Creating Video Projects

You have a variety of options for editing your video. This is not an exhaustive list and you are welcome to use any program that you prefer, but the following are all programs that are free for you to use for your next project.

Recommendations

For Beginners

• Camtasia, OpenShot, iMovie, Clipchamp, and VideoProc Vlogger have the features you need and a ton of great tutorials to follow.

Off-Campus Options

• OpenShot is free and open source and relatively easy to learn.
• Clipchamp
  • The Clipchamp browser version is free. Though you cannot save to the cloud, you can save to your computer.
  • On Windows computers, the Clipchamp app is free to download.
• VideoProc Vlogger is free to download and has some fun filters and effects.
• DaVinci Resolve is a more advanced editor, but it is completely free on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers.

On Chromebooks

• Clipchamp works in Chrome browsers.

On Phones and Tablets

• Clipchamp has a free iPhone app that can also be downloaded on iPads (but has a small screen size).
• Adobe Rush has iOS and Android apps.
• There are also quite a few free videos editors to choose from. Before you get too invested in an app, be sure that it doesn't have a total time limit or a watermark.

Clipchamp is an easy to use and fully featured video editor for Windows and is also available as a browser-based Chrome and Edge webapp. It allows you to create videos with all of the basic features you'd want. Including openly-licensed content like music, images, and even video clips that you can use in your project.

The browser-based version of Clipchamp is great on Chromebooks and has all the features you need for small projects but working on big projects with multiple files over a browser may cause playback lag and other unwanted issues. The browser-based version also has freemium content that you want to avoid so that you can use it for free. Premium content is marked with a diamond icon, so avoid that to keep your project free.

To edit a video across multiple devices (like if you want to start editing on your home computer and then continue in the library computer lab the next day), be sure to sync your project to your Google Drive account. You will first want to upload your video files to your Google Drive and then you can import them into Clipchamp directly from your drive. See the video below for instructions.

Available in the Makerspace Lab (Library 122) on Windows computers.

VideoProc Vlogger is a completely free (proprietary) video editor that works with a variety of video formats and has several features for bringing your editing to the next level. If you're annoyed with the lack of features in OpenShot but don't want to take the deep dive in DaVinci Resolve, VideoProc Vlogger is probably what you're looking for.

Their guides offer extensive text and video descriptions on how to use the many features, including syncing to music, color correction, and reframing options for various social media aspect ratios.

The main downside to using VideoProc Vlogger is the lack of support for creating captions. For captioning, we recommend using YouTube, Canvas Studio, or Panopto (all free to Cal Poly Humboldt students, staff and faculty).

The programs above are great for most video projects but if you find yourself wanting to get into more advanced video editing and film making, the options below are all professional quality programs that you can access for free. These will take considerable time to learn and will be overkill for most class assignments. But if you are ready to immerse yourself in editing and want to get to the next level, these are great options.