OpenShot Video Editor For Mac

When it comes to video editing, Mac users already have a great free option in iMovie. It’s not as complex as something like Final Cut Pro, but it’s suitable for simple projects. However, there are free and open-source alternatives out there as well.

OpenShot Video Editor is one of them. Available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, it’s especially popular on the latter two platforms. It gives you quite a few features at no cost, and it’s very easy to use, but it’s going to have a hard time competing with iMovie on macOS, especially when it comes to performance.

Feature-wise, there is little difference between OpenShot and iMovie. They both offer all the essential tools you need to combine media, trim and slice, add transitions, animations, and effects, and export your project to various formats.

The interface is almost identical to what you see in every other video editor nowadays: files, transitions, and effects in the top-left, preview on the right, and timeline at the bottom. However, it does look quite outdated overall, with the buttons and other graphic elements not matching the macOS aesthetic.

On paper, OpenShot looks like a great choice, but there’s one big difference between this app and iMovie: processing time. iMovie runs natively on Apple Silicon and uses hardware acceleration, the result being remarkably fast encoding.

OpenShot, on the other hand, still uses Rosetta 2 emulation to run on M1/M2 chips, and hardware acceleration is still experimental on all platforms, with nothing being available for Apple’s SOCs.

For the types of projects you would use this app, iMovie can do the same job a lot faster. It’s a testament to the quality of Apple’s free editing software, but OpenShot was also hindered by the transition to Apple Silicon and the extra work required to optimize for these new chips.

At the end of the day, this isn’t a bad editor by any means, and it’s certainly a good option for Windows and Linux users, but it’s always a better idea to use iMovie if you’re on macOS.