A simple Mac app designed to make uploading images and screenshots to Imgur quick and effortless, as recommended by someone on Reddit. GIF Brewery is the best video to GIF creator on Mac OS X. GIF Brewery lets you convert clips from your video files to GIFs. Windows and Linux, it has many cool features like a built-in package manager.
Michael Muchmore The Best Video Editing Software for 2019 Whether you're a weekend GoPro shooter or a full-time video professional, you need editing software that's powerful but easy to use. Here's how the best video editing software stacks up. Edit Video on Your PC Nothing makes an impression like moving images with sound. That's why digital video continues to grow in importance online. Couple that trend with the ever-increasing availability of devices capable of high-resolution video recording—smartphones, GoPros, DSLRs—and the case for ever more powerful video editing software becomes clear.
Further, the software must be usable by nonprofessionals, and it has to keep up with new formats such as HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding), 360-degree VR video, and 4K and above. Increasingly, new capabilities trickle down from professional-level software to the consumer category. That's a good thing for nonprofessional movie editors, since the more-consumer-oriented software makes formerly difficult procedures a cinch for them. Read on for a survey of the latest trends in video editing software and our top picks in the field.
Multicam, Motion Tracking, and Yet More Motion Advanced abilities continue to make their way into accessible, affordable, and consumer-friendly video editing software as each new generation of software is released. For example, multicam editing, which lets you switch among camera angles of the same scene shot with multiple video cameras, used to be a feature relegated to pro-level software. Now this and many other advanced effects are available in programs designed for use by nonprofessional enthusiasts. Another impressive effect that has made its way into consumer-level video editing software is motion tracking, which lets you attach an object or effect to something moving in your video.
You might use it to put a blur over the face of someone you don't want to show up in your video. You specify the target face, and the app takes care of the rest, tracking the face and moving the effect to follow it. This used to be the sole province of special effects software such as Adobe After Effects. Corel VideoStudio was the first of the consumer products to include motion tracking, and it still leads the pack in the depth and usability of its motion-tracking tool, though several others now include the capability. The 4K Factor Support for 4K video source content has become pretty standard in video editing software, but the support varies among the products. For example, some but not all of the applications can import Sony XAVC and XAVC-S formats, which are used by Sony's popular DSLRs, camcorders, and professional video cameras. The same holds true for the H.265 High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard.
Most of the applications here now can import and export HEVC, though there are still a few holdouts. 360-Degree VR Support. Several of the products here (Adobe Premiere Elements is a notable exception) still support 3D video editing if that's your thing, though the this has been replaced by 360-degree VR footage like that shot by the as the current home-theater fad. As is often the case, our Editors' Choice, CyberLink PowerDirector was the first product in this group to offer support for this new kind of video media.
Other programs have jumped on board with 360 VR support, including Adobe Premiere, Apple Final Cut Pro X, and Magix Movie Edit Pro. Support varies, with some apps including 360-compatible titles, stabilization, and motion tracking. PowerDirector is notable for including those last two.
Final Cut offers a useful tool that removes the camera and tripod from the image, often an issue with 360-degree footage. Video Editing 101 Of course, none of the extras matter if an app can't do the most basic editing tasks. At this point, however, all of the products included here do a good job of letting you join, trim, and split video clips. They also let you make use of special effects such as animated transitions, picture-in-picture (PiP), chroma-key (the technique that lets you place a subject against any background, often known as green screening), and filters that enhance colors or apply creative effects and distortions. With most of them you can add a multitude of timeline tracks that can accommodate video clips, effects, audio, and text overlays.
LUTs and CLUTs One of the capabilities that has been making its way into consumer-level video editing software is support for LUTs (lookup tables), also known as CLUTs (color lookup tables). This staple of pro-level software lets you quickly change the look of a video to give it a specific mood. For example, think of the dark blue look of thriller movies like The Revenant.
You can download LUTs for free from several sites or use those included with some video software to give your video a specific look. One well-known LUT type is the kind that can make a daytime scene look like it was shot at night. Where the Action Is Many video editing apps now include tools that cater to users of such as the GoPro Hero7 Black. For example, several offer automated freeze-frame along with speedup, slowdown, and reverse time effects.
CyberLink PowerDirector's Action Camera Center pulls together freeze frame with stabilization, slo-mo, and fish-eye correction, and color correction for underwater footage. Magix Movie Edit Pro Premium includes the third-party NewBlue ActionCam Package of effects. And Wondershare Filmora lets you subscribe to new effect packs on an ongoing basis. Titles That Zing. I've been seeing a lot of attention paid to creating title effects in the applications over the past year. Apple Final Cut Pro X has added 3D title creation, which is pretty spiffy, letting you extrude 2D titles and rotate them on three axes. Corel VideoStudio in its latest version also adds 3D Titling, though not as powerful as Apple's.
PowerDirector's Title Designer offers transparency, gradient color, border, blur level, and reflection in titles; Magix has impressive title templates, complete with animations. Premiere Elements offers a nifty title effect in which your video fills the text characters.
Look for an application that lets you edit titles in WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) mode, so that you can type, format, and time it right over the video preview. Gathering Speed Video editing is one of the most computing-intensive activities around, so you'll want the or desktop you can afford if you're serious about cutting your own movies. Most applications help speed up the editing process by creating a proxy file of lower resolution, so that normal editing and previewing aren't slowed down by the huge full-resolution files. Particularly intensive is the process of rendering your finished product into a standard video file that will by playable on the target device of choice, be that an HDTV, a laptop, or a smartphone. Most of the software can take advantage of your computer's graphics processor to speed this up. Be sure to check the performance section in each review linked here to see how speedy or slow the application is. In rendering speed testing, CyberLink and Pinnacle have been my perennial champs.
Other measures of performance include startup time and simple stability. Again, video editing is a taxing activity for any computer, involving many components. In the past, video editing programs took longer than most other apps to start up, and unexpected shutdowns were unfortunately common, even in top apps from top developers such as Adobe and Apple. The stability situation has greatly improved, but the complexity of the process, which increases as more powerful effects are added, means crashes will likely never be fully eliminated, and they often raise their ugly heads after a program update, as I found with the latest version of Pinnacle Studio.
Free Video Editing Software If you don't want to invest a lot of money and effort into your video editing exploits, there are a few free options. Of course, if you use a Mac, the excellent iMovie comes with it. For PC users, 's Photos app (as of the Fall Creators Update) lets you join, trim, and even add background music, 3D animated effects, and titles to video. There are also some free video apps on the Windows Store, including, PowerDirector Mobile, Movie Maker, and Magix Movie Edit Touch. Some of these are quite basic, but the Magix app is fairly capable, with clip joining, transitions, and effects, in a very touch-friendly interface. Free video editing software often comes with legal and technical limitations, however. Some widely used codecs require licensing fees on the part of the software maker, meaning they can't offer free software that can handle these standard file formats.
That said, the impressive open-source does a lot of the same things that the paid applications in this roundup do, including things like chroma-keying and picture-in-picture. Shotcut is completely open-source and free, while another free option, Lightworks has paid options that remove a 720p output resolution limit. Note also that both Shotcut and Lightworks run on Linux as well as Windows and Mac. What About Apple?
Though Mac users don't have the sheer number of software choices available for PCs, Apple fans interested in editing video are well served, by four products in particular. At the entry level, the surprisingly capable and enjoyable-to-use iMovie comes free with every Mac sold since at least 2011.
IMovie only offers two video tracks, but does good job with chroma-keying, and its Trailers feature makes it easy to produce slick, Hollywood-style productions. In the midrange, there's Adobe Premiere Elements, which is cross-platform between Macs and PCs, and offers a lot more features and lots of help with creating effects. Professionals and prosumers have powerful, though pricey options in. Final Cut is a deceptively simple application that resembles iMovie in its interface and ease of use, but it offers massively deep capabilities, and many third-party apps integrate with it for even more power. It also makes excellent use of the Touch Bar on the latest MacBook Pro, as shown in photo above.
Premiere Pro uses a more traditional timeline and adds a large ecosystem of companion apps and plug-ins. It also excels in collaboration features.
Audio Editing We still live in the days of talkies, so you want to be able to in your digital moves as well as the images. Most of the products included here offer canned background music, and many, such as Pinnacle Studio, can even tailor the soundtrack to the exact length of your movie. All of these programs can separate audio and video tracks, and most can clean up background noise and add environmental audio effects such as concert hall reverb. A couple of the products have an auto-ducking feature, which lowers background music during dialog—a definite pro-level plus.
What's Not Here There are more video editing software applications than we can fit into this roundup of the best options, which includes only software rated three stars and higher. The best known among them is probably, which was recently acquired by Magix from Sony. Sony's product used a very cluttered interface that more resembled high-end professional video editing software from the early days of the craft. Magix has made some progress in simplifying it and bringing it up to par with the competition, but more work is needed for it to be included here. Another program, simply has too outdated an interface, making common tasks difficult. Longtime pro video editors will note the absence of Avid Media Composer, which is simply too unwieldy for PCMag's primarily consumer audience.
There are a couple of more interesting applications—NCH VideoPad and AVS Video Editor among them—that we simply haven't tested yet. The Finish Line The video editing application you choose depends on your budget, the equipment you're using, and how serious you are. Fortunately, you're spoiled for choice with the products available. Peruse our in-depth reviews of enthusiast-level video editing software reviews linked below to see which is the right one for you.
Pros: Clear, flexible interface. Lots of organizational tools. Responsive speed. Ultimate power in video editing. Rich ecosystem of video production apps.
Excellent stabilization. Unlimited multi-cam angles. Cons: No keyword tagging for media. Some techniques require additional applications such as After Effects or SpeedGrade. Bottom Line: An expansive professional-level digital video editing program, Premiere Pro CC has everything today's pro video editor needs, particularly when it comes to collaboration. Pros: Wide selection of fun video-creation tools. Clear, simple interface.
Support for 360-degree VR, 4K Ultra HD, and 3D media. Multipoint Motion tracking. Multicam editing. HTML5 video page creation.
No search for effects or media. Only 20 video overlay tracks. Bottom Line: Corel continues to offer one of the most feature-packed consumer video editing packages around. The 2018 update adds even more including 360-degree support, 3D titles, and action-cam lens correction. Pros: Clear interface. Edits 360-degree VR content.
Fast rendering performance in testing. Tons of effects. Multicam editing.
4K and H.265 support. Tagging and star ratings for media. Good audio tools. Cons: Motion tracking issues on one test PC.
Occasional crashes in testing. Uneven 360-degree VR implementation. Bottom Line: Pinnacle Studio is a fast, full-featured, near-professional-level video-editing application with support for 360-degree VR, 3D, and multicam edits.
New color grading and four-point editing make it even more appealing, though our testing uncovered some instabilities. Pros: Lots of video effects. Good titling tools. Trailer-like movie templates. Solid audio editing tools. Strong disc authoring.
Fast rendering. Good stability. 360-degree media support. Cons: Not much help with difficult procedures. Lacks import and organization tools.
Extra costs and coded downloads for some video formats. Bottom Line: Now with faster rendering, Movie Edit Pro offers solid stability, up-to-date support for 4K, 360-degree, and multicam editing, but it trails other video editing software in ease-of-use. Pros: Magnetic, trackless timeline. Superior organization tools, including libraries, ratings, tagging, auto analysis for faces, scenes.
Support for 360-degree footage and HDR. Multicam support.
Fast performance. MacBook Touch Bar support. Cons: Nontraditional timeline-editing may turn off longtime editors.
Can't import projects from previous versions without a third-party plug-in. No stabilization or motion tracking for 360-degree video. Bottom Line: Apple's professional-level video editing software, Final Cut Pro X, brings a wealth of power in an interface simple for pros and consumers alike. Recent highlights include rich support for 360-degree content and improved stability. Pros: Inexpensive. Plenty of video effects. Good audio tools.
Solid file format support, including H.265. Compatible with 4K content. Burns DVD, Blu-ray, and AVCHD.
Cons: Light on features. Outdated, unconventional interface. No 360 or 3D support.
No motion tracking. No direct output to social networks. Bottom Line: For less money than the competition, Nero offers a wide array of enthusiast-level video editing capabilities, but the interface is dated and it trails in support for new formats and techniques.
Pros: Beautifully simple interface. Color matching for consistent movie looks. Classy themes. Great chroma-keying tool. Lots of audio tools.
Theater feature shares movies to all your Apple gear. Cons: Not as flexible as some PC video editors. In the name of simplicity, some useful controls are missing. Does not support tagging. Lacks multicam or motion tracking capabilities.
Limited to two video tracks. Bottom Line: Apple's excellent entry-level desktop video editing application can turn your footage and photos into impressive productions.
I have a heterogeneous IT environment, which means I use a mix of software that includes Linux as my primary operating system, Mac OS X on a Macbook Pro Retina, iOS on the iPad, two Chromebooks, Android on Nexus 6, 5, 7, and Samsung Galaxy S4. Windows is the only OS that doesn’t get to talk to my hardware or participate in my computing. It runs in a secluded virtual machine just for the sake of keeping me abreast of what Microsoft is trying to do with it. This mixed environment forced me to pick apps that can be used on both Mac OS X and Linux so switching between the two platforms is as easy and seamless as possible. It also has saved me quite a lot of money, as I later discovered. And since all of the apps are fully open source and community driven there is no risk of any malware, spyware, or adware, which you would find on typical proprietary ‘freeware’ apps.
Being open source I can also be assured there won’t be any secret backdoors to spy on me. Ready to start saving some money? Let's get started.
See also: Editor's Note: If you are unable to advance to the next slide, try disabling adblock. We apologize for the inconvenience. Mac OS X comes pre-installed with QuickTime player, which can't play a majority of video formats.
That's where VLC comes into play. VLC is a fully open source project developed by the community and is available free of cost. It's like a swiss army knife for movie playback. Once installed, VLC can play virtually any video format on the planet without any extra work. It can double as a music player as well as video converter.
You can easily convert videos from one format to another to play them on your iPad or iPhone, which can't play quite a lot of video formats. Another lesser-known feature of VLC is the ability to play online videos from the likes of YouTube.
Safari isn't a terribly useful browser, as it's not available on other platforms. But Firefox and Chrome are up to the job. The built-in syncing feature of Firefox keeps all of your browsing data synced with the server so regardless of which OS you are on all of your data - passwords, history, bookmarks - are accessible on all the devices. Google also has a similar feature but it takes the browsing experience to the next level with. These apps turn your browser into a “sort of computer” in itself: Word processing, text editing, basic image editing, chat, video chat, making phone calls, sharing files, etc. Can be done from within the Chrome browser. Download and for Mac OSX.
As a writer, information is my life line. I can't live or work without it. However I track so many developers, open source projects and open source companies that's it's virtually impossible to keep tabs on what they are doing. That's where RSS feeds come to the rescue. An RSS reader keeps an eye on any new posts by developers and I am notified immediately.
On Linux there is no dearth of good RSS feed readers, but I struggled to find a decent one for Mac OS X that didn’t want me to shell out some dollars and had all the features that I needed. My RSS feed needs are limited: all I want is support for folders and the ability to export/import OPML files so I can keep my RSS feeds synced across devices. Well if I am on Linux and add a new feed to my RSS reader there, the RSS client on Mac won’t get that feed. So what I do is keep the OPML file synced through my ownCloud server so whenever I add a new site all rss clients are automatically updated. Vienna does all this - and it's open source and available free of cost.
I must admit I am not a heavy word processor user. I do most of my work in 'text editors', without any bells and whistles. However there are occasions when you do need a word processor and that's where LibreOffice shines. One of the biggest arguments in favor of LibreOffice vs.
Microsoft Office or Apple Pages is that LibreOffice uses ODF as the default file format. ODF is an international standard approved by the ISO so it ensures that your data will never be locked to a vendor or lose changes when accessed from competing applications. LibreOffice comes with the complete suite of applications which include SpreadSheet as well as Presentation. Clementine was designed with music lovers in mind. Unlike iTunes where adding tracks and managing playlists is quite tiresome, Clementine is a pleasure to use. One of the features that I like the most is that I can keep all of my music (as well as movies and documents) on a central file server running Linux and accessible through Samba. ITunes just doesn’t have the capability to deal with such a scenario.
With Clementine I can browse the Samba server (or any other location such as an external drive) and add those music folders to the library. Clementine will scan all files and start playing directly from the server without having to copy that 500GB of data on to the 256GB SSD of my MacBook. That’s not all, Clementine has many more features up its sleeve. If you want to do Karaoke, there is a tab called 'Song Info' on the side panel and it pulls the lyrics of the current track from the web (Last.fm)! Another tab called 'Artist Info' opens the Wikipedia page of the article within Clementine so you can read about the artist while you enjoy their work.
Clementine has great support for podcasts, and it also supports tons of cloud services so you can connect Clementine to Dropbox or Google Drive and start playing music stored on these clouds. Do you still want to go back to iTunes? I thought not. Let me tell you straight, Photoshop is the best image editing application around. No further discussion.
But not everyone needs, or can afford, Photoshop. In some cases it's overkill for an average image editing job. GIMP on the other hand fills the bill nicely. GIMP is an open source powerhouse that is available for free of cost for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.
Its interface is similar to that of Photoshop so there is no steep learning curve. And, like Photoshop, you can expand the functionality of GIMP through plugins, scripts, and extensions.
The only sad part is that Photoshop and GIMP extensions are not compatible with each other so you can’t use them interchangeably. Give GIMP a try for your image editing needs. If you are a photographer like me you would be shooting in RAW image format, which retains much more data than.jpg. But you need to process them before you can print or share them online. LightRoom is a great tool to process such files, but it's not available on Linux.
Your best alternative: Darktable. Having used both Lightroom and Darktable, I can vouch for Darktable as a dependable tool to process your images.
Not only is the interface of Darktable similar to that of LightRoom, it is quite feature rich. The one downside of Darktable is that there is no integration with GIMP. Once you have processed your images through Darktable and GIMP, how about adding some creativity to them? Check out works from Belgian artist Ben Heine for some inspiration. To create sketches or illustrations you need a professional grade vector graphic editor and there is no dearth of such tools. I often use Inkscape for the job. Drawing sketches is not the only task this app can do: It’s also a great tool if you want to work on icon designs, logos, and diagrams.
It’s an open source project, but installation on Mac OS X takes some extra work. If you plan to install Inkscape. Do you create podcasts or work on audio production? I often create video-casts, and audio editing is a core component of video production. Audacity is undoubtedly a leader when it comes to audio editing applications.
It was the 11th most downloaded application on SourceForge in 2011 and was downloaded by more than 76 million users. The app interacts with your hardware so you can record podcasts directly to Audacity using the built-in mic or through external microphones.
Check it out. There are tons of features for great audio production.
I once recorded and edited an entire drama for community radio on Audacity. This app is out of my league because I don’t do 3D animation.
But if you are into animation, or want to learn it, there is no need to buy expensive 3D computer graphics software. Blender is the undisputed king of 3D animation. Blender is extremely powerful and can also double as a film-editing software. Blender can do so much that it seems like 20 apps packaged in one. The project page brags: It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation.
Do you want to see what Blender is capable of doing? One of the biggest gripes I have with iOS is that it can play only a few (.mov, mkv and mp4, I think) video formats, whereas my Android devices can play virtually all video formats. What’s even worse is that iTunes won’t even let you copy any such ‘unsupported’ files to your iPad. The only solution is to convert the video to a supported format such as.mp4.
While VLC (which I mentioned earlier) can convert videos, there is an open source app that specializes in video conversion and can convert files in batches. It’s called Handbrake: a free-of-cost open source software that can convert videos from any format to mp4 and mkv. So next time if iTunes tries to put the brakes on your videos, you can pull out Handbrake. Do you know of any useful open source apps for Mac OS X? Share it with us in the comments below.