Free and Most Professional Open-Source Video Editors Available Today

Nowdays, video has become an incredibly common part of everyday life. People take videos on smartphones, upload them via YouTube, and share them on Facebook. I often ask myself what the current state of video editing is for free and open source software (FOSS).

The 6 most professional open-source video editing software available today

Here’s a quick list:

1. Lightworks
Lightworks is an industry standard, and is going to be released on all platforms. The free version is seriously limited on codec options, but not on features. The Pro version is unbelievably cheap, at only $60 for a whole year. That’s less than the price per hour of a good video editor. As far as I’m concerned, $60 a year is free.

Without reservation, if you want to get into professional editing, and seriously lack money, buy Lightworks Pro.

2. Blender
Blender is a power-house, and many of its features aren’t important to a video editor. But there are two things that gives it supreme importance – it is extremely stable, and it has an active community that’ll help you get the job done. Even if other stand-alone video editing software exists, it is hard to recommend them over something as reliable and dependable as Blender.

3. Kdenlive
What sets Kdenlive apart is the support for a wide variety of codecs via FFmpeg (most free software use FFmpeg as the base), its professional-looking GUI and layout, and sufficiently rich set of features.

4. Avidemux
Avidemux is a free and simple NLE, available for the big three operating systems. It’s big advantage is its GUI, which is not as good as it can be. I think if one is using Avidemux, one can also look to support it with Virtualdub and AviSynth.

5. LiVES
LiVES has just released version 2.0.4, so the programmers are still active. It only runs on Linux (among the big three, that is), which might or might not be a bad thing, depending on whom you ask. It has solid features, and supports open-source codecs well, including Dirac.

6. Brorsoft Video Converter Ultimate
Brorsoft Video Converter Ultimate (for Windows) | iMedia Converter (for Mac) is one of the best open source video editing tools that is available for both Mac and Windows PC and will let you edit a video in any possible aspect. The user interface of Brorsoft Video Converter Ultimate is designed in such an incredible way that it works correctly for both Entry level Video bloggers and Professional Video Bloggers.



Key Features:

*The drag and drop feature of the program has made it too easy for the users to add required data onto the timeline with ease.
* It is user friendly and not much clicks are required to handle the requests.
*It is very easy to learn and operate. No prior knowledge of video editing is required to handle the requests through this program.
*Exporting video using this program is too easy and offers several format supports as well.

Edit video with multiple video editing tools



*Trim video: From the Trim workspace, you can create a custom clip from a larger scene. To adjust the duration of your clip, move the sliders below the screen to the start and end points you want.
*Crop video: Here you can drag and move the rectangle on the video to set the crop area or enter the accurate crop values on Left and Top. Meanwhile, you can zoom in or out, change the aspect ratio and rotate videos. In this way, you can remove the black bars of your Blu-ray / DVD movie or videos.
*Add effect Click the Effect tab and you'll be able to adjust video brightness, contrast and saturation, apply grey, negative, emboss or old film effects and apply a number of deinterlacing options.
*Add watermark Under Watermark tab, you can import an image/video watermark or create a text watermark to personalize your video. For a text watermark, select the text watermark circle below the preview screen and type whatever text you want in the blank input field next to it. You can also adjust the Font, Transparency, Color, Size and horizontal position of your watermark.
*Add subtitles You can insert plug-in .srt, .ssa, .ass subtitle files to your movie to make it better understood.

Price: $49.95
Web Address:
http://www.brorsoft.cn/mac-imedia-converter/purchase.html
http://www.brorsoft.cn/blu-ray-video-converter-ultimate/purchase.html

Additional Tips:

Open Source Video Editor is a video editor with its source code, so the users can customize the program according to their needs. Most of the time, open source programs are confused as absolutely free of cost but in case of Open source video editors, it is not absolutely true.

Why open-source video editing can never be free?

Video codecs come from various sources. Some of these sources have a vested interest in their development and distribution.

Most codecs aren’t license-free, and if you want to use them you have to pay a fee. Just because there is a free software doesn’t mean you can use your favorite codecs for free. As far as I know, the only ‘free’ codecs in widespread use are:

*x264 – only an implementation of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, it is not a codec per se
*OpenEXR
*TIFF – not officially free, it is owned by Adobe
*JPEG – not officially free either, but free enough
*DNG – like TIFF, it is owned by Adobe, but is still considered ‘free’
*Xvid
*Lagarith
*Dirac
*Huffyuv

Just so you understand, ‘free’ isn’t a strictly defined word. There is a difference between legally free and free-to-use-under-certain-conditions. Don’t take my word on what’s free or not. Do your own research, find out what your scale of work is going to be like, and take proper legal advice before committing to any codec or software.