Best Video Editing Software for YouTube in 2025 (Beginner to Pro)

what is the best video editing software if you're either a beginner or want to know what the best video editor is possible today I'm joined by Craig Creator at think media now you've been editing with Premiere Pro for the past eight years I made the move from Premiere to to venture resolve and we'll talk about that but first I want to ask you Craig what is the best editing software if you're just starting out if you never edited a video in your life well I think the first software that most people will probably think of

especially if you're in the Apple ecosystem would be iMovie this really is Apple's kind of Baseline entry level I think that's how many people got a start how I got my start ex that's how I started I started on iMovie I had a really old MacBook Pro and it came installed with iMovie and I started editing super basic videos and so I needed a software iMovie was the easiest solution to as a launch point right like what was your experience at your your I mean I think I started with my imoving on my phone so

it was like free and it was easy to use and I would recommend yeah if you're starting out you don't want any friction at the get-go so you just want something easy to use play some b-roll play some text and imov can do all that and I think one of the benefits of iMovie is it is a really like apple esque experience so if you like the Simplicity of the iPhone it's not super customizable but if you like that it could be a real benefit for you and the other benefit would be if you're editing

on older machines so a lot of these like I mean I know you have the M3 Max MacBook Pro in front of you right now that's an insane editing machine you can do all sorts of things with but if you have an older machine some of these newer softwares don't perform as well but iMovie has been around for a long time and has really been optimized for the older Mac system so it could be a good first option if you're just starting out so iMovie is great because it's free but unfortunately there are some cons

number one being is you're dedicated you have to use a Mac in order to use iMovie but what are some of the cons of iMovie so the reason that I in particular made the switch is mostly because of the way my brain works I really like to think of editing as sort of like a puzzle where you're sort of working on different parts of a project as different times and so with both iMovie and Final Cut they leverage the magnetic timeline system so everything's going to kind of snap to the beginning of your project and

then you sort of edit more sequentially in order and the way my brain works is I like to edit sometimes like the intro and then the outro and then start filling in the gaps and edit things a little bit more out of order and move things around the timeline sometimes I'm even working on a timeline where I'm producing two videos on the same exact timeline at different locations so for me it just wasn't the ideal situation to be limited to the magnetic timeline but some people so as you get more familiar you start growing you

want to be able to customize more and the simplified version of iMovie kind of limits your ability to move on so it can be a detriment because it's so simple yes and you can't really do that much others you see in that yeah I mean there's really limited effects tools transitions color grading I would never color grade an iMovie I'd basically bring in footage that has already been maybe shot on an iPhone or a camera it's really not intuitive when it comes to color grading gotcha but let's say you're still a beginner but you want

something that's a little bit more Advan maybe more effects what would be another editing software you would recommend I'd say the best free editing software that exists on the market right now would be capcut and this is actually both for the mobile editors out there as well as people editing on desktop so they have the option for both people I'd say the desktop version though has a lot of really cool features especially for people who are wanting to save time with more like Elite level effects things like automatically removing your background just instantly with one

click it's crazy it actually works pretty well as well and then you also have cooler effects like if you want to whiten your teeth or like brighten your eyes these are all things that are built in to the native desktop app I don't know if they're actually in the mobile editor or not have you seen those in the mobile editor I don't think so but I have messed around with the desktop version and there are some surprisingly Pro level effects that is just drag and drop if you try to do that in a traditional editing

software it' be incredibly time consuming very hard to do and this like like you said remove the background there's also like an AI expanding background so you could reframe the shot and go wider that's crazy my editing software can't do that so it's like it's a pretty high Lev effects so overall you get a lot more features out of it is that available cuz I know there is a paid for tier for cap cut I think it's like $10 a month for the paid version which again is all things considered it's very cheap um but

does that come is that I believe some of those effects the higher end ones are definitely you have to pay for there are some great things for free especially if you're doing basic edits you probably don't need to pay you yeah but capcut I mean it's I highly recommend it if you were just starting out whether you're on Mac or a Windows system I'd for sure probably use cap cut as my first editing software so let's touch on that you we mentioned to the mobile app so you know iMovie can do mobile but capcut mobile

is a real powerhouse I know a lot of people who are looking to edit off of their phone cap cut is really important so I would say if you're looking to get started definitely look at cap cut if you're on mobile yep 100% so let's move on let's talk about a little bit of your editing Journey you started using iMovie right but you outgrew that what did you move to so initially I kind of followed people's advice and they were like okay if iMovie is not for you the next natural step would be Final Cut

Pro it honestly feels like iMovie sort of like went to the gym and it just like swolled up a little bit but it only did like upper body so it like worked out its chest it worked out his arm a little bit but it's still like skipped leg day and it's got some issues right it's like the really buff guy at the gym walking around but he's got really tiny legs that's how I think of Futo Cut Pro now I will say one of the best things about Final Cut Pro is it is a onetime

payment so you get it's $300 for the software so you only pay that one time and then you have it forever and if you're a student or an educator so a teacher and you have a a doedu email you can when you when you decide you want to buy a final cut for the first time it's only $200 if you register with a an edu email so you save $100 plus you get all of their extra software so you get logic pro if you want to get into like music production or sound editing you get

motion which is their animation software so you get their full Suite of creative softwares only for $200 which is a really good deal so we talking about Final Cut beam more buff version of IM what are some more things you can do within Final Cut they couldn't do in IM so I think that Final Cut Is optimized for higher resolution playback so if you're shooting at 4K even 8K Support Final Cut supports whereas imov does not support AK resolution so if you're working with bigger better files the overall performance of Final Cut is going to

be way better than iMovie also they use kind of this unique Library management tool where there's like Collections and and libraries so there's cool organization features in Final Cut That iMovie does not have as well and it also has a little bit better color correction tools so and and just effects in general has some better transition so really again it's kind of like you're going from the Baseline iMovie to a little bit of an upgrade more professional features with Final Cut yeah so I kind of got my start similar like I said I I'm moving

my phone then the computer then I eventually got Final Cut Pro on the Mac in my experience I found that you could do a lot more with it but there were you definitely need like a lot of plugins and other things to really build it out which thankfully they do support plugins some softwares it's a little bit nonintuitive to add plugins and apple does a pretty good job with Final Cut for plugins so you might have to take some time to kind of get extra effects and make it work but I know a lot of

people love Final Cut because of how fast they can move it's so fast export time render times I mean if you compare like Adobe Premiere head-to-head with Final Cut Pro I would say nine out of 10 times if not 10 out of 10 times Final Cut is going to render out a video faster than Premiere because Apple has optimized Cut Pro for their systems and it makes sense obviously it's like if if Apple's going to make the software they might as well make it run a little bit better than all the competitors and they definitely

have done that so what are some of the cons of Final Cut I'd say the cons are well first of all you do have to pay for it so whether it's $200 with the edu discount or 300 whereas some of the other softwares have a free variant which we'll talk about even one of the best softwares has a free option as well also there's even some other features like there's no autoc captioning feature which a lot of these softwares have like cap cut Adobe Premiere I think does Da Vinci have a auto capture feature right

so that's a huge limitation in my opinion if you're a shorts editor if you're making vertical videos for social media and you don't have that autoc caption native it's not a native plugin you'd have to bring in an external third party plugin in order to do captioning and then the last con I can think of and the reason why I decided to switch from Final Cut to Premiere is again you still have that magnet magnetic timeline so you're limited to everything's kind of snapping to the beginning of the project and there are some workarounds you

can do to add like a a black layer of video or you're kind of like doing workarounds to get that my style of like puzzle piecing things together it's always a workaround it's not a native thing because it's that kind of magnetic timeline limitation so we're talking about editing software and a lot of these programs and a bulk of like editing YouTube videos is simply like cutting down your a-roll your talking head video there a lot of like listening to silences cutting and removing those now there's an editing software that not many people mention but

I actually use for every single video probably this video I'll be editing is a tool called gling doai are you familiar with this yeah for sure we use it here at thing media you use it all the time you told me nothing but good things about it yeah yeah so what's so cool about this tool is it will automatically transcribe your video so kind of like turn into like a Word document but it's automatically going to cut out all of our bad takes so if you're sitting in front of the camera and you miss make

a mistake and it's three four different takes automatically removes those cuts out remove silences and then gives you like a pretty good a roll where you can then do all your b roll and effects afterwards what's so cool about gling is you can also export out as an XML which is a fancy word but it's kind of like a file that tells Premiere divin resolve and these editing platforms it keeps all your cuts and transfer those over into your editing program from there you can add in your Boll your graphics and all from that and

then you can later adjust your editing Clips so I've been using this tool and absolutely love it saves me hours on each video I love the way to also just edit like a Word document I can remove a word here or there if I find something I want to remove so if you want to get started for free you can head over to gl. or click the link in the description to get started for free again if you're looking to speed up your editing workflow I can't say enough good things about gling AI so I

now want to talk about some editing software more professional kind of what you hear about you use Premiere Pro and that's kind of a go-to for many people in many industry it is tell me about why use Premiere Pro what are some of its pros well I mean you mentioned it is a go-to so this really is still kind of standard industry software for smaller films produ video production companies agencies it's still a tried and true software for them and we were doing some research before this video we actually learned that 35% of the market

share for video editing softwares is retained by Adobe so Premier Pro users make up 35% of the the editing FL which is kind of crazy I thought it may be a little bit lower maybe like 20 30% but right now it's 35% I think that the most recent stat we have is 2023 so it could have changed but I think it's probably accurate it is a little bit surprising but then again a lot of professionals industry if you're working with a team I think can make some sense but let's just talk about why you decided

to leave Final Cut to Premiere my personal bias is just this way I edit I like to edit things sort of out of order I like to do my intros and my outros sometimes first in my project and then start piecing together the middle so Adobe allowed me the ability to do that and there's just way more features and even plug-in options with the Adobe software and Adobe Works off of a subscription based model so this is kind of a con with it is that it's it's $50 a month unless you have like an education

discount which I think is like 20 or $30 a month so but 50 bucks a month is a pretty high price point for a lot of people to pay but with that $50 you do get all of the applications as well so I'm somebody who I also take a ton of photos sometimes I shoot weddings or family portraits and I edit all of my images in Adobe Lightroom so Lightroom is included in the software After Effects Photoshop illustrator so if you're a creative professional or a team of creative professionals who need to use all of

the Adobe Suites it actually might be more cost effective just to use Premiere as your editing software because you're already going to use those other applications so I had had a kind of similar path you know use Final Cut then when I started working for a small production company they were using Premiere and I had to learn it and that's the thing too it's like people are using that if you're going to be part of a team you need to learn how to use their editing software and then true it's like you might actually not

have to pay for a subscription if you're a company you work for pays for it yeah exactly so still though it's a very powerful tool what are some other Pros you found with Premiere Pro some of the more advanced tools that maybe these other softwares don't so with a lot of the free softwares out there you're limited with your multicam editing abilities I believe Final Cut Pro does have a pretty robust multi-cam editing feature but Premiere also has that multi-cam editing feature which is really important for like this situation right now we with multiple cameras

and how you're going to sync them up switch angles that is another level of editing that you may not need at the beginning but start going into do other Productions is pretty critical it's so much easier than you know with some of those other softwares we would have to take these three camera files and layer them on top of each other them up and then start cutting them up and trying to create a multisequence but with like something like Adobe Premiere you can just Nest all of these camera angles into a multi- camera sequence file

and then either using you know your mouse clicks or even like literal physical numbers like one two and three you can map these to different cameras and you can like sort of do a sort of like a live cut as you're watching back your edit to change from when I'm talking we could switch to this camera or the wide or to over to Nate's camera so multicam sequence editing is really seamless in my opinion in Premiere I think another Pro with Premiere is that you know you got Adobe this monster house and they're really leaning

into Ai and there are some pretty crazy tools I haven't used Premiere in a while but have you messed with any of these AI tools I know there's things like autopod that helps you cut your podcast in a matter of minutes sometimes or seconds I personally haven't used autopod but what I have used so often I use these for all of my YouTube shorts and Instagram reels which is the autoc captioning feature which actually does a really good job you can even create some presets too so I have like a a personal font style and

size and positioning and you can create a preset through all these things so that when it starts autoc captioning your short or even your long form video before you hit import captions you can select the style that you want to have and then click import you just save yourself a ton of time all the captions are your your style already and you don't have to go in and dial in your font and and size and color that say a lot of time especially if you're doing that over and over again just simply recrea a preset

and I will say Adobe is trying to listen to Consumers there's been a lot of critique about their performance over the years I mean everybody knows that like Premiere will crash every once in a while and I will say I have not experienced a crash in at least six months so with these newer Max systems the newer you know 2024 2025 versions of Adobe Premiere they're actually a lot more stable than they have been in the past and they're trying to get on top of these AI improvements that a lot of software companies are adding

to their softwares yeah that was one reason I actually switched to resolve is some of the performance things I'll want to get to that a little bit later but do you know of any other AI like I know adobe's using Firefly for creating stock dude Firefly is sick it's really cool and I actually use this I used to be a director of video production for a university and sometimes we'd have professors come in who were teaching a course and they would give like a very specific example of something like you need like a like a

a market like a Saturday market near like a boat dock or something and in order to go shoot that b-roll or create that kind of scene would cost thousands of dollars you'd have to have travel but Firefly and they're going to add some video Firefly features I believe in the future but right now I think it's limited to mostly just still images but you could type in prompt the AI to create like that exact situation that I just told you and it will create a pretty usable result and you could even like kind of add

some movement some push-ins to create some movement with that image but we would use it all the time at the University to create content that's probably another Pro with Premiere is because if 35% of the market is using that any new tool they're first going to go to Premiere Pro Y now I'm using D Vin resolve and they still will make plugins for that but a lot of times I find a cool tool and it's only for Premiere I'm like yeah crap you know yeah it's rough yeah so the next one is Da Vinci resolve

now you know this is a very popular program that's coming out and for good reason first of all it's free which is amazing okay let me just ask you do you secretly judge me for using premieres a little bit you know later we're going to talk about editing mistakes and uh Craig's still making using Premiere is one of the editing mistakes yeah yeah no honestly I totally get you know I Ed Premiere Pro for a while and trying to switch and use a tool especially if you're working you know you don't want that extra hassle

but when I was using Premier Pro and at the time we're using a little older Macs crashing once a day was very common place and sometimes you have to rebuild the progress you've made and it's very very frustrating but you're saying that premier's definitely got more stable the past years but I noticed immediate switch when I switch to resolve my export times are you know multitudes faster just simply playing back my videos was extremely quick so the overall performance was great also resolve has Autos saving so after like every change you make it just saves

every single change wow so while CU I edit a lot with resolve I'm editing every day I have had it crash a handful of times but anytime I do I just open a project it's exactly how it was wow with Premiere it's kind of a guessing game yeah I think you can change like the autosave time like maybe you know 3 minutes 5 minutes 10 minutes but you're right it's not usually if a crash happens somehow you just lost like 10 to 20 to half hour of work at minimum yeah yeah so there is a

free version it's really really robust you can do a lot with it and you have a lot of control over things from the color grading you know it's a professional editing software that Hollywood even uses to edit movies with so it's pretty robust they do have the pro version which is a $300 onetime fee and I love that I don't want to pay a subscription if I don't have to and so that onetime fee or chances are you have a buddy that's bought a Blackmagic camera they have an extra Studio license yeah you know so

they so literally with every Blackmagic camera they issue a pro license to Da Vinci resolve that's insane resolve studio and then also I know that at least around the holiday seasons you can purchase some of their like their color correction boards right and one of I think the most cheap one is like $295 and it comes with the and it comes with the software you could buy a control unit to color correct and then you get the software I think that's a great deal yeah so there's a lot of cool peripherals keyboard and stuff they

have for resolve if you're really want to know coloring or speeding up your editing workflow obviously there's some learning curve that comes with it and I exps a few months you know I was a pro editor but making that move still took me a few months to know where things are and move but I adapted I learned and I love using resolve for a lot of things in terms of AI tools D Vin resolve is catching up to speed with that we have autoc captioning we have transcribing your video dude there's a really really cool

tool called music remixer so traditionally if you wanted to download a song and let's say had vocals well you have to download an instrumental one resolve has a built in you just turn on if you want to remove vocals or remove guitar any song any song just an MP3 file or wave file you can remove vocals you can do all that so that's like an example of one tool that's AI it's like mindboggling voice isolation is another thing I use on a day-to-day basis if you're dealing with rough audio you simply just turn it on

you can dial in how much you want it to remove background noise overall it's a very very powerful tool constantly growing constantly improving and I think if you are trying to learn an editing software it's a good Contender to learn it's free we have tutorials here on the channel about learning resolve and kind of guide you through step byep of opening it up for the first time to edit it a first YouTube video so go ahead and check out that video you mean peanut butter and jelly sandwich yeah if you also want to learn how

to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich you'll get the reference if you watch that video y for sure all right so that is pretty much our Roundup do you have any final thoughts on this and what you would recommend to someone who's getting started I'd say if you are just getting started and you don't want to invest a bunch of money there's a free version of Da Vinci resolve that you could look at and if that feels too overwhelming then I'd go for cap cut as my first editing software of choice but if you

really want to get serious about editing I do think sadly Da Vinci resolve is probably a better option for beginners than Adobe Premiere I think for me though it's like just weighing the cost benefit analysis of like how much time is it going to take me to learn the new software quickly to where I can get I've been editing in premiere for eight years you know and I think it's really good in a lot of ways so for now I'm going to stick with Premiere I have dabbled in resolve especially for its color grading features

are incredible so maybe one day I'll make the switch but for now I'm an adobe guy so tap cut if you are getting started really want to learn video editing or dive into a more professional workflow if you want to become an editor start messing with denture resolve and if you want to learn more about denture resolve and editing you can click out this video video where I guide through through a whole process of how I edit a YouTube video you click that right here thank you so much for watching and we'll catch you next

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