Video editing software, or a video editor is software used performing the post-production video editing of digital video sequences on a

non-linear editing system Non-linear editing is a form of offline editing for audio, video, and image editing. In offline editing, the original content is not modified in the course of editing. In non-linear editing, edits are specified and modified by specialized sof ...

. It has replaced traditional flatbed

celluloid Celluloids are a class of materials produced by mixing nitrocellulose and camphor, often with added dyes and other agents. Once much more common for its use as photographic film before the advent of safer methods, celluloid's common contemporary ...

film editing tools and analog video tape-to-tape online editing machines. Video editing software serves a lot of purposes, such as

filmmaking Filmmaking (film production) is the process by which a motion picture is produced. Filmmaking involves a number of complex and discrete stages, starting with an initial story, idea, or commission. It then continues through screenwriting, casti ...

audio commentary An audio commentary is an additional audio track, usually digital, consisting of a lecture or comments by one or more speakers, that plays in real time with a video. Commentaries can be serious or entertaining in nature, and can add informatio ...

, and general editing of video content. In NLE software, the user manipulates sections of video, images, and audio on a sequence. These clips can be trimmed, cut, and manipulated in many different ways. When editing is finished, the user exports the sequence as a

video file A video file format is a type of file format for storing digital video data on a computer system. Video is almost always stored using lossy compression to reduce the file size. A video file normally consists of a container (e.g. in the Matroska ...

Components

Timeline

NLE software is typically based on a

timeline A timeline is a display of a list of events in chronological order. It is typically a graphic design showing a long bar labelled with dates paralleling it, and usually contemporaneous events. Timelines can use any suitable scale representi ...

interface where sections moving image video recordings, known as clips, are laid out in sequence and played back. The NLE offers a range of tools for trimming, splicing, cutting and arranging clips across the timeline. Another kind of clip is a text clip, used to add text to a video, such as

title screens This list includes terms used in video games and the video game industry, as well as slang used by players. 0–9 A ...

movie credits Two types of credits are traditionally used in films, television programs, and video games, all of which provide attribution to the staff involved in their productions. While opening credits will usually display only the major positions in a pro ...

. Audio clips can additionally be mixed together, such as mixing a

soundtrack A soundtrack is recorded music accompanying and synchronised to the images of a motion picture, drama, book, television program, radio program, or video game; a commercially released soundtrack album of music as featured in the soundtrack o ...

with multiple

sound effects A sound effect (or audio effect) is an artificially created or enhanced sound, or sound process used to emphasize artistic or other content of films, television shows, live performance, animation, video games, music, or other media. Traditi ...

. Typically, the timeline is divided into multiple rows on the y-axis for different clips playing simultaneously, whereas the x-axis represents the run time of the video. Effects such as transitions can be performed on each clip, such as a crossfade effect going from one scene to another.

Exporting

Since video editors represent a project with a

file format A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free. Some file formats ...

specific to the program, one needs to export the video file in order to publish it. Once a project is complete, the editor can then

export An export in international trade is a good produced in one country that is sold into another country or a service provided in one country for a national or resident of another country. The seller of such goods or the service provider is an ...

to movies in a variety of formats in a context that may range from broadcast tape formats to compressed video files for web publishing (such as on an online video platform or

personal website Personal web pages are World Wide Web pages created by an individual to contain content of a personal nature rather than content pertaining to a company, organization or institution. Personal web pages are primarily used for informative or enter ...

optical media In computing and optical disc recording technologies, an optical disc (OD) is a flat, usually circular disc that encodes binary data ( bits) in the form of pits and lands on a special material, often aluminum, on one of its flat surfaces ...

, or saved to mobile devices. To facilitate editing, source video typically has a higher resolution than the desired output. Therefore, higher resolution video needs to be downscaled during exporting, or after exporting in a process known as transsizing.

Visual effects

Green screens compare with Iman Crosson 20110524

As digital video editing advanced, visual effects became possible, and is part of the standard toolkit, usually found in prosumer and professional grade software. A common ability is to do

compositing Compositing is the process or technique of combining visual elements from separate sources into single images, often to create the illusion that all those elements are parts of the same scene. Live action, Live-action shooting for compositing is ...

techniques such as

chroma key Chroma key compositing, or chroma keying, is a visual-effects and post-production technique for compositing (layering) two images or video streams together based on colour hues ( chroma range). The technique has been used in many fields to ...

ing or

luma key Compositing is the process or technique of combining visual elements from separate sources into single images, often to create the illusion that all those elements are parts of the same scene. Live-action shooting for compositing is variously ca ...

ing, among others, which allow different objects to look as if they are in the same scene. A different kind of visual effects is

motion capture Motion capture (sometimes referred as mo-cap or mocap, for short) is the process of recording the movement of objects or people. It is used in military, entertainment, sports, medical applications, and for validation of computer vision and robo ...

. Software such as

Blender A blender (sometimes called a mixer or liquidiser in British English) is a kitchen appliance, kitchen and laboratory appliance used to mix, crush, purée or emulsion, emulsify food and other substances. A stationary blender consists of a blender ...

can perform motion capture to make animated objects follow an actor's movements.

Additional features

Most professional video editors are able to do color grading, which is to manipulate visual attributes of a video such as contrast to enhance output, and improve emotional impact. Some video editors such as iMovie include

stock footage Stock footage, and similarly, archive footage, library pictures, and file footage is film or video footage that can be used again in other films. Stock footage is beneficial to filmmakers as it saves shooting new material. A single piece of stock ...

available for use. Other then these text and titles includes tools for adding text and titles to videos. This can be used for adding credits and subtitles, as well as creating titles for the video.

Hardware requirements

As video editing puts great demands on storage and graphics performance, especially at high resolutions such as 4K, and for videos with many

visual effects Visual effects (sometimes abbreviated VFX) is the process by which imagery is created or manipulated outside the context of a live-action shot in filmmaking and video production. The integration of live-action footage and other live-action foota ...

, powerful hardware is often required. It is not uncommon for a computer built for video editing to have a lot of drive capacity, and a powerful

graphics processing unit A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...

, which optimally has hardware accelerated video encoding. Having sufficient disk space is important since videos take up large amounts of storage, depending on resolution and compression format used. Each minute of a

Full HD 1080p (1920×1080 progressively displayed pixels; also known as Full HD or FHD, and BT.709) is a set of HDTV high-definition video modes characterized by 1,920 pixels displayed across the screen horizontally and 1,080 pixels down the screen vert ...

(1080p) video at 30 fps takes up 60MB of space. When visual effects are used, a

server farm A server farm or server cluster is a collection of computer servers, usually maintained by an organization to supply server functionality far beyond the capability of a single machine. They often consist of thousands of computers which require ...

can be employed to speed up the rendering process.

Examples

Video editing software can be divided into consumer grade, which focuses on ease-of-use, along with professional grade software, which focuses on feature availability, and advanced editing techniques. The typical use case for the former is to edit personal videos on the go, when more advanced editing is not required.

Consumer grade

Apple Photos Photos is a photo management and editing application developed by Apple. It was released as a bundled app in iOS 8 on September 17, 2014—replacing the Camera Roll—and released as a bundled app to OS X Yosemite users in the 10.10.3 update on ...

Prosumer grade

Proprietary software

* iMovie * CyberLink PowerDirector

Professional grade

Proprietary software

Final Cut Pro Final Cut Pro is a series of non-linear editing, non-linear video editing software programs first developed by Macromedia, Macromedia Inc. and later Apple Inc. The most recent version, Final Cut Pro 10.6.4, runs on Macintosh, Mac computers power ...

Adobe Premiere Adobe Premiere Pro is a timeline-based and non-linear video editing software application (NLE) developed by Adobe Inc. and published as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud licensing program. First launched in 2003, Adobe Premiere Pro is a success ...

DaVinci Resolve DaVinci Resolve (originally known as da Vinci Resolve) is a color grading, color correction, visual effects, and audio post-production video editing application for macOS, Windows, and Linux, originally developed by da Vinci Systems, and now ...

Vegas Pro Vegas Pro (stylized as VEGAS Pro, colloquially called ''Sony Vegas'') is a video editing software package for non-linear editing (NLE). The first release of Vegas Beta was on June 11, 1999. The software runs on Windows operating systems. Origin ...

Lightworks Lightworks is a non-linear editing system (NLE) for editing and mastering digital video. It was an early developer of computer-based non-linear editing systems, and has been in development since 1989. Lightworks won a 2017 EMMY Award for being ...

Camtasia Camtasia (; formerly Camtasia Studio and Camtasia for Mac) is a software suite, created and published by TechSmith, for creating and recording video tutorials and presentations via screencast (screen recording), or via a direct recording plug-in ...

Free and open source software

Avidemux Avidemux is a free and open-source software application for non-linear video editing and transcoding multimedia files. The developers intend it as "a simple tool for simple video processing tasks" and to allow users "to do elementary things in ...

Cinelerra Cinelerra is a video editing and Digital compositing, composition program (an NLE, Non-Linear Editor) designed for Linux. It is free software distributed under the open source GNU General Public License. In addition to editing, it supports advance ...

Flowblade Flowblade Movie Editor is a free and open-source video editing software for Linux. The project was started by lead developer Janne Liljeblad in 2009 and has been active since. The source code is currently hosted on GitHub. Flowblade employs a f ...

Kdenlive Kdenlive (; acronym for ''KDE Non-Linear Video Editor'') is a free and open-source video editing software based on the MLT Framework, KDE and Qt. The project was started by Jason Wood in 2002, and is now maintained by a small team of develope ...

OpenShot OpenShot Video Editor is a free and open-source video editor for Windows, macOS, Linux, and ChromeOS. The project started in August 2008 by Jonathan Thomas, with the objective of providing a stable, free, and friendly to use video editor. The pr ...

Shotcut Shotcut is a free and open-source, cross-platform Video editing software, video, Audio editing software, audio, and Graphics software, image editing program for FreeBSD, Linux, macOS and Windows. Started in 2011 by Dan Dennedy, Shotcut is develo ...

While most video editing software has been separate from the operating systems, some operating systems have had a video editor installed by default, such as

Windows Movie Maker Windows Movie Maker (known as Windows Live Movie Maker for the 2009 and 2011 releases) is a discontinued video editing software program by Microsoft. It was first included in Windows Me on September 14, 2000 and in Windows XP on October 25, 2001 ...

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...

, or as a component of the default photo viewer, such as the Photos app on

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also include ...

. Some

social media platforms Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social media ...

, such as

TikTok TikTok, known in China as Douyin (), is a short-form video hosting service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from 15 seconds to 10 minutes. TikTok is an international version ...

and

Instagram Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can ...

may include a rudimentary video editor to trim clips.

References

External links

A guide to non-linear video editing, Adobe Software
{{Film Editing Film and video technology

Components

Timeline

Exporting

Visual effects

Additional features

Hardware requirements

Examples

Consumer grade

Prosumer grade

Proprietary software

Professional grade

Proprietary software

Free and open source software

See also

References

External links