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Choosing and Organizing your Footage Cutting and Managing Shots

What is the Shot List and How do I use it?

☕️ TL;DR – The Shot List shows you the Shots that Kamua AutoCut has made from your video, so you don’t have to find cut points manually. Each Media Asset (source) has its own Shot List. You add Shots to your Timeline to get started with your edit.

The Shot List is automatically generated using the Kamua AI AutoCut feature and is the starting point for every Project, once you have selected and imported or uploaded your source Media. 

Pro Tip: Shots are the building blocks of every video. They represent natural changes in the action for raw unedited video, or hard cut and transition edits that an editor made to the original Source. If you’re not sure what a Shot is, why it is important, and how it is different from a Clip, visit the Shots vs Clips article to learn more

In this article, you will learn how to:

  1. Review and audition your Shots 
  2. Add, Insert and Remove Shots on the Timeline
    1. Adding and Inserting Shots
    2. Selecting and Adding multiple Shots
    3. Removing Shots
  3. Switch back and forth between the Shot Lists of different Media Assets
  4. Merge 2 or more Shots into a single, longer Shot
  5. Split a Shot to create 2 shorter ones

Pro Tip: If you are using more than one Media Asset (source), you can easily switch back and forth by clicking on the Asset within the Media panel or on the colored chips on the navigation bar while on the Shot List screen.

 

1. Reviewing and Auditioning Shots

Position your mouse cursor over a Shot and it will autoplay. You can scroll down the Shot List and see all of the Shots that are in the Source Media Asset (in this case, a video – photo support will be coming soon). Each Shot has its own number in the top-left of the Shot Preview Thumbnail and you can see the total number of Shots in the Source on the top-right side of the Shot List screen.

To Audition a Shot, simply enable the sound with the  icon and listen to the Shot as it plays on loop on the screen.

{% video_player “embed_player” overrideable=False, type=’scriptV4′, hide_playlist=True, viral_sharing=False, embed_button=False, autoplay=False, hidden_controls=False, loop=False, muted=False, full_width=False, width=’688′, height=’378′, player_id=’31661035815′, style=” %}

That’s it! You can easily get an idea of what’s inside a video, which will help you decide on which parts of the video to include in your edit – perfect for cutting down long videos into short ones for social media stories and ads.

2. Adding, Inserting and Removing Shots on the Timeline

There are 2 ways of adding Shots to the Timeline:

  • Click on the Shot Preview
  • Click and Drag

Click to Add

To add a Shot to the Timeline, simply click on a Shot Preview thumbnail in the Shot List. You can also click on the little plus button that appears when you mouse-over. If you click multiple times on the same Shot or the plus, it will add multiple copies of that Shot to the Timeline, in sequence.

Once you add a Shot to a Timeline, the next Shot you add will be appended to the end of the Timeline.

If you want to edit the entire Source Video on the Timeline, simply click the purple button:

Click-and-Drag to Add or Insert

You can also add a Shot to the Timeline or insert a Shot onto the Timeline (between two Clips) using click-and-drag on the preview of the Shot to the point in the Timeline you wish to insert it. A green region indicator will appear showing you where the Shot will be inserted, and the Clip that is at that location in the Timeline will shift to the right to accommodate the new Shot. 

{% video_player “embed_player” overrideable=False, type=’scriptV4′, hide_playlist=True, viral_sharing=False, embed_button=False, autoplay=False, hidden_controls=False, loop=False, muted=False, full_width=False, width=’688′, height=’378′, player_id=’31659294375′, style=” %}

Pro Tip: Learning the difference between Shots and Clips is a key step in mastering editing in Kamua. Reminder: a Shot is a piece of one of your source videos and doesn’t get altered or deleted when you work. A Clip is what a Shot becomes when it is added to the Timeline, and can be trimmed, copied, and altered in all kinds of ways without changing the Shot that the Clip is from. Read more.

Selecting and Adding Multiple Shots

Steps to take:

  1. To select and add multiple Shots, click on the check mark  button on the top-right of the Shot Preview Thumbnail.
  2. It will turn light blue when selected.
  3. Then, click sequentially on the check marks for the other Shots you wish to add, or you can hold down the Shift key and click on the check mark button of the last Shot you wish to include in the selection.
  4. Click the Add {number} Shots to Timeline button – or – click-and-drag the Shots to the desired place on the Timeline.

 

{% video_player “embed_player” overrideable=False, type=’scriptV4′, hide_playlist=True, viral_sharing=False, embed_button=False, autoplay=False, hidden_controls=False, loop=False, muted=False, full_width=False, width=’688′, height=’378′, player_id=’31633834458′, style=” %}

 

Removing Shots

You can see how many times a Shot appears on the Timeline by looking at the number in the blue circle just below the preview of the Shot itself in the Shot List. If the Shot has not been added at least once, it won’t appear.

To Remove one or more instances of a Shot, click the minus button. This will remove the last instance in the Timeline first. To remove all instances of that Shot at once, click on the trash can button on the bottom right of the Shot Preview Thumbnail. For more information about deleting Clips on the Timeline, visit our article about the Timeline. 

 

Heads Up: At this point, if you haven’t read the articles about the Timeline (and its two different modes), it would be a good idea to head over there and check them out before continuing with the rest of the Shot List info. Kamua will make more sense once you understand how the Timeline and the Shot List work together. Main Timeline article.

3. Switching back and forth between the Shot Lists of different Media Assets

AutoCut (automatically) generates a Shot List for each Source Media Asset that you add to a Project. Kamua doesn’t mix Shots together, so if you want to combine Shots from different Sources, make mashups and remixes, it’s super easy to do so. 

Method 1 – Media Panel | Steps to take (see video below)

  1. Make sure you are on the Shot List screen  accessible on the left nav bar.
  2. Open the Media Panel by clicking on the left nav bar.
  3. Assuming you added more than one Source already, click on the different Source Media Assets to switch Shot Lists. The first Source that you added is listed at the top.

{% video_player “embed_player” overrideable=False, type=’scriptV4′, hide_playlist=True, viral_sharing=False, embed_button=False, autoplay=False, hidden_controls=False, loop=False, muted=False, full_width=False, width=’688′, height=’523′, player_id=’31744147530′, style=” %}

Method 2 – Source Media Chips | Steps to Take (see video above)

  1. Make sure you are on the Shot List screen  accessible on the left nav bar.
  2. On the top of the Shot List nav bar, you will see Source Media Chips, and the current Source Media is in blue.
  3. Click on a Chip to switch to the Shot List for that Source Media.

4. Merging 2 or more Shots into a single, longer Shot

Sometimes AutoCut gets a bit scissor-happy and cuts your video into more Shots than you would like, or you may have a preference for how you want a particular Shot to be grouped. Merging Shots takes care of both.

Steps to Take:

  1. Click on the check mark button on the top-right of the Shot Preview Thumbnail.
  2. Then click on the check mark button on each of the Shots you wish to merge – or – hold down the SHIFT key and click on the check mark button of the last Shot in the sequence of Shots you wish to merge. 
  3. Then click the Merge Shots  button from the Shot List nav bar.
  4. Choose an option to tell our software why you chose to Merge the Shots:

This helps us improve AutoCut to save you even more time on future projects.

Un-Merging Shots

To un-merge (return the Shot to its original state):

  1. Select the Shot(s) that were merged using the check mark button
  2. Click the “Reset Changes” button in the nav bar.

Heads Up: Choosing to Merge Shots that should be separate cuts may affect the accuracy of our automated cropping system (AutoCrop). So only Merge Shots where you are sure that they should be just one Shot, not multiple Shots. If you are in doubt, you can always just add the Shots to the Timeline and edit them there.

5. Split a Shot to create 2 shorter ones

Sometimes AutoCut gets fooled by transitions like cross-dissolve and wipe effects so it decides not to cut certain Shots where in fact it would be better to have them cut. You can easily change this.

Steps to Take:

  1. Clicking on the edit button  pops open the Shot Modal, where you can see a timeline on the bottom of the modal that shows the timestamps for where in the original video (Source) the Shot is located. 
  2. Let’s say that you want to split the Shot into two shorter Shots. You simply move the Playhead to the point you want to split, and you click the Scissors  button.  

This will split the Shot at that exact Frame, which will become the first Frame of Shot 2. The previous Frame will become the last Frame of Shot 1.

Pro Tip: Most of the time you don’t need to split Shots; you only really need to do this if there is a transition that AutoCut did not detect or decide to cut, or where you have a long stretch of continuous footage, such as an interview or podcast, where there are no natural cut points.

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