Create eye-catching videos, films, and animations by relying on this popular open-source video editor
What’s new in OpenShot Video Editor 2.6.1:
- HIGHLIGHTS AND FEATURES:
- Auto migration of Crop keyframes from 2.5.1 projects (adds a crop effect and sets the equivellent keyframes). 100% backwards compatibility.
- Title Editor: TAB between fields
- Fix Windows drive letter regression, where saving projects on a different drive than the assets would cause corruption. 2.6.1 will also repairs any corruption detected in *.osp project files.
Launched in August 2003, OpenShot is to this day one of the best middle-tier, open-source video editors you can get your hands on.
While OpenShot was not designed to compete with premium, professional video editors out there, it’s more than adequate for anyone looking to get into video editing, as well as for those who want a decently capable app for their video creation projects.
OpenShot gets all the basics right
OpenShot is a Qt-based video editor that works on all three popular OSes out there: Windows, macOS, and Linux. It supports a plethora of video, audio, and image formats (it’s based on the powerful FFMPEG library), unlimited tracks and layers, and boasts various basic editing tools such as clip resizing, scaling, trimming, snapping, rotation, and cutting.
It provides various video transitions with real-time previews and it does a decent job when it comes to title and sub-title creation. Not only that, but it’s capable of creating 2D animations (image sequences), as well as 3D animated titles (with various effects). Furthermore, it’s SVG-friendly, meaning you can include vector titles and credits.
When it comes to micro-editing, OpenShot does not disappoint, but it doesn’t impress either. You can go through each frame of your video creations, you can change the speed of your clips, mix and edit audio files, as well as tweak your video’s basic parameters such as brightness, gamma, hue, greyscale, and so forth.
It’s also easy to work with
Not to say that OpenShot is the easiest video editor out there, but when compared to other apps of this sort, it does alright. OpenShot’s GUI is laid out in the same way most video editors are. In the bottom part of the GUI, you can find the Timeline function, a clip bin on the left, and a preview pane on the right.
There are also various educational videos, and an above-average User Guide provided on the app’s official website, which should make the lives of new users a lot easier.
What are its limitations?
OpenShot suffers from the same aspects as most free video editors. For example, the provided effects and transition effects are not what one might call eyecandy or professional-looking. The title creator is also not the most flexible of the bunch, but it gets the job done nonetheless.
In terms of performance, though, OpenShot is a lot better than most other open-source alternatives. It’s capable of loading massive files (even though it’s not as adept at previewing them).
Verdict
Considering that fact OpenShot is an open-source, community-maintained project, there’s really not much to fault. As a basic, beginner-oriented video editor it does a damn fine job as it offers way more than expected.
However, the app was launched over 10 years ago, and, to be honest, it somewhat looks and feels like an app of that age.
