VideoPad Video Editor 3.8

Converting your home videos and images into creative movies – complete with subtitles and your favorite soundtrack – can be a less complicated process than you imagine thanks to VideoPad Video Editor.

Its timeline and storyboard interfaces, together with the wide range of transitions and video effects provided, make video editing an enjoyable and rewarding task. The resulting files can then be turned into high-quality DVDs or Blu-ray discs, saved as independent and portable video files, or shared to social media sites without leaving the program.

You can add any set of video, audio, and image files stored on your computer as input, though you also have the possibility of recording new video and audio files directly from VideoPad and combine them with your existing media files. Likewise, you can create new images by taking screenshots from your desktop as well as snapshots from your favorite video files, and turn them into creative video clips. Audio tracks can also imported from CDs, from existing audio files, or by creating text-to-speech clips. Besides, you can make use of NCH’s clipart and sound effects libraries to complement the program’s extensive list of audio and video filters and effects. This comprehensive video editor is just as versatile when it comes to exporting your edited videos. It supports all the most widely used video codecs, whose most relevant settings can be customized to your preferences. The program offers you a short yet useful list of device-based presets that cover most mobile phones and some of the most popular Apple devices and consoles. Burning your movies to a DVD or Blu-ray disc is also an option. While you can add chapters and bookmarks to your movies during the editing process, the lack of a menu-authoring tool somehow limits their usability.

VideoPad Video Editor comes with two preview windows – one to check individual video clips before adding them to your project and another one for the project (or “sequence”) itself. The former will help you decide which videos and images will make it to the final movie and which will not, while the latter will give you an excellent overview of how your project will look like when finished. You can import subtitle files or create your own from scratch using the program’s subtitle editor. Its wysiwyg approach will allow you to type in your lines and sync them with your project in real time and in a most intuitive way, which is more than what some so-called “subtitle editors” allow you to do.

I won’t list all the video effects and filters provided by VideoPad. Suffice to say that this list covers all the usual "suspects" (color correction, motion, blending, rotation, and artistic filters are just some of the main categories) plus 2D to 3D conversion. It is this wide range of easy-to-apply effects and filters, together with the program’s intuitive interface, that makes VideoPad Video Editor both a fun-to-use and a high-quality editing tool suitable for all users.