The Best Video Editing Software of 2018 Whether you're a weekend GoPro shooter or a full-time video professional, you need editing software that's powerful but easy to use. Here's how the best.
Movie Editor For Mac ReviewsTurn your videos into movie magic.
With iMovie for iOS and macOS, you can enjoy your videos like never before. It’s easy to browse your clips and create Hollywood-style trailers and stunning 4K-resolution movies. You can even start editing on iPhone or iPad, then finish on your Mac.
Download iMovie for iOS
Download iMovie for macOS
See a film shot in 4K resolution on iPhone and edited with iMovie.
Watch in HDDownload the 4K version
Make MoviesEasy. From the first scene to the last.
Whether you’re using a Mac or an iOS device, it’s never been easier to make it in the movies. Just choose your clips, then add titles, music, and effects. iMovie even supports 4K video for stunning cinema-quality films. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a wrap.
Studio-Quality Titles
Select from dozens of styles to add beautifully animated titles and credits to your movies. On a Mac, you can easily customize the font, size, formatting, and color of the text.
High-Fidelity Filters
Choose from 10 creative video filters that add a cinematic touch. Give your film a nostalgic silent‑era style, a vintage western appearance, or a futuristic cool-blue look. It’s simple to apply filters to individual clips or your entire movie at once.
Extra-Special Effects
Make action shots more exciting by slowing them down. Let viewers fly through scenes by speeding them up.* Or add a broadcast feel to your school report with picture-in-picture and split-screen effects.
Soundtracks, Simplified
Rock your video with over 80 smart soundtracks on iOS that intelligently adjust to match the length of your movie. You can also add built-in sound effects or record your own voiceover to create a video that sounds as good as it looks.
Appear AnywhereTransport yourself with green-screen effects.
Go everywhere you’ve always wanted to — without leaving home. With green-screen effects in iMovie for iOS and macOS, you can place yourself or your characters in exotic locations with a tap or a click. Masking controls and strength adjustments let you fine-tune the effect for maximum believability.
You have hundreds of videos. And one big dream to be a moviemaker. iMovie trailers let you quickly create fun, Hollywood-style movie trailers from all that footage. Choose from a range of templates in almost any genre, pick your studio logo, and type in your movie title and credits. Then add photos and videos to the storyboard. Whether you’re using an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, you’ll have an instant blockbuster.
iMovie for iOS and iMovie for macOS are designed to work together. You can start cutting a project on your iPhone, then use AirDrop or iCloud Drive to wirelessly transfer it to your iPad. You can also send a project from your iPhone or iPad to your Mac for finishing touches like color correction and animated maps. And you can even open iMovie projects in Final Cut Pro to take advantage of professional editing tools. Time to take a bow.
iMovie on MacBook ProYou have a great touch for making movies.
iMovie is even easier to use with MacBook Pro, featuring the revolutionary Touch Bar. The most useful commands automatically appear on the keyboard, right where you need them. And MacBook Pro easily powers through demanding 4K video projects so you can edit and export in record time.
iMovie on iPad ProA powerful performance in every movie.
iMovie delivers a tour de force on iPad Pro. Work with multiple 4K video clips. Create effects like green screen, picture‑in‑picture, or split screen and play them back instantly. Use keyboard shortcuts to speed up your editing performance. And with the USB‑C port on iPad Pro, you can connect to an external display to show others your latest cut in 4K while you continue editing.
iMovie in the ClassroomAssignments that come to life.
Engage your students through video storytelling. Students can use green-screen effects to go back in time for history projects, or create split-screen and picture-in-picture effects to report on current events. Drag-and-drop trailers make it even simpler to create beautiful, personal projects that look and sound great. And iMovie for iOS works with ClassKit, so teachers can assign projects to students, and students can easily hand in their finished assignments right from the app.
Download iMovie
iMovie is easy to use, and it’s free. Just click to download and install on your Mac or iOS device.
![]() Clips.
Clips is a free iOS app for making and sharing fun videos with text, effects, graphics, and more.
Learn more about clips
Apple computers have long been aimed at the creative professional, particularly when it comes to photo and video editing. Unfortunately, industry-leading packages like Adobe Premiere, After Effects, and Apple’s own Final Cut Pro aren’t cheap.
Fortunately, there’s a selection of capable free video editing apps for Mac to sink your teeth into. Some are made for beginners, while others will satisfy seasoned video editors with their impressive feature sets.
These are our favorite free video editors for Mac.
1. iMovie
Summary: A free, consumer-grade video editor. It’s well-optimized for Apple hardware and suitable for most personal projects.
iMovie is free for anyone who owns a Mac. Plus, the iOS version is free to all iPhone and iPad owners. The software is aimed at consumers who want to quickly create videos with footage stored in their Photos library. To facilitate this, iMovie uses a simplified timeline editor that doesn’t allow for multitrack editing.
Despite the linear editing and basic UI, iMovie is a highly optimized piece of software that can handle 4K video and green screen compositing. It also supports picture-in-picture video and slow-motion/fast-forward visual effects. iMovie can generate titles, drag-and-drop transitions, and motion graphics like 3D globes and travel maps.
The app comes with built-in music and sound effects that are ready to go. It can generate Hollywood-style trailers using footage that you supply. Additionally, the app allows you to export directly to YouTube and Vimeo at up to 4K resolution.
Download:iMovie (Free)
2. DaVinci Resolve
Summary: A powerful, professional-grade video editor that lacks the color grading tools the developers are famous for.
The Studio version of DaVinci Resolve costs nearly $1,000, but the basic version is completely free. Better still, it includes the same high-quality image processing abilities as the pricier version. You get a powerful video editor, some of the best color correction capabilities around, and even support for external hardware panels to enable faster editing.
There are limitations, of course. The main one is that Resolve can only output in SD, HD and Ultra HD, which is likely more than enough for most users. Also, the app places limits on some of the advanced grading and tracking tools. However, these restrictions are mainly in place to convince professional users to upgrade.
The app might have quite a learning curve, but DaVinci Resolve is one of the most powerful video editing suites on the planet and you get a lot for free. See our comparison of DaVinci Resolve and HitFilm ExpressHitFilm Express vs. DaVinci Resolve: The Free Video Editor BattleHitFilm Express vs. DaVinci Resolve: The Free Video Editor BattleWe pit HitFilm Express vs. DaVinci Resolve and compare to see which one wins the free video editor battle.Read More for more on how it stacks up.
Download:Da Vinci Resolve (Free)
3. OpenShot
Summary: A free and open source video editor with an impressive list of features. However, the interface is outdated and may put some users off.
OpenShot is a cross-platform open source tool that’s been around since 2008. It’s built with the aim of providing a stable, free, and accessible video editor. The project receives several major updates per year, in line with the expectations for an open source project with a small team.
OpenShot’s feature list has grown over the years to include great support for a variety of formats, keyframes for animation, and unlimited video/audio tracks. It also packs in transition and compositing support, titles, and a heap of extra features you’d expect from a modern video editor.
Past criticisms have panned OpenShot’s reliability, but it’s still worth a shot for free.
Download:OpenShot (Free)
4. Shotcut
Summary: A capable open source editor with an interface that’s superior to OpenShot.
Here’s another free, open source, cross-platform video editor. Shotcut’s feature list is just as impressive as OpenShot, but Shotcut features a great-looking interface. It more closely resembles a pro-tier application than a free one.
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The app supports a wide range of video files and formats, including 4K, ProRes, and DNxHD. Shotcut also includes great support for working with audio, an impressive list of video effects (including compositing and transitions), and a flexible UI.
Of note are support for advanced features like 5.1 surround sound, three-way color correction, and a huge number of video and audio filters. There’s even a full set of official Shotcut video tutorials you can watch to get you up to speed with the editor.
Download:Shotcut (Free)
5. Blender
Summary: Not a purpose-built video editor, but it’s a powerful tool for free.
Blender is a free 3D modeling and compositing app used in some high-profile productions. Yet many don’t realize Blender is also a capable non-linear video editor, provided you’re willing to take the time to learn.
You can use Blender to cut and splice video, mix and sync audio, or apply adjustment layers, transitions, and filters. You probably won’t edit a whole film together in Blender, but for basic editing tasks it might suffice.
Blender isn’t the easiest system to learn, but underneath the hood is a powerful non-linear video editor. Check out Daniel Pocock’s quick guide to editing video in Blender and the official Blender video sequencer manual to learn more.
Download: Blender (Free)
6. Lightworks
Summary: A powerful editor with plenty of features, but some seriously restrictive output options make the free version feel more like a trial.
Lightworks is one of the most powerful apps on this list. I’d happily recommend it above all other packages if it wasn’t so restrictive for the free user. The free version includes video effects, multicam editing, and titling, as well as the usual multi-layered timeline approach you’d expect from a comprehensive editor.
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Unfortunately, rendering (exporting your project) is limited to 1080p output on Vimeo, and 720p output to YouTube. You can also render to Lightworks Archives, but you lose H.264, MP4, or even DVD export options.
So while the toolkit is vast, Lightworks isn’t a very appealing free editor unless you’d like to thoroughly try it out for free and upgrade at a later time.
Download:Lightworks (Free, premium version available)
7. Avidemux
Summary: A capable freebie, but lacking in polish and features.
Avidemux made our list of the best Linux video editors7 Free Open Source Video Editors for Linux7 Free Open Source Video Editors for LinuxVideo editing on Linux is constantly improving. A good selection of open source video editing software is now available to Linux users, and we've got seven of the best for you to check out.Read More. Though it’s basic in nature, it works well for simple editing tasks. The app supports a wide variety of input and output formats. The project undergoes several updates a year, with development continuing at a steady pace.
Thankfully, the team maintains parity among all three major versions, so you won’t miss out on any features if you opt for the Mac package.
Avidemux is best reserved for simple tasks like cutting a video down to size, applying video or audio filters, and transcoding. If you’re willing to dig a little deeper, you’ll find a highly capable script editor to automate many of these common tasks.
Be sure to check out the Avidemux wiki for learning materials, and the Avidemux forum can help in case you get stuck.
Download:Avidemux (Free)
Mac Video Editing on a Budget
So which is the best video editor for you? iMovie is probably the best all-rounder. It’s free, easy to use, and carefully optimized for Apple hardware. There are plenty of features in it to satisfy beginners and mid-tier users. However, it lacks the raw power to compete with Final Cut or Premiere Pro.
Da Vinci Resolve, on the other hand, is surprisingly-feature rich. It offers multi-track editing and a huge number of professional-tier features to play with. Blender is open source and powerful, but is bogged down by complexity. Shotcut and Openshot are pretty evenly matched, so why not test drive them both? And if you’re looking for something specific to 4K video editing, check out VideoProc.
If you want a simple video conversion app instead of a full-fledged video editor, try these top macOS video convertersThe 7 Best Video Converter Apps for macOSThe 7 Best Video Converter Apps for macOSNeed a Mac video converter app? Here are the best options for easily converting any kind of video on macOS.Read More. And if you need to edit images as well as video, check out our lists of free and paid image editors for MacThe 8 Best Free and Paid Image Editors for MacThe 8 Best Free and Paid Image Editors for MacHere are the best free and paid Mac image editors, whether you're a professional professional or amateur shutterbug.Read More and free Mac photo editorsThe 8 Best Free and Paid Image Editors for MacThe 8 Best Free and Paid Image Editors for MacHere are the best free and paid Mac image editors, whether you're a professional professional or amateur shutterbug.Read More too.
Image credit: Gustavo Devito/Flickr
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