Top 7 Windows Movie Maker Alternatives in 2021
Windows Movie Maker tops the chart for the best free video editing software for years. This handy video editor, offered by Microsoft, is easy to use and quick to respond to. It even enables a rookie to create small videos or slideshows in minutes.
However, Microsoft officially discontinued all support and download services in 2017 for Windows Movie Maker for unknown reasons. Though there are ways to get Windows Movie Maker back on Win10, many people refuse to download it due to possible incompatible errors and pin their hope to Photos App, released by Microsoft and claimed to be the replacement of Windows Movie Maker.
Sadly, there are lots of things missing in Photos App, like, there is no timeline, transitions effects, split tool, etc. Now, what if you still want to do some quick edits and don’t want to jump to serious tools like Premiere Pro, Final cut pro. Don’t fret. We list 7 of the best paid and free Windows Movie Maker alternatives.
1. Openshot
Openshot is a cross-platform and open-source editor that allows you to process videos on macOS, Windows, FreeBSD, Linux, and Haiku without paying a dime. The interface is very intuitive, though a bit more complicated than Movie Maker due to more advanced features. It won’t take you longer than an hour to master all the options if following the tutorial posted on its official site. There is a wide variety of transitions and effects that are available to choose from. You can click on the effects to see what it looks like to apply them to your recordings.
Relatively Same Features with Windows Movie Maker:
- Cut, crop, trim, split, merge, and rotate, playback speed control
- Add transitions, subtitle, audios, and pictures
- Change aspect ratio, subtitle, and playback speed
Missing Features — Compare to Windows Movie Maker:
- Stabilization
- Snapshot
- Online-share
- Record screen/ voice/ webcam
It’s Own Features:
- You can add text or PNG files to watermark your contents
- Trim and split functions are more flexible and precise to apply
- You can add multiple video and audio tracks, and it also supports to unlink the video and audio track
- It allows you to add plain or 3D subtitles with rich templates so you don’t need to invest much time
2. VideoPad
It has the most similar layout to Windows Movie Maker and is very easy to master. It put all functions in visually. Put simply, you can get what you want in 3 clicks. VideoPad also comes with a timeline for you to organize and edit materials, it is more advanced but even easier to use than Windows Movie Maker. For example, when you hover over the timeline, an icon of scissors will display that allows you to easily understand its function. No more extra work to know how to use VideoPad. But, noted it can only be used for non-commercial. Another downside of VideoPad is its high CPU usage which makes the editing of 1080P or 4K video extremely slow and stutter.
Relatively Same Features with Windows Movie Maker:
- Cut, trim, split, merge, rotate, flip, split, and crop videos
- Add subtitles, transitions, filters, animations, pictures, and audios
- Stabilize and denoise your footages
- Record video, capture screenshot, record screen
- Online share: YouTube, Google Drive, Flickr, Dropbox, One Drive, Vimeo
Missing Features — Compare to Windows Movie Maker:
- Music stock
It’s Own Features:
- 70 effects & transitions including blur crossfade, dissolve, fade, circle, diamond, pan & zoom, place in 360, rotate, scale, shake, split-screen, etc.
- Support to create and load SSA/SRT/VTT subtitle files and auto-generate subtitles. Users can customize the format/font/size/color/outline color/background color/alignment way of subtitles
- 15 effects can be put to your audio including amplifying, chorus, compressor, distortion, etc.
- 3D video file/portable video file, lossless video/Blue-ray Movie Disc/Blue-ray
3. VideoProc
As one of the simplest video editors, VideoProc allows beginners to create quick edits without any awareness of video editing. VideoProc doesn’t do quite everything, but the one-click workflow makes it extremely efficient in what it does. You won’t encounter stutter or CPU over-usage error as you meet with other software. In other words, you can use VideoProc on a slow computer smoothly.
Relatively Same Features with Windows Movie Maker:
- Cut, trim, split, rotate, flip, crop, and merge videos
- Add subtitles and effects
- Deshake, denoise your recordings
- Change aspect ratio and playback speed
- Snapshot, screen, and webcam capture
Missing Features — Compare to Windows Movie Maker:
- Add pictures, audio, and transitions
- Online share
It’s Own Features:
- The built-in downloader allows you to extract videos, audios, and subtitles from 1000+ online websites
- Subtitle your videos with the ASS or SRT file
- Watermark videos with customized JPG/PNG pictures, timecodes, and texts
- Level-3 hardware acceleration to process 4K videos in minutes
- Edit and convert videos without diminishing in quality
- Support all popular video and audio formats including 4K/8K HEVC, H.264 MKV, MP4, AVI videos
4. iMovie
iMovie is prebuilt on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Here we focus on iMovie on Mac. You can add two video tracks. As for audio tracks, there is no limitation. If you don’t want to manually set filters or transitions, the rich preset themes can do you a big favor. You can get a nice outcome through one click on the available themes. There are also many stunning subtitle templates, with it you can create very eye-catching clips. Just like Windows Movie Maker, you can use iMovie to record voice, and the recording will display in the new track on the timeline which is easy for you to control.
Relatively Same Features with Windows Movie Maker:
- Cut, trim, split, merge, rotate, flip, split, crop, scale videos
- Add subtitles, transitions, effects, pictures, and audios
- Deshake and denoise your footages
- Add voice overlay and adjust the audio file
- Online share: YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, Email and more
Missing Features — Compare to Windows Movie Maker:
- Not goes compatible with Windows
- Screen and webcam capture
It’s Own Features:
- Rich premake themes, transitions, and subtitle templates
- Multiple video/audio tracks enable you to easier organize materials
5. DaVinci Resolve 16
DaVinci Resolve 16, freely offered by Blackmagic Design, is an industry-level replacement for Windows Movie Maker. You can get the installer pack on its official after logging in with your personal information like name, city, phone number and email. The paid version is DaVinci Studio and tagged at USD 299. Though you can’t use it to remove objects, auto-match color, grade HDR color or get support from a robust AI engine, the free version has hardly any features missing compared to its brethren expect in terms of most commonly used functions. Why do we still list it here if it isn’t entry-level editing software? The workflow of DaVinci Resolve is well organized so you will never feel like trying to wade through a seal of tools to find the right one.
There are Media, Cut, Edit, Fusion, Color, Fairlight and Deliver tabs on the main interface. The benefit of these partitions is that you can click each tab to enter a separate panel to polish videos. For example, most editing works like cut, trim, split, and crop can be done on the Edit Tab. To do color corrections or fine-tuning, you will naturally go down to the Color tab. One small downside of DaVinci Resolve 16 is its limited output options. It only allows you to create the video in DNxHD, DNxHR, GoPro CineForm, Grass Valley, H.264, Kakadu JPEG 2000, MPEG, Photo JPEG, and uncompressed codec. This means you can generate videos in VP8, VP9, HEVC, MKV, and many other popular formats.
Relatively Same Features with Windows Movie Maker:
- Cut, trim, split, merge, crop and rotate videos
- Add pictures, music, transitions, and effects to the projects
- Change aspect ratio and playback speed
- Record screen or webcam
- Remove shakiness and reduce noise
Missing Features — Compare to Windows Movie Maker:
- Click to share online
- Online free or paid music resources
It’s Own Features:
- Create a proxy for high-resolution videos to improve the efficiency of editing
- Strong color grading capability: the node-based color correction workflow is extremely efficient and precise. With the support of Luts and collaboration of color wheels, scopes, and other useful tools, you can get a professional-grade color correction outcome
- Edit audio like you do with videos
6. Shotcut
It is pleasant to create a video with Shotcut. You can easily add or remove video and audio tracks on the timeline. The split, ripple, cut tools are easy to find. To further edit your videos like grading color, distorting frames, adding Luts, blur and saturation effect, cropping (circle/rectangle, source) footages, you don’t need to look them up everywhere as they are all listed on Filters. It supports 4K input and output and a wide range of popular audio, picture, and video codecs. Things worthy to mention is that there are many nice preset transitions like what you can get in Windows Movie Maker or Openshot, you need to import the background picture and get the desired transitions effects after some efforts.
Relatively Same Features with Windows Movie Maker:
- Cut, trim, crop, split, merge videos
- Add transitions, effects, music, pictures, texts to recordings
- Change aspect ratio, playback speed, and up/downscale the frames
Missing Features — Compare to Windows Movie Maker:
- Online sharing and music resources
- Record audio, screen, and webcam
It’s Own Features:
- There is no watermark option, but you can create a watermark by adding a picture and changing its positions, transparency, and duration in a new video track
- Strong color grading capability: the node-based color correction workflow is extremely efficient and precise. With the support of Luts and collaboration of color wheels, scopes, and other useful tools, you can get a professional-grade color correction outcome
- You can flexibly add texts, zoom in/out, rotate, correct colors, remove shakiness, adjust audio by adding filers
7. Kdenlive
Kdenlive is an FFmpeg-based open-source editor. Unlike other primary open-source video editing software like Openshot we mentioned earlier in this post, Kdenlive is a lot more versatile and has a very fast response speed. It supports to create proxy clips so you can create HD or 4K videos on a relatively poorly-built computer without suffering from stuttering and freezing. Besides the basic editing tasks, you can also make customized transitions and effects. The layout is a little confusing, but most toolkits can be explored in the effects and composition tab.
Note: it can run on Windows, Linux, and Mac. But installation on windows can be a little tricky.
1)Download Kdenlive on the official site
2) Download FFmpeg-3.3.2-win64-shared from https://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/win64/shared/
3) Extract files from those two folders
4) In the folder FFmpeg-3.3.2-win64-shared: put preset into the bin, and then paste all files into the bin
5) Go to the folder kdenlive-19.12.1_standalone, where you paste those files. Click Replace the files in the destination if that request pops up
6) Right-click Kdenlive to install the freeware.
Relatively Same Features with Windows Movie Maker:
- Cut, trim, split, crop, scale, joint video clips
- Add music, subtitles, pictures, effects, and transitions
Missing Features — Compare to Windows Movie Maker:
- Record screen and webcam
- Online sharing or music resources
It’s Own Features:
- Stabilize videos accurately by putting proper value in the properties of shakiness, accuracy, stepsize, minimum contrast, smoothing, max shift, max angle, etc.
- Create 2D titles and you can set the align and distribute, letter-spacing, line-spacing adjustment, font, color, shadows and more as you like, or take the utilization of template directly
- There are transitions for both audio and video which make Kdenlive a decent audio editor