Shotcut

I have been looking for good, free, non-linear video editing tools for many years. This has always led me to the same handful of programs which do some nice things, and are good enough to improve on using iMovie or Windows Movie Maker. But they also all had some very strict limitations. Some don't deal well with different audio and video formats, others are very limited in their timeline editing, and still others have very limited encoding options.

For me, Shotcut appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and I was completely amazed how feature-complete and professional it is. So far I haven't found anything where the program would restrict my options, as most others do. It reads an impressive number of input formats. It allows me to customise my project settings with regards to picture format, so there won't be any surprises with unwanted resizing or "re-timing" of my input video. Likewise, it gives me complete control over the encoder, providing many presets, but allowing customisation down to the command line level – and handling encoding in a professional-style asynchronous queue.

The timeline editor is great, you'll be adding unlimited tracks and dragging in and out audio and video, cutting and trimming and overlaying in a breeze. Plus, it looks nice. The software makes it very easy to precisely trim input material, and comes with a selection of audio and video filters to boot. What it doesn't give you, unlike some other tools, is fancy amateur video transitions between clips. You can probably put together a few simple things using video filters and multiple tracks, but none of this drag & drop transition library business (your videos will probably look better without them anyway).

I'm glad to have finally found something like Shotcut. That it's open-source and seems to be updated very frequently is the icing on the cake. If you're looking for a "lightweight Premiere" non-linear editing suite (in contrast to linear editors such as Avidemux or VirtualDub), be sure to check this one out.

Marginally better than its "cousin" OpenShot (which is based on the same framework). Shotcut seems to be a bit more stable, but suffers from the same void of features, and a clumsy user interface. For example, you can not select several clips at once to apply an action to them (e.g. detach audio) - you have to do it for each clip by itself. Most annoyingly though, both programs seem to suffer from a very similar bug, where repeated use of "undo" and "redo" can sometimes scramble your project beyond repair, loosing tracks, clips, or leaving them in the wrong order. This is not acceptable. If I lose hours of work due to a bug, I can not consider a software as usable.