MICROSOFT CLIPCHAMP

Windows' built-in movie-making app includes powerful tools for making high-quality videos. Nik Rawlinson gets close to the edit

- Nik Rawlinson

Clipchamp is one of the great unsung features of Windows. It’s a powerful modern video-editing app, which you can use to edit and assemble your video clips into professional-looking productions.

If you’ve previously used the old (now discontinued) Windows Movie Maker app, you’ll be amazed at how much smarter Clipchamp is. It’s not an upgrade but a completely different product, originally developed by an Australian company of the same name, and it’s been in development for more than a decade. Since Microsoft acquired the publisher in 2021, Clipchamp has become the company’s official video-editing platform, described as “an AI-powered video editor with everything you’ll need”.

Is Clipchamp free?

Clipchamp comes preinstalled with Windows 11, and can be downloaded to Windows 10 from the Microsoft Store. It will work on any version of the operating system released after March 2019, with a recommended minimum of 8GB of RAM.

The standard installation of Clipchamp lets you import and edit your own clips, access a library of stock audio, image and video materials, apply a range of filters and effects, and export your productions at 1080p resolution. All of that’s completely free, with no time limitations, watermarks or other restrictions.

If you have a subscription to a Microsoft 365 plan for either Home or Business you can access additional premium features, which include an expanded selection of audio, image and video stock material, extra filters and effects, automatic content backup and 4K exports. Premium users can also create a “brand kit”, to keep elements and styles consistent across multiple video projects.