Good video editing software can help you showcase your products comprehensively, creating professional promotional videos tailored for platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or any other platform where you share brand videos. There are many easy-to-use free video editing apps that can help you stand out from competitors.
Producing well-crafted product videos is a more engaging form of content marketing than standalone photos, reducing customer hesitation when making purchases. In fact, according to online publication Small Business Trends, ecommerce product videos can increase conversion rates by up to 144%.
Below, we’ve compiled a list of the best free video editing software from the internet, along with some affordable paid versions. Every entrepreneur has their specific needs, so we’ve summarized some of the most useful features of each tool for video editing or enhancement.
Best Desktop Free Video Editing Software For businesses looking to create promotional videos, there are many desktop-based editing software options available. The biggest advantage of desktop free video editing software is that they usually offer more features than most mobile video editing apps.
If you’re looking to edit your promotional videos within budget, check out our list of free video editing software, suitable for editing YouTube videos, your ecommerce website, or various other platforms to create long-form content.
- OpenShot Best simple video editor for beginners
OpenShot’s easy-to-use interface makes it an excellent video editing program for beginners. While more complex tools offer more editing components, OpenShot’s intuitive interface and minimalist design are perfect for simple editing.
For small businesses, OpenShot is an efficient choice, best suited for video editing tasks like resizing, scaling, trimming, capturing, and rotating. It also offers subtitle scrolling, frame stepping, time mapping, audio editing, and real-time preview.
Features include:
- Unlimited layers for watermarks, background videos, and audio tracks
- Customizable title card templates
- Drag-and-drop functionality for easy addition of video, audio, or image files
- Digital video effects, including brightness, gamma, hue, grayscale, and chroma key compositing for green screen effects
- Powerful keyframe animation for creating animated videos
- Compatibility: Windows, Mac, and Linux
- VSDC Free Video Editor Top-tier free video editing software with a full editing suite
VSDC’s desktop video editing software comes in both free and paid versions. While the free version has some limitations, it still comes with VSDC’s full suite of video editing tools, including a masking tool and chroma key functionality for green screen video effects.
If you have the budget for the full version, this suite of tools extends to include video stabilization, powerful post-production effects, slideshow/presentation features, 3D chart templates, and direct publishing to social media.
Features include:
- Color correction tools for professional-looking output
- Full range of transition effects
- Easy-to-use photo filters similar to those found on Instagram
- Masking tool for hiding, blurring, or highlighting specific elements
- Social media links for sharing videos on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Vimeo
- HEVC/H.265 (an advanced video compression standard) for preserving maximum quality with minimal file size when handling 4K or HD files.
Compatibility: Windows
Price: Free; Pro version $19.99
- Movie Maker 10 Excellent free video editing software for Windows
Movie Maker 10 is a convenient Windows video editing software, ideal for those looking to get back to basics. It’s perfect for quickly editing short video clips that you need to use right away.
Movie Maker 10 offers a free version, including a suite of video and photo editing tools. When editing online videos, you can also use the feature to add subtitles with custom fonts and colors.
Features include:
- Automatic preview tools for editing and effects
- Auto movie options for creating custom-cut video clips
- Animation tab for easily adding music, titles, and subtitles
Compatibility: Windows
Price: Free
- Lightworks Best online video editor for real-time project sharing
Lightworks has a clean, intuitive interface, making it easy to get started. When you decide to learn online video editing, Lightworks also offers a range of detailed video tutorials, making it one of the more accessible Linux video editing software on this list.
Lightworks comes with a set of stock video and music clips for you to use in any video edited on the program, giving any marketing video an outstanding finish.
Features include:
- High-quality simple video editing for quick edits
- Accelerated optimization, allowing you to continue editing while importing new content
- Multi-camera editing for synchronizing footage from multiple cameras
- Real-time team project sharing, with full control over which users have editing rights
- Easy video sharing, with quick exports to YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, and Instagram
- Wide support for video formats
Compatibility: Windows, Mac, and Linux
Price: Free version; Pro version $24.99 per month
- Shotcut Best open-source movie maker for enthusiasts
Shotcut is an open-source cross-platform video editing software with plenty of tutorial videos. It also supports a wide range of formats, including FFmpeg, 4K, ProRes, and DNxHD. However, there’s a small caveat: Shotcut was originally designed for Linux, so some people may find the interface a bit unusual. Nevertheless, it remains a top-notch editor.
Shotcut also offers a wealth of audio editing features, perfect for enthusiasts. It comes with audio tweaking tools, allowing users to adjust bass and treble, create bandpass filters, adjust gain, add dynamic compression, and more.
Features include:
- Support for the latest audio and video formats through the leading multimedia framework FFmpeg
- Native timeline editing, allowing users to import video files directly into their project documents rather than the multimedia library
- Multi-format timeline for mixing and matching resolutions and frame rates in projects
- Advanced audio filters like balance, low-high pass, bandpass filters, compressor, and more
Price: Free
- Blender Best professional video editing software with a 3D creation suite
Blender is a free open-source 3D creation suite. It includes features for modeling and rendering 3D animations. The software is developed collaboratively by hundreds of developers from around the world. The large user community provides Blender with a wealth of tools. Blender is designed as a 3D animation suite, but it comes equipped with a powerful video editor, enough to meet the needs of most users. When editing online videos, it can also handle more complex edits like video masking, making Blender a flexible video editing software suitable for both beginners and experienced users, as well as excellent for more advanced projects involving 3D animation.
Features include:
- Track tracking engine for rendering realistic animated objects
- Advanced rendering processes to speed up project saving and exporting
- Options for encoding game logic into video game development software
- Advanced character animation tools for realistic kinematics
- Rich library of visual effects and shading
Compatibility: Windows, Mac, and Linux
Price: Free
- HitFilm Express Best free video editor with multifunctional editing and professional video effects and tutorials
If you don’t have much video editing experience, you may find HitFilm Express a bit advanced at first. It’s used to produce Hollywood-style movies, but it’s worth learning because it’s one of the best multifunctional free video editors available.
