Five Free Video Edit­ing Tools

There was a time when video edit­ing was only avail­able to the lucky few.

It used to re­quire ex­pen­sive desk­top ma­chines, com­plex soft­ware, and an ex­pert-level knowl­edge of the edit­ing process.

As you’re prob­a­bly aware, things have changed dras­ti­cally in re­cent years. Tools have be­come user friendly, pow­er­ful and cheap – and users can edit videos portably, only re­quir­ing a mid-range lap­top computer.

There are even sim­ple tools avail­able on smart­phones for chop­ping and chang­ing the videos you take on the move.

Most promis­ingly, there are sev­eral ex­cel­lent free video edit­ing tools in the mainstream.

We’ll take a look at five of them here and give you the lowdown.

Win­dows Movie Maker 2012

Microsoft’s en­try into the free video edit­ing space does a pretty good job over­all. The edit­ing is very easy to per­form, and com­puter novices should get the hang of it fairly quickly.

Movie Maker sup­ports plenty of dif­fer­ent video for­mats, and users can save the video in file for­mat or up­load it di­rectly to shar­ing sites such as Face­book or Youtube.

It’s not par­tic­u­larly so­phis­ti­cated, and ad­vanced users may want a tool with a lit­tle more scope. How­ever, it’s a solid piece of soft­ware that does what it’s built for, and does it well.
https://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/get-movie-maker-download

VSDC Video Editor

VSDC is a non-lin­ear video ed­i­tor. So what does that mean for you, the bud­ding producer?

Well, non-lin­ear ed­i­tors al­low you to see all frames si­mul­ta­ne­ously, with­out need­ing to scrub through to edit.

Frames can be ac­cessed di­rectly by their po­si­tion in time or even by de­scrip­tive meta­data – so for ex­am­ple, an ed­i­tor could ac­cess all frames in which a cer­tain char­ac­ter makes an ap­pear­ance ( if he’s in­cluded in the metadata).

The added func­tion­al­ity and flex­i­bil­ity of non-lin­ear edit­ing does bring a fairly steep learn­ing curve, and VDSC lives up to that. How­ever, it’s a pow­er­ful ed­i­tor, packed with plenty of fea­tures to help you pro­duce a high qual­ity fi­nal video.
https://vsdc-free-video-editor.software.informer.com/

Wax

If you’re af­ter spe­cial ef­fects, Wax is the tool for you. It’s a piece of gen­eral pur­pose 2D and 3D ef­fects soft­ware. Wax’s par­ti­cle ef­fects, pic­ture warps and a wide range of ren­der­ing op­tions let you trans­form your video into some­thing spectacular.

Con­ve­niently, Wax is avail­able in two forms. Home users seek­ing to add ef­fects to a video can down­load the stand­alone ap­pli­ca­tion, and do just fine with that.

Pro­fes­sional users gen­er­ally have their own pre­ferred choice of ed­i­tor, and for that mar­ket, Wax is avail­able as a plug-in that en­ables spe­cial ef­fects in the editor’s tool of choice.
https://www.debugmode.com/wax/

Freemake Video Converter

This is the tool for you if you need to con­vert video files from one for­mat to another.

As you’d hope, Freemaker sup­ports a very wide range of for­mats. It’s also ex­tremely re­li­able, keep­ing loss of data or im­age qual­ity to an ab­solute minimum.

It’s rel­a­tively quick, too – video con­ver­sion will al­ways take time, but Freemake does seem to per­form efficiently.

It also al­lows for some sim­ple edit­ing, al­though most users would do well to choose one of the other more fully-fea­­tured ed­i­tors from this list.
https://www.freemake.com/free_video_converter/

Light­works

Light­works is the heavy­weight of the free video edit­ing tools cur­rently available.

It’s ab­solutely full of fea­tures – it has un­prece­dented trim­ming abil­ity, syn­chro­ni­sa­tion and sup­port for mul­ti­­ple-cam­era edit­ing, along with pow­er­ful re­al­time ef­fect ren­der­ing. It also lays claim to the widest range of video for­mats sup­ported by a pro­fes­sional edit­ing tool.

It’s so pow­er­ful in fact, that it’s been used by pro­fes­sion­als to edit many suc­cess­ful mod­ern films.

Light­works re­ally packs a punch, so if you’re look­ing to get your teeth into pro­fes­­sional-level video edit­ing soft­ware, it’s prob­a­bly the tool to go with.

So, there you have it – five free video edit­ing tools that you can down­load to­day and start chop­ping your footage with. Choose the one that best suits your needs, and get to work pro­duc­ing your fin­ished masterpiece.
https://www.lwks.com/