20 Best Video Editing Software For Free [Download]

There are quite a number of free video editing software packages available for Windows currently. Generally speaking, most of this free software does not have the same level of quality that you would expect to find from commercial software. However. there are some good free video editing software packages available out there that can almost perform like a professional versions.

In this article, I will give you my top 20 free video editing software for Windows designed for beginners along with its pros and cons along with some user-experience reviews. These software are mostly compatible with any version of Windows and allows you editing, encoding, merge or split videos, add special effects like 2D and 3D effects, audio enhancements and much more.

If you know any other video editing software, feel free to add the link in the comment section below.

Windows Movie Maker

Microsoft has made version 2.6 of Movie Maker available for download, and it runs on both Windows Vista and Windows 7. While advanced users are likely using a more sophisticated video editing program, there’s no denying that Movie Maker is an excellent, full-featured option for the average home user.

Blender

Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License. It is one of the powerful, multi-use editing/compositing and modeling tool.

This tool allows you to edit, create 3D graphics, sound effects, add special effects and much more.

Related: Tears of Steel: Awesome Short Open Movie from Blender Foundation

Cinefx Jashaka

Cinefx is an offline playback, editing, encoding, animation and visual effects tool based on the Jahshaka technology that allows you to create professional digital media on your desktop.

Use the tools that Hollywood uses to create blockbuster films and special effects.

VirtualDub

VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows platforms (98/ME/NT4/2000/XP/Vista/7), licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).  It lacks the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video.

It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters.  VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images.

AVIedit

It is a great tool to work with .AVI files. Regardless of small executable size, this avi editor offers you unlimited power of digital video processing. AVIedit allows you to join and split avi files, extract frames and do whatever you want…

You can capture video by number of ways, including one-frame-per-minute (web camera) option, workaround annoying 2 Gb file size limit, send your videos to printer, heavy compress it and post to your webpage.

Video Spin

VideoSpin, free editor based on Studio, does a pretty darn good job compared with most free video tools.

It doesn’t match the qualities of paid softwares but perform basic editing and output movies pretty easily.

T@b ZS4 Video Editor

ZS4 Video Editor is free to download and use. It is video editing and compositing software which aims to provide media experts with a facility to combine a variety of media types(currently photos, videos and audio files) into one or more output files.

 Wax

Wax is a high performance and flexible video compositing and special effects software. The idea for Wax is to be very general purpose and flexible in video compositing and effects, so that you can compose your dream video sequence with ease every time.

Wax can create 2D & 3D special effects and can work in two modes – as a standalone application which would appeal for home users/beginners, and as a “plug-in” to video editors/NLEs which would be more useful for professional editors.

Avidemux

Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs.

Tasks can be automated using projects, job queue and powerful scripting.

MovieStorm

Moviestorm is the complete 3D movie making software application for all abilities. Whether your movie interest is cartoons, crime, music, horror etc, you can create awesome animation effects using this software.

Movica

Movica is just a graphical user interface that uses some fine programs to edit movie files. A great deal of emphasis has been placed on keyboard shortcuts to make the job of editing easier.

 Basically, it is meant for editing the kind of movies that VirtualDub won’t. V-Dub is primarily an AVI editor, Movica will work on .wmv, .flv, .rm and .mpg files. This makes it more versatile than Virtualdub.

StoryBoard Pro Software

Atomic Learning’s FREE Video StoryBoard Pro is designed to give teachers, students, and home movie makers a tool to plan ahead when creating video projects.

It features the ability to enter shot titles and descriptions, complete with planned lengths and edited order, indicate shot types: video, still, audio, music, or titles and much more.

AVI Trimmer

SolveigMM AVI Trimmer is a free video editor for fast and lossless AVI editing. This freeware AVI editor is small, smart, easy to use and  involves no encoding/decoding processes.

No video / audio degradation and out of sync problem arises after editing. All AVI file types of any size and video / audio content are supported.

Zwei-Stien Video Editor

Zwei-Stein 3.01 is a freeware non-linear, non-destructive video compositing and editing system which offers many advanced features unavailable elsewhere.

With Zwei-Stein you can edit up to 256 video, audio and still image clips, each with up to 64 effects chained serially. Cropping, panning and custom effects are easy with automatic key frames.

DVDVideoSoft Free

A pretty basic software to edit video and audio files. Free Studio is a single package which bundles all free software from DVDVideoSoft to work with DVD, video and audio files.

With this free software you can convert video and audio files between different formats and to iPod, PSP, iPhone, BlackBerry and other portable devices; burn and rip DVDs and audio CDs; upload and download videos and music to your computer, iPod, PSP, iPhone and BlackBerry; perform basic editing of audio and video files.

AVITricks Video Editor

AviTricks is a non-linear, non-destructive AVI video editor with real-time preview. It makes cutting and joining footage easy and includes a wide range of built-in adjustable effects that can be used separately or in combination. (Effects include dissolves, mirror image, sepia, iris effects, fades, TV-shop and many more.)

Besides the preview screen, the video you are working on is also represented clearly and graphically on a timeline and a tree-structure. Both of these fields are active and easy to work.

Mewa Film

It is a non-linear editing tool, called montage (this name might change) where video files are shown as a sequence of images layered off horizontally.

The video files can then be assembled and cut using intuitive actions as “drag and drop” and “ rubber band selection”.

DVD Knife

DVD Knife is a simple tool for extracting DVD clips from your DVD’s.The clips will be stored in VOB format only. This is the simplest and fastest tool in its category which has ability to extract long VOB clips in few seconds.

Its so simple that only three steps can extract the clip ie “Select start” – “Select end” – “Save”. So get your favorite movie or film scenes stored separately now. It is compatible with Windows XP. I hope this little free tool will come for Vista or 7 in he future.