No one has imagined that the success of a film will depend as much on the editing as nowadays it is affecting the industry. Lightworks is a video editor used by professionals, with advanced features and endless possibilities, suitable for those who need good results without paying for it.
Used by professionals
We all usually think that a professional software must cost a fortune. However, the Lightworks costs nothing and is still used by major publishers in Hollywood, as Tariq Anwar, editor of the movie " The King's Speech "- production that took the Oscar for best film of 2010 and several other nominations, including the category for best editing.
Creating a new project
Creating a new project is simple and you can easily choose technical aspects such as screen aspect ratio (4: 3 or 16: 9), the quality of video and audio, among others. All this can be changed later, but it is important to define the main settings before starting.
The only information you need to mandatorily set from the beginning is the frame rate, or the amount of frames per second, as that will later define what videos you can import. For example, if you choose 24 fps, there is a wider range of acceptable frame rates, since 25 fps only accepts 25 or 50.
To begin, you need to import the raw material by clicking the "Import" button or by dragging the video to the program window. The Lightworks reads the main professional video formats like AVI, MOV, RED R3D, DPX, among others. Being a more advanced application files in formats like MP4 and 3GP are not recognized, then you must use a converter.
After importing, open the timeline editor, clicking the third button (top-down) on the toolbar, corresponding to the function "Create a new edit."
In fact, the software is very flexible and there are several ways to do what you want.
In fact, the software is very flexible and there are several ways to do what you want.
Editing
For those who are familiar with software such as Adobe Premiere or Final Cut, the Lightworks can scare at first. That's because the issue in this case is a slightly different from the traditional way, and you can take some getting used to, but it's not impossible to deal with.
Instead of the "Cut" button, Lightworks has several other options such as "In" and "Out", which serve to mark the times for cutting, plus four other buttons: "Replace", "Insert", "Delete" and "Remove". There are also "Unjoin" and "Join", that separate and unite the severed portions options.
If you want to better understand how this works, several tutorials are available to help you. While this system is quite different from other publishers, a bit of practice to learn to do more complex issues with Lightworks is needed.
Add effects
There is a lot of transition effects and image effects available in Lightworks. To apply them, just open the window by clicking on "Effects" beside the "Join /Unjoin" button. Now select the effect you need to use and click the "Add" button.
Browse through the categories of effects, apply them to test and play with your stuff. There are eight categories of effects for video, including adding text, image inversion, changing color, transition effects and masks.
The Lightworks can seem complicated and different at first glance, but it takes patience and practice to understand and master their editing methods. There are several online tutorials for both video and written, and the developer's own website provides a support page with a forum where more experienced users answer questions from beginners.
Registration and download
To download the software, you need to register on the developer site. This is necessary so that they better know your audience and know how to improve the software. On the form, there are personal and technical questions, like what other editing software you've used previously, and for what purpose you use them. It is not difficult to register and it costs nothing.
License type Open source1
Author's homepageVisit the author's site
Date added29 Oct 2014
Downloads13,006
File size73.09 MB (< 10min @ 1Mbps)
Supported languagesEnglish
Operating systemsVista / Win7 / Win8 / WinXP
