To make great videos, you need more than a good camera; you need great video editing software. PCMag has been reviewing video editing software for more than 20 years, and we put each application through rigorous hands-on testing. We've reviewed dozens of applications, updating the reviews annually to keep up with their changes. The best video editing programs work well for both professionals and hobbyists, and they incorporate new technology like generative AI. Based on testing, our Editors' Choice winners are Adobe Premiere Pro for professionals, CyberLink PowerDirector for enthusiasts, and iMovie for beginners with a Mac. But those aren't the only options worth considering. Check out our comprehensive reviews of each pick below, along with additional advice to help you determine the best video editing software for your needs.

How to Edit Video on a PC

No fancy effects matter if an app can't do the most basic editing tasks. At this point, all the software here does a fine job of letting you join, trim, and split video clips. Most also provide extensive tutorials, help, and guided editing tools. You can make use of special effects such as animated transitions, picture-in-picture (PiP), chroma-key (aka green screen), and filters that enhance colors or apply creative effects and distortions. With most products, you can add a multitude of timeline tracks that accommodate video clips, effects, audio for soundtracks, and text overlays. Some of the more entry-level programs include a storyboard view, which makes joining clips and adding transitions, effects, and background music even simpler.

The Best Video Editing Software for Motion Tracking

Motion tracking is an impressive effect that's available in most pro-level and some consumer-level video editing software. It lets you attach an object or effect to something moving in your video. For example, you might use this editing tool to place a blur over the face of someone you don't want revealed in your video or to display a text box next to a moving object. You mark the object you want to track, specify the effect or text, and let the app follow the marked object.

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Motion tracking used to be the sole province of special-effects software tools such as Adobe After Effects or Apple Motion. Corel VideoStudio was the first consumer product to include motion tracking. It still leads the pack in the depth and usability of its motion-tracking tool (even including multipoint tracking), though several others now include this video editing tool. Pro-level software like DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro also do motion tracking, and they support plug-ins and ancillary applications with even more capabilities.

Does Editing Software Support 4K and 8K Video?

Support for 4K video source content has become fairly standard in video editing software, and pro software already supports up to 8K and sometimes even higher. However, this isn't really practical unless you're running a full-size movie theater. That said, even smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra can now shoot in 8K.

(Credit: Corel/PCMag)

Support for 4K and higher formats varies among the consumer products. For example, some but not all the applications can import Sony XAVC and XAVC-S formats, which Sony's popular DSLRs, mirrorless cameras, camcorders, and professional video cameras use. The same is true for the H.265 High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. Most of the applications here now can import and export HEVC, but there are still a few holdouts.

If you plan on working with 4K or higher video content, make sure you choose a video editing application that can render output files quickly (see the section on speed testing below).

Support for newer formats, such as the open-source AV1 and the even more efficient H.266 (VVC—Versatile Video Coding), is very limited at this point. Furthermore, none of the apps here supports H.266. Happily, several of them do support importing Google's WebM format.

The Best Video Editing Software for Multicam

Advanced abilities continue to make their way into accessible, affordable, and consumer-friendly video editing apps as each new generation of software is released. Multicam editing, which lets you switch camera angles for the same scene shot with multiple video cameras, used to be a feature only for professional software. This and many other advanced effects are now available in enthusiast-level programs. CyberLink PowerDirector excels at multicam editing, as do the pro-level applications DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, and Final Cut Pro.

Can You Edit Video on a Smartphone?

You can create and edit videos on mobile devices almost as easily as you can watch them. If you're making videos for social media, you might even prefer to edit on a phone. Many of the desktop applications on this list of the best video editing apps also have mobile video editing apps.

Adobe has a separate app called Premiere Rush, which you can use to edit video on your phone and then continue editing it on the desktop Premiere app or the Adobe Express app; it comes with a subscription to either. Apple's iMovie interacts similarly with Final Cut Pro. TikTok itself has the excellent and free CapCut. With more than 100 million downloads on the Google Play store, the powerful CyberLink PowerDirector's separate mobile app has made a name for itself on mobiles as well as the desktop. Many of these apps let you shoot video with your phone and start editing right away on the same device.

What Is Color Grading and What Can LUTs Do?

(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)

One capability that has arrived in consumer-level video editing software is color grading. Color wheels, curves, and histograms give editors control over the intensity of every shade. Another important tool you find in some applications is color matching. If you shoot videos with multiple cameras and in different lighting conditions, you should make sure your video editing software has good color-matching capability for a consistent look. You may also want an application that supports producing HDR content, since that's now available on many TVs.

LUTs (lookup tables), also known as CLUTs (color lookup tables), are powerful color editing tools. This staple of pro-level software lets you quickly change the look of a video to give it a specific mood. For example, think of the dark blue look of thriller movies like The Revenant. You can download LUTs for free from several sites or use those included with video software to give your video a specific look. One well-known LUT type is the kind that can make a daytime scene look like it was shot at night, known in moviemaking as day for night. In fact, pros use LUTs to simply get colors right based on the camera they use for shooting.

What Are the Best Apps for Editing Action Cam Footage?

Many video editing apps now include tools that cater to action camera users. For example, several have automated freeze-frame along with speedup, slowdown, and reverse-time effects. CyberLink PowerDirector's Action Camera Center pulls together freeze-frame with stabilization, slo-mo, fish-eye correction, and correction for underwater footage. The Platinum version of Magix Movie Studio includes templates and effects specifically for action-cam footage.

Which Video Editors Have the Best Title Effects?

These video editing applications pay a lot of attention to creating title effects. Apple Final Cut Pro has added 3D title creation, which is pretty spiffy, letting you extrude 2D titles and rotate them on three axes. Corel VideoStudio also includes 3D titling, though it's not as powerful as Apple's. PowerDirector's Title Designer has transparency, gradient color, border, blur level, and reflection in titles; Magix has impressive title templates, complete with animations.

Corel VideoStudio and Pinnacle Studio have a nifty title effect in which your video fills the text characters. Look for an application that lets you edit titles in WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) mode so you can type, format, and time it right over the video preview.

Captions for dialogue are another type of text you may want to overlay on your video. Several of the programs now have auto-captioning that takes dialogue from your video clips and produces a caption file. The next step is appearing in the applications, too: letting you edit using the text captions. This capability started in Premiere Pro and most recently has landed in PowerDirector.

What Are the Fastest Video Editors?

Video editing is one of the most computing-intensive activities. It pays to have the best laptop or desktop you can afford if you're serious about cutting your own movies. Most applications help speed up the editing process by creating a proxy file of lower resolution so that huge, full-resolution files don't slow down normal editing and previewing.

Particularly intensive is rendering the finished product into a standard video file that is playable on the target device of choice, whether it's a TV, laptop, or smartphone. Most software can speed up by taking advantage of your computer's graphics processor. Be sure to check the performance section in each review linked here to see how speedy or slow the application is.

For render speed testing, I have each program join seven clips of various resolutions ranging from 720p all the way up to 8K and then apply cross-dissolve transitions between them. I then note the time it takes to render the project to 1080p30 with H.264 at 16Mbps and 192Kbps audio. The output movie is just over five minutes in length. I tested on a Windows 11 PC sporting a 3.60GHz Intel Core i7-12700K, 16GB RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, and a 512GB Samsung PM9A1 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. In my render speed test results over the years, CyberLink PowerDirector has been a leader, but in the latest test runs, DaVinci Resolve currently takes the crown, with PowerDirector, Filmora, and Adobe Premiere Pro hot on its heels.

Other measures of performance include startup time and simple stability. Again, video editing is a taxing activity for any computer, involving many components. In the past, video editing programs took longer than most other apps to start up, and unexpected shutdowns were unfortunately common, even in top apps from top developers such as Adobe and Apple. The stability situation has greatly improved, but the complexity of the process only increases as these editors gain more powerful effects. As such, they are likely never fully immune to crashes, which often raise their ugly heads after a feature update.

What's the Best Free Video Editing Software?

If you don't want to invest a lot of money and effort into your video editing exploits, you have some free options. Our top pick for free video editing is DaVinci Resolve. The free download is popular among YouTubers and gamers because it gives you a large subset of the program's features without the pro-level capabilities you don’t need. The free version is surprisingly robust, with standard editing and cutting, effects, motion graphics, color correction, and audio editing.

If you use a Mac, the excellent iMovie comes with your computer. For Windows users, the free Clipchamp gets you all the basics along with some nifty effects, though some of its more appealing features (like exporting to 4K) require a paid subscription. A very cool feature is its text-to-speech voiceover capability. The app is the same on Windows 10 and Windows 11, and it's a Progressive Web App with a multitrack timeline that outputs videos suitable for social media sharing.

There are some free video editors in the Microsoft Store, including Animotica, Movie Maker, and Video Editor Studio. Some of them are quite basic, but most include clip joining, transitions, and effects in a touch-friendly interface. One freemium video editing app is not in the app store that recently caught my attention is MiniTool MovieMaker. I prefer apps from the Microsoft Store since I know they've been vetted for security and function, run in sandboxes that can't mess with your system software, and are easy to install and update.

Free video editing software often comes with legal and technical limitations, however. Some widely used codecs require licensing fees, meaning makers can't offer free software to handle these standard file formats. That said, the impressive open-source Shotcut does many of the same things as the paid applications in this roundup, including chroma-keying and picture-in-picture. Shotcut is completely open-source and free, as are the also surprisingly powerful Kdenlive and Openshot applications. Lightworks is also free but has paid options that remove a 720p output resolution limit. Shotcut, Lightworks, Kdenlive, and Openshot all run on Linux as well as Windows and Mac.

Do You Need 360-Degree VR Support?

Several of the products here (Adobe Premiere Elements being a notable exception) still support 3D video editing if that's your thing, though 360-degree VR footage is now more important.

If you want 360-degree VR support, use CyberLink PowerDirector. Other options are Adobe Premiere, Apple Final Cut Pro, and Magix Movie Edit Pro. Support varies, with some apps including 360-compatible titles, stabilization, and motion tracking. PowerDirector is notable for including those last two. Final Cut has a useful tool that removes the camera and tripod from the image, which can be an issue with 360-degree footage.

Which Video Editors Have the Best Audio Features?

We still live in the days of talkies, so you want to be able to edit the audio in your digital moves as well as the picture. Most of the products here include canned background music, and many, such as Pinnacle Studio, can even tailor the soundtrack to the exact length of your movie.

Most of these programs can separate audio and video tracks, clean up background noise, and add environmental audio effects such as concert hall reverb. A couple of the products have an auto-ducking feature, which lowers background music during dialog—a definite pro-level plus.

If you want to create movies that use surround sound technology like Dolby Atmos, you need a pro-level application such as Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro, or DaVinci Resolve.

What About Apple Video Editing Software?

Though macOS users don't have the sheer number of software choices available for PCs, Apple fans interested in editing video are well served. At the beginner level, the surprisingly capable and enjoyable-to-use iMovie comes free with every Mac since at least 2011. iMovie only gives you two video tracks but does a good job with chroma-keying, and its Trailers and Storyboard features make it easy to produce slick, Hollywood-style productions, showing you what kind of shots to include.

(Credit: Apple/PCMag)

In the midrange is Adobe Premiere Elements, which is cross-platform between Windows and macOS and has a lot more features and provides help with creating effects. Recently joining that program in Apple world is a macOS version of PCMag's Editors' Choice enthusiast-level video editing application, CyberLink PowerDirector. It now has nearly as many features as the Windows version.

Professionals and prosumers have powerful but pricey options in DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, and Premiere Pro. Final Cut is a deceptively simple application that resembles iMovie in its interface and ease of use, but it's massively capable, and many third-party apps integrate with it for even more power. Premiere Pro uses a more traditional timeline and enjoys a large ecosystem of companion apps and plug-ins. It also excels in collaboration features and plays well with ancillary Adobe software such as After Effects and Photoshop. Read more about the differences between Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro here. Note: you do not need a full Creative Cloud subscription to get Premiere Pro. You can get a separate subscription just for it.

For more advice, see our list of the best video editing software for Macs.