• Best 2d Animation Apps For Mac
• Best Animation Apps For Computer

The best iPad Pro apps have been created from the outset to work with Cupertino's stunning stylus, the Apple Pencil. The Pencil was created from the outset to augment the iPad Pro's feature-rich native applications, so there's no reason why drawing, sketching, note-taking and other design apps should fail to take full advantage of its capabilities.

Thankfully, there is a plethora of iPad Pro apps that have been built with the Apple Pencil in mind and allow it to shine. And it is worth noting that all of our recommended apps will work just as well with the latest iPad Air (3rd generation), iPad mini (5th generation), and iPad (6th generation), all of which now pair with the first-generation of Apple Pencil.

Download and install the best free apps for Animation Software on Mac from CNET Download.com, your trusted source for the top software picks.

The Best Free Presentation App While PowerPoint has a limited free version and Keynote is often free for Mac owners, there's a free presentation app that I like perhaps even more: Google Slides. 6 great animation apps for the Mac The Mac has long been a premier platform for many artists, and these six apps from the Mac App Store are powerful tools for creating all kinds of animated content.

Last year heralded the arrival of third-generation iPad Pros (known as the iPad Pro 2018). The updates included a souped up processor and edge-to-edge screens, and the cherry on the cake was the second-gen Apple Pencil. The newest stylus added wireless charging, double-tap to change tools and magnetic pairing (which means its harder to lose – what a bonus). But, as good as the Apple Pencil is, also be aware that it's not the only option available for using with an iPad, as we explore in our post on the best iPad stylus.

• Download and install the best free apps for Animation Software on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android from CNET Download.com, your trusted source for the top software picks.
• The Best 2D Animation Software There are plenty of 2D animation software on the market currently but there are quite a few that stand out from the rest and some of these include: 1.
• First up is Animation Desk, an app which aims to replicate the environment of a real animation desk. Within the app, users of all skill levels can make simple and fun animations. The app supports layers, allows for dynamic and static backgrounds and boasts a variety of tools including onion-skin capabilities and a powerful frame manager.
• Pencil 0.5.4b - Simple animation planning tool (beta). Download the latest versions of the best Mac apps at safe and trusted MacUpdate Download, install, or update Pencil for Mac from MacUpdate.

So, we've found the best iPad Pro apps that work with the Apple Pencil like a dream, but will also be comfortable with a fingertip. We will let you know which apps have been updated with second-gen Pencil double-tap support as we go. And if you haven't yet got a Pencil, but you would like one, see our deals below.

Regardless of whether you have a Pencil, you might also want to check out our best drawing apps for iPad roundup.

01. Astropad

• Requirements: iOS 9.1 (iPad) and 10.11 (Macs)
• Price: $29.99

Built by former Apple engineers, Astropad enables you to turn your iPad Pro into a graphics tablet for your Mac. Download Astropad and the free Mac companion app, and you can use your iPad just like a graphics tablet, using the Pencil to draw directly in any Mac app, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Affinity Designer and so on.

It promises the high-end experience of a Wacom pen display (without actually having to buy a Wacom tablet), and you can connect it to your Mac wirelessly or via USB. Smart.

02. Affinity Designer for iPad

• Requirements: iOS 11.0 or later
• Double-tap support: No
• Price: $19.99/£19.99

The latest offering from Serif, Affinity Designer for iPad is right up there with the best tools for designers and artists on the go. It comes complete with full support for the Apple Pencil’s drawing capabilities in terms of precision, pressure sensitivity and tilt functionality. Fully optimised for iPad without compromising on power, Affinity Designer for iPad offers the functionality of a professional desktop app, adapted to a tablet workflow.

03. Adobe Illustrator Draw

• Requirements: iOS 11.0 or later
• Double-tap support: Yes
• Price: Free

Illustrator Draw is one of the talents on offer from Adobe. Illustrator CC is renowned, but you may not be familiar with Illustrator Draw. It is more than just a digital sketchbook – this drawing app for your iPad has all the popular and most useful features of Ai wrapped up in a simple UI, designed for quickly sketching out ideas and concepts when you're on the go.

Features include simple vector-based drawing tools with separate drawing and photo layers as well as the ability to sync to Adobe's Creative Cloud. With this feature, you can also download Adobe Illustrator-compatible files and work with them on your iPad with your Apple Pencil.

The app enables you to draw perfectly straight lines and geometric shapes, rename layers, and use shapes from Adobe Capture CC. An enhanced perspective grid also means you can map shapes to a perspective plane. All told, this is an essential app for iPad-owning Ai users.

04. Autodesk SketchBook

• Requirements: iOS 11.0 or later
• Double-tap support: Yes
• Price: Free

Autodesk Sketchbook is not one of the most well-known Autodesk apps. Autodesk is in the know in the main for pro-spec 3D apps like 3ds Max and Maya (see our Maya tutorials here), but in Sketchbook it has a powerful mainstream sketching application with an incredibly natural drawing experience – something that is superbly exploited by the latest iPad Pro's ProMotion tech and, of course, Apple Pencil.

Featuring 170 customisable brushes, full PSD layer and blending support, and switchable predictive stroke which transforms your hand-drawn lines and shapes into crisp, precise forms, Sketchbook is probably the best free-drawing app around – and incredibly it doesn't cost a penny, and has no in-app purchases.

05. Procreate

• Requirements: iOS 12.0 or later
• Double-tap support: Yes
• Price: $9.99/£9.99

Procreate is the king of natural media apps on the iPad, and it is completely transformed with the addition of the Pencil. Sure, you can use your finger with it, a simple stylus, or even one of the increasingly complicated and expensive third-party styluses from the likes of Adonit, but none of these give you the fluidity and analogue-like experience that the Apple Pencil does.

In part this is down to the Pencil's fine tip, in part the low latency and double-speed sampling rate, and in part because the palm rejection is nearly flawless. But all that technical stuff just fades away into the background when you're faced with the joy of sketching with a 6B pencil, turning it flat to block in big areas of shade, or mucking about with paints.

Procreate 4 boasted a significant technological overhaul, along with a litany of improvements including the introduction of wet paint options and an intuitive redesigned menus. A major update to version 4.2 added support for the third-generation iPad Pro and second-gen Apple Pencil – Clipping Masks, Crop, inking, and Selections have been redesigned for multitouch and Apple Pencil 2, amongst other improvements, and the latest release, 4.3, adds a much-anticipated text tool as well as animation abilities. Also check Procreate Pocket.

06. Noteshelf 2

• Requirements: iOS 12.0 or later
• Double-tap support: Yes
• Price: $9.99/£9.99

Full disclosure: Noteshelf 2 fulfills an urge we have had for a long time. We have wanted to include Noteshelf on this list for some time – it has always been an incredibly rich notebook app, albeit one that wasn't quite as pretty or simple as some others on this list. However, although it added support for the Pencil on the first-generation stylus' release, it was not well integrated, so we couldn't include it on a list of apps that come alive with Apple Pencil.

Happily, Noteshelf has undergone a transformation, so much so that a mere version update wasn't enough – it has instead been reborn as Noteshelf 2. It now includes tilt- and pressure-sensitivity with Apple Pencil and supports double-tap to switch between tools with Apple Pencil 2. Siri is integrated, and you can record audio notes as well as marking up PDFs and images.

But what you've bought it for is note-taking, which it accomplishes with aplomb – a beautiful lag-free action combines with uncanny handwriting recognition and useful autoshapes to make for one of the best notebook apps around.

07. Linea Sketch

• Requirements: iOS 11.0 or later
• Double-tap support: Yes
• Price: $4.99/£4.99

On the iPad Pro, there's a sketching app for everyone. Linea Sketch is the ideal app for the creative person who wants something more powerful than a basic pen-and-paper app, but is turned off by the complexity of full-feature painting and drawing engines like Affinity Designer or Procreate.

Doing without the infinite canvas of some rivals, Linea Sketch instead supports a fixed canvas and familiar drawing layers that can be repositioned anywhere in your infinite layer stack. The app doesn't go overboard with power user tools, but still offers several pens, color palettes and background textures, plus there is a transform tool, automatic ruler, grid tool which gives you backgrounds for note-taking, drawing, and user interface design, and a few more useful additions.

You can share via the usual well-known applications, and export in Photoshop PSD as well as JPG and PNG file formats. At a smidge under a fiver, this is a pleasingly pared-back app that won't weigh heavily on your pocket or your iPad's processor.

08. Concepts

• Requirements: iOS 11.0 or later
• Double-tap support: Yes
• Price: Free ($9.99/£9.99 Essentials in-app purchase)

Concepts is the award-winning, advanced sketching and design app for professional creators. With infinite canvas and organic brushes, fluid and responsive vector drawing engine, and intuitive precision tools, your design experience has never felt so natural. Whether you’re an architect, product designer, illustrator or visual thinker, you can explore, iterate and share your designs anywhere you go.

Concepts is another iPad Pro app that quickly released a major update following the launch of the second-generation Apple Pencil – double-tap tool switching is supported, plus you can customise how the double-tap manifests itself.

Fortunately, there is a file system (actually two, I'll explain) that you can format your flash drive in order to be fully compatible with Mac and PC. In other words, you can access the drive and transfer data without any hassles. How can the answer be improved? Best flash drive format for mac and pc. Format a drive using Disk Utility on a Mac. Launch Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities). Select your external hard drive or USB flash drive from the list on the left. Click on the Erase tab. Select the format – Mac OS Extended (HFS+), MS-DOS (FAT32), or exFAT – then name the drive. Click the Erase button and the drive will start formatting. Mac 101: Format choices for USB flash drives. The overwhelming majority of USB flash drives you buy are going to come in one of two formats: FAT32 or NTFS. The first format, FAT32, is fully compatible with Mac OS X, though with some drawbacks that we'll discuss later. Dec 06, 2011  Hey everyone. I was recently trying to put a file on a 16GB flash drive that is formatted via FAT32. The file being bigger than 4GB would not go on it, seeing how FAT32 can't handle it. So that brings me, what's the best format to have your flash drive, if you will be using it back and forth between Mac and PC units.

09. Affinity Photo

• Requirements: iOS 11.1 or later
• Double-tap support: Yes
• Price: $19.99/£19.99

Another one from Serif, Affinity Photo is a fantastic Photoshop alternative on Mac and Windows machines thanks to its solid tool set, amazing performance and one-off price instead of a subscription fee. Its iPad version – used by Apple to demo the iPad Pro and Pencil – is no less impressive.

While it's compatible with earlier iPad models, it's when you pair it with an iPad Pro and Pencil that Affinity Photo really comes alive. As it's engineered to make the most of the iPad's hardware and touch features, Affinity Photo on the iPad Pro is also built to take full advantage of the Pencil's pressure and angle sensitivity. It's great for tasks from painting with its professional brush engine, or for applying realtime lighting effects.

Affinity Photo is built for a professional workflow, with support for raw and PSD files as well as full cross-platform performance and file compatibility in case you feel the need to add some final polish on your desktop. But you probably won't need to.

10. Adobe Comp CC

• Requirements: iOS 9.0 or later
• Double-tap support: No
• Price: Free

The Adobe Comp CC iPad pro app is a revelation, and makes the process of wireframing or mocking up designs a cinch. Rather than pulling out your notebook and drawing dumb rectangles for pictures or a few horizontal lines to indicate where text would go in a layout, with a few simple and intuitive sketched shapes you can actually start building those layouts for real – and then pass them into InDesign CC, Illustrator CC or Photoshop CC.

It's worth familiarising yourself with all the different gestures for aligning, grouping and so on so you can work quickly and efficiently. You could do all this with just your finger, but using the Pencil feels delightfully like drawing in a notebook with a magical pencil, where birds you draw come to life and fly off the page.

Draw a rectangle, slash it with a diagonal cross and it becomes an image box that you can populate with assets from, say, your Creative Cloud Library. Draw a box and scrub a few horizontal lines in it, and boom, it's a text box, which you can style manually (there's also a handy, quick slider control for point size) or apply styles to from your CC Libraries. Rough squares snap to perfect geometric shapes.

It's fast, fluid and easy, and while sure, pro designers are likely to work from these wireframes like they would with one drawn in ink in a Moleskine – that is, merely referring to it but building from scratch, rather than importing it from Comp – but it can still be a boon to your productivity to be able to quickly mock up your designs using real live assets and styles.

11. Graphic for iPad

• Requirements: iOS 11.0 or later
• Double-tap support: No
• Price: $8.99/£8.99

Despite Adobe bringing Illustrator to the iPad, there are some who will swear blind that Graphic remains the best vector drawing app available on iOS.

As well as offering various brushes and tools, Graphic comes packing useful features including geometry settings pane with -/+ nudge buttons, three and four-finger tap gestures to undo/redo, and you can customize the screen tap gestures to perform whatever actions are most beneficial to your workflow.

Recent updates arm Graphic with a larger drawing canvas (developer Picta claims 16k x 16k), pressure-sensitive drawing with the Apple Pencil, and document tabs. If you're looking for professional desktop-class vector illustration tools right on your iPad Pro, give Graphic a try.

12. Sharpr 3D

• Requirements: iOS 11.0 or later
• Double-tap support: No
• Price: Free, Pro subscription $31.99/£28.99 per month

The Sharpr team claim that Shapr3D is the only truly mobile CAD app, and that may well be true but it is certainly an expensive one if you subscribe to the Pro version – which is the only way to export your work. However, marry this app to an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil and you will quickly see what you get for your money – a quick, precise way to create 3D models using the same geometric modelling engine as Solidworks.

And it's a cinch to use, too – sketch out a shape, add constraints, pull for an extrude or choose from various tools to make 3D from sketches. Then finish off your work by dragging the edges down for a fillet, and move your edges for freeform surfaces. This app is deep-designed for Apple Pencil – you will actually need Cupertino's smooth stylus to carry out all of Sharpr's functions.

13. Adobe Photoshop Sketch

• Requirements: iOS 11.0 or later
• Double-tap support: Yes
• Price: Free

Pared-back it may be, but Sketch is genuinely really good, with not only some lovely natural media types built-in (and the option of adding more brushes via Capture CC), but also some features that might quickly endear it to you.

For starters, it can push layered PSDs directly to Photoshop on your Mac or PC, and you can add either a flat grid or even a configurable 3D plane grid to the background, plus preset geometric shapes, to help keep you on the straight and narrow. When you want to go on the wide and sinuous, there are French curves that you can trace against.

But that would be for naught if the natural media tools themselves were rubbish, but in fact they're generally very nice. Pay attention specifically to the watercolour tool, which has colours bleed into one another in a most pleasing manner.

What's even nicer is that you can tap an icon – which looks like fan blades – to 'dry' the paint so that new colours added on top don't bleed, giving you some terrific flexibility. The tools are Pencil-aware, so react wonderfully to pressure and tilt differences, but we are awaiting an update that allows for double-tap compatibility.

14. Notability

• Requirements: iOS 11.0 or later
• Double-tap support: Yes
• Price: $9.99/£9.99

For some, digital notepads will always come under the 'scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should' banner, but those happy to commit to stylus-on-screen experience should try Notability.

Notability allows you to combine handwriting, photos and typing, and adds a small but well-integrated selection of drawing tools so you won't be jumping from app to app if you want to sketch. What makes Notability shine as an Apple Pencil app are those little features like automatic palm rejection, where you can rest your hand on the screen and it won't register as a mark, and straight-line detection, where the app engine will recognise when you are trying to draw a ruled line and straighten it for you.

Notability's features exist on a few other note-taking and sketchbook apps, including many on Apple's native Notes app, but its the combination of essential tools in one app combined with lag-free drawing that makes this a great go-to iPad Pro app when you're away from the studio.

15. Pixelmator

• Requirements: iOS 9.1 or later
• Double-tap support: Yes
• Price: $4.99/£4.99

In place of Pixelmator, we could have recommended Adobe Photoshop Mix. Although the latter's cut-out tools, layers, and paintable filters are generally quite nice, the stalwart iOS bitmap editor Pixelmator just feels like the more mature and useful app.

As well as offering some natural media drawing tools that work with the Pencil, it gives you the ability to tweak the colours either by applying Instagram-style filters, or with sliders for brightness, contrast, saturation, RGB and white balance – or indeed by tweaking the curves.

But the pairing of Pixelmator and the Pencil really shine if you want to do some touch-ups or object isolation. The touch-up controls – repair, dodge, burn, sharpen, saturate and more – are easy to apply with the Pencil especially given its precision. When painting out backgrounds this precision, plus the various different eraser types available, are hugely welcome.

Best 2d Animation Apps For Mac

If we've one criticism, it's that we'd like the option of pressure-sensitivity to affect the size of an eraser rather than its opacity, but nevertheless this is the closest thing you're going to find to Photoshop on the iPad – until later this year.

16. Clip Studio Paint for manga

• Requirements: iOS 11.0 or later
• Double-tap support: No
• Price: Free, $4.49/£3.49 (PRO), $8.99/£6.99 (EX)

Clip Studio Paint for manga replaced the popular Manga Studio and immediately inherited its legions of users thanks to its specialised features for drawing comics and cartoons. Instantly familiar to anyone who has used the desktop version of the app, Clip Studio Paint allows you to create full-colour comics and cartoons with ease.

The desktop-style UI means Apple Pencil is virtually essential here unless you have particularly slender digits with pointed fingertips. But once you have familiarised yourself with the fiddly buttons and menus, you can fully appreciate the feature-dense drawing app at your disposal.

Despite its talents and vast repertoire of tools, there is no denying that this is an expensive app. But if you specialise in this area of art and design, there are few better.

17. Paper

• Requirements: iOS 10.0 or later
• Double-tap support: Yes
• Price: Free, $7.99/£5.49 (Pro)

At first glance Paper by WeTransfer (formerly Paper by FiftyThree) it might look like a reasonably simple drawing and diagramming tool – and on one level, that's what it is – but there are some smarts here.

They are frustratingly difficult to discover, but again it's worth poking around the support files online to understand how the apparently simple tools can be used to create graphs, org charts and Venn diagrams, can easily duplicate shapes, link shapes with lines (with optional arrows at one or both ends) and much more.

Paper doesn't demand the kind of precision you get from the Pencil, but it's certainly welcome, and the slightly, delightfully cartoonish media work great with its sensors.

18. Evernote

• Requirements: iOS 11.0 or later
• Double-tap support: Yes
• Price: Free (Basic), $4.99/£4.99 per month (Premium)

Ah, Evernote. Now, this definitely isn't for everyone. For some, this uber-notebook has become an indispensable place for gathering websites, sketches, notes, to-do lists and more – the detritus of modern life as well as inspiration and creative work – but for others it's just a bit baffling and never quite clicks.

It's definitely rich and capable, though, and the ability to record audio – during a briefing meeting, say, while you sketch ideas for a client using its simple but effective drawing tools – is great (though this isn't the only app to offer that, of course). It's pleasing how the eraser tool creates nicely rounded ends to the ink strokes rather than just slicing them into sharp points.

Using the Pencil rather than a dumb stylus or your finger gives you a more expressive line since it's pressure sensitive, but more importantly the palm rejection means that you can lean your hand on the screen like you would with paper, and Evernote won't get confused and make marks where your hand is resting.

19. LiquidText

• Requirements: iOS 9.3 or later
• Double-tap support: Yes
• Price: Free, $29.99/£28.99 (Pro)

Even without a Pencil, LiquidText is a handy tool for reading and annotating PDFs, Word and PowerPoint documents, and web pages. It's designed to support 'active reading', so as you're reading you can be highlighting and snipping out sections to refer to later, collapsing sections of a document down so you can refer to disparate bits of it at once, and more.

Add in the Pencil, though, and it becomes even faster to use, and it's a great example of how the Pencil's pressure- and tilt-sensitivity can be used not just to mimic real-world drawing tools.

Dragging the Pencil over text instantly selects it (rather than having to tap-and-wait with your finger), pressing harder selects any part of the document as an image, and dragging across text with the Pencil held at a flattened angle selects and highlights it. Smart. And if you own an Apple Pencil 2, you can use LiquidText's configurable double-tap compatibility, too.

20. uMake

• Requirements: iOS 11.2 or later
• Double-tap support: No
• Price: 14-day free trial, $15.99/£14.99 per month

We'll come clean: despite assurances from uMake that it 'empowers anyone to create 3D designs easily and intuitively', we don't have the chops to produce anything remotely impressive in this 3D drawing app, but we can nevertheless see that it makes great use of the Pencil.

The idea is that you can sketch in 2D – optionally making use of smart symmetry controls – and then extrude your designs or even draw entirely in 3D space, connecting points on different planes.

Even if you're a bit clumsy and jittery, your lines are smoothed into flowing curves, and with practice we can see that it would be possible to create some elegant, organic forms at speed – and the precision of the Pencil's tip will make this whole process simpler than with any other stylus.

It might get frustrating for highly technical engineering work, but you can always use it as a tool for getting an initial concept down before exporting to IGES or OBJ files so you can work it up in other apps. Version 2.0 sees SketchUp support, meaning you can import and open .SKP files directly in uMake, but exporting to .SKP format is not yet available – however, it is in the pipeline.

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On the face of it, getting hold of the best video editing software is no easy task. There are loads of options out there, all boasting brilliant features and innovative add-ons. But the option that will suit a professional video editor won't necessarily be the best for the enthusiastic amateur. And what about free video editing software?

That's where this TechRadar guide to choosing the best video editing software comes in. We've used all the best (and worst) editors around and distilled them down to an easy-to-digest list of our favorites.

Below you'll see lists of both premium and free video editing software. So if you're ready for something advanced, opting for a paid product will get you high-end extras like 360-degree video support, motion tracking and multi-cam editing, but that's just the start.

The most impressive programs make your everyday tasks like cutting, trimming, combining and applying filters to clips as simple as possible - that's true regardless of whether you demand the absolute best video editor out there, or if you were hoping for free video editing software instead. Downloading an inferior option will lead only to frustration and a less polished finished product. The tools we've picked out for you in this guide are the very best in their class.

Keep reading to get the best of both worlds, with Adobe Premiere Pro leading the way as our #1 favorite. And further down the page we have an FAQ to answer all your burning questions about video editing software.

• Need the hardware, too? Discover the best laptops for video editing

The overall best video editing software

These premium video editors can't be matched - not even by the very greatest free options. The extra resources available to commercial projects help to refine the entire package, often bringing more accurate and configurable effects, an enhanced interface and a faster rendering engine. If it's the very best video editing software that you're after, then look no further than this quintet:

1. Adobe Premiere Pro CC

Dedicate the time to mastering Premiere Pro and reap the rewards

Platform: Windows/Mac Free trial: 7 days Upload straight to YouTube: Yes 8K support: Yes 360 support: Yes Purchase type: Subscription

Adobe Premiere Pro is an industry-standard video editor and getting the most from it will require an investment of time as well as cash, but if you’re serious about video then it’s well worth the effort.

There's a vast assortment of stackable audio and video filters, support for 360-degree and VR video, native support for a huge number of raw file formats, and the ability to work collaboratively with others. You can even start editing your videos before they've finished importing.

This kind of power doesn't come cheap and the monthly or annual subscription fee adds up, but the lack of a large initial outlay makes Premiere Pro surprisingly accessible. It's worth downloading a trial of the other video editors here before making a decision, but Premiere Pro is extremely versatile and the cloud-based model means you won't have to pay for upgrades as they're released.

Read our full review: Adobe Premiere Pro CC

Adobe Premiere Pro From $20.99 (£19.97) per month
Like all of Adobe's single app plans, Premier Pro costs around $20/£20 per month when you sign up for a year. That's excellent value for such an impressive piece of software.

2. Apple Final Cut Pro X

A premium editor for Mac owners, with a unique interface

Platform: Mac Free trial: 30 days Upload straight to YouTube: Yes 8K support: Yes 360 support: Yes Purchase type: Retail

This is a video editor aimed squarely at the professional end of the market, but Apple Final Cut Pro X is not needlessly complicated. Its interface is a little different to most, and is built around a 'trackless' timeline that encourages you to organize elements into specific 'roles', such as voiceover, music and titles.

If you're looking for a video editor to pair with your drone, Final Cut Pro is an excellent choice. It supports raw video from all the major makes and models, and is regularly updated with additional profiles. It also supports 360-degree video editing (fast becoming mandatory for premium video editing software) and HDR, with advanced color grading.

Rather than adopt a subscription model like Adobe, Apple has chosen to make Final Cut Pro available for a one-off flat fee. It's relatively expensive, but includes all major updates and will work out cheaper than Premiere Pro if you keep using it over a couple of years. If you own a Mac and are torn between Apple and Adobe, we recommend taking the free trials of both for a spin before making up your mind.

3. CyberLink PowerDirector

A video editor that puts premium tools within reach of newcomers

Platform: Windows Free trial: 30 days Upload straight to YouTube: Yes 8K support: Yes 360 support: Yes Purchase type: Retail

If Adobe Premiere Elements and Apple Final Cut Pro X are overkill for your video editing projects, take a look at CyberLink PowerDirector.

Although PowerDirector is a premium, feature-packed video editor, it's also very forgiving, and offers a gentle introduction to post production that won't faze complete beginners. The Magic Movie Wizard is the ultimate example, paring the task of combining and optimizing videos down to a few clicks. You'll achieve better results by spending a while in the timeline editor, but for anyone who just wants to quickly piece something together to publish on Facebook, it's ideal.

That's not to say that CyberLink PowerDirector is dumbed down, though; far from it. The software also offers a standard post production interface based around control panels and a timeline. It sometimes takes a little while to drill down to the finer controls, but every filter and option is extremely flexible once you start exploring. Perhaps most impressive of all, CyberLink PowerDirector makes video editing fun.

4. HitFilm Pro

If you're interested in special effects, HitFilm is the editor for you

Platform: Windows Free trial: No time limit, but can’t export Upload straight to YouTube: Yes 8K support: Yes 360 support: Yes Purchase type: Retail

HitFilm Pro is a premium video editor that's a firm favourite with fanfilm makers - and with good reason. It's packed with tools for creating stunning special effects, but is accessible enough for home users.

One of HitFilm Pro's biggest selling points is the ability to tackle pretty much every aspect of video post-production within the editor. Animations, titles, audio editing and color grading are all accessible with a couple of clicks, but the interface is intuitively designed and never feels cluttered.

Unlike the other video editors in this roundup, HitFilm Pro supports importing and animating of custom 3D models, complete with simulated 3D cameras, custom shadows and dynamic lighting. There are also impressive particle effects, and superb chroma-keying to minimize annoying spill.

5. Adobe Premiere Elements

A friendly introduction to video editing for complete beginners

Platform: Windows/Mac Free trial: 30 days Upload straight to YouTube: Yes 8K support: No 360 support: No Purchase type: Retail

Of all the premium video editors in this roundup, Adobe Premiere Elements is the most beginner-oriented. It's designed to make video editing as easy as possible, and even its Expert interface is extremely straightforward.

Best Animation Apps For Computer

Unlike Adobe's premium software (like Premiere Pro), Premiere Elements is only available as a one-off purchase, so you aren't committed to paying a monthly fee to keep using it. It's also one of the most affordable video editors around, which is impressive for a huge name like Adobe.

Some video editors assume a certain degree of familiarity before you begin, but Premiere Elements is ideal even for total beginners. Its interface features large buttons, clearly labelled. There are also some excellent tutorials included to help bridge the gap between creating a video using wizards and using the more traditional multi-track timeline.

The best free video editing software

If you're a beginner, there are free video editors that will make the whole process as easy as can be and don't cost a penny. These user-friendly editors offer a gentle introduction to editing, so you'll learn the basics and be able to make the step up to a more advanced premium program when you're ready. We've picked our the five best video editing software choices below.

1. Lightworks

The best free video editing software available, for any level of expertise

Platform: Windows/Mac/Linux Upload straight to YouTube: Yes 8K support: No 360 support: No

Lightworks is an incredible tool that's published free with the noble aim of making professional quality video editing software available to everyone. As you would expect for such a powerful video editor, you won't be able to master it overnight, but that's certainly not something you could hold against it and hasn't stopped us naming it as our number one best video editing software on the web.

If you've tried other free editors you'll probably find that the interface is a little different to anything you're used to, but you can arrange the various controls and windows to create something that suits your way of working.

There's a paid version, Lightworks Pro, which adds the ability to export in formats other than MPEG, publish 4K video directly to YouTube, and export 3D videos, but the free video editing software includes everything else you need to make impressive videos.

2. Hitfilm Express

A powerful free video editor that's expandable if you outgrow it

Platform: Windows/Mac Upload straight to YouTube: Yes 8K support: No 360 support: Requires add-on

Hitfilm Express is another video editor that promises pro-level features for free – and it delivers. The basic editor is very impressive, with advanced cutting tools, a great set of audio and video filters, layers and masking, compositing options, and chroma keying for creating green screen effects.

Additional tools are available for a fee, starting at £8.85 (about US$10, AU$15) for a pack featuring color-correction, exposure adjustment, split screen masking, and various creative filters. But the free video editor is well worth a look, too.

The downside of all this power is that Hitfilm Express is much more demanding than either Lightworks or Shotcut, which is the main reason it's dropped to third place. Make sure you check the technical requirements before downloading it to avoid disappointment.

3. Shotcut

It might look unusual, but master it and you'll reap the benefits

Platform: Windows/Mac/Linux Upload straight to YouTube: No 8K support: No 360 support: No

Shotcut is another professional-feeling free video editor that requires a little patience if you are achieve the results it is so capable of delivering. The slightly unusual interface can be put down to the fact that this started life as a Linux application, and little has changed in its conversion to Windows.

To start with, the interface may seem a little stark. You will need to not only load a video, but also choose which editing mode you would like to work in and which tools you'd like to use.

There's no getting away from the fact that Shotcut has a steep learning curve. It's possible to achieve some impressive results by simply applying one of its many filters to your video, but the real rewards will only be reaped by those willing to invest the time and energy in fully getting to grips with what's on offer.

4. DaVinci Resolve

Premium quality software for advanced video and audio editing

Platform: Windows/Mac/Linux Upload straight to YouTube: No 8K support: Yes 360 support: Requires add-on

DaVinci Resolve is a free version of a premium video editing suite, but as with Lightworks, it's so feature-packed you probably won't miss the few tools it lacks.

DaVinci Resolve is a professional-grade free video editing software, with intuitive interfaces for editing, color correction, audio mastering and exporting. Color correction is one of DaVinci Resolve's standout features, whether you want to adjust a whole video or just a selected part. There's HDR support, and you can work on raw files directly from your camera.

A few of the filters are exclusive to the premium DaVinci Resolve Studio, and there's a maximum export resolution of 3,840 x 2,160, but those are the only limitations. It's overkill if you just want to trim a video and upload it to YouTube, but for bigger projects DaVinci Resolve is hard to beat.

5. VSDC Free Video Editor

A non-linear editor stacked with tools, with more added all the time

Platform: Windows Upload straight to YouTube: Yes 8K support: No 360 support: Yes

VSDC Free Video Editor is highly capable, and can yield superb results. As a non-linear editor, it works in rather a different way to many other similar tools, letting you position clips and other elements on the timeline wherever you like and edit them there.

With the ability to not only work with multiple scenes and transitions, but also to add sprites and text to videos, you can create a professional-quality movie if you're willing to stick with VSDC's slightly unusual workflow – though its interface has recently had a total overhaul, making it look much more slick and modern. You can now detach the timeline too, which gives you lots of extra flexibility – particularly when working on multiple monitors.

VSDC's free video editing software lets you add extra artistic effects, including smoke. There's also a dedicated Instagram export profile and automatic image stabilization. You also get look-up tables (LUTs) for professional color grading, the ability to export footage at 120fps, and automatic alignment when dragging objects. An excellent choice for creative video projects.

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Video editing software FAQ

How do I choose video editing software?

There are several key factors, and price isn’t necessarily the most important: if it were, every Hollywood movie would be made in Apple’s free iMovie!

Let’s start at the end. What kind of video do you intend to make, and where is it for? There’s a world of difference between quick editing of home videos you’ll watch on TV and editing something for Netflix or cinema distribution.

You’ll need to consider what formats the software needs to export in, what level of quality it needs to output (HD? 4K? 8K?) and whether it can deliver the kind of visual effects you want to use. If you’ll be collaborating, your app will need to be compatible with the other people’s apps too.

There’s also you to consider. Are you experienced, or would a simpler app that takes you step by step through the whole process be more helpful? Do you want to have complete control over every pixel, or would you rather let the computer do most of the work? How future-proof do you need your app to be?

And then there’s price. Most but not all cheap or free apps are very limited; most but not all high-end editors are frighteningly expensive. It’s possible to pay too much and end up with an app that’s overkill, or to pay too little and end up inventing new and colourful swears when the app refuses to do what you need it to do.

Remember too that the more you can do, the more you’ll want it to do. Can your chosen app grow with your imagination?

Why should I care about video editing software?

Video is the new rock’n’roll: where children used to dream of being rock stars, now they dream of being YouTube vloggers. Meanwhile video has become the lingua franca of the internet, from viral clips and video responses to indie films and glossy corporate presentations.

The one thing they almost all have in common is editing. That could be simple trimming to cut a clip at the appropriate place, or it could involve mixing multiple clips together, changing the soundtrack and adding a whole bunch of special effects. To do these things you’ll need a video editing app.

Free video editing software vs premium video editors

To state the blindingly obvious, premium video editors tend to have advantages that free ones don’t. Those advantages tend to come in the form of resources: resources to develop apps that squeeze the most performance out of high-end hardware, resources to develop better effects, resources to fix show-stopping bugs, resources to make sure the app works on the latest hardware, resources to polish the interface and create help files and how-tos and all the other things you’d expect from professional software. But of course, that comes at a price – $300ish for Final Cut Pro X, for example.

If you’re a pro, time is money so you spend money to save time, whether that’s the time it takes to render your footage or the time you can’t afford to spend shouting 'WHY GOD, WHY?' when the app doesn’t do exactly what you want or crashes mid-edit.

Free apps are aimed at a more forgiving and less demanding kind of user. That’s not to say they can’t do great things. They can. But they often take a hand-holding approach that focuses on the basics and doesn’t give you access to the fine detail. They might take a good-enough approach to performance rather than a “Steven Spielberg needs this NOW!” no-compromise approach, and their effects may be simpler than the pro ones.

So is free video editing software worth getting?

It can be. Movies made in Apple’s iMovie have wowed crowds at film festivals over the years, and some people have made perfectly good movies using just it and an iPhone.

There are many decent free video apps out there, but there are a few things to consider. Performance, especially encoding and exporting, isn’t always up there with the big hitters, and you’ll often find that features are only available if you buy in-app purchases or just aren’t there at all. Some stick an enormous watermark over everything you output; few offer any kind of technical support. Pro-level features are rarely offered because these apps aren’t designed for video pros.

It’s worth being a bit pedantic here and differentiating between free commercial software and free open source software. The former is often a cut-down version of a full product offered for free in the hope you’ll buy its big brother. The latter is usually a full product made available by individuals or teams of volunteers with no expectation of any financial reward. While open source acts can sometimes lack the polish and/or user-friendliness of commercial software they may well deliver all the features you need without requiring you to spend any money.

What video editing software features should I look out for?

That depends on the kind of editing you’d like to do. For example, you might not need much in the way of visual effects if you’re just splicing together clips from Uncle George’s 90th birthday party. But there are some key things to consider.

First up, what formats and resolutions does the app support? Can it use the footage from your camera without converting? Can it export to the places you want to share your finished footage?

Do you need features such as green screen or picture in picture (if you’re a YouTuber, the answers to those to are probably yes)? Can you share directly with social media, if that’s your thing?

How many tracks can you use? Can you pull in footage and audio from multiple files, swapping between them as needed, or will you need to do some pre-production first because the app can only handle a couple of tracks at once?

Does the app have any smart features to make everyday editing easier, such as smart trimming of clips or simple editing modes? Is it easy to add titles, transitions between scenes or to adjust the colours?

If it’s a mobile app, can you transfer your project to continue editing in a desktop equivalent of the app?

What does 8K support mean for video editing?

8K is a screen resolution: that is, it tells you how many pixels (dots) make up the picture.

Here’s a list of the resolutions for TV and movies formats in recent years.

VHS 335 x 480

DVD 720 x 480

HD 1,280 x 720

Full HD 1,920 x 1,080

Then there was 4K. 4K can mean a few different things, but the version you’ll get on a 4K TV is called 4K Ultra HD and delivers 3,840 x 2,160 pixels. Take those numbers, double them and boom! 8K!

Do you need it? Almost certainly not. Chances are you don’t know a soul with an 8K TV or monitor, and that you don’t have and can’t afford a camera capable of recording in that quality.

What is 360 support for video editing?

Traditional cameras can only point in one direction, but 360 video uses clever cameras and/or clever processing combining the input from multiple lenses to get a full 360-degree video recording. You’ve probably seen it on Facebook or in a VR app: if you move up or down or left or right the video moves accordingly just as it would if you were actually there.

In fact, editing 360 video isn’t significantly more difficult than editing 2D video, but exporting is more complicated and many apps just can’t cope with 360-degree video in the first place. The video sharing site Vimeo strongly recommends using Adobe’s Premiere Pro CC (yep, our number one recommended video editing software) our if you’re serious about 360-degree video editing.

What video editing software do most YouTubers use?

iMovie remains massively popular among YouTubers because it’s really easy and it comes free on their MacBooks, iPhones or iPads. For straightforward face-to-camera videos you don’t really need anything more complicated: iMovie has all the cutting, titling and transition effects you’re likely to need, and it supports green/blue screens for when you want to put yourself over something such as footage of gameplay. On PC, Microsoft Photos is an underrated gem. Adobe Premiere Pro CC, the entry-level version of Premiere Pro, is very popular too.

Generally speaking YouTubers tend to go for simple, effective and affordable apps. One of the best free apps is Lightworks, which you can get for Windows, Mac and Linux devices. It has integrated YouTube exporting and a bunch of really impressive real-time effects. It looks absolutely terrifying compared to something like Microsoft Photos but it doesn’t take long to learn and it’s a really good editing app.

There are lots of other good options too. HitFilm Pro has a free version but also offers a powerful professional version. The free app DaVinci Resolve is very good, especially on colour correction, and while the VSDC Free Video Editor lacks the hardware acceleration of paid-for editing apps that’s not really an issue if you’re not in a busy working environment.

What video editing software do professionals use?

That depends on your definition of professionals and the industry or sector you’re thinking of. Go to Hollywood or a major TV studio and the editing’s almost certainly being done in Avid Media Composer Ultimate. In ad agencies, indie film studios and businesses making YouTube films you’re more likely to see Adobe Premiere Pro CC or Apple Final Cut Pro X and associated apps such as Adobe’s After Effects, a motion graphics and visual effects app - see above for how well we rate those. These are very, very good tools designed to run on very, very good computers.