Shotcut tutorial · companion page
A transparent colour clip, one Text: Rich filter keyframed from below the frame to above it, and a Corner Pin filter to bend the flat block into perspective. Two filters, two keyframes, one track — that is the entire build.
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.
Nothing is imported and no footage is involved. A transparent colour clip carries a rich-text block; the block scrolls on two keyframes; a second filter bends the result into perspective after the scroll has already happened.
Open Other → Color, left on its default value of transparent. Everything else in the build is a filter sitting on that one clip.
Text: Rich gives you a real text box you can drag and resize in the player, plus a formatting toolbar for font, size, colour and justification. Text: Simple has none of that.
The whole crawl is Position animated on its Y value only — from 1161 at the head of the clip to -160 at the tail. There is no third keyframe.
Order matters. Corner Pin sits above Text: Rich in the filter list, so it distorts the already-scrolling text. Pull the top two corners in and down, push the bottom two outward, and the flat block reads as a plane tilting away from you.
[ It just takes using your imagination so let’s learn together! ]
on-screen text · 0:40
This video carries no chapter markers and nobody speaks in it. The sections below were derived from the screencaps themselves, sampled every 10 seconds, and are numbered by this page rather than by the video. Click any screencap or timestamp to play from that exact second, right here in the card.
The video opens on the trick itself. Yellow text recedes into a starfield while an on-screen monologue scrolls past — this is Ben’s channel intro, already built with the technique the next five minutes teach. It is also the only place in the video where words appear on screen. Nothing in the build that follows is captioned.
The About Shotcut dialog is opened and held: version 20.10.31. Every panel name, menu path and default value on this page belongs to that release. The video description says V20.10:31 — the same build, written with a colon.
Open Other → Color opens the Color dialog. The Color... button is left on its default, which reads transparent. That is the entire source for this build: no footage, no image, nothing on disk.
The transparent clip is dropped on V1. There is no second track and no background layer — the crawl is built entirely inside this one clip. The player reads a total of 00:00:14:15.
With the clip selected, Filters → + and the search box filtered to text. Two filters match. Text: Rich is the one chosen — it is the only one of the pair with a per-character formatting toolbar and a draggable text box, and both are needed here.
The filter opens with placeholder Lorem ipsum text and a live formatting toolbar sitting above the text box in the player. The panel underneath carries the geometry.
The A button on the rich-text toolbar opens the standard font dialog. Helvetica is selected, style Regular, size 72. No bold and no italic are set here — the slant the finished crawl has comes later, and from a different filter.
The text box is dragged in from the edges of the frame and the paragraph is set to justify, which is what gives the crawl its straight left and right edges. The panel now reads Background size 1355 x 918 and Text size 1341 x 1034 — the box is narrower than the frame, and the text inside it is taller than the box.
The stopwatch beside Position is switched on, which turns the pair of numbers into a keyframed parameter. With the playhead at the head of the clip, Y is set to 1161 — well below the bottom of a 1080-line frame, so the clip starts on empty black.
The playhead moves to the tail of the clip and -160 is typed into Y. That single edit writes the second keyframe. The Keyframes panel shows the result: a Position / Size track under Text: Rich carrying exactly two diamonds, one at each end.
The colour swatch on the rich-text toolbar opens the colour dialog. The value picked is #ffe629 — R 255, G 230, B 41, alpha 255. It is warmer and slightly greener than a pure yellow, which is what keeps it from glaring against black.
A second filter is added on top of Text: Rich. Corner Pin takes the four corners of the picture and lets you move each one independently, which is what bends a flat block of text into perspective. Pulling the two top corners in towards the centre and down makes the top of the block recede; pushing the bottom corners outward widens the base. The values are still being tuned in this frame.
From here to the end of the build the four corners do not change again. The top pair sit at 25 % and 75 % across and are pulled down to 43.75 %; the bottom pair are pushed past the edges of the frame to 106.25 % and -6.25 %, still at 100 %. Stretch and Interpolator stay at their defaults.
The build ends at the Jobs panel. The job that starts is C:\Users\bespanto\Desktop\starwars.mp4, running at 29 % (00:01:13). Shotcut opened at 0:50 and the export begins at 6:00 — five minutes and ten seconds of screen time, which is the five minutes the title promises.
Every number below was read off the pixels. There is no narration in this video and no instructional caption anywhere in the build, so nothing here came from a transcript. Frames were sampled once every 10 seconds; where a step falls between two of them, the step says so rather than pretending a frame shows it.
Open Other → Color. The dialog has a Preset field and a single Color... button, which already reads transparent. Accept it and the clip opens in the player under that name.
That 00:00:14:15 is the length the clip is carrying by the time it reaches the timeline. Where it was set is not on screen; the sampled frames jump straight from the dialog to the clip in place. Make yours as long as you want the crawl to take, because the two keyframes are pinned to the ends of the clip and the clip length is therefore the scroll speed.
With the clip selected, open Filters, press + and filter the list to text. Choose Text: Rich. It arrives with placeholder Lorem ipsum text already selected, so you can type straight over it.
Text: Simple will not do for this. The toolbar that Text: Rich puts above the text box — font, size, colour, justification — is where three of the settings on this page are set.
The A button on the rich-text toolbar opens the font dialog: Helvetica, style Regular, size 72. The colour swatch beside it opens the colour dialog, where the value is #ffe629. Set the paragraph to justify so both edges of the block are straight.
Neither bold nor italic is switched on. The slant in the finished crawl is produced entirely by Corner Pin in step 05, not by the font.
Drag the text box in from the edges of the frame so the block is narrower than the picture. Then switch on the stopwatch beside Position. With the playhead at the head of the clip, set Y to 1161; move the playhead to the tail of the clip and set Y to -160. X never changes.
Starting at 1161 puts the block below a 1080-line frame and ending at -160 carries it off the top, so the clip opens and closes on empty space. The keyframe interpolation menu is never opened in the video, so this page does not claim a value for it.
Press + again and add Corner Pin. It must sit above Text: Rich in the filter list — that is the order the video builds it in, and it is what makes the perspective apply to the moving text rather than the other way round. Then move the four corners.
Read the numbers as a shape. Corners 1 and 2 are the top of the picture: they close from the full width to the middle half — 25 % and 75 % — and drop to 43.75 % down the frame, which is the horizon the text recedes towards. Corners 3 and 4 are the bottom: they are pushed just outside the frame, to 106.25 % and -6.25 %, so the base of the block is wider than the picture. Stretch, Interpolator and Alpha Operation are left on their defaults.
Corner Pin carries no keyframes in this build. The corners are static for the whole clip; only Text: Rich moves.
Open Export and the job appears in Jobs. In the video the file is starwars.mp4.
There is no starfield in this build. The timeline holds a single track carrying a single transparent clip, and the finished crawl plays on black. The stars you see over the crawl at the start of the video belong to Ben’s channel intro, which was made before this recording. To get them, put a starfield image or clip on a track below V1 — the transparent clip will let it through. The video does not show that step.
Read directly off the frames. Where the video never showed a value, the row says so rather than filling in a plausible one.
| Setting | Value | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Shotcut version | 20.10.31 | Help → About Shotcut, held on screen at 0:57 |
| Source clip | transparent | Open Other → Color |
| Clip length on the timeline | 00:00:14:15 | Player readout |
| Track | V1 | Timeline — one track, nothing above or below |
| Project video mode | Never shown | The Video Mode dialog is not opened in this video |
| Filter 1 | Text: Rich | Filters |
| Filter 2 | Corner Pin | Filters, added above Text: Rich |
| Export target | C:\Users\bespanto\Desktop\starwars.mp4 | Jobs |
| Setting | Value | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Font | Helvetica | Rich-text toolbar → A |
| Font style | Regular | Font dialog |
| Font size | 72 | Font dialog and toolbar |
| Text colour | #ffe629 | Rich-text toolbar swatch |
| Text colour, RGB | 255, 230, 41 | Colour dialog |
| Alignment | Justify | Rich-text toolbar |
| Background colour | none | Text: Rich panel |
| Overflow | Automatic | Text: Rich panel |
| Background size, default | 1920 x 972 | Text: Rich panel, before resizing |
| Background size, as built | 1355 x 918 | Text: Rich panel |
| Text size, as built | 1341 x 1034 | Text: Rich panel |
| Position, keyframe 1 | 282, 1161 | Head of the clip |
| Position, keyframe 2 | 282, -160 | Tail of the clip |
| Keyframed parameter | Position / Size | Keyframes panel |
| Keyframe count | 2 | Keyframes panel |
| Keyframe interpolation | Never shown | The keyframe context menu is not opened |
| Setting | Value | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Corner 1 X / Y | 25.00 % / 43.75 % | Corner Pin panel |
| Corner 2 X / Y | 75.00 % / 43.75 % | Corner Pin panel |
| Corner 3 X / Y | 106.25 % / 100.00 % | Corner Pin panel |
| Corner 4 X / Y | -6.25 % / 100.00 % | Corner Pin panel |
| Stretch X / Y | 50.00 % / 50.00 % | Default, not changed |
| Interpolator | Bicubic Smooth | Default, not changed |
| Alpha Operation | Overwrite | Default, not changed |
| Feathering | 68.50 % | Corner Pin panel |
| Corner Pin keyframes | None | The corner values are static for the whole clip |
The four corner rows are highlighted because they are the effect. Everything else on this page is scaffolding — change the font, the colour or the clip length and you still have a crawl; change these four pairs and you do not.
This tutorial has no narration. The audio is a continuous music bed for the full 6:34. The only words in the video are burned into the picture, and all of them sit in the intro crawl and the end card — none of them teach the build. They are reproduced below in full.
A BENTACULAR Production
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!
If this video has inspired you in any way, I’d LOVE for you to subscribe. It goes a long way to help my channel!
LINKS ABOUT GEAR USED IN THE VIDEO ARE IN THE DESCRIPTION
A machine transcription of the audio returns the word “You” nine times and “Thank you so much for watching this video” three times across the whole 6:34 — the filler a speech model emits over music with no voice in it. The audio measures as a continuous bed, -9.7 dB mean and -1.1 dB peak, with only two quiet stretches in the entire file and no speech-shaped gaps anywhere. There is no speech to transcribe, so this page carries no transcript; a nearly empty one would only look like something had gone missing. The build from 0:50 to 6:00 is taught purely by what happens in the interface.
