Friday 1 January 2016

Best free video editing software: 2015's top applications for making movies

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.
  • 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.WeVideo 


Windows Movie Maker remains one of the best free video editing applications out there and certainly the most popular one on the market.
The best part is that it comes free-of-charge as part of the Windows Essentials package shipped with every version of the OS. It's designed with simplicity in mind and all users have to do is drag a selection of video clips and/or photos over to the app and they will immediately be displayed in the order they were added.
After this it's very easy to add soundtracks, captions or credits, save it all as a video file and you can even upload it directly to YouTube, Facebook or other sites.
The program has seen little wholesale change in years and its ease of use almost guarantees it will be a part of Windows 10 when it is released later this year.

While there's nothing too surprising in Kate's Video Toolkit, it does provide some very, basic but useful editing features. So you can trim files or join them, link two videos with a transition, create a sequence of videos with a custom soundtrack, and there's a simple file format conversion tool as well.
There are plenty of limitations, too (you can't maximise the program window to use your full screen resolution, for instance), but Kate's Video Toolkit is extremely easy to use. If you don't want to read Help files and your editing needs are simple, it could be a great choice.

Cloud-based video editing services are growing in popularity and WeVideo is one of the go-to offerings that has a useful free-to-use version, even if it does have some fairly harsh limitations. Users gets 5GB of cloud storage plus the ability to publish five minutes of video per month to YouTube, Facebook and another six services.
When it comes to uploading video to WeVideo's editing suite, you can connect it to a variety of different social media sites in order to grab clips that could otherwise be hard to reach on desktop programs. Adding files is very easy and then applying special effects is just as simple thanks to a range of different options.
Whilst the five minutes of video per month is pretty stingy, WeVideo is still a useful editing program for one-off videos.


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