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You can't drag clips between tracks, which is a bit inconvenient you can only drag them from the source panel. That's not bad, but it's nowhere near the choices available in products like PowerDirector or Pinnacle Studio.
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By default, you get a cross-fade, but there are 24 basic wipe-style transitions built in, and you can also download custom wipes. Instead, you drag adjacent clips in the timeline to overlay, and a transition appears. I tested on my trusty Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC, with a 4K touch screen and running 64-bit Windows 10 Pro.Īdding transitions isn't as straightforward as in most editors, which let you drag canned transitions from a source panel. It's updated with surprising regularity for an open source app, and on first run the app asks to check if you're running the latest version. For a video editor, it's a lightweight download of only 184MB. In addition, your GPU must support OpenGL 2.0 or DirectX 9 or 11. Your CPU should be 2GHz, with 4 cores for 4K video, and you need 4GB RAM for SD video, 8GB for HD video, and 16GB for 4K video. It runs on Windows 7 through Windows 10 for Apple desktops, macOS 10.8 and later is supported Linux machines need at least GLIBC 2.13. Shotcut is available for Windows (both 32- and 64-bit), Mac, and Linux.
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It's free, too, so you have nothing to lose by kicking the tires. Shotcut offers many standard video editing features, and after you spend a little time figuring it out, it's not that hard to use. In some cases, like the GIMP photo app, you take a huge usability hit, but video editing software Shortcut is only moderately less usable than the commercial offerings like PowerDirector and Pinnacle Studio.
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For those who don't want to pay for slick interface design and all the latest features, there's always open-source software.
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