Editing aids
Effects, transitions and music.
The video editors featured in this Roundup can help you weave a compelling narrative by manipulating the different clips and using various effects to enhance their appearance. At the minimum, you need to be able to make smooth transition from one clip to the next.
Although rather equally matched, as you spend more time with them, you’ll come to realise that some tools are more intuitive at manipulating files than others.
Shotcut, for instance, refers to these as Effects, and clicking the Effects button at the top presents a panel on the left from where you can introduce different video, audio and other effects into your clips. The application resorts to use of buttons to segregate the different effects, but unfortunately there aren’t any helpful tooltips to assist users.
Kdenlive comes across as far more polished on this front, offering a text list of all available effect, split into different categories such as Artistic, Audio, Blur and hide, which makes for easy selection. It also enables you to filter the available choices into video and audio.
If a clip has 540 frames as per LiVES, when deploying an effect, it pops open a dialog advising you that it’s adding an effect onto all 540 individual frames. The application is unusable during this process, which is far slower, compared to all the other tools.
In stark contrast with the other applications, Openshot presents helpful pictures to depict the different effects and transitions such as cross, distortion, hue saturation, wave and so on. This is incredibly helpful for novice users, because the alternative is to deploy an effect or transition to determine what each does, as you must with the other tools.