Not great, but there are high bit-rate files in a high resolution. They would start off fine, but begin to skip and stutter after a few seconds. OpenShot loaded the clips just fine, though it did have difficulty playing them. This produces large files that some low-end editors really struggle with. I guess they're easy to code and attractive to complete beginners.īut how does it perform? I captured some video from a game using Nvidia Shadowplay. I never understand why so many video editors want to include all these features: cross-fades, fade-outs and fade-ins are generally all you will ever need. There's also a whole pile of transitions, but unless you want to recreate Homer Simpson's use of star wipes, then you're better off never touching any of them. The effects are equally useless, with only one or two having any utility. The included presets are mostly unusable amateur rubbish that no one in their right mind would want to use. There's a titler, which is okay, but not terribly flexible and that's all there is when it comes to captions, titles, etc. What's not so good is that you very quickly come up against the limitations of the program. Drag some clips into the bin, drag them onto the timeline and arrange them to make your video. This is a good thing as you'll be able to transfer what you've learned to another editing program should you choose to do so. There's the timeline at the bottom, a clip bin on the left and a preview pane on the right.

When you start OpenShot, you'll notice it's laid out in pretty much the same way every video editor is.

In short, OpenShot uses Qt to make it easy to support multiple platforms - in this case Windows, Mac and Linux. Qt is a a toolkit that allows easy development for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and embedded systems without having to recode interfaces for each of these platforms. If you're a casual user, this won't mean anything to you. The first thing to note is that OpenShot uses Qt. Whilst I may have used high-end editors for professional work, I don't use an Avid suite to make simple YouTube videos, so I'm also interested in something simple for my own use.

I'm forever being asked to recommend video editing software, so I'm always on the look-out for something that is simple, light on system resources and flexible enough to produce decent results. I worked in the film and video industry for over ten years and have used lots of different video editing software.

Openshot video editor for pc