Free Video Editing Software for Windows

29 Comments March 1, 2007 42162 Views

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UPDATED: 03/08/07

When I blogged about my new toy the Sony DCR-DVD 105, I didn’t expect the post to be a support forum of sorts for this device. Visitors have posted comments and asked different questions regarding this camcorder and other video related stuff. Recently, one of the visitors asked me about video editors. So I decided to do some research and put up a list of free video editing software or what people usually refer to as free video editors for Windows.

Here’s the list in alphabetical order:

Avedit
It is a great tool to work with .AVI files. Regardless of small executable size, this avi editor offers you unlimited power of digital video processing. Some high-tech tricks included into AVIedit allows you to perform with ease and fun the many interesting things, like video warping, color restore, noise reduction and so on…
Homepage

Avid Free DV
Avid Free DV is feature-streamlined, standalone software which includes basic video and audio editing capabilities, up to two streams of real-time effects and support for both Windows XP and Macintosh OS X platforms.
Homepage

Avidemux
Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs. Tasks can be automated using projects, job queue and powerful scripting capabilities.
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Chopper XP
Chopper XP is a tool that lets you extract a part of any DVD easily. It is a Vob cutting program with a video display and a great interface. You just need to scroll to a location and select mark in and out points. The program also lets you set any priority of extraction and displays the estimated time left for extraction.
Homepage

DDClip Free 2.23
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FFMpeg
FFmpeg is a collection of free software that can record, convert and stream digital audio and video. It includes libavcodec (a leading audio/video codec library), and libavformat (a leading audio/video container mux and demux library). FFmpeg is developed under Linux, but it can be compiled under most operating systems, including Windows. The project was started by Gerard Lantau, a pseudonym of Fabrice Bellard, and is now maintained by Michael Niedermayer. It is notable that most FFmpeg developers are also part of the MPlayer project, the VLC/VideoLAN project, plus one member of the xine project, and that FFmpeg is hosted at the MPlayer project server.
Homepage

Jahshaka
Jahshaka is the worlds first OpenSource Realtime Editing and Effects System. Jahshaka takes advantage of the power of OpenGL and OpenML to give its users exceptional levels of performance. We currently support Linux, OsX, Irix and Windows, and Solaris is on the way! Jahshaka is licenced to the public under the GNU GPL agreement.
Homepage

SolveigMM AVI Trimmer
SolveigMM AVI Trimmer is a free video editor to allow you to AVI movie cut extremely fast and lossless. This freeware AVI editor software is small, smart, easy to use and involves no encoding/decoding processes. Video enthusiasts use AVI Trimmer to cut commercials, cut video files or edit video for YouTube. AVI Trimmer solves annoying out of sync problem. It operates with all known types of AVI including DV AVI type 1 and 2.
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WAX
Wax is a high performance and flexible video compositing and special effects software. The idea for Wax is to be very general purpose and flexible in video compositing and effects, so that you can compose your dream video sequence with ease everytime.

Wax can create 2D & 3D special effects and can work in two modes - as a standalone application which would appeal for home users/beginners, and as a “plug-in” to video editors/NLEs which would be more useful for professional editors. Currently Wax can work as a plug-in with Sony Vegas, Pure Motion EditStudio and Adobe Premiere and work for integrating with various other NLEs is in progress.
Homepage

Windows Movie Maker
Windows Movie Maker is a video editing software that is included in recent versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. It contains features such as effects, transitions, titles/credits, audio track, timeline narration, and Auto Movie. New effects and transitions can be made and existing ones can be modified using XML code.
Homepage

Virtual Dub
VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit Windows platforms (95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video. It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images.
Homepage

Virtual Edit
Virtual Edit is a semi-professional software video editing package aimed at ambitious content creators to video novices, who want to produce material with a slick and professional look, on a limited budget. Virtual Edit has been written by experts with experience in the Television and Broadcasting industries, which has been encapsulated in this simple software package.
Homepage

Zwei-Stein
Zwei-Stein 3.01 is a freeware non-linear, non-destructive video compositing and editing system which offers many advanced features unavailable elsewhere. With Zwei-Stein you can edit up to 256 video, audio and still image clips, each with up to 64 effects chained serially. Cropping, panning and custom effects are easy with automatic key frames.
Homepage

Let me know if there are other free video editing software that I missed so I could add it to this list. Next, I’ll come up with a list for Macs so stay tuned!