Video Editor Review

This is now my third week using OpenShot Video Editor. It works, it’s free and is very glitchy.

The good thing about the OpenShot Video Editor is free. It’s great for a new video you tube personality. It is very easy to learn. When you overlap videos the fade out transition to the new video is automatically inserted. I have a 7 year old computer and it struggles with the program (the processor isn’t top notch new). The processing time to export a video project into a finalized video file can be very long. For me a 20 min project takes about 2 hours (about .3 upload every minute) or a 1.5 minute video about 40 minutes.

This is then where the problems begin. The overlay fading usually works but not always. As I slice, speed up, layer voice over with time lapse, music and then export to video file things happen. I watch the final video all the way through and there are glitching, usually in the automatic transitions. So then it’s frustrating re-editing and re-exporting again and again.

One other issue is the clips need to be perfect the first time. If I change my mind and want to further speed up a clip and add a 2x over the previous 4x the program cuts the clip in half instead of speeding up. So then I have to grab the original clip and speed it to 8x the setting I want.

I have had a similar issue on sound. When I layer sound in one of the tracks I then have no control over it’s volume. I would have to copy it down in a separate project, reduce the sound, export and then overlay. As it currently is, if I tell the program to play at 40% even though I have it highlighted it will change my voice (an unselected clip) to a reduced to 40%. In the end the program had so damaged my voice audio file I rerecorded it.

One nice thing about the program besides being free and quick to learn is it doesn’t need to download the files onto the platform to work. The files stay on the card. So grabbing a new video is fast and starting work. Bad thing about that is I delete the files off my car and the project is then an empty shell unable to work. So make sure you really were done. But with an older computer this is something I can live with considering the push for HD video editing.

The platform is usable. Just be prepared to export multiple times checking for glitches and go off and do something else, like your next video while it’s working its way through.

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