Free Video Editors
Free video editing software: create, edit your own movie
Free Video Editors
This page lists free video editing software, which you can use to edit or process your video file, training video or movie. Editing can involve as simple an operation as cutting or trimming portions you do not want (such as ads from a video you captured from your TV tuner) or as complext an operation as adding effects, layering an audio track, adding subtitles, and so on, to a movie that you are creating The supported operating system for each program is also listed below. Some of them may require that you install one or more of the codecs listed on the Free Video Codecs page in order to support a particular video format.
If you are looking for a fully-featured product, you may want to also consider a commercial product like
Corel VideoStudio Pro,
which not only contains a large set of features for creating and editing your videos or movies, but also tools
to make it easier for you to author your own DVDs (etc).
Furthermore, this page does not list companies that provide free online editors for your videos and movies. These sites are generally listed on the Free Video Hosting page. The online editing facilities provided by such sites, though, tend to be rudimentary at best and are not meant to be general purpose video editors as such, but designed for you to polish files that you have uploaded to their system. If you want to create a video for use both online and offline (such as to be published on a DVD or VCD), it is generally best to use offline software tools like those listed on this page.
Related Pages
- How to Create/Make a Website: The Beginner's A-Z Guide
- Free DVD Authoring and Creation Software
- Free Digital Audio / Sound Editors
- Free CD and DVD Burners and Copying Software
- Free Video Capture and Recording Software
- Free TV PVR (Personal Video Recorder) and TV Recording Software
- Free Video Hosting
- Free DVD and VCD Players, Free Movie and Video Playing Software
- Free Audio CD Rippers
- Free Drawing and Painting Software, Image and Photo Editing Programs
- Free Partitioning Software - Copy, Create, Move, Resize, Convert, Undelete Partitions
- Free Data Recovery, File and Partition Recovery, Undelete and Unformat Software
Free Video Editing Software
- Simple Video Cutter (Windows)
This Windows program lets you quickly cut your video files (for example to extract footage that you want to keep, or even to split a large file into multiple parts). It is meant to be especially useful if you have a lot of files that you want to process, since it lets you go through them one after another without having to select the next file manually. This is an open source program.
- OpenShot (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)
The OpenShot video editor features unlimited tracks, resizing, scaling, trimming, snapping, rotating, cutting, video transitions with real-time previews, compositing, image overlays, watermarks, frame accuracy (the ability to step through every frame of the video), audio mixing and editing, digital video effects (brightness, gamma, hue, greyscale, chroma key, etc), 3D animated titles and effects, all video, audio and image formats supported by the ffmpeg project (too many to list, but it includes, where video is concerned, MP4 with H.264, WMV, Ogg Theora, WebM with VP8, VP9, Flash video), etc. Versions are available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. This is an open source program.
- Shotcut (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)
Shotcut is an open source video editor. It handles a wide variety of audio, video and image formats, and allows you to edit those formats directly, often with frame-accurate seeking. You can mix resolutions and frame rates, deinterlace, encode/transcode to other formats, capture, stream, apply video (blur, colour grading, colour inversion, crop, rotate, mirror, etc) and audio filters (balance, copy or swap channels, downmix, normalize, etc), mix audios across all tracks, append, insert, overwrite, delete, and so on. (There are too many features to list here. You can see the full list on their site.)
- LiVES Video Editing System (Linux, BSD, OS X/Darwin)
LiVES, formerly the "Linux Video Editing System" but now "LiVES Is a Video Editing System" (since it now supports other operating systems besides Linux), is both a non-linear video editor as well as a VJ tool for realtime video performance. It's designed to let you edit videos without bothering about formats, frame sizes or video rates. You can mix and switch clips from the keyboard, trim and edit your video clips, put them together using its multitrack timeline, record a live performance, etc. You can also script the application or control it remotely. It supports a wide variety of formats (both input and for encoding), features frame accurate cutting and pasting, deinterlacing, subtitle removal, resampling of video, load audio tracks off CDs, fade-in and fade-out for audio, provides effects and transitions, etc (too many features to list here). This program works on Linux and the various BSD systems including Darwin and Mac OS X. It is an open source program.
- Avidemux (Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD)
The Avidemux video editor allows you to perform simple cutting, filtering and encoding operations on AVI files, DVD-compatible MPEG files, MP4 files, H.263(+) video streams, simple QuickTime files, and ASF files. It uses built-in video codecs to read and write video files and is able to use a variety of audio codecs to encode your audio data. If you want to cut portions from the video without the software re-encoding/transcoding the file, it even provides facilities for you to precisely pinpoint keyframes (I-frames or Intra frames) so that your cuts are on such boundaries. The software is released under the GNU General Public License (that is, it's free and open source).
- VidCutter (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)
VidCutter is an open source utility to cut, trim, split, merge/join media files. It provides the ability to make frame accurate cuts. It uses FFmpeg, so it presumably supports the same formats and codecs that those libraries handle.
- LosslessCut (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)
Lossless Cut lets you trim or cut pieces from a video file without causing the file to be re-encoded (which often causes a degradation in the quality of the video). It does this by only cutting at the nearest keyframes, which means that your cuts will not have the same precision that a lossy cut has. It supports the MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV, Ogg, WAV, MP3, AAC and h264 formats/codecs. Note: to download the program, go to the link stated in the "Installing / running" section of the page (which points to executables that you can run on your computer), and not the "Clone / download" button at the top of the page (which links to the source code used by computer programmers). Platforms supported include Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. This is an open source program.
- MPEG Streamclip (Windows, Mac)
MPEG Streamclip can convert, play and edit a variety of movie/video formats, such as MPEG, VOB, PS, M2P, MOD, VRO, DAT, MOV, DV, AVI, MP4, TS, M2T, MMV, REC, VID, AVR, M2V, M1V, MPV, AIFF, M1A, MP2, MPA, AC3, etc. Editing facilities include cut, copy, paste, trim, the ability to convert to muxed or demuxed files, etc. Because of its support for VOB files, it looks like you can use this tool to save/copy a clip from a DVD as well.
- Virtualdub - Video Capture and Editing (Windows)
Virtualdub is a well-known video capture, processing and editing software that allows you to capture video from an input source and perform simple video editing. It is not a full-blown video editor as such, but for simple cut and trim operations, it works well. It is also able to perform a variety of pre and post processing operations on your video such as adjusting the frame rate, remove audio tracks without touching the video, pass your video through processing filters like blur, sharpen, emboss, smoothen, flip, resize, rotate, adjust the brightness and contrast, deinterlace, etc. It is geared towards processing AVI files, although it can also read, though not write, MPEG-1 files. If you install video codecs onto your system, VirtualDub will be able to use it. This is a Windows program.
- HyperEngine-AV (Mac OS X)
HyperEngine-AV is a non-linear video editor that allows you to capture, arrange, edit and process video, audio and text. You can work with an unlimited number of video, audio and text tracks. Transitions are created automatically when you drag video clips on top of each other, and they can be edited. This is a open source program (GNU General Public License) that works under Mac OS X.
- ZS4 Video Editor (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X)
The ZS4 Video Editor (or Zwei-Stein Video Editor) is a video editing and compositing software that comes with a huge number of built-in video effects. It allows an unlimited number of video, audio and picture tracks, an unlimited number of video and audio effects for every track, cropping, panning, zooming, looping of both audio and video signals simultaneously with adjustable cross-fade on loop boundaries, up to 16 audio channels per track, distortion effects, colour adjusters, etc. It handles a variety of formats, depending on the operating system used, including IYUV/I420, YV12 and YUV9 AVI files, MJPEG AVI, MPNG AVI, other AVI files, WAV, JPG, PNG, BMP, etc. This program is no longer being maintained.
- Jahshaka (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X)
Jahshaka is a video editor that allows you to edit your videos, create effects, animate, paint and design on moving video, create music, and work with a variety of file formats. It is an open source program. Also available are royalty free media files including textures, 3D models, images and video clips.
- Kino (Linux)
[Update: this software is no longer available.] Kino is a non-linear Digital Video (DV) editor that supports video capture in raw DV or AVI format (type 1 and type 2 DV, with separate audio streams); loading of multiple video and audio clips for editing, cutting and pasting portions of those clips; exporting the composite movie to DV over IEEE 1394, raw DV, DV AVI, still frames, WAV, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4; importing of still frames in a variety of formats (eg, GIF, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, PPM, BMP, SVG, Targa, XPM); audio and video playback; multilingual interface; PAL and NTSC; a variety of effects, audio and video filters, video transitions, audio transition (crossfade); etc. This is a Linux program.
Related Pages
- How to Register Your Own Domain Name - get one for your video site
- How to Record a Game Video
- Free Anonymous Surfing
- Free Device Driver Backup and Extraction Utilities
- Free Antivirus Software and Free Online Virus Scans
- Free Fonts
- Free Secure File / Disk Deletion (Wipe) Utilities
- How to Create a Blog
Newest Pages
- How to Convert Your Website from XHTML 1.0 to HTML5 the Quick and Easy Way
- How to Set the Height of a DIV Relative to a Browser Window (CSS)
- Free EPUB Readers (Ebook Viewing Software)
- How to Generate the Free Let's Encrypt SSL Certificate on Your Own (Windows) Computer
- How to Insert Meta Tags into a Web Page with BlueGriffon
- How to Play a Song (or Some Other Audio Clip) from a List on a Website
- Two Ways to View a Binary File on Windows Without Installing Anything
- How to Draw a Horizontal Line on a Web Page with Expression Web
- How to Create a Website Free of Charge
- Why Can't I Make Up Any Domain I Want? Is There a Way to Do Away with a Registrar Altogether?
How to Link to This Page
It will appear on your page as:
Free Video Editors (Video Editing Software)
