Free Video Editing Software

For high-quality free video editing software, the TopBits staff actually recommend two excellent Open Source solutions.

When utilized together, these two video editing productivity tools provide a reasonably comprehensive digital video editing "bay".

Movica

Movica is an ultra-compact Windows application that will allow you edit WMV and ASF files (using Asfbin) and MPEG files (using Mpgtx), which are two very decent command line editing tools.

Movica provides you with a clean graphical user interface that makes the above two line editors user-friendly, and utilizes an exhaustive array of hot key combinations for editing movie files.

Though the initial learning curve is a bit longer, this greatly helps prevent the errors and delays normally associated with attempting to click on options while editing, and will massively speed up your overall editing efficiency.

Movica Features

• Select and delete multiple sections of your video file (with full copy and paste capabilities);
• Fine tuning options;
• Automatically combine multiple files together, from different sources;
• Also acts as a simple scene player (without editing your clips);
• Movica will work with any computer strong enough to run Win XP, with the Microsoft .NET framework installed), and utilizes your Windows Media Player for movie play-back.

VirtualDub

VirtualDub has been hailed by many adoring fans as the ultimate Open Source AVI video editing solution and justly so. Upon initial inspection VirtualDub looks far less capable than it actually is.

Unfortunately, while many programs allow you to "edit" video, they can be intimidatingly complex for even some of what should be the simplest tasks.

To that extent, VirtualDub is not an editor application, in the conventional sense.

Rather VirtualDub is a pre-video and post-video production editing 'engine' that greatly extends the usefulness of any video editing software you are currently using, as well as a stand-alone utility for editing and creating clips.

Basically, you can import a captured video clip, trim the clutter, clean up the noise, play with filters, and convert it to the proper frame size.

Even cooler, is that if you do not see a filter you like, you can simply write or outsource the one you need (i.e. RentACoder), with the filter SDK.

And while the documentation for VirtualDub is scantily-clad (and could certainly use a real Ghostwriter), it is somewhat adequate - provided that you have no objection to trial and error style learning.

To its credit, not only is VirtualDub extremely robust- most of the most commonly useful options and utilities have been laid out in a semi-intuitive manner with a pleasant graphical user interface.

VirtualDub will run on Win 95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000 and XP; and although it cannot be compared to the editing power of a commercial editor (such as Video Wave or Adobe Premiere), it is ideal for lightning-fast linear operations (over video).

VirtualDub supports large file quantity batch-processing capabilities, is supported by numerous third party AVI video filters, can also import (not export) MPEG-1, handle BMP image sets, will work with nearly all Windows-compatible capture devices, and has a loyal support and development Global community following .

VirtualDub Features

• Fractional frame rates (not just a whole frame rate, like 29 or 30- now you can get it right to 29.44, if you want);
• Optimized hard drive access for more consistent hard drive usage and expedient rendering and launching;
• Supports OpenDML AVI2 (and multi-segment AVI clip file) import and export-
• This means that you are no longer shackled to the 2GB AVI barrier or having to split your production into multiple files to get around the 4GB FAT32 limitation!
• Integrated histogram and volume meter cmbination for monitoring input level;
• Real-time noise reduction, field swapping and downsizing;
• Verbose monitoring (including CPU usage , available disk space and compression levels);
• Allows you to access 'hidden' video formats your capture device or card may, in fact, support- albeit with no user-friendly default setting selection (i.e. 352 x 480);
• Integrated decoders and MPEG-1 decoders;
• Strip and add audio tracks, without altering the audio tracks within your original video clip;
• Impressive video filter selection (such as sharpen, blur, smooth, emboss, 3x3 convolution, resize, rotate, flip, brightness and contrast, levels, de-interlace, and threshold);
• Supports bi-linear and bi-cubic re-sampling- no more blocky resizes or rotates!
• Decompress and re-compress both video and audio;
• Conveniently remove specific segments of your video clip, then save the rest (without any additional re-compressing required);
• Adjust the frame rate, and decimate specific frames;
• Support for 3:2 pull-down removal.