If you are reading these lines, it is likely that within your group of friends or family, you are the one in charge of video editing, and if you want to get good results, we know that you need a program that meets your needs. Within this very competitive segment, we want to stop specifically in Shotcut, one of the best utilities we have found recently, and about which we will talk now.

First, Shotcut is an application that will allow you to create videos or edit them to share these files with whoever you want, reaching a definition at the height of the best proposals, almost at the level of professionals. If we add to this the fact that it is free, completely free, and even more complete than other cheap but paid ones, there is no doubt it is worth giving it a try.

Operation

That is to say, you will be able to forget about Pinnacle Studio, Windows Movie Maker, Lightworks, and other famous systems to give place to this one that has multiplatform support so that you can carry out your projects on practically any device. Then, if you are used to those, it won't take you too long to take advantage of our today's protagonist since the distribution of its main elements is similar.

However, you will soon notice specific improvements, such as the possibility of uploading videos in 4K format, which is not so common, or recording directly from the webcam, in case you want to edit videos for tutorials in which you appear. If that does not convince you, you have a screen grabber that, under certain conditions, generates a background image that produces others.

Shotcut also has an integrated format converter, so you don't need to edit the videos if you want them to go in one format and come out in another. That frees you from the space and RAM consumption of having another application open. In the meantime, if you have applied changes to the file, you can undo or redo them as often as you like until you are 100% satisfied with your work.

And what kind of editing can be applied to the contents? We can then discuss the available transitions and effects, such as color correction, adding saturation filters, or optimizing the white balance. We would also like to mention the drag & drop function that allows you to drop files directly onto the timeline or others you will discover as you use them.

Let us also tell you that there are many good tutorials on the Internet, both on websites and YouTube, thanks to which you will learn some tricks to get the most out of this tool, even if you are just getting started with it.

Keep in mind

Although here we have been talking about the installable version of Shotcut, you should not lose sight of the fact that we also have a portable one that we can carry on any USB device, from which we can launch it without wasting time with the installation process.

The user interface may not be the first reason to recommend this program since at. First, it is a bit confusing due to the enormous amount of functions it offers, but with a little time, you will get the hang of it. While you do so, you will appreciate that it is translated into many languages, as well as the excellent placement of the menus at the top and the file information on the left margin.

The best

Among the main positive aspects of this service, we can mention its excellent compatibility with all types of audio, video, and image files and the multitude of tools it puts at our disposal. We must add a time bar that is excellent for controlling the contents and possibly undoing and redoing the changes according to our preferences.

The worst thing

On the other hand, we also found some issues that have not convinced us, such as the fact that it is a platform that occupies quite a lot of memory, which could compromise some older computers that are not very well equipped. In addition, the rendering is somewhat slow. It affects the operation of the rest of the applications on the computer, and, finally, we have noticed some loss of quality when moving between formats.

Rating

Beyond the latter, we insist that Shotcut is one of the best programs we can consider for free video editing, working not only with video files but also with audio and images. It is software with each feature we expected when downloading and installing, which has also surprised us with other beautiful additional ones.