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I'm looking for a good free (as in freedom + beer) video editor for OS X. It needs to be:

  1. intuitive / easy to use,
  2. non-linear, and
  3. able to work with .avi files.

Basically, we have a couple of short video clips, and we want to accomplish the following:

  • merge end edit these clips to our liking (of course),
  • insert still pictures in 2-3 consecutive frames, and
  • i) isolate a frame from the movie, ii) edit this frame in an image editing program, and ii) put this back in the movie.

What can you recommend? Cheers!

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3 Answers

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I've used avidemux2 a couple of times. It doesn't have all of the functionality of something like iMovie, but for what I needed (pulling out a chunk of a movie), it worked. It is F/OSS and was pretty simple to figure out. It might do what you need.

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Most of the free video editing Mac software boils down to front-end apps for mencoder and ffmpeg. As command-line tools they are far from intuitive, but people have worked to ease that pain with wrapper software.

Check out ffmpegx and MPlayer's list of mencoder front-ends.

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Do you recommend anything in particular, bearing in mind the requirements I listed above? – trolle3000 Jun 2 '11 at 0:14
Command line is not an option, by the way. The weapon of choice in general, but it won't work for video editing. – trolle3000 Jun 2 '11 at 0:19
I don't I'm afraid. I used iMovie. – blahdiblah Jun 2 '11 at 1:14
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I've been using Hyperengine AV for several years now, and I can't fault it. Originally I had it running under Panther on a G4 PowerMac, and now I have it running equally well (but faster!) under Snow Leopard on a Mac Pro. It was originally a commercial product from Arboretum systems, aimed at the professional market, but in 2006 they stopped development (a great shame IMHO) and made its final release freely available.

I'd say that its GUI and method of use fits exactly the profile you are looking for: intuitive, non-linear and stable. You just drag video files into the main editing window and work on them: splitting, overlapping, adding transitions, alternative audio tracks, titles etc., then you export the final edit into pretty much any format/codec your machine will support. Here's a link to the sourceforge project page, which contains several screenshots and a download link:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/hyperengine/

It's a universal binary (PPC and Intel).

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