Video Editing for free in Windows 10

Today during the monthly meeting of the “Professional Speakers Association of India”, my friend Navanee Viswa gave a good talk on the importance of video recordings for professional speakers. He was sharing his experiences of the actual recording for a typical video taking just a quarter of the effort, but the majority (3/4th) going towards editing the video and polishing it.

When it comes to the software for video editing, there are plenty of apps for iOS and Android – but they are aimed for limited editing and small work like captioning, and it is cumbersome to work on the small screen of mobile for this job. On the other side of the spectrum, video professionals use Adobe Premiere (available for Windows PC and Mac OS) or Final Cut Pro X from Apple (for Mac OS). Personally, I fall in between these two, I do video editing – mostly home videos and the recordings of talks I give. I like to use the following:

1. For serious work, requiring a good set of editing tools, I go with Adobe Premiere Elements for Windows (Rs.6500 + tax in India). I bought this as part of the Adobe Photoshop Elements bundle (Rs.9500 + tax in India) which is great value as it comes with a light version of the versatile Adobe Photoshop photo editing software too.  The downside to PRE (Premiere Elements) is that it requires nearly half the training time that the full Premiere needs, which is quite a lot, I won’t recommend this for any casual user.
2. If I am on my Apple iMac, which I do at times for home videos, as it is my media server running Plex, then I use the lovely “iMovie” app.
3. If it is for regular video recordings that I would be publishing on YouTube, I used to go with the simple yet powerful “Windows Movie Maker“. Unfortunately, a few years ago, Microsoft stopped shipping it. And this was the question I was asked by the participants – what to do if you are using a Windows 10 PC – I am going to be answering that in this post.

In the recent builds of Windows 10, say 1809, ship out of the box, a free video editor that is extremely easy to use and ticks all the basic features needed for amateur users. Unfortunately, the app is normally hidden and not listed at all (or listed prominently) in the start menu. We will first look at two ways you can discover the app.

Either way, the inbuilt “Video Editor” app in Windows 10 will get launched. You start by adding all the media assets (Photos and Videos) in the “Project Library” section, then dragging them to the “Storyboard” area, then rearranging the clips or trimming them, followed by captioning and then exporting the video.

If you wish to go further, like squeezing your large video files for sending through WhatsApp or editing the audio in more ways, check these Open Source tools that are available for free:

• HandBrake is a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs. Please download this only from their official site: handbrake.fr
• Audacity is an easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor and recorder.
• VideoLAN Movie Creator is a non-linear editing software for video creation.

You are all set, start to showcase your newly found video editing chops!