17 Video Editors Review for Blogs

These are the notes I took researching video editors for use in creating my blog. There are no detailed reviews or How-To’s. My main goal was to stabilize hand-held videos and not pay a lot of money. Other uses could be simple trimming, removing and adding sound, and adjusting brightness, contrast, etc.

Easily Stabilization with Video Editors

The final answer up front is that I used OpenShot and Adobe Express to get the results I was happy with for video stabilization. The important thing you need to know is I already pay for a subscription to Adobe Express. Details follow below.

If you are not picky, both Animotica and Filmforth have a stabilization function that does improve the video, but I wasn’t happy with the occasional “flashes” at times that made it seem choppy. Moving to most of the more expensive, “Intermediate” editors, the quality was only slightly better. My recommendation for cheap, easy, video stabilization that is of pretty good quality is to use Filmforth video editor (1x price about 20USD).

Improvement: I thought the best viewing with the least amount of jumps was from Openshot video editor with a significant “catch”: The video was smoother, but the edges of the video moved in and out to compensate for the shakiness of the camera. So, I used OpenShot to stabilize the video and then cropped the video in Adobe Express to eliminate the moving edges.

It’s more steps, but I am going to add an intro page and sound to the video, so it doesn’t take that much longer. Filmforth actually has a Crop function with a fixed ratio setting (e.g., 16×9) and I probably would have used this to complete the process if I didn’t already have a subscription to Adobe Express. Here is the Before and After results.

Video Editor Categories and Pricing

I separated the video editors into three levels: Easy, Intermediate (Midlevel), and Pro for my own use, that is not how the software makers identify them. Here is the very unprofessional results I came up with, along with pricing. “Color-Crop” means I could crop a video and separately alter the brightness, contrast, saturation, etc., and not simply apply “effects”.

	Product	Company	Price/Time	Level	Color- Crop
	Adobe Express	Adobe	$100/YEAR	Easy+	Yes
	Adobe Premier	Adobe	$263/YEAR	Pro	n/a
	Animotica	Mixilab	$20/once	Easy	No
	Blender	blender.org	FREE	Pro	n/a
	Canva	Canva	$120/YEAR	Easy+	Yes
	Clipchamp	Microsoft	$120/YEAR	Easy	n/a
	Video Studio	Corel	$100/once	Midlevel	Yes
	Davinci Resolve	Black Magic Design	$295/once	Pro	n/a
	Filmforth	IOForth	$20/once	Easy	No
	Filmora	Wondershare	$80/once	Midlevel	Yes
	Kdenlive	kdenlive.org	FREE	Pro	n/a
	Movie Maker	V3TApps	$25/once	Just Weird	No
	Openshot	openshot.org	FREE	Midlevel	No
	Pinnacle	Corel	$60/once	Midlevel	Yes
	Power Director	Cyberlink	$75/YEAR	Midlevel	Yes
	Shotcut	shotcut.org	FREE	Midlevel	Complex
	VideoPad	NCH Software	$80/YEAR	Midlevel	Limited

I immediately stopped researching the Pro level video editors because they are expensive and/or overly-complicated for what I want to do. It’s probably worth noting, though, that the Davinci video editor gave the BEST results, by far, for stabilizing a video.

Adobe Express and Canva

I listed two video editors as “Easy+”, meaning they were much easier to use than the Intermediate editors, but they both had a lot more functionality than the Easy editors. Both Adobe Express and Canva are a bit pricey, but they are super easy to use. I have continued to pay for Adobe Express because the method to make videos out of photos, adding text, and music is extremely simple to use, as well as easily being able to crop, resize, and adjust the color of the video.

I have no experience with Canva, but the interface looks very similar. If you want to stick with free stuff, explore both Canva and Adobe Express. They both have sophisticated web interfaces, while Canva also offers an edition for PCs.

For what it’s worth, you can get a subscription to Microsoft Clipchamp in the same price range, but it seems to be very over-priced. The interface is worse than either of the above and when I wanted to crop a video, it sent me to the web and it just stunk (in my non-professional opinion), so I stopped looking at Clipchamp.

Buying An Intermediate Video Editor

If I was going to be editing a lot of videos, my first choice would be to try and master one of the advanced open source video editors: Blender or Kdenlive.

If I was going to pay money for a slightly more polished / easy to use software, at first I was going to say I’d pick Pinnacle from Corel because I preferred the interface. After discovering I could make a side-by-side video easily with Filmora, and not being able to follow the directions in Pinnacle, I think I would go with that Filmora at this point. They are both one-time fees.

Here is a peak at a few of the intermediate video editors. Corel seems to make both Corel Video Studio and Pinnacle which is a bit of weirdness I don’t have figured out.

Remarks

I may be the biggest consumer of this page as I forget what editors I looked at after taking a trip and having videos to edit. It’s frustrating to rework the same stuff, so my notes are here for me and to maybe be useful for you, too. In other news, it turns out I was lucky in picking Adobe Express as an easy video editor that came with quite a lot of functionality. I can also use it from my linux computers.