Many commercial and open source and free video editing software applications are available in the market. Both commercial and free video edit applications are available with more or less features and functionalities. But most of commercial video editing software is expensive and they need considerably more disk space and hardware support for high performance graphics. Commercial products such as AVS Video Editor, Adobe Premiere Elements, CyberLink PowerDirector etc are advanced video editing tools that require more resources.
Fortunately there are many high quality open source and free video editing software are available. Most of these software applications allow non-linear editing of videos. Non-linear editing software can perform random access non-destructive editing on the source video file and also enables direct access to any video frame in a video clip, without needing to play or shuttle through adjacent footage to reach frame.
Here in this post let us have a look at some of the top free video editing software which will definitely help us in our video editing exercises. The tools are available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X and few of them are cross platform video editors.You may be interested in the following related articles as well.
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Best Free Video Editing Software for Linux, Mac OS X etc
Cinelerra video editing software for Linux
Cinelerra is the one of the most advanced non-linear video editor and compositor for Linux. Cinelerra-CV is the community version of the software. Cinelerra tries to be a single location for all your audio and video editing needs. All the recording, editing, and playback are handled here. It can be used as an audio player. It can be used to record audio or video. It can even be used as a photo retoucher.Cinelerra includes support for very high-fidelity audio and video and it processes audio using 64 bits of precision.Picture from heroinewarrior.com
There are Live DVDs that contain Cinelerra available to download. You just need to download the .iso file, burn it on a DVD, insert it in the drive and restart your machine.
Get Cinelerra-CV
Kdenlive video editing software for FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X
Kdenlive is an intuitive and powerful multi-track video editor which is free and open-source for GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. Kdenlive supports most recent video technologies. Kdenlive supports all of the formats supported by mpeg (such as QuickTime, AVI, WMV, MPEG, and Flash Video), and also supports 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios for both PAL, NTSC and various HD standards, including HDV and AVCHD.Image from Wikimedia Commons
You can even discover Kdenlive without installing it.
Get Kdenlive
Kino video editing software for Linux
Kino is free video editing software for Linux and it is included in several Linux distributions, including Debian, Puppy Linux and Ubuntu. It features integration with IEEE-1394 for capture, VTR control, and recording back to the camera. You can load multiple video clips, cut and paste portions of video/audio, and save it to an edit decision list.Image from kinodv.org
Get Kino
LiVES free video editing software and VJ tool for Linux distributions
LiVES is a Video Editing System that for Linux, BSD, IRIX, Mac OS X and Darwin. You can load and edit almost any video format using LiVES. The tool helps both professional VJ’s and video editors. To start editing and making video right away, without having to worry about formats, frame sizes, or frame rates.Image from Wikimedia Commons
Get LiVES
Best Free Video Editing Software for Windows
Windows Movie Maker
Windows Live Movie Maker helps you to quickly turn your photos and videos into polished movies. Add special effects, transitions, sound, credits, and captions to help tell your story. Windows Movie Maker also allows you to post your movies to other services including YouTube, Facebook, and Windows Live SkyDrive.
Windows Live Movie Maker and Windows Live Photo Gallery work together. You can organize and select the photos and videos you want to use in your movie.Get Windows Movie Maker
ZS4 Video Editor
ZS4 Video Editor is video editing and compositing software. ZS4 helps you to combine a variety of media types including photos, videos and audio files into one or more output files. The software supports unlimited number of audio, video and picture tracks and also unlimited number of video/audio effects for every track. It can produce video with a resolution of 8×8 or 16000×16000 (~200 Megapixels / frame) and many sizes in between.
Using key frames you can have full automation control for all track and effect variables. The tool also supports looping of both audio and video signals simultaneously, with adjustable cross-fade on loop boundaries.Get ZS4 Video Editor
Wax video compositing and special effects software
Wax is a free high performance and flexible video compositing and special effects software. Wax uses graphics acceleration available with your video card for creating mind-boggling effects in real-time or near-real-time. It also supports unlimited video and audio tracks with top-down compositing and many compositing modes. Wax supports AVI, WAV video formats and all popular image formats. It supports AVI, MPEG, WAV, Flash, all popular image output formats.Get WAX Video Editor
Zwei-Stein Video Editor
Zwei-Stein 3.01 is a freeware non-linear, non-destructive video compositing and editing system. Using Zwei-Stein you can edit up to 256 video, audio and still image clips, each with up to 64 effects chained serially. Cropping, panning and custom effects are easy with automatic key frames. The tool supports an Output Resolution of up to and Including 800*600 30fps 44.1 khz stereo (AVI and Real Media), including DV NTSC (720*480) and DV PAL resolutions.Get Zwei-Stein Video Editor
AVI Trimmer + MKV 2 Free video editor for Windows
SolveigMM AVI Trimmer + MKV is a free video editor for Windows and allow you to perform fast and lossless AVI and MKV editing. The tool supports any video content – DV, XviD, DivX, 3ivX, MPEG-4 and audio formats including MPEG-1,2 Layer I, II, III; AC3 etc. The software also supports cutting off several portions of a movie at one time.Get AVI Trimmer + MKV
VideoLAN Movie Creator (VLMC) for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X
VideoLAN Movie Creator is a cross-platform, non-linear, video editing software application based on the VLC Media Player. The tool is still under development.Get VideoLAN Movie Creator
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