Best Free Software

www.openshot.org What you need: Windows 7, 8.1 or 10

Openshot Video Editor 2.6.1

Many free video-editing programs are either too basic or too complex, but Openshot strikes the perfect balance between advanced features and ease of use, and this new version is its best yet. The open-source software has added lots of useful new tools while keeping its interface simple.

The most exciting change in version 2.6.0 (which is the latest major release – the ‘2.6.1’ in the heading above relates to a minor update that fixed some bugs) is the introduction of ‘computer-vision’ AI effects for enhancing your videos. The best of these is Stabilizer, which offers an easy way to detect camera shake, and eliminate it with a single click, making the clips you capture look steadier and more professional.

There’s also Tracker, which lets you draw a box around any element in a video to track its motion throughout each frame – very useful for recordings of moving vehicles or people. Another new AI effect, Object Detection, automatically identifies objects in a scene and lets you add text labels to them, but it’s currently still in beta and requires you to download extra files (from www.snipca.com/39393) to use it.

Openshot has also added nine new audio effects, which let you reduce the volume of loud sounds in videos while amplifying quiet ones, apply echo to your audio track, and make voices sound robotic, whispered and more.

On a more practical level, Openshot’s Timeline – the most important part of any video editor – now offers a ‘zoom slider’, which makes it much easier to navigate multiple clips, tracks and transitions. This feature was apparently requested by the developer’s daughter, and we think she made a great call.

The Timeline also now offers smoother ‘snapping’, for aligning tracks as you trim them, while the program’s improved Transform mode speeds up the process of resizing, rotating and cropping video content.

1 Add a video to Openshot by clicking the File menu and choosing ‘Import Files’. Drag the clip to a track in the Timeline at the bottom of the window. 2 Click the clip you want to edit and it will appear in the Video Preview pane, where you can play, pause, fastforward and rewind it. 3 Click the Effects tab and choose an option to apply. We’ve selected the new Stabilizer effect to remove camera shake from our footage. 4 Drag and drop the effect on to the clip in the Timeline. When the Initialize Effect box opens, click the Process Effect button to apply the change.