Video editing can be a very sophisticated task. Mac users are famous for their skills in this area. Two applications stand out for their excellence and quality, namely Final Cut Pro and Blender. Both have been used in famous films and TV programs. Here below is a description of these two apps and five others that are also a frequent choice amongst Mac users.
1. Movavi Video Editor For Mac
Movavi is a video editor application for the Mac that has a free version as well as a more full-featured Pro alternative. It runs on the Mac OS X 10.7 or later and is an easy to learn editing tool that can be mastered in well under an hour. Let’s take a look at the features included in this powerful editing software.
Free Features
Best Video Editing Software for Windows and Mac for professionals as well as amatuer. All of the Movie Editing software’s mentioned have a free version with limited features of course and you can always swtich to paid version to get access to more brilliant features. I shoot video on a Canon XL2 and edit with Final Cut Express. I am looking to get a more powerful computer to edit as I currently edit on a 2007/8 MacBook with 120GB hard drive. It gets the job done but rendering takes forever and I can tell my MacBook is slowing down.
- The free version of Movavi is in itself an extremely useful tool for video editing. You can export your finished video to any of the popular video formats as well as uploading directly online.
- Filters such as Pop-art and Old Movie let you easily add character to your home videos for a distinctive finished product.
- One of the best features of Movavi is their new Montage Wizard. Incorporating elements of artificial intelligence, the program can take your footage and edit it to create a complete movie including the music of your choice.
- Audio is an important facet of any quality video and Movavi offers the user a full suite of audio tools. You can manipulate audio frequency, remove background noise, and easily add sound effects to your video.
- A beat detection feature lets you easily sync your video with its musical soundtrack.
- The program enables you to add voice-overs or input from musical instruments for more creative flexibility.
- Stickers and music tracks are provided and can easily be used with your video projects.
- Capture video directly from your webcam and start editing it immediately.
Pro Features
In addition to all of the features in the free version, the professional tool adds sample videos and more music tracks. It also introduces keyframe animation to add movement to titles and overlay clips. Whether you opt for the pro or free version, Movavi gives you the ability to create quality videos in a simple and painless manner.
2. Filmora for Mac
Filmora by Wondershare is a powerful video editing application for your Mac machine running OS X 10.10 or later. Its intuitive design makes it easy for anyone to create great videos using its array of advanced features. The developers have included creative tools that enable the user to make outstanding videos by dragging and dropping moving graphics into your videos or adding effects by taking advantage of their regularly updated effects store. You can download a free trial version of Filmora to see if it’s right for you.
Free Features
- With Filmora, you can edit and export videos at a resolution up to 4K and the tool makes it simple to import photos and clips from social media platforms.
- You can reverse your clips and play them backwards, and frame by frame previewing is available for more precise editing.
- Speed control that allows you to speed up or slow down your video up to 100 times, makes the tool an excellent choice for time-lapse videos.
- Other features that give you more creative flexibility include camera shake effects, color tuning, and the ability to easily remove background noise.
- You can add up to 5 text tracks and 10 music tracks to your video’s timeline.
Pro Features
In addition to Filmora’s basic features, the application includes advanced tools that allow you to create professional grade videos. Editing is made easier by the scene detection feature, which identifies scene changes automatically. Audio separation, equalization, and mixing capabilities let you fine tune the sound of your video. You can split your screen to play two or more videos at once and layering of multiple video clips can be done with the picture-in-picture feature. With advanced text editing that allows you to animate the text and titles of your videos, Filmora provides a powerful video editing tool for your Mac.
3. iMovie
iMovie was developed by Apple Inc. for its iOS and Mac devices. Released in 1999, it has been enhanced in later versions.
This app is a simple video editor for Mac that can be used to import videos using FireWire, from a USB drive or a hard drive. It has basic editing capabilities that can be used in video clips, to add effects and music. It also has video enhancing and color correction tools.
Overall, iMovie is ideal for the person looking for an easy to use tool, who is mainly interested in doing some basic editing to movie clips.
4. Final Cut Pro
Final Cut Pro is a series of non-linear video editing software programs, initially developed by Macromedia Inc. and later continued by Apple Inc. This well-known professional video editor for Mac stands out for its user-centered design, which has resulted in Final Cut Pro being at the top amongst the Mac video editing software programs currently available on the market.
The secret behind Final Cut Pro’s success is its interface, which has been designed based on non-computerized editing workflows, and thus, working the same way professionals do. Its interface has four main windows for organizing, editing and viewing. They are the browser, the timeline, the canvas and the viewer.
The browser is a virtual space for referencing and arranging clips. It is complemented by the timeline, where clips are grouped in sequences, which can also be nested inside other sequences. The canvas is used to output the contents of the timeline, and editing them with features such as overwrite, replace, insert, fit to fill and superimpose.
Finally, the viewer shows the content for each different channel of the selected clip’s audio, and has tools to adjust for scale, opacity, cropping, rotation, distortion and many more.
Final Cut Pro’s many users reflect the success of its design approach. In 2007 they amounted to 47% of the professionals in the USA market. Prizes, such as the Primetime Emmy Engineering Award in 2002, echoed this market judgment.
This video editing software for Mac has a proven record of excellence in the many movies in which it has been used. Amongst the best known titles in a long list are: The Rules of Attraction (2002), Happy Feet (2006), The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2009), Gamer (2009), By the People: The Election of Barack Obama (2009), The Patrol (2013), and the recent Saved by Grace (2016).
Other technical information includes being written in the Cocoa language, outputting films in DV, P2 MXF, HDV, XDSCAM, 2K, 4K and 5K, and running on Intel-based Mac computers supported by OS X Yosemite or later versions.
Based on its success, Apple has presented this app to the market in two versions: Pro and Express. This second version presents the same interface, but without some advanced functionality. Aimed at the non-professional editor, it is available at a more affordable price.
5. Blender
Blender is an open source and free video editing software for Mac with an outstanding differentiator over other similar apps: great functionality. Much more than just rendering – Blender is also a capable free video editor for Mac.
Written in C, C++ and Python, and available for Mac OS X 10.6 and above, this software has been used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, video games, engineering simulations, and many more.
Written in C, C++ and Python, and available for Mac OS X 10.6 and above, this software has been used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, video games, engineering simulations, and many more.
Although Blender has been described as difficult to use, it has been very successful on the market. This app has been used for television commercials in several countries, amongst them Australia, Iceland, Brazil, Russia, and Sweden. It is currently used by the History Channel and NASA, and has been a tool for the film Spider-Man 2.
Features
Its vast array of features include 3D modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, raster graphics editing, fluid and smoke simulation, particle simulation, soft body simulation, sculpting, animation, match moving, camera tracking, rendering, video editing and composing, and an integrated game engine.
This free video editing software Mac works by organizing data into data blocks of different types. Blocks are grouped in objects, which are edited in different modes.
The video editing is done with its Video Sequence Editor (VSE), which has plenty of functions. Examples are: Gaussian blur, color grading and several transformations.
In summary, Blender has filled a niche where high technical functionality is required. This great video editing software for Mac is the best option for complex editing tasks, such as engineering simulation and sophisticated 3D animations.
6. Avidemux
Avidemux is an open source and free video editing software for Mac, whose main characteristic is user-friendliness. Its ease of use and installation, with the added availability of a good tutorial, makes Avidemux an ideal tool for beginners in video editing.
The app can work with many video formats such as DVD, MPEG, AVI and many more. It can also handle several common audio formats, such as WAV, MP3, AAC and others.
In addition, it includes several functions for editing, cutting and filtering, which make this app a very practical tool.
In brief, Avidemux is a great tool for the beginner or unsophisticated video editor, who prefers something friendly and easy to learn.
7. Kdenlive
Kdenlive, which stands for KDE Non-Linear Video Editor, is an open source video editor for Mac. It is based on the MLT Framework, which is characterized by simplicity.
The application supports many formats, including AVI, QuickTime, FlashVideo, WMV and MPEG, among others. It also supports 16:9 and 4:4 ratios for NTSC, PAL and HD standards. A video capture Mac can be saved on a DVD.
On the other side, Kdenlive falls short in user-friendliness, particularly with its difficult interface. However, it comes with a manual that can help in answering questions.
In summary, Kdenlive is a good app for those friends of open source software, who want to edit small videos.
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Digital video editing has long been associated with massive machines packed with the most expensive components on the market, and with good reason. Dark and musty rooms crammed with tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment have been par for the course in the realm of high-end editing for decades. However, that’s been changing in recent years as laptops have become much more powerful. No longer are editors lashed to desks while working on a new project. Instead, they can actually join the rest of the world, and edit on the go.
Gigantic towers aren’t the only game in town anymore. But what exactly should an editor look for in a work laptop? The processor, RAM, storage, and display all play an important part of the equation. But more than anything, you need to pick a laptop that fits your specific on-the-job needs. Your budget, your existing workflow, and the needs of co-workers or clients all come into play here. It’s impossible to recommend just one laptop to fit every editor, so here is a selection of four laptops that offer a variety of features at different price points.
Apple MacBook Pro with Touch Bar
The MacBook Pro can make any video editor drool. Available in both 13-inch and 15-inch configurations, the Retina displays are superb. On the smaller model, the screen sports a 2560×1600 resolution (227 ppi), and the larger one jumps up to 2880×1800 (220 ppi). Which ever you prefer, you can edit in 1080p while the user interface of your editing suite stays on screen — incredible clarity packed into relatively small screens.
The display isn’t the only impressive aspect of this laptop though. The highest-end 15-inch configuration ships with a 3.1GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, 2TB of flash storage, 16GB of LPDDR3 RAM, and a discrete AMD Radeon Pro 560 GPU with 4GB of GDDR5 all in a thin aluminum case that weighs just 4.02 pounds. Unfortunately, all of that power comes at a cost — a whopping $4,199 when you max it out.
It’s worth mentioning that the most recent major revamp is a bit controversial. The top row of the keyboard has been done away with in favor of a dynamic Touch Bar that’s actually quite well-suited for scrubbing through footage. And the ports? Everything but the headphone jack has been removed in favor of four Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports. On the upside, that’s a ton of bandwidth for accessories to use. The downside? You’ll need specialty cables for anything that doesn’t have a USB-C port built-in.
Adobe’s Premiere Pro CC will work on both Windows and OS X, but Apple’s video editing products are only available for OS X. If you want to use Final Cut Pro X, Motion, and Compressor, you’ll need a Mac. Depending on your work environment, a MacBook Pro might be your only suitable option for portable editing.
- Price: $1,499 and up
Dell XPS 15
Not content to let Apple hog all of the spotlight, Dell has really stepped up its game. If you’re looking for a high-res laptop with a slightly lower price point, the 15.6-inch Dell XPS 15 is no slouch. For $2,099.99, the suped-up configuration gets you an ultra HD 3840×2160 display, a 2.80GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, a 512GB solid-state drive, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, and a discrete Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 GPU with 4GB of GDDR5.
This machine is made out of high-end materials like machined aluminum, carbon fiber, and Corning Gorilla Glass, so it can remain very sturdy despite only weighing about 4.5 pounds. And while this model only sports a single Thunderbolt 3 port, it does have quite a few additional ports on offer. You’ll also find a USB 3.0 port, an HDMI port, a headphone jack, and an SD card reader.
- Price: $999 and up
HP ZBook 17 Workstation
Want a full-fledged desktop replacement? Try out the ZBook 17 Workstation from HP. The top-tier option has a huge 17.3-inch 1080p display, a 3.1GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E3-1535M v6 processor, a 512 GB solid-state drive, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, and an Nvidia Quadro P4000 with 8GB of GDDR5 for $3,309. Keep in mind, this is a huge laptop not suited for heavy traveling. It weighs in at about 6.9 pounds, and has an enormous footprint, so don’t expect to be able to edit on a crowded flight.
However, this is an extremely powerful laptop for video editors, and HP doesn’t skip on the ports. It has three USB 3.0 ports, two Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports, an HDMI port, an ethernet port, and a headphone jack. It also includes a built-in SD card reader, so your import and export options are numerous.
- Price: $1,367 and up
ThinkPad P70 Mobile Workstation
Lenovo certainly isn’t out of the game, and the P70 Workstation proves it. With the top-end configuration, it can go head-to-head with just about any other laptop. Coming in at over $4,300, you end up with a 17.3-inch ultra high definition (3840×2160) display, a 2.8GHz quad-core Intel Xeon Processor E3-1505M v5 CPU, 32GB of DDR4 RAM, a 512GB solid state drive, and an Nvidia Quadro M5000M graphics card with 8GB of GDDR5. It does weigh over 7.5 pounds, so that does hamper portability quite a bit. Even so, the performance and outstanding display are worth the additional weight when deadlines are right around the corner.
And if you need lots of external storage or additional displays, you’ll be well-covered with the P70. This model has four USB 3.0 ports, two Thunderbolt 3 ports, an HDMI 1.4 port, a Mini DisplayPort 1.2, an ethernet port, a connector for a dock, a headphone jack, a 34mm ExpressCard slot, and an SD card reader. What else could you possibly need?
- Price: $1,890 and up
The best of the best
Video editing is definitely resource intensive, but laptops have finally become flexible and powerful enough to handle the task with aplomb. Even though these machines are expensive when compared with the average laptop, you’re getting a lot of bang for your buck. There will never be a single machine that fits everyone’s needs perfectly, but with variety like this, that’s not so bad. And truth be told, we’d be more than happy to use any of these machines to edit.
Now read: Best Laptops for Photo Editing