2. Cutting Your First Clip Into a Sequence

What an editor is for

A single generated clip isn't a film. A cut is a relationship — one image giving way to another — and the meaning lives in the pairing. The work here is a short exported file, a second or two longer than the clip it started from, that someone else can watch and understand.

Why Shotcut, and why not Resolve yet

Shotcut is free, GPL version three, with no watermark and no export resolution cap; editing at 1920x1080 wants around four cores and eight gigabytes of memory. DaVinci Resolve is the more powerful program and will come up later, but it expects sixteen gigabytes (thirty-two for compositing), a separate graphics card, and splits work across six named workspaces. Builds for Windows, macOS and Linux come from the Shotcut download page.

Getting Video Mode right before anything else

Name a project folder and keep the media in it — the project file is only a list of instructions pointing at where the files live. Leave Video Mode on Automatic, which reads resolution, frame rate, aspect ratio and colour space off the first item imported. So the generated video goes in first: with an image or music first, Shotcut falls back to 1920x1080 at twenty-five fps, and a mismatch means duplicated or dropped frames and a small stutter in the exact moment you care about. Different aspect ratios get black bars and a notice in Properties. Generated files often carry variable frame rate; accept Shotcut's offer to convert to edit-friendly, which writes a constant-rate copy and leaves your original alone.

Two clips, two trims

A still of the bakery step, same sixteen-to-nine shape, becomes the companion shot. In and out points by dragging the trim bracket, or by splitting with S and ripple-deleting with X. Cut about a third of a second after the parcel settles and the hand starts to withdraw; run the still about a second and a half.

Titles, sound and permission

Check Properties for an audio stream rather than assuming one — quiet street tone across the cut makes it feel intentional. Titles go on with the Text: Simple filter, or on a second video track. Synchronisation is a separate right: commercial music needs clearance for both composition and master, and the Creative Commons letters matter — NC, ND, SA, and attribution done properly. Keep a record of title, source, rights holder, licence version, proof of purchase, platform clearance code and attribution text.

Export, then watch it

The YouTube preset gives MP4, progressive scan, libx264, quality-based variable bitrate, stereo AAC at forty-eight thousand. A green tick means the render didn't crash, nothing more: watch the file in a player with the sound up, read its codec information, and reopen it in Shotcut to confirm the chain held.

Generation inside the timeline

On the eighth of September twenty twenty-six, Runway released plugins for Premiere Pro and After Effects on macOS and Windows, querying Gen-4.5, Kling 3.0 Pro, Veo 3.1 and Aleph 2.0 and inserting results at the playhead. Video-to-video restyling pulls anchor frames from the sequence and returns clips cut to the original's exact length, so the cuts either side don't move. It needs a Premiere subscription and a paid Runway workspace, and nothing here depends on it.

One clip is not a film. You can generate a beautiful five seconds of a courier setting a parcel on a bakery step, watch it back, decide it works, and still have nothing a viewer can follow. A shot becomes film only when something is placed next to it and both are trimmed so that together they carry one action. That is what an editor is for, and that is the whole job of this chapter. By the end of it there is a short exported file, a second or two longer than the clip you started with, that somebody else can watch from beginning to end and understand.

So we need a place to do that. A video editor is a program that holds your media in one project, lets you lay pieces out in time, decide where each one starts and stops, put words and sound over them, and then write the whole arrangement out as a single new video file. The arranging is non-destructive: your original clip is never changed. The editor only records instructions about it, and applies them when it renders.

The editor to start in is Shotcut. It is free, it is open source under the GPL version three, and it puts no watermark on your export and no cap on your export resolution. It runs on sixty-four-bit Windows ten or eleven, on macOS twelve and later as a single build for both Intel and Apple Silicon machines, and on sixty-four-bit Linux. For editing at nineteen-twenty by ten-eighty, which is what a widescreen clip like ours is, you want about four processor cores and eight gigabytes of memory. That is an ordinary laptop, not a workstation.

The obvious alternative is DaVinci Resolve, and I want to be honest about why we are not starting there. Resolve is the more powerful program by a wide margin, and this course will have reasons to reach for it later when finishing work demands it. But Resolve asks a lot of both the machine and the beginner. It expects at least sixteen gigabytes of memory, thirty-two if you use its compositing page, and a separate graphics card with a few gigabytes of its own memory. It also splits the work across separate workspaces with their own names and their own logic, one for media, one for cutting, one for editing, one for compositing, one for sound, one for delivery. That structure is a real advantage to a professional who already knows which room the job lives in. To someone opening an editor for the first time it is six front doors. Shotcut is a single window with panels you can move around: your list of media, your timeline, your filters, your export settings. Everything for this chapter is visible at once.

To get it, go to the Shotcut download page and take the build for your system: the sixty-four-bit Windows installer, the macOS disk image, or one of the Linux packages. On Windows you run the installer, accept the licence, and keep the default location. On macOS you open the disk image and drag the Shotcut application into your Applications folder. On Linux, if you took the portable AppImage, you mark the file executable and run it directly.

Now, before any media goes anywhere, there is a decision to make, and getting it right here saves you from a whole category of problem later.

When Shotcut opens, the middle of the window offers you a new project. It asks for two things: a folder to keep the project in, and a name. Give it both, deliberately. Make a folder for this piece, with the courier clip and its companion image inside it, and point the project there. The project file Shotcut saves is small. It is a list of instructions that refer to your media files by where they live. If the media moves, the project cannot find it. Keeping the project and its sources together is the difference between opening this sequence again in a month and rebuilding it from nothing.

Under the name there is a setting called Video Mode, and by default it says Automatic. Leave it there. Then click Start.

Video Mode is the geometry of your timeline: the resolution, the frame rate and the aspect ratio that everything in the project gets conformed to. Resolution is how many pixels wide and tall each frame is, nineteen-twenty by ten-eighty for ordinary high definition. Frame rate is how many of those frames go past in a second, and it is written frames per second, often shortened to fps. Aspect ratio is the shape of the frame, the proportion of width to height, sixteen to nine for widescreen. A project has one set of these, and it does not change to suit each clip. Each clip changes to suit it.

What Automatic mode does is read those values off the very first piece of media you put into the project and adopt them. It reads the resolution, the frame rate, the aspect ratio and the colour space, and locks the timeline to them. That means you do not have to know your clip's numbers to get them right. You just have to control the order in which things arrive.

And here is the trap. Automatic mode takes its reading from the first item, whatever that item is. If you drag in your music file first, or your still image first, Shotcut has nothing to read a video geometry from, and falls back to a default of nineteen-twenty by ten-eighty at twenty-five frames per second. That default might be wrong for your clip in both numbers. So the rule is simple and it is not optional: the generated video goes in first. Everything else after.

Suppose you get it wrong and the timeline ends up at twenty-five frames per second while your clip is twenty-four. Nothing breaks visibly. There is no error. Shotcut conforms the clip without asking, and to fit twenty-four frames into twenty-five slots it duplicates a frame. Going the other way, from a higher rate to a lower one, it drops frames instead. Either way you have a clip that is subtly not the motion you generated, with a small stutter that you will notice most in exactly the moment you care about, which is the hand moving. A shape mismatch is more visible. If a still or a second clip is a different aspect ratio from the project, Shotcut keeps its proportions rather than stretching it, and pads the gap with black. You get bars down the sides or across the top and bottom. Shotcut will tell you so: select the clip and its Properties panel carries a notice that the aspect ratio does not match the project Video Mode, which causes black bars. If you ever want to check what the project itself has settled on, select Output at the top left of the timeline and read its Properties.

There is one more thing that can happen on import, and it happens to generated video in particular. Many generators write out what is called variable frame rate, often shortened to VFR, meaning the gap between frames is not perfectly even across the file. That is fine for playing back in a browser and bad for editing, because an editor needs to be able to jump to an exact frame and trust that the sound stays with the picture. When Shotcut sees a variable frame rate file it stops and asks, in a dialogue box, whether you want to convert it to something edit-friendly, offering a few quality levels. Say yes and take the first or second option. Shotcut writes a new copy of the clip at a constant frame rate and uses that copy in the project. Your original stays where it is. Doing this now prevents sound sliding out of step with picture, and prevents your playhead landing somewhere other than where the picture says it landed.

So: project folder named, Video Mode on Automatic, courier clip opened first, conversion accepted if offered. The timeline now has the shape of your accepted shot, which is the point of doing it in that order.

Now for the second piece, and for why there has to be one.

You cannot cut a single clip into a sequence, because a cut is a relationship. It is the moment one image gives way to another, and the meaning lives in the pairing. With one clip all you can do is shorten it. The courier shot has an action in it, the parcel going down onto the step, but a five-second shot of that action is a shot of that action. Put a second image after it and the viewer's mind does something more: it reads the first as cause and the second as result. So bring in a companion. The easiest useful companion here is a still: a photograph or a saved frame of the bakery step itself, the parcel sitting there, nobody in the frame. It does not have to be generated. It has to match the world of the first shot and be the same shape, sixteen to nine, so it fills the frame without bars.

Use Open File on the toolbar, or drag from your file manager, and both items appear in the Playlist panel. The Playlist is a holding area. Nothing in it is in your edit yet.

Drag the courier clip from the Playlist down into the empty timeline area. Shotcut creates a video track for it, labelled V1. A track is a horizontal lane in time; clips sit on it end to end, and a project can have several stacked up. A clip on the timeline is one piece of media with a start and an end that you control. The vertical line running through the timeline is the playhead, and it marks the frame you are currently looking at in the preview. Wherever the playhead is, that is what the player shows.

Now drag the still from the Playlist onto the same track, V1, snug against the end of the courier clip. Two clips, one after the other, in order. That is a sequence in the plainest sense.

Watch it. It will be bad, and it will be bad in a specific way worth understanding before fixing.

The trouble is that the generated clip ends where the generation ended, not where the action ended. Say the five seconds run like this: about a second of the courier walking in, a second and a half of her crouching, the parcel meeting the step somewhere around three seconds, and then a second and a half of her straightening up and the camera drifting. Cut to the still immediately after the parcel lands and you have cut too early: the viewer sees a hand approaching and then, abruptly, a parcel already resting there, and the completion of the action has gone missing. Their eye has not had time to register contact. The cut lands on the busiest frame. Alternatively, leave all five seconds in and the last second and a half is dead air with the action already over, and the still feels like the film stalled.

The fix is trimming, and trimming is setting the in point and the out point. The in point is the first frame of the clip that you keep. The out point is the last. Everything outside them stays in the source file and simply is not used. That is the whole of it.

There are two ways to do it. The first is dragging. Put your cursor over the right-hand edge of the courier clip on the timeline until a trim bracket appears, then drag inward. As you drag, watch the preview: Shotcut shows you the frame you are landing on. You are looking for the moment about a third of a second after the parcel has settled and the hand has begun to withdraw. That is the frame where a viewer has seen the action complete. Set the out point there. The second way is splitting. Move the playhead to the cut point, press the S key to split the clip at the playhead, click the piece you do not want so it takes a red outline, and then press X to ripple delete it, which removes that piece and closes the gap behind it so nothing moves out of order. Plain Delete would remove it and leave the hole.

Then trim the still. A still has no natural duration, so Shotcut gives it a default one, and the default is usually too long. Drag its right edge until it runs about a second and a half. Long enough for the eye to settle on the parcel and understand it has been left; short enough that it does not become a photograph the audience is being asked to admire.

Play the two together again. Parcel goes down, hand withdraws, cut, parcel resting on the empty step. One action, begun and completed, read by the viewer without help. That is what we came for, and it took two trims.

Now a title and some sound, and one of those raises a question you have to actually answer rather than assume.

The question is whether your generated clip came with audio at all. Do not guess from memory of what the model does. Look. Select the clip in the timeline and read its Properties panel: it reports the streams the file contains, and if there is no audio stream, there is no audio, and there is nothing to fix or balance. A clip with no sound needs a separate sound step, which means you supply the sound yourself. For a shot like this the honest minimum is quiet outdoor ambience, a little street tone, under the whole thing. It does more than fill silence: continuous sound across a picture cut makes the cut feel intentional, because the world does not stop when the camera does.

To put it in, open the timeline's menu, the small stacked-lines button on the timeline toolbar, and choose Track Operations, then Add Audio Track. That creates a track called A1. Drag your audio file onto A1, line up its start with the start of the picture, and trim its end so it stops where the picture stops.

The title goes on with a filter. Select the clip you want the words over, open the Filters tab, click the plus button, and choose Text: Simple. Type your title. You can move and size it by dragging the box in the preview, or set position, font and outline in the filter's controls. If you would rather have the title live independently of any clip, add a second video track above V1 with Add Video Track, use Open Other and then Text to make a standalone text item, and drag that onto the upper track, where its duration is just its clip length and can be dragged like anything else. One title is enough for a piece this short, and it belongs at the head.

Any asset you bring in from outside carries permission questions, and they are worth knowing now while the stakes are a five-second exercise. Putting music or recorded sound against moving pictures is called synchronisation, sync for short, and it is a distinct right. Buying a track, streaming it, or having a personal-use licence does not give you sync. For commercial music you would need two separate clearances, one for the composition, which belongs to the songwriters and their publisher, and one for the master recording, which belongs to the performers and their label. The audio libraries built into social platforms usually clear ordinary personal posts only; the moment a video is promotional or sponsored, that clearance stops covering you.

If you take something under a Creative Commons licence, read the letters. NC means non-commercial, which rules out a monetised or promotional channel. ND means no derivatives, and shortening a track or syncing it to picture can be exactly that. SA means share-alike, which obliges you to release your own video under the same terms. An attribution licence needs credit given properly, which by convention means title, author, source and a link to the licence, placed where the licence says to place it. Images have their own version of this: anything marked editorial use only has no model or property release behind it and cannot be used in commercial or sponsored work, and a copyright licence to a photograph never covers a trademark in the frame or the privacy rights of a person in it. Finally, check whether a music catalogue is enrolled in automated fingerprinting such as YouTube's Content ID, because if it is, your licence needs to supply a whitelisting or dispute code or you will be arguing with a robot about your own video.

Write down what you used. For each asset: its exact title and file name, the address you got it from, the rights holder, the precise licence name and version, your proof that you held it when you downloaded it such as an invoice or order number, what the licence permits regarding sync and commercial use, any platform clearance code, and the exact attribution text and where you put it. That record is the only thing that helps you if a claim arrives.

Then export. Exporting is rendering: Shotcut plays your whole arrangement through and writes it out as one new file in a chosen format.

Choose the destination before the settings, because the settings follow from it. Say this piece is going onto YouTube. Click Export, and in the stock presets pick YouTube. Then click Advanced and read what the preset chose, because it is worth recognising. The container format is MP4. The resolution, aspect ratio and frame rate are inherited from your project Video Mode, which is inherited from your clip, which is the reason we were careful at the start. Scan mode is progressive, meaning whole frames rather than interlaced half-frames. The video codec, the scheme used to compress the picture, is libx264, an implementation of H.264, which every platform and player accepts. Rate control is quality-based variable bitrate, set by a quality percentage somewhere around the high fifties, which means Shotcut spends more data on complicated frames and less on simple ones instead of holding a fixed rate. The group of pictures value, how often a fully self-contained frame is written, sits somewhere between half a second and two seconds' worth. Audio is two channels, stereo, at forty-eight thousand samples a second, in the AAC codec, at a few hundred kilobits a second. Then click Export File, name it, and save. The Jobs panel shows the render climbing to a hundred per cent and finishes with a green tick.

That green tick means the render did not crash. It does not mean the file is right. So inspect the file, and inspect it by watching it.

Open the exported MP4 in a normal player, VLC or whatever your system uses, and watch the whole thing with the sound up. You are checking that sound and picture start together and stay together, that the cut plays cleanly without a hitch or a repeated frame, and that the levels are comfortable rather than distorted. Then read the file's own account of itself: in VLC, the codec information window lists each stream, and you should see the video stream as H.264 at the dimensions and frame rate you expected, and the audio stream as AAC, stereo, forty-eight thousand. If you want a third check, open the exported file back in Shotcut as a new file and read its Properties. If its reported dimensions, aspect ratio and frame rate match the project you built, the chain held from the generated clip all the way to the delivered file.

Save the project, and save it in the folder you named at the start, with the clip, the converted edit-friendly copy, the still, the audio and your licence notes beside it. Add the prompts, the settings and the rejection notes from the generation work. That set of files is what makes this sequence revisable. Change your mind about the cut next week and you open the project and move the out point. You do not generate anything again.

And the cut has already taught you something about generating. You trimmed a second and a half off the end of a clip that looked good on its own, and you trimmed it because the shot delivered an action that had barely finished when the footage ran out. A shot that plays well by itself and a shot that gives an editor something to work with are not the same shot. The editor needs handles: a little footage before the action starts and a little after it ends, so there is somewhere to put the cut. It needs overlap, some room where the same moment exists from more than one angle or where the action carries past the join. Most of all it needs one action a viewer can read, started and completed inside the frame, rather than three things happening at once. Those are requirements you can ask for when you describe the next shot.

A plugin that puts generation inside the editor

That gap between where you generate and where you cut has just narrowed in the paid tools. On the eighth of September twenty twenty-six, Runway released plugins for Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, on macOS and Windows both.

What changes is the round trip. The pattern you have just worked through has a loop in it that nobody enjoys: generate in a browser, download the file, find it, import it, place it. The plugin removes those middle steps. It puts a generation panel inside Premiere Pro, and from there you query hosted models directly, including Gen-4.5 as well as Kling three point zero Pro, Google Veo three point one and Aleph two point zero. What comes back is inserted straight onto the active sequence at the current playhead position, or dropped into the project bin for later.

The production task this touches is the one you have been doing: getting material onto a timeline. It touches one more that is worth naming, because it is harder to do by hand. For video-to-video restyling, the plugin takes reference anchor frames from the sequence itself, restyles them through Aleph two point zero, and renders replacement clips cut to exactly the length of the original timeline clip. That last detail is the useful part. Matching a regenerated clip to the duration of the one it replaces is fiddly work when you are exporting frames, uploading them somewhere and converting files on the way back. Done at the timeline, the replacement lands at the length the edit already expects, and the cut either side of it does not move.

This sits above where we are working, and knowingly so. It needs Premiere Pro, which is a paid subscription, and a paid Runway workspace to log into. Nothing in this chapter depends on it, and the sequence you just exported is not worse for having been assembled by hand. But if you already have both of those, the smallest useful next action is short: install the plugin package for your system, open Premiere Pro, go to the Window menu, then Extensions, then Runway, sign in with your paid Runway workspace, put the timeline playhead at the edit point you want filled, and generate onto the active track.

Then inspect what arrives the same way you inspected today's export. Watch it in place, at full speed, with the sound up, and check that the action reads across the cut. A clip that appeared on the timeline without you touching a file manager is still a clip that has to earn its place.