Digital Home Thoughts: Lightworks: The Open Source Video Editor

"Back in April 2010, we announced our plans to take Lightworks open source. We always said the first step would be to make the application freely available so that a large community of users could start becoming familiar with it. We are very pleased to have reached this first milestone. Now you can freely download the most intuitive and advanced editor available. This is not a trial download. From here forward, you will always be able to download and use the latest version of Lightworks for free."

An open source video editor? Sounds like it might be too good to be true, but looking at the list of features, it's quite impressive. Amazingly, it was used to cut "The King's Speech" together - and that says a lot for software that's still in beta! Unfortunately, I've been unable to figure out how to use it yet - when I start a new project and go to import the video files, my AVCHD videos are not available for import. Turns out this file format isn't supported - which is a real shame given it has become a standard consumer format. Still, Lightworks may be the video editing you're looking for if you happen to have video in a format it can support...