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The Video

As a sample video, I used a screencast on my desktop, were Clementine plays some music for ~1 minute.

Did you know? Pressing Alt+Ctrl+Shift+R on Gnome Shell records your desktop!

Prepare the Video for Editing

Open Avidemux and load your video file. You will have to first choose what format should the exported result be, and then choose one of the filters that we will see more analytically below.

Every video format comes with some restrictions, or requirements. For example, I chose mpeg-4, and for that reason my exported video dimensions must be a derivative of the number 8.

(press images for larger)

If you are screencasting it means that your video will have the same size as your screen does. When you insert that video on Avidemux the window of the application becomes bigger than your screen and is not resizable. To fix that go on the “View” menu and change the zoom setting.

If the video you entered seems to have inverted colors, then you should first fix that and then proceed with the editing. To do this open the filters and choose the “Colors” category and then apply the “Swap U and V” filter. Then save the result with a different file name and open it again to proceed.

Applying filters

On this article we will see how to apply crop and fade in/out filters and you will get the idea on how to apply the rest of the filters just fine.

Fade In/Out

Go on the filters, choose the “Transform” category and then the Fade filter and press the add button.

You can choose the time width of the effect by determining on what frame should the effect start and when to end. I chose both fade in and fade out for our example video and also checked the to/from black option to have a better optical result.

You can see now that the filters are loaded on the right column (Active Filters) which means that if I export my video now, the filters will be applied on the exported video file!

Crop

Applying the crop filter is a little different story, but not difficult at all!

You must first find the filter on the “Transform” category and add it by pressing the add button. A screen with the video and crop settings will appear.

Now, before we continue let me explain what is going on here. Just below the screen, there is a bar that determines what frame of the video you are currently watching (frame 172 on the screenshot). Below this bar, you will find the crop regulators for the four edges of the screen.

On our scenario we want to crop everything except Clementine. To do this you start increasing the crop value on all four regulators till the green colored area that determines what is cropped reaches the four sides of the Clementine window. You should end up with something like this:

Pressing “OK” button will add the crop filter to the Active Filters that are now three. You can now press the “Preview” button to see the result before exporting.

If you find that everything is ok with your video, you can proceed exporting it by pressing the “Save” button. This may take some time depending on the size of the video, but works relatively fast.

The result

This is the finished result:

Video Editing is not only about simple effects and tasks of course, but I thought that these basic few things will trigger your appetite into getting your hands dirty. This kind of things need time and patience to learn and master. If you liked this how-to and want to see more advanced stuff, just ask for it on the comments and we will prepare something for you!

If you got into video editing and now need a good and simple way to add fancy, crazy and proffesional effects to your videos, check out the LiVES video editor!