out of the tracks above it.
Three video streams decoding at once will choke the preview on most machines. Settings → Preview Scaling lowers only the preview resolution — the export is untouched. In the video it goes to 720p first, then down to 540p.
Type the same Rotation value into both masks — −14.6 deg here. The moment they tilt, both panels stop reaching the frame edge, so each one needs Height taken to 100.00 % and Width opened up until the corners are covered. Vertical then slides each panel along its own tilted axis to line the seams up on a grid intersection.
Type the angle, never drag it. Two masks that are a tenth of a degree apart produce seams that converge across the frame, and it is obvious.
Read directly off the frames of the video. Each mask row is a complete panel definition — the six values in a row are everything Mask: Simple Shape needs.
| Setting | Value | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Shotcut version | 21.05.18 | Help → About Shotcut |
| Playlist clip #1 | video3.mp4 · 00:00:51:09 | Playlist |
| Playlist clip #2 | video.mp4 · 00:00:29:03 | Playlist |
| Playlist clip #3 | video2.mp4 · 00:00:12:06 | Playlist |
| Timeline length | 00:00:12:06 | All three clips trimmed to match |
| Track stack | V3 video3.mp4 / V2 video2.mp4 / V1 video.mp4 | Timeline |
| Add a video track | Ctrl + I | Track Operations → Add Video Track |
| Filter used | Mask: Simple Shape | On the V3 and V2 clips only |
| Filter count | 2 — one per masked clip | V1 carries no filter |
| Guides | Grid → 3×3 | Player toolbar |
| Preview scaling | 720p, then 540p | Settings → Preview Scaling |
| Control | Default | What it does here |
|---|---|---|
| Operation | Overwrite | Left alone for the whole build — the shape keeps what is inside it |
| Shape | Rectangle | Left alone. A panel is a rectangle |
| Horizontal | 50.00 % | Centre of the shape, left to right |
| Vertical | 50.00 % | Centre of the shape, top to bottom |
| Width | 10.00 % | Half-width, measured from the centre outward |
| Height | 10.00 % | Half-height, measured from the centre outward |
| Rotation | 0.0 deg | Tilt of the shape |
| Softness | 20.00 % | Edge feather — taken to zero on both masks |
| Layout | Track | Horizontal | Vertical | Width | Height | Rotation | Softness |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Upright — left panel | V3 | 16.72 % | 50.00 % | 16.73 % | 50.00 % | 0.0 deg | 0.00 % |
| Upright — right panel | V2 | 83.67 % | 50.00 % | 17.01 % | 50.00 % | 0.0 deg | 0.00 % |
| Diagonal — left panel | V3 | 16.72 % | 91.84 % | 19.90 % | 100.00 % | −14.6 deg | 0.00 % |
| Diagonal — right panel | V2 | 83.67 % | 17.35 % | 23.47 % | 100.00 % | −14.6 deg | 0.00 % |
The middle third is never masked. It is whatever V1 is showing, revealed by the two holes cut above it — which is why only two rows are needed for a three-way split.
| Moment | Horizontal | Width | Height | Softness |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4:30 — filter added, defaults | 50.00 % | 10.00 % | 10.00 % | 20.00 % |
| 5:10 — hard edge first | 50.00 % | 10.00 % | 10.00 % | 0.00 % |
| 5:20 — slid onto the left third | 16.32 % | 10.00 % | 10.00 % | 0.00 % |
| 6:00 — height typed to 50 | 16.32 % | 10.00 % | 50.00 % | 0.00 % |
| 6:20 — width opened out | 16.32 % | 15.82 % | 50.00 % | 0.00 % |
| 6:40 — scroll-wheel centring | 17.38 % | 15.82 % | 50.00 % | 0.00 % |
| 7:20 — centred | 16.72 % | 16.12 % | 50.00 % | 0.00 % |
| 8:00 — sliver closed, final | 16.72 % | 16.73 % | 50.00 % | 0.00 % |
The last four rows took nearly three minutes on screen, all of it scroll-wheel work on two fields. That is the honest cost of a seam that does not show.
Machine transcribed from the video audio. Spoken phrasing is left as-is; only the product and filter names Whisper mangled have been corrected. Every timestamp plays the video in the hero from that second.
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to do one of those cool split screens that you
see a lot on commercials, music videos, and a lot of cinematic videos out there. 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. Today’s tutorial will be done on Shotcut version
21.05.18. So this one should be relatively easy. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to start
out with three videos that I’ve already dragged into my playlist. So this is the first video.
Let’s just play it real quick.
This is the second video.
And this is the third video.
So what I want to do is I want to play all three videos at the same time,
but shown via split screen. So in order to do that, first I need to drag all three videos
into the timeline. So I’m going to drag the first video into the timeline and it’s going to
track. Now what you’re going to need to do is you’re going to need to add two additional tracks
stacked on top of each other. So all you have to do is right click track operations, add video
track, or the shortcut is control I. So I’ll add another one. And then I’m going to go control I
to add a third one. So the first video I added is on the bottom track. The second video
I’m going to drag into the middle track. And then the third video I’m going to drag
to the very top track. And just to make my desktop a little neater, what I’m going to do is
I’m going to trim all of them so that they are all the same lengths. I’m going to delete
all the excess. And so we’re going to end up with the three videos on top of each other naturally
because they’re stacked in layers. All you’re going to see is the video that’s at the very top most
of the layer because that’s the one that’s covering up the other two in the bottom. And so
because there really isn’t a reason to show the two bottom ones, I’m just going to turn it
off right now and just focus on this top layer here. So again, I’m going to go into this second
layer. I’m going to click this little eye or hide icon. And then the same same thing on this third
one here. And I’m going to click the icon. So now all our focus is going to be on this top
video, which is this one. Now let’s create our first split screen.
To do that, while the track is selected, all you have to do is go to filters, click the plus symbol
and type Mask: Simple Shape.
And right now you’re not seeing anything because
the layers are invisible at the bottom. So actually I’m going to activate the second one
here just so you can see what it did. And so right now by default, this is what Mask: Simple Shape
is doing. And so we’re going to fix that. To make our lives a little easier, what I’m going to do
is I’m going to add guides so that we know exactly where the mask begins and ends.
And the easiest way to do that is to use one of my favorite tools,
which is the Grids icon right here, as you can see, I’m going to select that.
But I’m going to go into the drop down and I’m going to click three by three,
which is really convenient because what we’re trying to do is we’re actually
trying to split this screen into three equal sizes.
So now that we have that guide, what I want to do is I want to manipulate the mask so that this
video right here is actually on this first panel right there.
So the first thing I would do is I would go into softness and I would take the softness
all the way to zero because I don’t I don’t want that blurry edge. I actually want a hard edge.
So we want that to be zero. The second thing is I want to go into the horizontal measurement
and I want to move it all the way to the very left and kind of center it as close as possible,
probably right there. Now let’s work with the height. So I want this to be
touching the very edge at the very top and I want this to expand all the way to
the very bottom. So we’re actually going to pull the height and just drag it all the way to 100%.
Actually you didn’t even need to do it 100%, probably 50%.
This is probably the setting that tells it go all the way to the very edge,
which is fine right there. And now we’re going to manipulate the width
and all I wanted to do is expand so that it
hits the little guidelines that we created. And as you can see, as we get a little closer,
we can tell that this this part right here is actually not centered because you can see it’s
a lot skinnier on the left side than it is on the right side. So I’m actually going to move
the horizontal a little bit
to kind of get it as close to center, just eyeballing it.
As I get closer to the edge, instead of me moving the bars left and right, what I’m doing is
I’m using the scroller on the mouse so that I can be more exact in my measurement so that it
it’ll actually move by 0.01%,
which is probably right there, is as close to center as we can get that thing. And then I’m
going to go back into the width measurement, which is right here. And you can see this
measurement move, even though I’m not moving the mouse, because I’m actually
manipulating it again using the scroller on the mouse, just to get a little bit more
fine tuned movement and fine tuned increase or decrease in
measurements. And so that’s about it, I think. And if I deactivate the
guides here, and I start playing, you can see at this point, I can kind of see a little
edge right there. So I’m going to go back into the width and kind of just increase
there right there, increase it a little bit. And then once again, at this point with the
current setting, we have two videos playing at the same time that split. So now what we
want to do is we want to add the third split screen, this middle one is already taking up
taking up this middle panel right here. So let’s work on the rightmost panel. And so while this video
is selected, again, we go into filters, we click the plus button. And then again, we
choose Mask: Simple Shape. And we’re basically going to do the exact same thing we did to this one here.
But this time around, again, let’s activate this here so that the bottom shows through.
Again, we’re going to do the exact same thing we did. Let’s reselect the middle track.
Let’s drop the softness down all the way to zero. Let’s get the height up to
50% so that it spans to the top and the bottom. And then we’re going to use the horizontal measurement
here. And we’re going to try to move it all the way to the right and try to center it
in that rightmost panel as close as we can eyeballing it. I think that’s pretty close.
And then we go into this measurement here, which is the width, we then expand the width
so that it expands across as close. See, now I need to use the scroller mouse
to fine tune. I think it went past the guide there. Let’s see.
Okay, let’s turn off the guide here right there.
So now you have three, it’s going a little slow. So let’s drop the preview scaling to about
720p and see if that’s better because you have three videos playing at the same time here.
Okay, let’s preview scaling to 540p right there.
And that, folks, is how you do a split screen, split in three ways. Now
you don’t just need to end here. If you want to make this a little bit more advanced,
what you can do is you can go back to the topmost video here. And instead of this being split
perfectly upright, what you can do is you can change the angle because I’ve seen some of those
split screens where it’s actually a diagonal split screen. So if you want a diagonal version of what
you’re seeing right now, all you have to do is go back into the topmost and then, luckily,
in the Mask: Simple Shape filter, there’s also a measurement, there’s also a kind of a lever
for rotation. And so we can actually rotate this a little bit. I’m just going to bring back the guide,
even though that’s not really going to help us much. But say I want to rotate it this much, which
based on the measurement we’re seeing right now, it is negative 14.6 degrees. So all I need to do
is rotate this panel by negative four or the mask by negative 14.6 degrees. And then I go into the
second one and do the exact same measurement, you need to make sure that they’re equal, so that it
looks right. So right now we rotated it by 14.6 and you can see that the top and the bottom
doesn’t extend to the very edge. So now we can go into the height measurement and extend it all the
way. That might as well extend it to 100%. You’re not going to see anything past that anyway.
And then why don’t we then move it a little bit to the left here? So that’s using the vertical
measurement. And so we’ll move it a little bit to the left. Let’s say
right, like I’m looking at this intersection right here. And that’s going to be that’s what I was
using as a guide. And then we need this panel now to be a little bit wider so that this little
thing that’s showing through is covered up. And so now we go back into the width measurement
and we make this a little wider again. And let’s bring it in a little bit more.
And then we’re going to fine tune it a little bit. And again, we can see that this thing is
extending past this little intersection here. So what I can do is I can then go into the vertical
and move that
as close as I can do it with my mouse, which is about right there.
And so now you have one diagonal panel. So now we’re going to do the exact same thing. I’m
just going to remember that this was negative 14.6. Go back into this clip right here,
go back to Mask: Simple Shape immediately go into the rotation and I’m just going to type negative 14.6
to kind of give it that same angle. And again, you can see here the top and the bottom is not
extending to the very edge. So we go into the height measurement and just drag it all the way to
100. And then we’re going to go into the width so that this edge here extends all the way to here.
And then this edge here covers up this edge right there. So let’s go into width and make it a little
wider. Now that it’s extended, everything is covered up. I need to move this edge here. So
drag it until this is what I’m targeting this intersection here this crosshair here.
That’s why these guides are amazing, because it’s a lot easier to figure out
your thresholds and your measurements. And so right there. And then I’m just going to toggle
off the Grids icon. And now you have a split screen that is diagonal. And you see you actually
see this in some of the cinematic travel videos. And so this is what it ends up being.
And that’s about it. Really simple, really fun. A cool way to add dimension to the videos that you’re
creating. Let me know if you have any questions. I’d love to see how you implement this tip.
But that’s it. Really simple. Hope you like it. Let me know in the comments. And if there’s any
other tutorials you’d like to see, please let me know. Of course, I would always love your subscription.
And if you can like this video, it helps the algorithm. Otherwise, I’ll see you next time. Thank
you. 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.
