When my trial for Adobe Premiere expired I was looking for free editing software. I tried several according to many “guides”, for example Ligtworks was often recommended as “free” but it has really big downside. You have to buy license if you want to export anything better than 720p.

In the end I end up with:

Shotcut

And I am pretty satisfied. It’s truly free! No hidden pro features or anything.
It’s also multi-platform, so you can download it for:

  • Windows 7+
  • macOS 10.8+ (Mountain Lion)
  • Linux (Ubuntu 14.04+ , Mint 17+ , etc)

https://shotcut.org/download/

It’s open source software, so anyone can improve it. You can take a look at their GitHub repo.

If you want to do just basic editing, add few filters, modify the audio layer or add some text I think it could be enough for you.

Pros:

  • Free open source software
  • Multiplatform
  • Community guides ( I was able to find question to all the things I needed)

Cons:

  • Free ( Don’t expect that it will have all the features or will be that good as paid software)
  • Lacks some of the more advanced functions
  • Messy interface, in the default it doesn’t show all the windows and features ( I had to edit the interface settings a lot)
  • Not that intuitive to control
  • Sometimes buggy

Yeah, it has quite a lot of cons but hey it’s truly a free software. If you know how to code, you can fix some of the issues. But so far Shotcut seems like the best free open source multi-platform editing software. If you know about any other, let me know down bellow in the comments.

 

Categories: Software

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