Shotcut

1) This software is free to use with no watermarks or weird annoying ads. 2) It's fantastic for the beginning video editor. 3) Works perfectly on a PC where as I think most of the better video editors have been designed for Macs (personal opinion) 4) Allows you export in a large number of different formats, including YouTube in 4K resolution 5) So many options and features, it's almost overwhelming! 6) Fantastic interface!

If you're running other programs or working on a very big project, this can eat up your computer memory, causing lagging and freezing. Highly recommended to close all other programs before opening up Shotcut and using a computer or laptop with a fast processor. You can make due without it, but once you add any transitions or layers, it'll start freezing. The preview feature so you can see what you've already done can also be a bit slow and glitchy... Imagine skipping one frame out of every three frames. However, it does NOT export this way. I have no experience with other video editors, so I'm not sure if that's a common theme among them.

You can't beat the price (Free!). This program gets the job done. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles as expensive programs but it does plenty enough to do most basic projects. I've done numerous music videos and little comedy skits that I've uploaded to YouTube and they come out great. They look totally professional and the feedback I've gotten has been very positive. My action camera records in .mov format which is hard to edit with. I convert my raw files to .mp4 which makes editing much easier and I'm unable to discern any loss of video quality. All in all, Shotcut has been a great choice for me.

Some of the functions aren't intuitive. It takes a little while to figure out how everything works. Also it's slow while it publishes your final work but if you're patient it's well worth the wait to save money. It lacks a variety of scene transitions that more expensive programs have but it does have the basics.

When I was just starting out in video editing, the best thing about Shotcut was that it was free while still having the capacity to produce the results I was after. You can find plenty of tutorials on the Shotcut site and more on YouTube to help you get started.

It has handy keyboard shortcuts for the handful of basic functions that I used most often. Once you get into the habit of using them, they make editing quicker.

If you take the time to watch some tutorials, practice, and explore the features you realize that Shotcut is quite robust and full of possibilities for amazing results. I have even used it to make clips from a podcast which I could export a MP3 audio files.

The text feature always seemed clunky and not intuitive to me.

The interface does not have an option for organizing your media into folders - it's just one long Playlist. But you can drag files around in the Playlist and group them by by file type or some other way that makes sense to you.

What I liked most about the software was that it had the features of a professional video editor such as Adobe Premiere Pro. It could also process 4K HDR 10 video at 120FPS which other video editors struggled to render these types of video formats. My favorite part about it is that it doesn't have an ANNOYING WATERMARK. Basically some of the other editors I tried showed a giant watermark across the screen that said the company name or it said Free Version but Shotcut has no watermark.

Originally when my team picked this software for free I thought it was going to be easy to use but I thought wrong. But after a few days of learning I was using Shotcut in no time. I just think people should know that because it isn't easy to learn at the start doesn't mean you can't learn it.