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| How to use Free Windows 10 Video Editor- Best Video Editor Software: capcutsoftware |
Hi everyone, Kevin here. Today I want to show you how you can edit video on Windows 10 using an app that comes with Windows 10. Yes, Windows 10 includes a free video editor and I'm going to show you step-by-step how you can take advantage of it. Now if you're say running Windows 7 or Windows 8, you don't have to feel left out. You can actually upgrade to Windows 10 entirely for free. I have a link in the description that'll show you how you can do that. In the past, Microsoft used to include an app called Movie Maker on Windows 7 and Windows 8 that allowed you to edit videos pretty well. In fact, the first video that I have on this YouTube channel is a drone video of my hometown Morristown, NJ, and I edited that video with movie maker. Yes, I'm not lying.
I admit to it. I used Movie Maker to create my very first video, and it worked fairly well. It had lots of customer love, and it had a huge fan base. Unfortunately, Microsoft decided to discontinue the app and for a long time many people thought there was no free video editing tool that came with Windows anymore.
That has changed. Microsoft includes a video editor, and it turns out it's actually bundled together with the Photos app. So, we're going to leverage the Photos app today to edit video. Yes, that's right, the Photos app. Now, don't let that deceive you, the video editor that Microsoft includes as part of the Photos app is a fully functional video editor. You can do all sorts of things like trimming and splitting clips and reorganizing clips, and I'm going to walk through a sample video today. We're going to go ahead and edit it together and I'll show you the full functionality of the video editor. The great news is you don't have to go out and buy video editing software. You don't have to search for free video editing software.
Instead, if you're on Windows 10, you already have some awesome software to edit videos with. All right, well, why don't we jump on the PC, and I'll show you first off how we could start using it and then we'll edit a video together. Here I am on my Windows 10 desktop and Launch Video Editor first off I want to show you how we can open the video editor that comes with Windows 10. Let's go down to our task bar and within the search field, we're going to type in video editor. You'll see that the best match here says video editor. We're going to go ahead and click on that. Video Editor start screen This opens up the video editor that comes with Windows 10.
The benefit of typing in video editor and launching that way is it opens the Photos app but drops us directly into the video projects view. If instead, we had opened the Photos app, we would then have to navigate to the video view within the Photos app, so it's a little bit quicker going this way. On the main video editor screen, you have a bunch of different options, and I want to walk through what you can do here.
Windows 10 Video Editor- Best Video Editor Software: capcutsoftware
In the top left-hand corner, and perhaps one of the most important things that we can do here is we can kick off a new video project. When we click on this, this will drop us into a blank project where we can put our video together, and we'll do that in just a moment. Down below, I have all of my recent video projects. Here they're ordered by recency. Now over here under sort, I could select a different way to organize it as well. Maybe I just want to see the newest, or maybe the oldest first, or even alphabetical, so I could sort this view in different ways, and this helps me get back to video projects that I had been working on. Down below is another interesting view called created for you. This is videos that the video editor automatically pulls together based on video clips and photos that you might have within the Photos app.
How to use Free Windows 10 Video Editor- Best Video Editor Software: capcutsoftware
Now let's go back up to the top and let's create our very own video by clicking on new video project. Name your video This drops me in a new video project and first off, it's going to ask me to name my video and by default it says new video. Now a little bit of background before I start this video project. My wife, son, and I were recently in Mexico, and we stated a resort that had an amazing slide. So, I'm going to go ahead and title this video Mexico slide adventure. Once you type in a name for your video, click on OK. Overview of editing interface This drops us into the main video editing interface. If you've used any other video editors before, this likely looks very familiar or even if you're a graduate of movie maker, you'll likely feel very comfortable here. To give some overview of what we have here on the screen, over here in the top left-hand corner, this area is called the project library. This is where we're going to place all of our video clips and all of our photo files. We're going to use this to build our video.
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Over on the right-hand side, this is a preview of the video as it starts coming together. Down below, you have your typical video controls like play, or fast forward, rewind. Over here, we have a timeline progress bar that'll show us how long the video is, and we'll be able to scroll through it, and then down at the very bottom, this is perhaps the most important part. This is our storyboard. We are going to use this storyboard to start organizing and laying out our video. The order in which we put our clips down here on the storyboard will determine the order in which the video plays. I mentioned that I want to have a Mexico slide adventure video, and it's not much Importing videos & photos of an adventure if we don't have any content here, so let's get some content into this view. Right up here in the project library, to get content in, you have two different options. One, you could drag and drop content from say, your desktop or File Explorer directly into the project library. Alternatively, there's also this plus button up here where we can add content. I'm going to use the plus button. When I click on that, I get a drop-down menu and there are three different ways I can pull content in. One of them is by selecting content on my PC.
This will open up a file picker. The second option is from my collection. So, let's say you have a collection of videos or photos within the photos app, you can pull them in to create a video from, and then the last option is to pull content in from the web. This will open up Bing where you can then pull in images from Bing. In my situation, I have all of my videos and photos on my PC. I'm going to click on from this PC. This opens up the Windows file picker and within here you can navigate to where you have your videos and where you have your photos on your computer. Luckily, the file picker opened up directly in the in the folder where I have all of my videos and photo files. I can go through and press the control key to select multiple items or I could simply click on the first, press the shift key and then simultaneously press my left mouse button to select all the photos here.
Once I've selected all the videos and photos that I want to bring into the video editor, I'm going to click on open. This adds all of my photos and videos into the video editor. Adjusting Project Library thumbnail size Let's say that maybe I have additional videos or additional photos that I want to bring in, once again, I can go into, say, File Explorer, I can drag more files in, or I can click on the plus button again and I can add additional files. Right now, when I look at my project library, these thumbnails are fairly large, and I'd rather have them be a little bit smaller. Over here, I could control how I view all of these previews. By default, it's set to view medium. Instead, I could click on view small, and this will show me smaller thumbnails. Because I have a number of thumbnails, I'd rather switch to this view. That way I could see all of my different clips that I'm going to be building a video from, so I'm going to stick with this view. I have all my clips in the project library. How do we start pulling together a video? Add title card Well, the very first thing I want to do is I want some type of introduction or some type of title for my video. Down here, on the storyboard, there's an option to add a title card. Let's go ahead and click on that. This now adds the very first item to my storyboard. I see my title screen right here. When I click on an object on the storyboard, I see controls that I can take related to that object. For instance, I could set the duration of my title, I could also modify the text, and I can modify the background. If I want to get rid of it all together, I can also just trash it if I want to do that. Let's go ahead and click on text. Within this view, I want to type in a title for my video.
By default, it simply says title. Let me go ahead and once again, I'm going to type in Mexico slide adventure. I have my title on here but to me this doesn't really seem that adventurous. It's just a simple font. Instead, let me go down and take a look at all the different styles that I can apply. Some of the styles, you'll see a diamond on them, this indicates that it's a premium style that you need to have a Microsoft 365 subscription for; however, all the ones and most of them don't have diamonds, and anyone with Windows 10 can take advantage of these other ones. Now, nothing speaks adventure like the adventure style. I'll go ahead and click on this one.
Now that I've selected an animated text style, I can also select a layout for it. Down below, I see six different layouts that I can choose. By default, it's title one or the center one. I could also place it on top, over on this side, or I could place it right in the center, along with a few others. Now I think this layout and this style looked pretty good. What does it actually look like? Well, over here on the left-hand side, I see a timeline view and here's a marker that shows me where I am in the animation.
It's the seek marker. I'm going to go and pull this over to the left and if I drag it over, I could see what the animation will look like. I'll bring it to the beginning and hit the play button and we could see what this title looks like. Now that's pretty cool. Now I have a simple blue background, I think that doesn't quite speak adventure, so to change the background, if we go up to the top, I'm going to click on background color, and this exposes a whole bunch of different background colors that I can choose from. Of all these background colors, I kind of like this teal color down here, it looks like it's called seafoam teal. Let me select that. I think that matches Mexico and a Mexico slide adventure a little more, so I'm going to go with this color. If I don't like any of the colors that are presented here, I could click on this plus icon, and then I could choose a custom color, and I could pretty much pick from any color imaginable. Everything looks good now. I'm satisfied with the background, I'm satisfied with the text, I'm going to go ahead and click on done. Up here in the preview screen, I can now see the title that I added, and you'll see now that the video is only three seconds long. It's not much of a video unless I have some content in there, Add video & photos to storyboard so I want to start adding some of my video clips to the storyboard. To do that, I need to get content from my project library down onto my storyboard.
Now I have a collection of video clips of my son and wife going down a water slide at this resort. I want to start off with an establishing shot of the water slide, and my first video clip has that establishing shot. I'm simply going to click on this item in my project library and you'll see that it expands indicating that it's been selected. I'm going to pull this down onto my storyboard in the second position. Now I could go through all my different video clips and start pulling them down onto my storyboard.
Let's say for instance, I pulled this video clip down of my wife and son sitting at the top of the slide, and I'm going to pull this onto my storyboard. One thing I did though, is I actually would rather have my wife and son going up the stairs before they're sitting at the top of the water slide. But it's very easy to adjust. All I have to do is click on this clip, once again, drag it down, and I could place it wherever I want on the storyboard. So, there's a lot of flexibility in allowing me to define how this story unfolds in the video. I've inserted a few clips onto the storyboard.
If I want to put all of my clips on the storyboard, I can go up here, select one of the video files, and when I click on it, it exposes a check mark. I can go through and then check all the different video clips I want to pull down. Alternatively, I could also use Windows shortcut keys. For instance, I could go over to the last item, press the shift key, and then press my mouse button, and that'll select all those files. I have all these different video clips selected. I'm going to click on one of them, drag it down to my storyboard, and release, and now I see all my videos included on the storyboard. Once again, the storyboard represents the order in which the video will play.
Up here in the preview area, you can see now that my entire video is about a 1:44. Now that's pretty long for video on going down a water slide. Now I want to show you some of the editing capabilities that the video editor has. Just Edit items on storyboard like we did with the title slide, to edit an item on the storyboard, we simply click on that item, and when we click on it, we see a whole bunch of different options that we can take on the file.
How to use Free Windows 10 Video Editor-
I'm going to walk through what all these different options do and how you can use them. One other way to expose these actions is you can right click on the file itself, and when you right click on it, this exposes a context menu. You'll see, though, if you go through the context menu, all the different actions that appear here within the context menu are also available here, and because this doesn't require an extra right click, I prefer simply using the actions right here. Trim video With this first video clip, this is going to serve as the establishing shot. Now a few things on the video clip, you'll see down here that it says 11.28, and this is the duration of the clip. Now almost 12 seconds of time for an establishing shot is a very long time, so I'm going to trim this down.
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Let me go ahead and click on this clip, and now we're going to click on trim to cut it down a little bit. When I click on trim, this opens up the video editor, and to trim a clip, I have some nice tools here on the time bar. So, here I see that it's 11 seconds or it's about 11 seconds or little over 11 seconds. If I click on this trim tool, I could go ahead and shorten it to whatever length I want it be, so maybe for the establishing shot, I really just want about 2 seconds. Once I choose that, I could play it to see what the clip looks like and that looks great. I'm going to click on done and at this point now you'll see the duration of the video file is about 1.7 seconds now. For the next clip, I want to do something similar. This is my wife going upstairs and here too I want to trim it as well. The nice thing about trimming is you can define when the trim starts, and you could also define when the trim ends, and for this portion, I just want to get our midway through the stairwell going up.
How to use Free Windows 10 Video Editor- Best Video Editor Software: capcutsoftware
This looks pretty good and I'm going to keep about, let's say about 2 seconds or so here again. So, let's click on done. This third video clip here. This is almost 30 seconds long. Split video That's a pretty long video clip, and I want to keep two different portions of it. I want to keep this beginning portion where my wife and son are sitting on the slide, and then they start going down the slide, and I can see them sliding down the water slide. So, I want to keep a beginning portion and the end portion. So, here instead of trimming the clip, I'm going to click on split, and this will allow me to split the video clip, and this marker appears. This is where I'm going to apply the split. Let me move up to maybe about this point here, and I'm going to split the clip right here. By splitting the clip, this will create two separate clips, one that contains the beginning portion and another clip that contains the end portion. This looks good. I'm going to click on done. Now on my storyboard I see the two clips because they've been split. Let me click into this one and I'm going to trim this down. For this clip, I'm going to go with about a three, almost a four second clip. It shows my wife smiling and then my son is also sitting in the slide. This looks good and I'm going to click on done. The same thing with the next clip, I also want to trim this down as well. This is the second part of the split, so let me click on trim, and here I'm just going to keep one portion of the video clip. I've edited a bunch of these video clips and the video is starting to come together. Now one thing I see here is two of these video clips are in the wrong order. Luckily, it's very easy to move things around, just like how I could pull different videos from the project library down onto my storyboard.
Once items are on my storyboard, I could click on them and then shift them to a new position, and I like that position better. I'm going to go ahead and trim a few more of these files. I've gone through and I've trimmed, and I've also split a whole bunch of the video files. I also want to show you some of the other actions that you could take on your video clips on the storyboard. I'm going to go ahead select this video clip right here, and once again, this exposes all of the different actions that you could take on a video clip. The next action here after trim and split is text. Add text on storyboard So, one of the things that I could put in here is a caption for this video clip. So maybe I'll simply type in big slide and this time I'm going to go with a simple animated style and we'll simply place it at the bottom and I'm going to click on done. Along with inserting text, you also have the ability to insert motion. Add motion I just clicked on the motion option and here you could do things like zoom in, zoom out, tilt up, pan right, lots of different controls over how you display your video clip. Back here on the main screen, when I have a video clip selected, I can also Add 3D effects insert different 3D effects. Let's see what we could do there. Within 3D effects, there are lots of different things that I can insert. Here are a whole bunch of different effects that I could insert.
How to use Free Windows 10 Video Editor
Up at the top, I have some recent ones that I've used, and down below there's a comprehensive list of all of the different effects. Here too, just like we saw previously, under styles you have a diamond over premium effects that you could use. Although even if you're not a Microsoft 365 subscriber, there are a lot of different effects that you could leverage in your video production. For this video, I'm going to go ahead and maybe I'll insert the live effect, and when I insert an effect, I can go ahead, and I can position it. So let me position it here. You get additional controls where you could rotate, you could swivel if it's a 3D object, so lots of different ways you can implement this. There's even the option to attach it to a point, so let's say that your movie is moving or maybe your video clip shifts around, you can attach it to a point within your video clip. Along with being able to insert different effects, you also can insert different items from a 3D library, and they have categories of all sorts of different things that you could insert. You can go in here and experiment with it and test out different 3D effects in your videos. Now that we've looked at 3D effects, the next one I want to click into is filters. Let's go ahead and add a filter. Add filters Here within filters, you have lots of different ways you can represent your video clip. By default, I just have it set to the original, but you could change it to classic or maybe adventure or pearl, and you'll notice anytime I click on one of these filters, it changes the feel and the atmosphere of the video, so depending on what type of mood you're trying to communicate to your audience, you can choose a filter that matches that. The last thing that I can also do with a video clip is I can adjust the speed, Adjust speed so when I have a video clip selected, if I click on speed, I could either slow it down or I could speed it up, so for instance, when my son is hitting the water, maybe I want to slow it down a little bit, so it really stands out.
Best Video Editor Software: capcutsoftware How to use Free Windows
So, I'll simply slow it down, so let's say .8x and let's see how that looks. So there, that slows down the motion in the action just a little bit. Remove or show black bars For these video clips, there's also an option over on the right-hand side where you could remove or show black bars. Typically, if you say record a video on your phone in portrait mode and you have black bars on the side, you can use this to zoom in on the clip and remove those black bars. Over my last image here, this photo includes black bars and let me demonstrate how that works. Let's remove those black bars. When I click on that, you'll see that it zooms in a little bit more and I no longer see those black bars. Rotate video The last control that I can take here is one where I could rotate the image. So, let's say that you have a video file or maybe a photo and it has the wrong orientation. You could simply rotate it around until you get it in the right position. A few additional controls that don't appear here. Cut, copy & paste on storyboard If I right click on a video file, I have the typical Windows shortcuts such as cut, copy, and delete. I could use this menu here if I want to cut a video, so let's say I cut this clip, if I right click, I could then paste the video in and that'll paste it in. Alternatively, if you're a Windows power user, you could also use Control + C, Control + V, and Control + X to cut, copy, and then paste. Here the last item I have on my storyboard Working with photos is a photo file and here down in the left-hand corner, if I click on the number, I can set the duration to however long I want the photo to appear. Additionally for photo file by default it's going to sit up here for three seconds and there's not much going on. It'll just show the photo. If I want to make things more interesting, I could select the photo, then click on motion, and maybe I want to add a nice little motion effect where it zooms out on the photo. Let's see how that looks. That’s already looking a lot better. I'm feeling pretty good about how my video is coming together. Adding background music & audio The last thing I think the video could use is some music to go along with it. In the top right-hand corner, there are two different options for adding music or audio. You can use the pre-included music that come with the video editor, or you could add your own. Let's start with background music. Let's click on that. Here you can see a whole bunch of songs that are included with the video editor. You could click on the play button to preview it. Here, too, you'll notice that some of the songs come with a diamond icon. These are available to Microsoft 365 subscribers. Don't worry though, if you're not a subscriber, there are still many different songs that you can incorporate into your videos. Down below, there's an option to sync your video to the music beat, which is kind of a fun one where the clips will be cut in a way that it matches the music. Here too you could define what the music volume is.
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I want to add my own custom music. I'm going to cancel this, and next let's go ahead and click on custom audio. Within custom audio, I have the option to add an audio file. I can add music, I could add narration, sound effects, any type of audio file I can bring into my video. I'm going to click on add audio file. This opens up the file picker and here I see a song titled End of Summer. Let me click and open that. This brought my song in and here I see my song on the timeline. I want this song to play for the entire duration of my video. To make sure it plays for the whole video, I'm going to select the song, bring it to the beginning of the video, and then once again, I could use these markers to indicate when the song begins and when the song ends. Right now, it's set up so when the video starts, the song will start playing, and when the video ends, the song will stop playing. I could also add additional audio files if I want, I can just click on add audio file again and in fact I could even have two songs. Let's say the video is long enough where I want a second song to play, I could say, hey, let's have this song end at this point, and then another song will start playing, so I have lots of control over how the audio of my video sounds. Once I'm done in here, let's click on done and this will bring the audio into my video. Once I pull in my audio, we could see how it sounds by previewing it. Let's go ahead and see what it sounds like so far. Now, one thing I could do, let's say I just want the music playing and I don't want the music, or I don't want the sound from the individual video clips, like we looked at earlier, you could click on this adjust volume icon and you could turn off the volume on the individual clips. In my case though, I'm happy with the sound playing, I think it's nice to have the music playing and then to hear our voices occasionally.
Before we finish the video, I want to show one other thing that you can set. Over on the top Adding themes right-hand corner, you have these ellipses, these are more actions that you could take. Video editor also includes themes that you could apply to your video.
If I click on themes, right now by default, there's no theme set, but I could choose a different theme like adventure, chilled, or even classic. Now with these themes, what it does is it applies a set of filters, music, and also text styles to your video so it makes it feel more cohesive. I'm not going to set any themes for now, but I wanted to show you that you are able to do that. I'm going to click on cancel. I have my video ready to go. Finish video I have all my video files. I have some nice music on top of it. At this point, let's click on finish video.
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This brings up the finish video dialogue and here I can choose the quality that I want to save as. Now one downside of the video editor and one thing that really bums me out is that you can't save videos in 4K quality. I recorded all these video clips in 4K, so by saving as 1080P, in a sense it's going to be downgrading the video quality, but 1080P is still very good and it still looks very sharp. I would recommend going with the best video quality, but you also have the choice to go with medium or low as well. The lower the video quality, the less space the video will take. Let's go ahead and click on high, and once you're confident with your selection, let's click on export. This will bring up the save as dialog and I can now choose where I want to save my video file. I'm just going to save it on my desktop and click on export. Once the video finishes exporting, it'll pop Preview video up the video file and now we can see what it looks like. Let’s go ahead and watch the video that we pulled together. That video file looks fantastic to me and I'm very satisfied with how it turned out. Wrap up All right, well that was an example of how you can use the video editor that comes for free with Windows 10. If this video helped you learn how you can edit videos on Windows 10, please give this video a thumbs up. As always, if you want to see more videos like this, hit that subscribe button, that way you'll get a notification anytime new content like this comes out. And lastly, if you want to see me cover any other topics in the future, feel free to leave a comment down below, that's how I build my list of videos to create. All right, well that's all I had for you today, and I hope to see you next time. Bye.
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