Kdenlive

Video editing software can be quite expensive, especially if you need something more than stitching together a few vacation videos. The answer to this issue is quite simple. Kdenlive provides you with everything you need to create high-quality video montages. Built on the Qt and KDE frameworks, this community-driven program uses various plug-ins, to deliver a powerful and effective solution creating videos, authoring DVDs and much more. The software provides the kind of tools you would find in advanced and expensive video editors, but it offers them for free.

Primarily developed for Linux, BSD and Mac OS X, Kdenlive is available for Windows systems as well. The interesting part is that it doesn't need to be installed. You can just extract its components from a ZIP archive and run an executable, though you may want to run a few other executables first, to make sure the program is working correctly.

Kdenlive is much more than a simple editor for home videos. You may need some time to look around its user interface and organize your media, before you start your work. Fortunately, the software is not too different from other video editors, in terms of appearance. The upper half of the interface consists of a media bin, where you can import your files, pre-made effects, an embedded player, for previewing your montage, as well as a clip properties panel. Like in all video editors, the lower half of the interface is where you will find a multi-channel timeline editor, where you can place videos, images and audio tracks head to head.

Working with Kdenlive is quite easy, especially for people who have used a video editor before. You can simply click and drag your clips to the timeline editor, cut and resize them, drag and drop special effects directly over your tracks and so on. What's more, the software lets you work with keyframes, which gives you a much better degree of control over certain effects.

To make cutting easier, you can just select the cutting tool and click the exact spot where you want to cut, without moving the playback cursor. The fact that you can preview scenes directly in the timeline gives you the possibility of making accurate cuts. This is something you don't see in many video editors nowadays.

Rendering a video is not a difficult task. Because it is based on the FFmpeg libraries, Kdenlive is capable of working with numerous media formats, for both input and output. When exporting a video, you can choose between a wide range of formats and make different quality settings, on a small window. The software can make full use of a processor, which means that it won't keep you waiting for too long to finish rendering a movie.

If you are looking for a free and powerful video editing solution, then you should look no further than Kdenlive.