Best Free Video-Editing Software

You don’t need to pay to get good video-editing software. Edward Munn rounds up six of the best free tools for creating perfect home movies.

Windows Movie Maker

What we liked:

From 10 January 2017, Microsoft will withdraw Windows Movie Maker and the other programs in the Windows Essentials 2012 bundle from its website. That’s a shame, because although Windows Movie Maker hasn’t had a major update for several years, we think it still offers the best combination of usability and tools of all the video editors in this roundup.

Importing your raw footage is as simple as dragging and dropping video clips (or images if you’re making a slide show) to the program. Once there, they appear on a simple timeline where you can reorder, trim or split them with frame-by-frame precision. Clicking the Animation or Visual Effects tabs lets you add a wide range of transitions and effects to your clips, and you can preview each one simply by hovering your cursor over it. To add a soundtrack, you can either drag and drop music files of your choice or click ‘Add music’. The program even lets you add a personal commentary by clicking ‘Record narration’.

It’s rarely practical to have the video’s audio and your incidental music at the same volume throughout a movie, so Movie Maker gives you full control over the ‘Video volume’ for every clip, and you can split audio tracks where necessary to change the music’s volume for a particular section. The program’s handy ‘Fade in’ and ‘Fade out’ tools also help ensure there are no abrupt start or end points on your video’s soundtrack.