February 13

Video Editing Software: Free Trial Versions

10  comments

There are dozens of video editing software programs on the market. If you want to try before you buy, some offer a free trial run. Here is a list put together for Video Production Tips readers by Gary Comerford of some of the better offers.

Gary runs the free video editing web-site. His site is a wealth of information on the subject of free video editing tools. Check out his site for reviews of free software, on-line software, and commercial software that you can get on a free trial basis.

Free software trial versions are a way of giving you a download of commercial software to entice you into purchasing the full version.

For video editing software, there are many tools out there which follow this approach. Free software trial versions usually fall into a couple of different types:

  1. Fully functioned software, which will work for a short period of time, but generally adds a watermark or something similar to output.
  2. Hobbled versions, which work without watermarks but have certain key functionality removed

The idea in both cases is to allow you enough freedom to use the software, see how it works, and decide whether you wish to shell out your hard-earned coin on the complete version.

Below, I’ve listed a selection of the top tools that can be purchased as a trial version. Some of these are well known, some of them are less so. All of them are worth checking out if completely free tools aren’t your thing.

(Incidentally, the Apple range of products do not come with free trials, unfortunately.)

“The Big Guns”

Adobe Premier – It’s one of the best, it works on Mac and PC. It’s very expensive.

The download is full functioned and lasts 30 days with a watermark through output. It’s my tool of choice!

Click here to go to the Adobe Premier download page (requires registration)

Sony Vegas Pro

It ranks up there with Adobe and Apple, but isn’t quite as widespread. The full-featured version costs around $550, but you can get a basic version for $75. I know people who swear by this particular product.

Click here to go to the Sony Vegas Pro download page

The “Smaller ones”

Nero – A market leader in audio and video management tools, Nero is admired as a comprehensive and versatile suite of tools for managing, burning, recoding and manipulating audio and video data. The latest version, Nero 8 Ultra, has recently been released and you can try it free for 15 days before purchase. The trial version is fully functional except that BDAV authoring and playback as well as AVCHD and MPEG-4 formats are not supported. The full version costs £49.99 as a download ($64)

Click here to download the Nero trial version (requires registration)

Corel– Well known for their picture editing tools, they also have great video tools. They own the Ulead range of products.

Ideal for video hobbyists and YouTube enthusiasts, VideoStudio 11 lets you easily produce professional-looking videos and slide shows right on your own PC. For beginners, it includes handy Wizards that help you automatically capture footage, polish videos in minutes and create DVDs, complete with menus, titles, transitions and music. For more video-editing power, VideoStudio 11.5 Plus features new creative tools and full high-definition support, including Blu-ray Disc, AVCHD and HD DVD. The full version costs £49 as a download ($64)

Click here to download Video Studio 11.5 (requires registration)

Avs4You – A complete suite of editing tools

The downloads are fully functional, non expiring, but have a watermark. If you want to get rid of the watermark, you can click to register and pay a 1 year or unlimited registration fee

Click here to go to download page (requires registration)

Blaze Media Pro – Conversion, editing and audio software

This is a real find of a software. For a mere $50 it will give you audio and video conversions, audio CD ripping, video construction, video decompiling, audio editor and recording, audio and data CD burning. Also, video CD (VCD and SVCD) burner, video DVD burner, video editor and movie editor (AVI, MPEG, WMV, etc.), MPEG encoder and decoder, the ability to convert (record) MIDI to MP3, WAV, WMA, and OGG, convert DVD audio to MP3, WAV, WMA, and OGG, DVD ripping, batch video processing (over 30 supported processing operations), video capture, AVI MPEG WMV video joiner, video compressor, media management, audio and video playback (including full playlist support), and much more! Blaze Media Pro features a complete and powerful digital video editor as well for AVI, MPG (MPEG-1 and MPEG-2), WMV, and ASF formats. The video editor allows you to edit, delete frames, delete selection, add audio to video files or replace existing audio in video files, and trim any desired portion of your video and audio content. You can add movie editing effects and titles, make colour adjustments, export frames or audio selections, crop the video, flip, mirror, rotate, resize, stamp, adjust audio volume, and much more. WAV, WMA, and MP3 audio files can be inserted into the video or extracted from the video; and BMP, GIF, JPG, PCX, PNG, RAS, PPM, TGA, and TIF are the supported image formats that can be inserted or extracted. The software’s video capture feature can even be used to record video from DVD and save to AVI or WMV, which can then be edited also.

The trial lasts for 15 days and is Windows only.

Click here to go to the Blaze Media pro page.

So there you have it, a list of great video editing software programs available for a free trial.

Thanks for reading Video Production Tips

Lorraine Grula

 


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Free software trial versions, free video editing web-site, video editing software, video editing software programs, video tools


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  1. I discovered your homepage by coincidence.
    Very interesting posts and well written.
    I will put your site on my blogroll.
    🙂

  2. Hi
    I have some 8mm film that I intend to have professionally transferred to DVD.
    The films ore on 400 foot reels from original 50 foot reels and are in not in any order. One 50 foot reel may be followed by another that was made 5 years later.
    The first thing I would like to do is arrange them in chronological order.
    Like any old movies some are too dark, and some too light.
    Some parts of some films should be discarded.
    The films all have no sound.

    My primary concern is to get a finished product that does not “dumb down” the quality of what I have.

    I am an older geezer and get overwhelmed by the vocabulary of todays
    Technology but am not unwilling to put in the time to learn how to do what I would like to do.

    I would appreciate any advice you can give me about the best software you can recommend to accomplish my goals.

    Any other advice would also be appreciated.

    Jim O’Brien

  3. Hi Jim.

    Thanks for stopping by video production tips and leaving a comment.

    This task will be a whole lot easier than you think it is. That’s the good news. The bad news is that you might not be able to achieve fantastic results correcting your exposure problems.

    First, if you get them professionally transferred to DVD, they will do 90% of the work for you. Find a good transfer house. Assuming you leave in a reasonably large city, you should be able to find one locally. You can start with a high quality film photography development services and places that do photo restoration. You can also look for a service that does video duplication. They often have machines to transfer from one format to the other. If you find a good service with good equipment, they will be able to compensate some for the under and over exposed portions while your film is being transferred to DVD. Honestly, you can not expect miracles in correcting any exposure problems. I use one of the best video editing software programs around, Final Cut Pro. And even with that, the exposure correction produces limited results that usually look pretty artificial. Sorry. A good transfer job might be able to give you the best results you can hope for. If it were me, I would just learn to love the look of over and under exposed film. Correcting for this requires a complex program and there are half a dozen variables to mess with. A good transfer house is probably your best bet to have this done well without lots of headaches.
    After that, all you need to do is rearrange the films to be in order and maybe add music. Any video editing program can do those things. Those are your very most basic task in editing.

    In short, wanting to correct the exposure is a very advanced task and wanting to rearrange the order is a very simple task.

    If you did get a complex program in order to adjust the exposure settings, you would want one that adjusts things like the black level, the brightness and contrast, the color saturation, gamma level, and probably a few more I am not thinking of. (Just woke up) With video, it is not the same as with some still image editing programs where you can click one button for instant correction. Sorry. If there is something like that in a video editing program I have not heard about it.

    I hope this helps you. Good luck! I have a bunch of old film I want transferred too. Plus I have old 3/4 inch tapes and beta tapes and a whole box full of tapes just begging to be transferred.

    Let me know how it works out.

    Lorraine

    Lorraine Grulas last blog post..Online Video Marketing: What is Good Enough?

  4. If any of you my dear forum crowd looking for wmv to avi online or, simply saying do you ask yourself a question – how to convert WMV, AVI, MPG and other media formats into other ones? Have you experienced problems with creation of proper video content? Do you have no clue how converter programs work?. If you want to convert media files into various formats you should have one to do it with ease. With the help of this free video converter you can easy convert your video into nice one and save it in any video format: AVI, MP4, WMV, FLV, MP3, MPg etc. And that is without spending a penny! Hope that handy software will help you to make your processor find youself a job for a few sleepy nights. 🙂

  5. Hi JMontes
    I understand and feel your pain! However let me put it all in perspective for you. Back before computer video editing it cost about one million dollars to set up a full and complete edit suite. Talk about ouch! There were lots of people who owned those who were quite miffed once computer editing brought the price down so much. Lots of them were put out of business! I know Premier is expensive, but it is a lot cheaper than all of that.
    Lorraine

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