some free video editing apps

xtrax · October 19, 2017

I want some free editing apps for some quick edits. Something like windows movie maker, which is easy to use and someone who is amateur can use it.

JakeNTech · October 19, 2017

Movie maker?

Joseph Stacklin · October 19, 2017

Resolve is great if you want the nitty-gritty of a non-linear program. Plus it is great to learn using the free version if you are wanting to study videography as it is used in many large production companies. If you want a slightly easier (and many up-to-date tutorials) I can wholeheartedly recommend HitFilm 4 Express. It's free and is a nice program to get used to, and plugins or the pro version can be bought directly from the application.

There's also the price gap for the upgrade path. With Resolve Studio users are looking at $300 with features similar to Creative Cloud (ie: multi user collaboration) and 3 versions of guaranteed updates.

For HitFilm Pro <insert year here> users are looking at dropping $350 (upgrades to latest version for a lesser cost) but has many new features and actually includes two programs (HitFilm Pro and Ignite Pro). Ignite is their premium VFX plugins for many programs. This pro edition has 8K support, more advanced features, all of the visual FX packs unlocked, Boris FX, and more.

With Resolve you are getting colour management, sound design, basic transitions, and a professional interface that definitely needs more than one monitor to work with (I use two and sometimes struggle). You also get GPU acceleration out of the box with Resolve which will cut the render time by 25% or more than just CPU bound renders and will look slightly better (exports to .MOV rather than .MP4 so it can be considered "lossless" in some aspects). The only downside is that it is much, MUCH, more difficult than any other editor, but once you get the hang of it, you won't have any issues.

With HitFilm you are looking at basic video editing, about 250 transitions, basic compositions (layers and such for tracking and projects), and basic OpenCL/OpenGL (AMD ONLY) GPU acceleration. The more advanced GPU acceleration, including Nvidia's CUDA acceleration, is only available in the Pro version. This is also only a 32-bit program so you will be stuck at a max of 2GB of RAM allotted to the program.

So I hope this wall of text helps. As a reward to getting to the bottom, you get a cute picture of a cat.