Techcaro.com Lifestyle Innovation & Creativity |
It’s the first law of movie-making: no matter how expensive your camera, or how skilled you are at using it, your raw footage will always be rubbish. And so, if you’re looking to add a little professional polish, then installing a video editor will be essential.
Commercial video editors can be very expensive, of course, but you may not have to go that far. Whether you want to trim your clips down to size, add a soundtrack or captions, apply transitions or special effects, there are some great free tools which can help – and these are the very best around.
Also, if you’re wondering what sort of PC you’ll need to buy (or build) in order to easily crunch through heavier duty video editing tasks (or indeed image editing), then we’ve got you covered.
- Garbage In, Garbage out, the saying goes, so if you want better raw footage, you should probably get a proper, decent camcorder. Check out our best camcorders and video cameras of 2016 shortlist.
- We break down all the dos and don’ts when it comes to concocting the perfect video editing rig in our article: How to buy a PC for editing video and photos.
- And if you’re after a suggested budget build for your DIY rig, then look no further than: Build the best video editing PC possible for £500.
- More than 1200 of you replied to our video editing software survey. Check out the surprising results here and find out what techradar pro readers use to edit their videos.
Here are the 20 applications we shortlisted in no particular order of preference.
- Blender
- Davinci Resolve
- HitFilm 4 Express
- Windows Movie Maker
- Kate’s Video Toolkit
- WeVideo
- Avidemux
- VSDC Free Video Editor
- MPEG Streamclip
- VirtualDub
- Free Video Editor
- Lightworks
- Freemake Video Converter
- Machete Video Editor Lite
- Wax
- Wondershare Filmora
- PhotoFilmStrip
- Jahshaka
- Shotcut
- ivsEdits LE
Also why not check out….
- 7 of the best free video converters out there
- Best drones for video, photography and ruling the skies
- Best free DVD burning software: 7 programs to burn discs and backups
- 10 best GoPro and Action cameras 2016
This article is updated regularly. If you have any comments, feel free to drop us a line in the comments section. Note that Serif no longer does MoviePlus starter edition and we’ve retired Pinnacle Videospin 2.0 as it is no longer supported.
Be aware that some developers choose to package their free applications with third party software (Google Chrome for example) in order to monetise their downloads. They usually earn a few cents or pennies for each successful download. However, these can often confuse computer users as well as security applications and may have a negative impact on performance.
Why does developer offer their applications for free then? Usually it is a way for them to improve their profiles amongst the target community with the belief that once a user will become accustomed to a particular package, he won’t mind spending extra to get either a higher value software or an unbridled version (e.g. a trial version or one that puts a watermark).
That’s the concept behind shareware (or freemium) which helped bring the likes of Doom, Winzip, Paint Shop Pro and later Evernote and Spotify to the masses.
