Looking for a Video Editing Freeware Program - With the Timeline Ribbon
December 24, 2018 8:49 AM   Subscribe

Been moving from PC to laptop - running Windows 7. Need a video editing program as close to the old, Movie Maker as possible. For some reason MM 2012 doesn't have a ribbon timeline below - the layout is very hard to work with and there's no adjusting it as I came to figure out. Is there a MM clone or something as close to it that's also freeware? TIA
posted by watercarrier to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 
I went through a bunch of video editing freeware a year or two ago and the most usable and least buggy one I found was kdenlive. Not sure if the windows version works as well as the Linux version but it's worth a shot.
posted by ropeladder at 9:58 AM on December 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


I've never used Movie Maker, so I don't know how it works, but Davinci Resolve is free and is based on a timeline

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/edit
posted by jonathanhughes at 10:07 AM on December 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


The generic term is NLE, Non-Linear [video] editor.

My company sells products to the post-production industry, and while most of the editors I speak with are using Macs, I know that some of their products are found in Windows too. Blackmagic and Avid come to mind first, for Windows, and both have free NLE's that're feature-limited versions of the pro product:

Try the free version of Blackmagic's DaVinci Resolve; probably most of my customers are using this.

Avid's Media Composer First is likewise a feature-limited version of some very high-end pro software.

Here's a list of free NLEs aimed at beginners, which you may or may not consider yourself. Looking at the list, there are some I wouldn't call NLEs, such as Freemake Video Converter, and Blender is a VFX platform, though it may also work as NLE, I'm not sure.
posted by Sunburnt at 10:31 AM on December 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


Back in the day a really simple, solid, freeware Windows video editor that performed well was VirtualDub, but per Wikipedia there hasn't been a new release in half a decade.
posted by XMLicious at 11:11 AM on December 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


Virtualdub is pretty well married to AVI-type video, which is going by the wayside because H.264, the juggernaut video codec, is barely and badly supported by AVI.

That said, it does AVI really, really well. You can use it for MPEG-based codecs.
posted by Sunburnt at 9:20 AM on December 26, 2018


« Older Bread burnt on bottom, not cooked through   |   Transitioning from MacBook Pro to iPad Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.