8 Excellent Free Video Editing Software and Online Tools

The rise of YouTube and other popular video sharing sites have ensured that video editing doesn’t remain a super-geeky thing. Don’t be surprised if you catch your 9 year old sprucing up the video of her puppy using a video editing tool before uploading it to YouTube. With the kind of free video editing software available at your disposal now, it’s not at all difficult to edit and create great videos.

The following list talks about 8 such tools that can help you edit, add affects and do much more with your videos. Both desktop software and online tools are included. Check them out.

UPDATE: We’ve added a bonus tool in the end. Don’t miss that!

Windows Live Movie Maker

Windows Live Movie Maker – that comes as a part of Windows Live Essentials suite – is a powerful and feature-rich video editing software by Microsoft. You can edit videos, audio, add all kinds of effects, add photos directly from Windows Live Photo Gallery and do much more. There’s also an interesting feature called the AutoMovie theme that lets you quickly choose photos and videos and then automatically create a movie out of them in no time.

VideoToolBox

VideoToolBox is a pretty impressive online video editing tool that’s free. It can accept video file up to 600 MB in size and has a range of features to cater to all your video editing needs. It also has a video recorder tool. We’ve covered it here – VideoToolBox: Online Video Editor to Convert, Crop, Merge & Split Video Files.

iMovie

iMovie is Apple’s flagship movie making software that comes bundled with the iLife suite for Macs. It has an impressive array of features including People finder, a feature that can find faces in the video. You can also create quick trailers of your videos with iMovie.

Wax

Wax is an advanced video editing tool that can add 2D and 3D effects to your videos apart from doing various other kinds of video editing tasks. It is Windows only, and also comes as a plugin to popular (and costly) video editing software like Sony Vegas Pro and Adobe Premiere. So, if you are a professional user, you too could make use of this tool.

Stupeflix

Stupeflix is a nice online video editing tool that can help you create quick videos out of the images you upload by adding some pretty cool effects. You can also pull in the images from Flickr, Facebook or Picasa accounts. The free account limits the videos to 1 min, but that’s usually enough if you are looking to create something short and sweet. Read more here – Stupeflix is a Powerful Tool to Make and Edit Videos Online.

AVITrimmer

If you are looking for a simple, no-frills video editing tool to edit your AVI or MKV files then you might want to check out AVITrimmer. This tool can trim your AVI or MKV files without any loss in the quality (no encoding or decoding is involved).

JayCut

JayCut (Update: From their homepage it looks like they’ve shut down the service) is a free online video editor that has an amazing number of features that is a bit surprising for a web based editing tool to have. The good thing about JayCut is that even beginners can quickly understand its interface and get started with the video editing process.

Avidemux

Linux users, if you had been feeling left out so far, Avidemux should cheer you up (of course you could go with the online tools mentioned above too). We mentioned Avidemux before in our list of tools to rip audio from video. It’s not incredibly feature-rich but has enough to get the job done.

Bonus: VideoPad

Our reader Noopur Julka tipped us about another nice video editing tool called VideoPad. She graciously agreed to send in her experience of using the tool.

VideoPad Video Editor (Windows only) gives your videos a new life. This full featured video editor lets you create professional looking videos with transitions, effects, music and narration in minutes, making your video look impressive and most importantly sharable!

There is an apt direct YouTube share option included in tool too.

For instance, I have uploaded two videos. The first one below is the unedited version while the next one has been edited with VideoPad.

1. ScubaDiving (Unedited)

2. ScubaDiving (With VideoPad)

Videos speak louder than text, no?

So, have you used any of the aforementioned tools before? Use something else? Let’s hear about it in the comments.