One very welcome change is in OpenShot’s speed and performance. Thankfully you can forgo all this by adding the entire clip to your timeline and using the Razor Tool (depicted as a pair of scissors) to cut that clip and keep the parts you need. It seems unnecessarily convoluted though, especially the creation of another clip. You can add that trimmed clip to your timeline, and are then also able to extend your clip beyond those Start and End markers from there. Those tell OpenShot which part of the footage you would like to use, and creates a new clip in your Media pane which is a trimmed version of the original (it is highly advisable to give this clip a new name as there is no obvious way to distinguish it from the original, especially if your start frames are similar). In order to do this, you need to choose the ‘Split’ option in that contextual menu from which you can also preview your footage, and set Start and End markers (making the first option superfluous in our humble opinion). In OpenShot, you can preview your clip by right-clicking it and choosing ‘Preview’, but you can’t set In and Out points. One major aspect of video editing is being able to choose the right part of your footage to add onto your edit.

OpenShot’s implementation of the JKL functionality (J to rewind, K to stop, L to fast forward) worked - somewhat (sometimes we had to hit the key twice to actually go in the direction we wanted). Sadly though, thoseones used to navigate around your work didn’t function on the machine we tested it on, even moving one frame at a time along the timeline using the appropriate arrow keys didn’t work. OpenShot has a series of customisable keyboard shortcuts for most of what you’d need to do while editing a video.

It does however make it much easier to move and animate a clip around the screen rather than having to fiddle with its properties values. However here again you cannot constrain its proportions when resizing it (even holding down the shift key - a convention adopted by numerous other apps - does nothing). It is possible to manipulate a clip directly from the main Preview window by selecting it in the Timeline, and choosing Transform from its contextual menu. The number of available effects is quite paltry (Image credit: OpenShot) Workflow

Openshot free video editor