Free, simple, intuitive on the Mac, and packs a solid suite of features. You could do worse than iMovie as your first video-editing app. But with this horror of personal discovery out of the way, you’ll find that iMovie is far from the only capable freebie available. And it’s not your only alternative either, because for not much more than zero bucks, you’ll have access to a lot more features.
Here, we’ve compiled what we determine to be the five best free video editors, each of which is stocked with usable features and puts fun video editing within fingertips’ reach – for free. Each one would earn a slot on its own right, but there’s no reason to use app A when app B offers five times the features, static-free. These editors are not mere slapped-together, half-step shovelware. They are legitimate, full-featured contenders, ones that could easily ask to be paid for and certainly earn the privilege.
Henceforth, in the unlikely event that you find yourself searching for a Mac-based, ad-free, free video editing app other than iMovie, here are five to consider.
DaVinci Resolve
If you edit video, you might already know the name of DaVinci Resolve. It’s used by Hollywood studios and film production teams to colour grade movies and shows to create that final polished product you see at the cinema or on TV.
It offers both a paid-for version, but also a free one that’s an app in its own right and much more than an editing add-on: it works very well as a video editor, with support for colour correction, audio enhancements, motion graphics and visual effects. It’s a powerful post-production app and it’s perfectly usable – and it’s 100 per cent free, making it one of the best free video editors around.
Upgrading to the full price edition takes things to the next level with ProRes resolutions and frame rates, noise reduction, lens distortion correction, advanced colour tools and a whole lot of other good stuff, but for most people the free edition will be all they’ll need. This makes it hands down the best free iMovie alternative there is.
Lightworks
Lightworks is another such piece of software – the balance between ‘professional-pleasing’ features and ‘friendly interface to put the novice at ease’ is just about right for me, and you’re unlikely to be put off by it whatever your stage and requirements. The free version offers suitable tools for beginners; the paid version offers more if and when your requirements change.
It’s a video editor on steroids, packed with more features than just video edits (though it’s very good at that). Its bountiful toolset includes audio refining, visual effects creations, colour corrections and edits, and sharing tools built right into the application to get your work out.
They come in two paid versions with different features, but as a general guide, they will give you higher quality exports, better titling and templates support, more file types, more effective effects, and a host of other kick-ass tools. The free video editor does not get much better than Lightworks, though.
Blender
The most obvious example is Blender, free video-editing software that draws attention to itself precisely because it does this: it jams every single feature and tool it can think of into the program, and it’s all completely gratis. There’s no premium version packed with features and debugged after the ‘real’ version ships — it’s all there from the start — and you don’t ever have to pay anything for it.
But it’s a lot more than a video-editing app. Blender can be used to create 2D and 3D animation, sculpt models, or render scenes and stories. Thanks to its deep scripting support, you can customise its toolset. Its UI can be tweaked into any shape you want.
That’s barrels of money. Not only that, it’s an open-source app: anyone can take the available code and fashion it in a new direction, going a long way beyond anything iMovie could ever do.
HitFilm
Hitting your first roadblock with a new tool such as a video-editing app can be a real drag, but thanks to the hundreds of tutorials and how-to guides already available for HitFilm, you’re at least pointed in the right direction. There’s no guesswork involved, and no dead ends that might have you tearing your hair out for several hours longer than necessary. It should have you churning out work as quickly as possible.
After learning the app, what do you unlock? Hundreds of added assets, plus a created set of movie-sound visual effects, that can be layered in with your footage. You get a powerful suite of colour correction and grading tools, audio effects, text-handling, and more.
Paying your $5 will help remove the development noise, giving you access to more assets, higher resolution exports and (in the Pro version) removing watermarks. But you don’t need to spend anything to get a very creditable iMovie alternative, especially where video editing is concerned.
Shotcut
It’s also free and open source like Blender, so you’ll never have to pay to use any feature; all is available from the getgo if you’re interested in keeping expenses to a minimum.
The demands of a professional video editor can be very different to those of a hobby videographer, and the best video editing app for one person may not be the best for another. However, if you’re in the latter camp, Shotcut sails past the competition thanks to an interface that gets out of the way and lets you get to work, in an expedient manner, without forcing you to master a convoluted workflow and confusing key features.
Thus, among the many things to praise about Shotcut, one is that the app’s flexibility makes it flawlessly compatible with hundreds of audio and video formats. It can import footage from network cameras, iPhones, camcorders and so on, and it has an infinitely customisable interface that allows you to work the way you want. It’s not the fastest video editor out there, nor does it try to be the most professional, but it is definitely one of the most accessible tools to create and edit videos – precisely for beginners and intermediate users who can afford themselves a bit of flexibility.