The text-editing tools, used to create titles and credits sequences, are excellent: your text can be static or animated, flat or 3D, and applied in classic styles you’ve seen many times before, or drop in from the top and fly around your frame. We particularly like the Adobe-like History palette, which lists every action you’ve taken so you can step back through them in the event you make a mistake. You can copy and paste your clips around. Once you’ve got your clips ready and begun editing, there are handy time-savers such as the way clips snap together, and trimming that’s a case of placing the playhead and clicking once. The instructional videos are a must-watch if you’re a complete novice. It is, however, tricky to load up and start using if you’ve got no experience of similar applications. In this way, you can make things as complex as you like, removing modules you’re not using when they get in the way. It’s all there though - click any of the buttons along the top of the interface and they’ll add modules to your workspace. The basic Shotcut Video Editor user interface is a bit sparse by the standards of other non-linear video editors, which like to throw the kitchen sink at you in terms of windows, menus and options. That said, if you want to edit 4K natively you'll need a good 16GB of RAM so you might want to check out our best laptops (opens in new tab) or home computers (opens in new tab) if you need an upgrade.

Another big draw is that is drains very little from your machine, so even works on older setups. Despite being free and not company owned this has made it onto our best video editing software (opens in new tab).

Shotcut Video Editor is open source, meaning it gets updates based on the actual needs of those using it.

Shotcut editor