It was once the world's most popular free video editor, but after many years of distinguished service, Windows Movie Maker has been laid to rest. Its installer is no longer available on Microsoft's website, and the software won't receive any security updates to fix newly discovered vulnerabilities. Don't worry, though – Movie Maker may have gone to the great hard drive in the sky, but there are some excellent alternatives available that are more powerful, just as easy to use, and completely free. Here we've picked the best Windows Movie Maker substitutes that will enable you to create great-looking videos without having to master a drastically different interface.

No multi-track timeline The Fall Creators Update brought many fun and useful new features to Windows 10, including a video editor that's a direct replacement for Windows Movie Maker. Interestingly, it's tucked away in the app, but it's easy to use and very accessible for beginners. Start by choosing your media files (photos and video) and arranging them in a sequence. You can then make some simple edits (like trimming video clips and applying filters), apply fun motion effects and titles, and set the whole thing to a lively soundtrack. You don't get quite as much granular control as you did in Windows Movie Maker (you don't have separate tracks for video and audio, for example). But the effects and transitions are vastly improved, and it's much easier for a complete beginner to achieve good-looking effects. Once you're done, you can save the video to your PC or share it straight via Skype, YouTube or OneNote.

You won't find a more direct replacement for Windows Movie Maker. No device-specific export profiles The first time you open it, bears little resemblance to Windows Movie Maker, but hit the Playlist and Timeline buttons at the top and it starts to look familiar. Open files to add them to your playlist, then drag and drop them onto the timeline to piece them together, just like you could in Movie Maker. Once you’ve got everything in order, hit the Filters button, then click the plus sign to apply transitions and effects. You can apply as many effects as you like, including coloured filters like those available in Windows Movie Maker, plus advanced options such as chroma key compositing for greenscreen effects. There’s even a text option that lets you create titles and watermarks – and they look less cheesy than Windows Movie Maker’s equivalents.

Best of all, Shotcut is open source, so none of its features are hidden behind a paywall. If you miss Windows Movie Maker, Shotcut is a solid alternative. No hardware acceleration looks less like Windows Movie Maker than Shotcut, but it’s superb if you’re willing to try something new. Video projects are built from video clips, audio files and pictures. Once you’ve selected your source files and put them in order, you can add annotations, effects, cursors, notes, and charts.

There’s a lot to experiment with, but thankfully VSDC Free Video Editor includes wizards that walk you through the trickier parts. We particularly like the retro-style filters and animations, which really bring a video project to life.

Note that you won’t be able to export your project if you’ve used premium features like hardware acceleration, which is enabled by default. You can turn it off by clicking Options (in the top right), selecting Acceleration Options and unchecking ‘Use hardware acceleration for encoding video’. VSDC receives frequent updates to add new features, and is an excellent alternative to Windows Movie Maker if you’re interested in getting creative.

No timeline If you only used Windows Movie Maker for basic video editing tasks, is well worth a look. It doesn’t offer a fancy interface or direct sharing to social media, but if you take a little time to peruse its menus, you’ll find it’s surprisingly capable. There are preset profiles for different output devices, video and audio filters, fades, subtitles, and lots of customizable encoding options. The main downside of Avidemux is that you can’t combine videos that are different heights or widths.

This won’t matter if you’re putting footage all shot using the same smartphone or screen capture tool, but can be inconvenient if your media come from different sources. To get around it, you have to resize each clip separately, export it, then make a new project. It’s not a serious issue, but the developers are aware and it should be resolved in a future update. Interface looks a little dated Of all the tools here, is the one that most closely resembles Windows Movie Maker. You’ll be up and running in seconds – just import your video clips, audio files and still images, then drag and drop them into the timeline at the bottom of the window. In fact, VideoPad Video Editor resembles good old Windows Movie Maker so closely that some of its effects now look a bit cheesy, and its interface (a busy combination of icons, menus and ribbons) looks rather dated. It’s kept up to date with stereoscopic 3D conversion, direct sharing to social media, and chroma keying.

VideoPad Video Editor also lets you export videos in 4K – a feature you’d normally only find in premium tools. There’s also a premium version of VideoPad Video Editor, which adds support for extensions and an unlimited number of audio tracks, but the free edition offers everything else you could wish for. Note that the main 'Download' link leads to a 30-day trial of the premium version of VideoPad. The link to the free version is a little way down the homepage, beside the subheading 'Get it free'.

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In our last lesson we looked at —the kind of movie you might throw together of the family gathered over a holiday meal or, in warmer times of the year, frolicking in the gush of an untended hydrant. Such movies allow you to piece together as much material as you like, which can be great if you’re the creator of Star Wars 4 – 6 Legomania! And less terrific if you’re the poor sap subjected to 90 full minutes of Baby’s First Bath! Fortunately, iMovie 10 also offers you a way to create videos that are necessarily limited to a running time of just over or under a minute. They’re called trailers and, like the countless movie trailers we’ve seen in theaters and appended to DVDs, are heavily templated. Here’s how they work.

Previewing the trailers To create a trailer choose File New Trailer, press Command-Shift-N, or click the Create button in iMovie’s toolbar, and choose Trailer from the menu that appears. The resulting Create window presents 29 trailer templates, including Action, Coming of Age, Holiday, Romance, and Travel. IMovie 10 packs a ton of trailer templates. Select any template, and a Play button appears over its thumbnail. Click that button to see a preview of the trailer that uses Apple-supplied footage.

Each template has its own visual style and title style, along with a unique musical score. Below each template is a Cast Members entry, which gives you an idea of how many “main characters” the template supports. You’ll also see the trailer’s length beneath each thumbnail. Working with a trailer Double-click a trailer (or select a trailer and click the Create button), and the Trailer Editor pane opens at the bottom of the iMovie window. Within the Trailer Editor are three tabs—Outline, Storyboard, and Shot List. Outline: In this case, “Outline” is a cute name for “title information.” Here you enter the time and date of your movie, as well as the information that will appear in the Cast, Studio, and Credits screens.

Free Movie Trailer Maker For Mac Pro

With some templates you’ll additionally see a Video Style pop-up menu. Click it, and you can choose Normal, Film Noir, or Black & White. You enter title and credit information in the Outline tab. Storyboard: In the Storyboard tab you enter interstitial text (for example, “Pow!” “Intrigue!” or “Meanwhile”) and place clips or stills to fill the video slots within the template. Filling these slots couldn’t be much easier. Each slot indicates its length and the kind of shot it is—a close-up image of one of the characters (your child, for instance) or a landscape, wide, medium, group, or two-shot (a shot that shows two people in the frame). To add a clip, move to the Browser pane, find the still or clip you’d like to use, and click it at the point where you want the clip to begin.

It will automatically occupy the slot, and it will last for exactly as long as the slot allows. When the current slot is filled, the next is selected. Keep selecting and clicking to fill the remaining slots. Should you wish to preview your work, just place your cursor before the beginning of the first slot (which is likely the studio credit) and press the spacebar.

The trailer will play in the Preview pane. Shot List: This tab gathers together all the video slots and categorizes them by type—Action, Closeup, Group, Landscape, Medium, Two Shot, and Wide, for example. This arrangement is a convenient way to confirm that the kind of clip you’ve used to fill a slot matches the slot type—that you really have put a head shot, rather than, say, a broad image of the Grand Canyon, in a close-up slot. You can also preview clips by scrubbing your cursor over them.

Get a better idea of how your clips measure up in the Shot List tab. Editing trailers Even though you’ve plunked a clip into a video slot, you have the option to replace or edit it. To replace a clip you can simply drag another clip over it in either the Storyboard or Shot List tab. Or, if you like, select the slot and click the Remove icon that appears in the top-right corner of the slot. As you hover your cursor over one of these filled slots, you’ll discover two other options.

Click the Audio icon, and you can turn on the audio track for that clip. (By default, clip audio is muted.) In this case both the clip’s audio and the music soundtrack that accompanies the trailer will play. Click the Adjust icon that appears in the bottom-left corner of the clip to reveal the Clip Trimmer.

I’ll discuss the Clip Trimmer in greater detail in our next lesson; for the time being, understand that it helps you make finer adjustments to a clip’s length. The process involves choosing a different starting point for the clip by clicking that location within the Clip Trimmer, after which the clip adjusts accordingly to fill the slot. To close the Clip Trimmer, click the X that appears to the left of ‘Close Clip Trimmer.’ If you’d like to perform the same kind of edits that you can in a regular iMovie project, you must convert the trailer to a movie. Simply choose File Convert Trailer to Movie, and iMovie does exactly that, placing the resulting movie in the Project pane at the bottom of the iMovie window. Saving and sharing your trailer iMovie 10 has no Save command because projects save automatically as you work on them.

Given that, feel free to click the small X that appears in the top-left corner of the Trailer Editor pane to close it. An entry for your trailer will appear in the Browser pane when you select the event that holds the trailer. If you’d like to continue working on it, double-click it to open the Trailer Editor. You share trailers exactly as you share any other iMovie project. Click the Share button in the iMovie window or choose an option from the Share submenu within the File menu, and proceed as I outlined in our last lesson.

Free Movie Trailer Maker For Mac No Watermark

And that’s largely it—an easy way to create some great-looking (and blessedly short) movies suitable for family and friends. Next week: Exploring iMovie’s editing options.