Good freeware NLE editor?

[Diana (Cda)]

I have an old Vegas Video v4 and Womble DVD v5 that are fantastic editors that I've used for years. I esp. like the ease and use of both, intuitive without any difficulty whatsoever. However, both of them don't give either MP4 or AVI in the finished video so I have to re-encode to the other, which is lossy.

I'm editing videos more so the hassle of the above 2 apps now becomes something more difficult to work with.

Has any good NLE video editor come up in recent years? I've tried a few and just not happy as cutting/inserting video, fades, etc., has not been as easy to do as in the above. Hopefully a good freeware exists somewhere.

Thanks!

[ProWo]

However, both of them don't give either MP4 or AVI in the finished video so I have to re-encode to the other, which is lossy.

That's not correct.
You can remux the output files from both editors to mp4 or avi.
No reencode occours.
Both containers can handle the mpeg2video codec.

[Diana (Cda)]

However, both of them don't give either MP4 or AVI in the finished video so I have to re-encode to the other, which is lossy.

That's not correct.
You can remux the output files from both editors to mp4 or avi.
No reencode occours.
Both containers can handle the mpeg2video codec.

So sorry for the late reply, months, in fact. But when I was dealing with this issue, it was at a time when I was dealing with bereavement and I just couldn't handle another complicated issue. So this got forgotten amongst RL.

Can you recommend how to remux, then, please? I've read a bit about it today, but it seems complicated. Hoping that with the right software, it'll be easy. Any recommendations, by any chance?

Thank you!

[abolibibelot]

So sorry for the late reply, months, in fact. But when I was dealing with this issue, it was at a time when I was dealing with bereavement and I just couldn't handle another complicated issue.

Sorry about those circumstances. Bereavement. Learned a new word today, both beautiful and sad... not quite as chilling as this one although it can come close...
And I know the feeling about having sudden, unexpected, prolonged leaves of absence.

Can you recommend how to remux, then, please? I've read a bit about it today, but it seems complicated. Hoping that with the right software, it'll be easy. Any recommendations, by any chance?

Depends which formats are available for export with either of those NLEs (Grammar Nazi aside: “NLE” stands for “non-linear editor” so “NLE editor” is redundant). If it's MPEG2 only, that's a very inefficient format by today's standards (as in, it can yield good quality but with a much higher bitrate than more recent formats). Also I would be surprised if MP4 or AVI containers can handle MPEG2 video with no hiccup. For sure it's not standard. (MP4 nearly always contains AVC [H.264] or HEVC [H.265] video and AAC audio streams; AVI nearly always contains either uncompressed video which is huuuge, or lossless compression formats like Huffyuv / Lagarith / UT Video / MagicYUV which yield marginally less huuuge files, or lossy compression formats like Divx / Xvid which are all pretty much obsolete at this point, and AC3 or MP3 audio streams which are pretty much obsolete too – and the AVI container itself is considered quite antiquated by now, mostly used for intermediate files, not for “delivery” files, only fools still encode movies in Xvid + MP3 in AVI container.)
MKV on the other hand can handle pretty much anything, but it depends what you intend to do then with those videos.
Remuxing can be done quite easily with a simple “set-and-forget” ffmpeg script, like for instance, on a Windows system:

FOR %%A in (*.mpg) DO ffmpeg -i "%%A" -c copy "%%~nA.mkv"

saved as a .bat file, then a double-click on that .bat file will losslessly remux each .mpg file found in the same directory to a MKV file with the same name (for it to work the ffmpeg.exe executable must be either in the same directory, or in a directory registered in the “PATH” system variable; or else the full path to the location of the ffmpeg.exe file must be specified in the command).
But again, it might not be an ideal solution depending on the purpose, especially if you're going to do video editing more regularly, it would probably be better to get acquainted with something more up-to-date. (Still, learning the basic of ffmpeg and remuxing could certainly come in handy down the line – as for why that line always has to go down, your guess is as good as mine.)
If either of those allows to export in a lossless AVI format (like those mentioned above – each one has to be installed first for it to be listed among the options, years ago I've been recommended either UT Video or MagicYUV rather than HuffYUV as they're more efficient while still easy on system resources, I've used Lagarith which in my experience yielded the best compression ratio out of those four but is reportedly more likely to cause performance issues when editing, don't know what's considered “best” by now), then the output can be compressed with a single lossy compression step, and it can also be done with a “set-and-forget” ffmpeg script, for instance:

FOR %%A in (*.avi) DO ffmpeg -i "%%A" -c:v libx264 -crf 20 -preset veryslow -c:a aac "%%~nA.mkv"

likewise, saved as a .bat file, then double-clicking on that file will convert each .avi file in the same directory into a MKV file with an H.264 video stream and an AAC audio stream (specific settings can be tweaked to reach an optimal size / quality ratio; in this example I used “-crf 20” which is generally considered a good compromise in that regard; for audio I didn't add specific settings, not sure what the default settings are by now, for my own use I encode the audio separately with qaac as it's reportedly better than the AAC implementations available in ffmpeg, at least that was the consensus some years ago when I did some research on that topic). But that solution requires a lot of temporary storage space (an hour of losslessly compressed video can easily be over 100GB, and I've mostly done editing in 1280x720 resolution).

As for the original question, there must be good options by now when it comes to free NLEs, but I have no first hand experience, I'd be interested too. I've briefly tried DaVinci Resolve, which if I'm not mistaken comes as a fully functional basic free version, but I found it quite difficult to handle (that thing is used in professional workflows). I've read about Shotcut and Openshot but haven't tried them. Hope someone will chime in.

[Sharc]

I would give Shotcut a try. Checkout their website and take a look at the tutorials to get a first impression. Pretty sure it meets all your needs for an NLE.
https://shotcut.org/

Kdenlive is similar to Shotcut. I find it a bit less intuitive perhaps.

For simple remuxing an ffmpeg commandline is easiest though - unless you are frightended by commandlines. There are many ffmpeg frontend GUIs though, like ProWo's clever FFMpeg-GUI for example
https://www.videohelp.com/software/clever-FFmpeg-GUI

Also, AVIDemux might be an option for you, although its development seems to have come to an end (?)
https://www.videohelp.com/software/AviDemux

[abolibibelot]

Also, AVIDemux might be an option for you, although its development seems to have come to an end (?)

Well since Avidemux seemed to be evolving backwards, “Benjamin Button style”{*}, perhaps it has finally reached its infancy!


{*} I still haven't watched that movie, but I had had the same idea years before it came out, even wrote the outline to a lady I was chatting with at the time, about 20 years ago, gee, time f**king flies... (A hardcore vegan lady. I would joke about Wile E. Coyote chasing the Roadrunner and never catching that damn bird, and she'd very seriously reply that it's immoral to eat meat. Well, I never got to catch that damn bird, but it got insanely protracted before it fizzled out.) I was surprised to find out that someone had actually thought that such a ludicrous idea could actually make it past the spec script stage, and paid good money to get it done with A-list actors... And with all the ludicrous ideas that come to my peculiar mind (I'm a mere vessel!), I have to think that there must be potential for a few bankable flicks in there somewhere... I absolutely, positively have to reach out to Samuel Jackson while he's still alive and kicking... I've had a quite hilarious idea for which he'd be the most obvious choice as the main actor... But how can you possibly reach out to a celebrity (or a celebrity's agent) these days? I can't even reach a damn doctor, have to make an appointment before to catch the damn neighbor between two bloody doors!

[Diana (Cda)]

However, both of them don't give either MP4 or AVI in the finished video so I have to re-encode to the other, which is lossy.

That's not correct.
You can remux the output files from both editors to mp4 or avi.
No reencode occours.
Both containers can handle the mpeg2video codec.

Thanks for this. I finally had a chance to try this out and did find a way that turned out to be surprisingly easy, but it is absolutely _not_ the solution.

MPGs come out very large, generally much larger than MP4s. Remuxing just seems to -- and forgive the non-technical terms as I'm no expert at all this, but have been editing videos for about 25 years now -- change the "container" or "wrapper" or whatever, so that the original file can be read as an MP4 even though it started life as a simple MPG.

So remuxing is out.

I did try KDenlive and that seems to work well, it's just not nearly as intuitive to use as either Vegas Video 4 was and Womble is.

But I didn't realize ShotCut is an NLE editor (I've run across it before, the name doesn't really label itself as such. I dl it last night so will give it a go).

Thank you.

[Diana (Cda)]

Thank you, abolibibelot. Very much appreciated. The loss of a parent, no matter the age of both parent and child at the time, is just so incredible and difficult. We all have to go through that unless one pre-deceases, it's just never going to be easy. It's been just 1 year now. Thank goodness my family is wonderful and we still have one parent left, so I'm incredibly fortunate!

Thank you so very much for the very helpful information! I did think that remuxing might be some sort of miracle worker but it was not, merely making the extension playable, but without re-encoding from MPG to MP4, so the huge MPG size remained, which is a problem.

Since I posted my response in this thread some days past (sorry, editing this post as it wasn't KDenlive I ended up using!) ... I ended up back with AviDemux, was forgetting it was an old standby. It was cumbersome to enter FADE OUT's (because you have to type in the start of the fade out rather than saying fade out x-number of seconds), but the file produced had the fades and was small and rendered in just a few seconds! So that rules out KDenlive and ShotCut (which I tried this morning). So for this task, a simpler app is the best. But I now have KDenlive and ShotCut if I ever get back into creating videos (which I may do now that I have 2 applications with choose to experiment and see if they'll do as good a job as VegasVideo4 and Womble).

Thank you so much everyone! Appreciate the help.

[abolibibelot]

Vegas Video 4 is an incredlble piece of software [...]

If you still have the license for that old version, can't you ask a bargain price for whatever the current equivalent is? Perhaps Shotcut will be a perfect fit, but if not, and if the current equivalent Vegas NLE still has the functional and ergonomic refinements that you got accustomed to, it could be a worthy investment in the long run. (Tell them that you will sing high praise of their product on a forum for video enthusiasts... that now has about a dozen new posts on a good day...)

And KDenlive allowed me to crop out the short piece and add start and end fades so it does the job.

If I'm not mistaken and spewing “misinformation”, the proper term here is “trimming” (which can indeed be lossless with so-called “smart” encoding if nothing else was modified, in that case only the fades would be actually reencoded – I haven't used KDenlive so I don't know if that's actually what it does), whereas “cropping” is removing borders around the frame of a picture or video (which can not be lossless{*}). Mixing up those two could be confusing when reading a tutorial, or if you ever have to ask a question related to trimming and/or cropping.
(One day in elementary school a girl asked me something about some word, don't remember the specifics, I replied best I could, and apparently she was impressed as she said that one day I'd end up writing the dictionary... well, it didn't work out so well... Perhaps I should try to track her down just to tell her: “You were wrong, I'm not writing the dictionary, I'm just writing nonsense on teh Internetz. But that was a cute moment, and that's one of very few cute memories I have of that time, or pretty much any time, so thank you for that Isabelle.” But sadly I don't even remember her last name. I remember the last name of the other Isabelle, the one who was literaly banging her head on the wall one day, sitting on the floor and crying horifically, while her friend Peggy was trying to cushion her head with her tiny hands, and it took a long, long time for some adult to do something... I never knew what happened to her that caused such turmoil.)


{*} Although MKVToolNix (lossless by design) does have a “cropping” option (as I mentioned once in a quite heated discussion on the benefits and horrors of cropping), which presumably only adds a “flag” telling the player to play the video with the specified cropping factor, but I've never tried it, and apparently this is an experimental feature which few players (even software players) properly respect.

[CountChocula]

MKV Toolnix is the solution for muxing. Its incredibly simple to use, simply drag and drop your files into the program and click mux. No command line needed. MKV is the superior container, as it will accept all codecs. You mentioned your remuxes were coming out large. I've found a very minimal file size increase when I remux to mkv using mkvtoolinx, so its worth a try.

However, you mentioned you were doing some fades, so in that case, if you need to do some editing work, I recommend getting more acquainted with Kdenlive, the superior free open source NLE. Way more feature-rich than Shotcut or Avidemux. Those latter programs great for quick re-encoding, however. If large file size is still an issue, then maybe look into encoding settings and experiment with bitrate of say, at least 5mbps or CQ/CRF 18.

[Diana (Cda)]

MKV Toolnix is the solution for muxing. Its incredibly simple to use, simply drag and drop your files into the program and click mux. No command line needed. MKV is the superior container, as it will accept all codecs. You mentioned your remuxes were coming out large. I've found a very minimal file size increase when I remux to mkv using mkvtoolinx, so its worth a try.

However, you mentioned you were doing some fades, so in that case, if you need to do some editing work, I recommend getting more acquainted with Kdenlive, the superior free open source NLE. Way more feature-rich than Shotcut or Avidemux. Those latter programs great for quick re-encoding, however. If large file size is still an issue, then maybe look into encoding settings and experiment with bitrate of say, at least 5mbps or CQ/CRF 18.

I see that I may not have used the right terminology which is creating an unintended misconception. Blame that on my being a "power user" but not someone in the video-editing industry <lol>! So I would like to clarify, if I may, in case anyone else with a similar problem ends up here and finds AviDemux as great a solution as I have for this.

The issue with Womble and Vegas Video was always that despite being EXCELLENT and intuitive-to-use programs, their output is limited when creating video (Vegas Video) or editing video (Womble) to a file format whose output size is always much too large (MPG). Because MPG was never an "efficient" file format because of that, I was delighted over a decade back (maybe 15 years ago, or so ... ) when I started working in AVI, instead (though I had to leave Vegas Video behind; very sad about that) and then years later in MP4! AVI and MP4 always came out much smaller than MPG! But I'd not consistently needed to extract clips from a larger video until very recently, and this will be an ongoing weekly occurrence from this point onward in my life. Which is why it was so very grand to find how beautifully AviDemux works to do this!

Re-muxing for this turned out to be no good. Too large a file output! So KDenlive here was not the solution. The rendering rate in KDenlive was quite long every attempt I made. And the 10-12 minutes clips I cut out of the weekly 1½-hour source video was way too large! That was unacceptable.

In the end AviDemux _DOES_ do the best job! It's a lossless process, I found. Clunky for the fade outs, but after cutting out the video before and after the desired sections and applying the fade in (that part is easy) and then fiddling with the fade outs (which in AviDemux is very clunky), there's absolutely NO rendering. It's a simple File Save which is practically nearly instantaneous!! Very awesome!

So I found the solution on my own by accident and despite the "clunkiness" and "fiddling" with the fades in and out (fade out especially), it's been perfect for this!



(I didn't delete KDenlive. I used it enough when trying to figure out if it would be the solution here, so it's part of my available toolkit. Thank you!)

I hope this helps!

[Diana (Cda)]

(p.s., I have to add something that is very valuable to me. Of the extracted clips I speak of in this thread, above, I have to create subtitles as the video poster doesn't add them.

I never thought I'd ever find a freeware solution! But if anyone needs to create subtitles, as I have needed for years, SubtitleEdit does this!

I found this out by this YouTube video on the David Mbugua YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo2n2NAVrDY

This young man provides such clear and concise instructions on how to do this in this video, it was an easy delight to figure this out.
[Basically through the commands in SubtitleEdit via VIDEO > AUDIO TO TEXT (VOSK/KALDI)... > GENERATE]

I set up the weekly video clip done with AviDemux in SubtitleEdit and walk away for a few minutes while it goes through and does its thing and I come back to save the resulting SRT file! Then follows a good amount of editing as the end result is not always 100% correct, but it's free (not sure if paid versions are more accurate, but I'm happy with the results! HTH).

[_Al_]

Sometimes around before Christmas you might check HumbleBundle web site, they always offer a legit versions of Vegas (nowadays Magix Vegas) NLE. It is ussually around $30. Last year was here (which expired already)

[Xuqiwu]

Magix Vegas Pro is now Boris FX Vegas Pro

https://digitalproduction.com/2026/03/30/boris-fx-welcomes-vegas-pro/

[_Al_]

ok, I was present when Sony required it from Sonic Foundry, then Magix got it from Sony, now Boris FX got it. Interesting, I think that's it then, no more $30 versions, sadly.
edit: though, they offer very affordable monthly subscription options now