About this Guide

OpenShot is a labour of love by people giving their time freely. Much of that time goes into new features or bug hunting, or work to support users on the forum - and sadly the User Guide doesn’t seem to get much attention.

When I started with OpenShot I was very frustrated by the lack of information in the User Guide, and this is my attempt to remedy that - to give something back.

This version of the guide derives from the official guide, and hence is licensed under GPL 3 or later. The source code is available (linked on each page), and it can be freely incorporated into the offical guide when the time is right, if thought helpful.

  • I have increased the width of the main content, which was formerly limited to 800px for some strange reason. To do this I added a custom css file and modified conf.py.

  • I have used smaller images where possible so that more text can be seen.

  • I have sometimes used right-aligned images, for the same reason. This meant adding a ‘clear both’ css class. It would be better to have proper css columns to handle screen resizing, but the compiler Sphinx is intended for documenting software, not writing user guides, so a lot of stuff is missing.

  • I have restructured the whole guide. I hope that a beginner sees something that is helpful but not overwhelming, and a power user can consult the appendices which contain much more detail. Info that should have been in an appendix is now in an appendix.

  • I’ve often used bulleted lists in preference to tables - not sure about this.

  • This User Guide is substantially larger than the original, mainly in the appendices - there’s a lot of info here - possibly too much. It would be useful to ask some newbies for opinions.

  • I have told it mostly as it is - including long standing bugs. It’s good to see some bugs being resolved recently, eg the Transform tool.

  • Generally the information applies to a recent daily build, rather than the official release (2.5.1 currently). That is helpful in preparing for the next official release, but the daily build is a moving target, and things change.

  • As the daily builds are changing rapidly at present and I’m not privy to what is happening behind the scenes, I’ve now stopped work. For example I carefully documented the bizarre existing behaviour of the crop properties - but they’ve just been removed (very sensible I think.)

  • I have hardly touched the Animation and Titles sections. They both need attention. Various other sections also need final revision.

  • I have ignored the technology for translation into other languages - which doesn’t seem to have happened anyway. I’ve generally used British English (except for the noun “license”, because GPL has the US spelling).

I can be pinged as rexdk on github. The call for a User Guide revision is under issue #2989.