Top 8 Free Video Editors 2020

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers comm this time I'm going to present my top eight free video editors which in alphabetical order are DaVinci Resolve flow blade hitfilm express kdenlive light works olive open shot and shot cut all of these are completely free with no watermarks or time limits and span a number of operating systems as you can see in this list usually in a video like this I'd spend the same amount of time looking at each individual application however I thought it would be more useful to present in-depth my choices for the top 3 pro editor the top 3 visual effects editor the top 3 editor for low end hardware and finally the top 3 editor for beginners after which I'll give a quick overview of the other packages right let's start with this DaVinci Resolve which in my view is the best professional video editor you can get for free and indeed while the best professional video editors at any price to get DaVinci Resolve you need to go to the Blackmagic Design website where you can go to products under Vinci resolve ignore the fact it says from 299 dollars there it Condor learn more and then download and you'll discover there were two versions of DaVinci Resolve and the free version is the version on the left the version on the right is the paid version DaVinci Resolve studio so to get that free version you want to use the links here under DaVinci Resolve on the left and as you can see it's available for multiple platforms here I'll click on windows it takes you to a registration page where you fill in your details and click on register and download so we go back to the package itself you'll see it's based on a tabbed interface at the bottom of the screen and the first tab is the media tab where you can take clips from your drives and pull them down into your media pool to the use in editing first then the edit tab this is your traditional video editing view we can scrub our timeline here as you would do it in other packages we can press the spacebar to actually play things through and that will work so this is where you do most of your editing but as in any other video editor it can be a bit difficult to navigate a timeline you can always scroll back and forth to get to different bits of your edit you can zoom in/out as well if you wish to but in DaVinci Resolve there's also a tab to enable better navigation called the cut tab and in the cut tab what we have at the top of the screen is the entire edit you can always see the entire edit at the top of the screen and you can use this to navigate around so I could go over to here where some nice little boats on the screen go back to the main edit tab we'll be at that part of the Edit go back over here again maybe go back over over there somewhere like that and go back again to our main edit and then we've navigated around so you can work very nicely across the edit and cut tabs there's also the fusion tab where you can add lots of different special effects in compositing Fusion is a standalone compositing and effects package from Blackmagic Design but it's integrated also into DaVinci Resolve first then the color tab DaVinci Resolve started out as a color correction program so hardly surprisingly this mass is a really really good color correction facilities here in DaVinci Resolve there's then the Fairlight tab which is the audio editing tab I just play things here you'll see all the levels going up and down on the meters and you can change all your audio levels and sort your audio out here at the fair light tap finally we've got the deliverer tab which is where you create your final output all sorts of presets and controls are available including presets for YouTube and when you set things up you just add your video to the render queue and click on start render so there we are this is DaVinci Resolve a very good free video editor the only real downside is that the package can be a bit overwhelming if you're new to video editing and you do need quite beefy hardware to run DaVinci Resolve which means in practice a quad core processor or more ideally 16 gigabytes of RAM and you will need a decent graphics card without daily at least 2 gigabytes of graphics RAM but if your computer will run DaVinci Resolve you won't find a better free video editor right let's now turn our attention to this package which is a hitfilm express which is my recommendation to the top three editor if you want to regularly produce visual effects and that doesn't mean you can't produce visual effects in other for editing packages like for example DaVinci Resolve and you can certainly use hitfilm express for general video editing it's a great free video editor full stop but as we'll see in a second it's got particularly significant route of effects functionality to obtain hitfilm express we need to head on over to the website at FX home comm go to the menu or see hitfilm express lose their free there and if we click on that then we go to its download page you might be surprised to see it initially comes up with a price here for 17 pounds for me and this bear is packs available and this is because hitfilm express is free that was all sort of add-ons you can buy and which obviously they would like you to buy but because this video is about to hit film express as a free video editor I'm going to put the slider down to make the price zero and from there you could click on download create an account and obtain the software so if we go back to the package itself you'll see that unlike DaVinci Resolve everything happens on the one screen we've clearly got a timeline here we can scrub through the timeline i've reproduce the same edit we were looking at individual resolve we've got two monitors up there we've got a clip bin up here if i go back over there there's our there's our media and there's also two effects we can put in so it's a well featured editor it's very straightforward to use and when we've finished creating an edit we can go to export over here just click on export and it would come up and produce a file using the standard preset and if you wanted to change the presets you put them down here to actually select a default preset so it's a very straightforward package to use and as i said a minute ago it's also got fantastic visual effects functionality because in hitfilm express you can create what's called a composite shot and basically here we've got one of those already in the Edit if I go over here this shot here of me with that little caption coming up that's actually a composite shot created in hitfilm express and it's actually the shot over here it is a composite shot which is built up in you'll see it was a layer here which is for Thea the caption there which is on the top there's a layer of it on the base for there the background there comes a layer for me in the middle which is clearly a layer there and this is an effect shot because the actual footage there was green screen footage if I turn off the green screen you'll see that's the case so this is building up this shot with the caption coming into its little thing like that and in fact the caption itself is also a composite shot over here way to puts three elements again but two ends of the thing in the middle and this is animated to do that bit and when it's brought into the shot here to actually do the op-eds as I call it I've been doing these for many years but that's how it works and I really like the way you can work on layers in hitfilm express I do this sort of work in After Effects all the time but if I couldn't use Adobe After Effects my go-to package would definitely be hitfilm express in terms of requirements in terms of system specification hitfilm express requires a relatively powerful PC that means a PC with at least 4 gigabytes of RAM although you'll need 8 gigabyte RAM really to edit HD footage and 16 gigabytes to edit 4k and you also need a graphics card in your PC to run hitfilm express with at least 1 gigabyte of graphics RAM so there we are hitfilm express another fantastic free video editing application next that's what we take a look at this program kdenlive which is a very solid a very capable free video editor and I'm particularly highlighting kdenlive here as my top free video editor for use on lower end on lower specification hardware so if you want to do video editing on say a laptop without a graphics card or you've got a PC with 4 gigabytes of RAM maybe even 2 gigabytes of RAM it's likely you'll be able to do some form of video editing in kdenlive editing it wouldn't be able to do on some of the other packages I'm looking at here and the reason that kdenlive is good for working on low-end hardware is partially because it's just efficiently written but it's also because if you go to project and project settings you can actually activate what's called proxy clips and generate proxy clips there and this means the program will produce lower quality version of your clips for using on the timeline which is easier to edit amal it will revert to the full quality clips when it renders out your final files kdenlive the website over here let's look at the websites are there you can find out all about it over here and for years and years k drivers when you go to free video editor on linux and indeed here I'm running on a Linux Mint but for a couple of years now kdenlive has also been available on Windows so if we use the magic of filmmaking to transition across to a Windows 10 I can bring up kdenlive running here in the Windows 10 exactly the same edits we were just looking at in the Linux Mint I've just brought it across onto another operating system he's thinking things look a bit different it's because a different theme is selected most video editors can have different themes here in settings you can guarantee a color theme and here we're obviously running a dark theme in Windows whereas running a light one in Linux and the fun of thing to tell you it works everything rows just on one screen in a kdenlive nice and straightforwardly when you come to render you hit the render button up there you can pick your formats you can have lots and lots of options to look at if you wish to answer everything to your heart's content when you click on render file to produce your final video turning to the best free software for those new to video editing I'm going to give you a couple of recommendations the first of which is a this package which is shortcut which you could obtain for its website over utter co.org where it's available for Windows Mac and Linux and if we go back to the package itself you'll see it's a nice straightforward program to use everything takes place on on the one screen and you can work through the timeline as you come in you know the packages it's very easy to change things like transitions just by dragging them in the timeline and when you're ready to export your final film readers click on export brings up the requestor export file and you can save and output your final file so short cut is a nice video editing package for beginners alternatively you might want to consider this package open shot available format open shot org or again you can get it for windows mac and linux and if we go back to the package itself I think you can see the interface is very straightforward if all you want to do is to bring in a few clips and to make a simple edit maybe add a few transitions then open shot is is a good place to start and when you've finished all you have to do is to press on the button up here to export your video in whatever particular resolution under format you happen to choose this said it's worth making the point that both a shot cut and open shot whilst they work they are straightforward to get into they don't give you as fluid editing experience as the free packages hitfilm express and kdenlive that we've we've just been looking at and therefore if you are new to video editing it might be worth thinking about going for a slightly more advanced package like that life example hitfilm express or kdenlive because it'll give you a lot more opportunities to to advance and just have a better editing experience so I just thought we'd take a look at the other free video editing packages on my list and because some of these older looks only here we are in a Linux Mint but in fact the first package you want to show you is Lightworks which is available for the Mac and for Windows and for Linux so it's full platform and it's a very powerful package these light works got a slightly different workflow to the other packages here takes a bit of getting used to how you actually use this thing but when you are used to it you can edit very quickly and very powerfully in light works the reason though it's not more prominent in this list can be seen if we look at it's a web page which is a down here is a comparison of the free version of light works with the paid versions and the free version of light works is limited because of its export formats and specifically it can't output video at more than 720p which is why it's not one of my top-ranked free video editors another package I've looked at in Linux is this one which is a flow blade this is Linux only you can find out more about it on its web site over here and it says fast precise and stable and certainly it is a staple and nicely written package as far as I can see but that said I've struggled to really get the logic of it in my head it doesn't edit the way I'm used to editing and then particular I found it very difficult to add in cross dissolves you can't keyframe opacity here there are tools for adding in cross dissolves but I couldn't get them to work for me but of course they might work for you it might just mean my way of working is a problem here so if you're a Linux user you might want to check out flow blade another package well worth the mention is this one which is the Olive Video Editor which has a website over here and if we look at the download section here your seats available for Windows Mac and Linux but it's only in version 0.1 this is very much still in alpha this said what I sent of this so far is very impressive I very much like what they're doing would the old live video editor so this is what I think very much to keep an eye on and I have to admit I found it very easy to use very easy to put in those across Tasos like we see it playing there so if you want to try out something new something up-and-coming I'd very much recommend taking a look at the olive video as so there we are my top eight free video editors 20 20 other three editors do exist such as vs DC which is feature-rich but has a rather cumbersome interface and avid media composer first which is great if you want to learn the industry standard avid editor but I wouldn't recommend in other circumstances if you are downloading free software please do take care make sure you only download packages from trusted sources but now that's it for another video you've enjoyed what you've seen here please press the like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and I hope to talk to you again very soon [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 213,864

Keywords: Free video editors, DaVinci Resolve, Davinci Resolve 16.1, HitFilm Express, HitFilm free video editor, DaVinci Resolve free video editor, free video editing, best free video editor, top free video editor, Kdenlive, Shotcut, OpenShot, Olive video editor, Olive free video editor, Flowblade, Lightworks, Lightworks free edition, VSDC, Avid Media Composer First, Barnatt, Christopher Barnatt

Id: GmHAiUcAPwk

Length: 15min 42sec (942 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 16 2020