Recommend a 1st time editor & How to "insert blank frames/slides"?

29th Apr 2025 17:01 #1

Member

Could you recommend me a user-friendly, free editor that can do these very simple edits? It doesn't have to be completely free. So long as it it has a free trial/free version, that's fine. And could you please explain how to do these things, or point to a short tutorial/help page?

Making my first video that will have frames added. I for sure want an intro, which will be composed of multiple slides with text on them. For example, the first slide might say "Hello, everyone" and the second one "Today I'll be sharing a video about...". They are completely blank slides, except for the text. And at the end have a slide that says "Thanks for watching". That's not actually what I'll be saying, just giving you an idea of what I mean.

Then the main part of the vid is prerecorded video. I want some text to "overly" it at some points. How to do that?

Please don't recommend an editor without explaining how to do these edits or pointing to a guide/tutorial - it's useless to me without the knowledge. Thanks for your help.

Quote

8th May 2025 22:29 #2

DarrellS

Member

Originally Posted by stebobibo

Could you recommend me a user-friendly, free editor that can do these very simple edits? It doesn't have to be completely free. So long as it it has a free trial/free version, that's fine. And could you please explain how to do these things, or point to a short tutorial/help page?

Making my first video that will have frames added. I for sure want an intro, which will be composed of multiple slides with text on them. For example, the first slide might say "Hello, everyone" and the second one "Today I'll be sharing a video about...". They are completely blank slides, except for the text. And at the end have a slide that says "Thanks for watching". That's not actually what I'll be saying, just giving you an idea of what I mean.

Then the main part of the vid is prerecorded video. I want some text to "overly" it at some points. How to do that?

Please don't recommend an editor without explaining how to do these edits or pointing to a guide/tutorial - it's useless to me without the knowledge. Thanks for your help.

I use VIRTUALDUB 1.10.5-TEST 7 to do almost all of my video editing.

If you are adding black frames then you would want to add (a very low) audio file to those frames and save to a file that matches your video since Virtualdub will not Append a file that doesn’t match your original video.

You would probably create a short video of a black frame with an audio file either saying what the text is going to say or leaving a very low volume audio file using Audacity (which is free also). You want to make the short video of the same file types as your original video. I haven’t recorded an audio file with Audacity but I’m told you can. If you can’t record an audio file of the text that is written then you can use any audio file.

Drag and drop the audio file into Audacity - Double click anywhere in the file and select Effect - Volume and compression - Pull the Amplification slider almost all the way to the left until you cannot hear the audio - click Apply and choose Select - Region and select a section the length of the file you want - choose File - Export - Export Selected Audio - Choose the same type of audio as your original file and click Save. Select what to call the file and where to save it - then click save.

Another option if you are trying to add black transitions between parts of your video is to use the Fill filter in Virtualdub with the Curve Editor. If you look in Help and click Contents and look for Processing and then Smart Rendering, then click on Search at the top and type Curve Editor. it will bring up a page on how to use the curve editor.

After placing the curves at the end of one section and the beginning of the next section you will then use the Smart Rendering.

To use SMART RENDER your video must be compressed and a video codec must be installed that matches your original video. Once your curves have been created then choose Smart Rendering. Then choose File and Save as AVI.

Here is a video tutorial for using a filter in blend mode and using the curve editor to create the curve for making transitions or effects in your video.

Applying Filters to a Range of Frames in Virtualdub
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MWoVY9mYbk

Below are VirtualDub help - Processing - Smart rendering.pdf and VirtualDub help - Processing - Video filter curves.pdf