Lightworks allows you to edit video to a good standard. There are free and premium versions available (Image credit: Lightworks) And the options for text graphics in the free version are very basic – for interesting titles, you'll need to invest in Lightworks Pro, which comes with the Boris Graffiti plug-in. There's no motion tracking or masking, which a lot of similar-level competitors such as VSDC and Premiere Elements do have.

However, the other effects available are very limited. All these options can be keyframed, too, so you have a good amount of control over the animation of clips. There's also a 3D DVE tool, the equivalent of motion controls in Premiere, which allows you to set rotation, position, scale, cropping, etc. It's quite intuitive to use, so you can easily give your video a professional-looking grade. This includes a colour correction effect with a good range of options – wheels for shadows, midtones, and highlights, RGB curves, sliders for saturation, gamma, and contrast, and more. The colour correction tool has a lot of options (Image credit: Lightworks)Īll visual adjustments are collected under the VFX tab. Also, the source monitor doesn’t display waveforms for audio clips, which slows down finding the part of a track you want to use. Projects have one video track by default, and you have to go into a menu to add a new track, rather than simply dragging a clip into the space. And you simply click on multiple clips in the timeline, without having to drag or hold shift, to select and move them together.īut in other ways, it's cumbersome. This takes a little getting used to but can speed up the editing pace.

When you preview a clip in the source monitor, rather than it being necessary to press keys to set input and output points, the last watched section is automatically selected.

The main editing tab has a similar layout to many other programs – multi-track timeline along the bottom, project library top left, a source monitor, and a program monitor Adding video clips to the timeline is simple and intuitive (Image credit: Lightworks)

Lightworks audio delay