Need a Good Free Video Editor? Shotcut video editor review

Note: This is not necessarily the best open source video editor, but it's definitely my favorite.

I have been looking around for a good video editor for quite some time before I ended up with shotcut. I won't be going into the details of shotcut as the features can be found on it's website. I'll just be describing what I think are the pros and cons of the video editor.

Pros

• Supports lots of audio, video, and image formats thanks to ffmpeg
• It's being actively developed and keeps on getting new features (see the roadmap)
• Has many video filters
• The filters are easy to use (In my opinion much easier than openshot or kdenlive's filters)
• Cross-platform (Linux, Windows, OS X)
• No need to import media - Native editing
• Very flexible UI using QT. Can be customized to your liking
• It's faster (less lag) than some other editors I've tried

Cons

• It may still crash at times although in my opinion it's fairly stable already (Just make sure you save your project frequently)
• No keyframe-able video filters although it's planned for a future release

I ended up with shotcut since the chroma key filter is really easy to use and powerful (much easier than kdenlive's chroma key filter). Another thing I like about it is the speed control of a video changes the speed of the audio as well whereas in kdenlive it'll remove the audio when modifying video speed.

The color grading feature is also really simple to use and powerful and is a must have in any video editor. I use it in about every project. It can really make your video look a lot more professional.

Here is an example of before and after applying color grading:



And a screenshot of shotcut with the color grading filter settings open:




That's it for now. I know this is a really short review, but this is my first video editor review and I'm still learning.

Feel free to leave a comment.