Free Video Editing Software

Video Editing need not be an expensive hobby.

Many club members use Linux, MicroSoft Windows or Apple Macintosh computers to edit their videos. There are free video editors for these operating systems. On Windows you can try Microsoft Movie Maker. On a Mac you can try VideoBlend. If you prefer a proprietary application you can look at the U-Lead Media Studio and Adobe Premiere products. Some members of the club use these applications. However some of the more powerful video editors are starting to become quite expensive or even have ongoing license fees.

For the absolute skinflints amongst us there is a cheaper approach. Assuming you already have a reasonably up to date computer, you can consider installing Kdenlive Kednlive.

Kdenlive provides most of the features of many expensive commercially available editors and is absolutely free. And if you have never really considered using Linux before it really is worth a quick look. In fact there are at least 6 other free Linux video editors just in case you want something easier to use or want some special technical functions.

And Kdenlive is also available for MAC and BSD and from 2019 (maybe earlier) even Microsoft Windows.

Just in case you wanted to know more, you can come along to a club evening and members will be happy to tell you which software they prefer. We have users experienced in all major operating systems (Mac, Linux and Windows), and they all want to show off their knowledge.

Digital HD Format Video Editing, By Chris Leaver, August 2014.

On our last video shoot, our trusty Canon XM2 3-chip Mini-DV camera gave the dreaded 'remove-tape-error'. This was extremely annoying and will require a very expensive repair by Canon. However after cooling off a bit we realised that our old camera was at least 15 years old. So we decided to upgrade to a new camera, and then decide whether to repair the old one.

After looking around we decided on a new Canon XA20. This is an entry level Pro-Camcorder which records at the current highest definitions and bit rates. The specifications can be a bit confusing but basically it can record at the full HD frame resolution of 1920x1080 at 50 frames per second (for the UK). Normally the recorded files are either in AVCHD (*.MTS) or MPEG (*.MP4) formats. This results in some absolutely huge file sizes. A 32GB SD card fills up in around 2 hours of filming!. Obviously lots of other choices appear in the steup menu for the camcorder but we didn't test all of them. This type of resolution and frame rate is typical of many smaller camcorders so what follows will probably be of relevance to almost anyone with a high definition (HD) camcorder recording to SD Cards.

After buying the camera I started to wonder whether our normal video editing software would be up to the task. I must admit I hadn't really thought much about this element of film making before buying the camera. I had just assumed that there wouldn't be any problems. From some research on the internet it appeared that the editing software we had been using on Microsoft WinXP and Windows 7 would probably not be up to the job. Having already spent quite a lot of money on a new editing PC fairly recently it didn't seem fair to have to spend another bundle of cash to buy some more expensive software and possibly yet another high-end computer. Some websites were advocating top-end Apple Macs, others some very expensive Windows based edit stations. Our favourite Windows-based editing software was now on a rolling license rather than a one-time purchase cost.

It turns out that only the very highest performance computers are likely to be able to edit native high definition AVCHD/MP4 files in real-time with previews of all the special effects such as dissolves, wipes, fades and the like. Apparently the high definition video is very highly compressed which means that there is not only the problem of having lots of pixels per image but that there is also a large processing overhead just to decode the file quickly enough to display it. Clearly there was some pressure to upgrade both the computer and the software. But before you dust off your credit card, pause to consider all the options.

Fortunately for my wallet I decided to investigate exactly what the computer needed to do and why some editing applications were almost free whilst others were many hundreds of pounds. Surely video had been around long enough for the software companies to have recouped most of their initial investments and start producing decent products at a fair price. After all, most of the actual compression codecs are now fairly well known even if still encumbered by licensing restrictions. And despite the feature creep on any software product, most of the time you just need to do basic cuts and dissolves between scenes and titles; surely not that hard.

So firstly I decided to record some footage using the new camcorder. I tried the HD format 1920x1080 50 frames/sec AVCHD and MP4 formats each at 17MB/sec. This is not quite the maximum data rate for my camera but is probably a practical test since it still gives the maximum possible definition and is more than sufficient for standard DVDs. This is approximately equal to the current BluRay resolution. (Note: In fact the AVCHD is pretty well exactly the same format as that chosen for the BluRay format)

The camera worked fine and generated *.MTS files when using the AVCHD format and *.MP4 files in the MP4 mode.

It turns out that Windows media player can usually play both of these formats. If you need just a player then download VLC PLAYER. It works on all operating systems.

However when I tried to import either the MTS or MP4 file into my Windows editing software it didn't work. Adobe Premier Pro refused to recognise the file formats. To be honest I didn't bother downloading a whole bunch of other Windows software or trying to install patches or updates to fix it. Due to a very bad experience of Windows some years ago I never allow my Windows edit machine anywhere near the internet and I am extremely careful with programs I install. (Especially from Sony!, which clandestinely installed some DRM software preventing me from copying my own work and eventually requiring a complete reinstall of my operating system).

Fortunately for me, my current PC is a reasonable specification and it had previously been quite capable of editing standard DV AVI files. I therefore decided to see what other options were available before spending large sums on another upgrade. Ignore sales staff who tell you that you need the latest MAC or a very expensive PC. I found an alternative.

At this point everyone will turn off when I say that I installed Ubuntu 14.04LTS. This is a version of Linux. And just for anyone who thinks it is complicated, it isn't. Linux is just a free variant of Unix. In fact Apple Mac's use a variant of Unix. I have used Linux for more than 13 years and it is really very good. And you don't lose anything except a bit of time if you try it because it is absolutely free.

Having read a little about Linux video editing I decided to try an application called KDENLIVE. There are several others which I could have chosen but this seemed to promise most of what I thought I would need. In particular it supports HD and is similar to other non-linear editing systems I have used previously.

Unlike Windows machines, you simply open the Ubuntu Sofftware Centre application and tell it you want to install the application. No special commands, weird menu clicks, no cost, no visits to PC world, no credit card or login details needed, no registration required, no special configuration, no hassle!

I started the KDENLIVE application and used the normal 'press-and-guess' method to learn what it did. Amazingly it was fairly intuitive. Had I wanted some proper tutorials I would have had to look online and search a few forums, but most people would probably only take half an hour or so to learn the basics. Within about 3 minutes I had a title track and some sound on the time line.

At this point I decided that I really needed to try using some of my camcorder footage to find out whether this editing program was up to the job of editing HD video.

So I plugged in my camcorder SD card into the computer and copied the entire contents to a folder on my video hard drive. This copied over much more quickly than I had expected. The new UltraFast SDHC SD cards are incredible....not surprising considering how much they cost! I measured them at just over 20MB/sec sustained transfer speed in a standard USB card reader from Poundland. It claims over 45MB/sec if you use USB3.

I opened a new project in KDENLIVE and selected the option to import clips. Not having used the application before, and without really thinking I simply selected ALL the clips at once. Not surprisingly several GB of files tends to bog down the system! Although the system didn't crash, I think maybe this was a bit too much to expect on any machine. I decided to restart the application and load files a dozen at a time. This worked much better.

Editing on KDENLIVE is similar to previous editing software in that it uses a time-line onto which you can drag and drop files, audio clips, transitions, titles and effects.

After some messing about with layered special effects, transitions and whacky mixes it was clear that the playback tended to glitch slightly between clips on the time-line. Unfortunately it would really get on your nerves if your editor glitched at every scene and took ages to load each clip. There had to be a better way. Out of curiosity I decided to render the project anyway and see what it actually produced. The good news is that the result was a perfect glitch-free composition. So even if your PC is a bit slow, the result will still be acceptable.

The following day I had thought about the glitches and had remembered that there were several menu items I had seen which I hadn't really understood. One of them was an option to create PROXY FILES. This was something new to me. Some internet research and 5 minutes later I had the solution.

Proxy files are a way to edit very large High Definition files in a manner which allows a relatively low powered computer to show what the result might look like. In the case of KDENLIVE, the original HD footage is copied to a much smaller format which is used for all the editing. This smaller format can be edited, mixed and have special effects added. The editor can show all the transitions and edits in real time using these proxy files. Once you have your masterpiece edited to your satisfaction, you save the project and then select the 'render' option from the main menu.

At this point KDENLIVE uses the original HD files to create a full resolution edit based on the edit decision list created when you edited the proxy files. This means you can easily use a lower powered computet for all your HD editing at the expense of slightly lower resolution during your edit previews and a slightly longer time needed to render the result. The final output is however identical to that achieved if you had been able to edit in HD throughout.

I tried using proxy files to edit a short film just to test out the camera and my current PC. Despite initially knowing almost nothing about editing HD films, we had produced a perfect master in one afternoon including all shooting, editing, adding transitions, titles, effects and rendering to a format suitable for burning to a DVD.

In order to burn the final MP4/MPEG files to DVD we simply used the Linux DeVeDe application.

Job done.

So if you have just switched to HD video filming and are new to video editing or maybe are considering an upgrade, it really is worth considering free software and even using Linux.

Chris Leaver