11/6/25
Over the month of October, I worked on a self-guided project developing a new guide to various free video editing programs available to Grinnell Students. Last semester, when I was doing my WeVideo training, I noticed the software was somewhat difficult to use smoothly, and may not suit the needs of everyone on campus trying to do video editing. Particularly, I thought of art students who may have just started exploring digital mediums, students with projects that involve animation or audio mixing, or students who already have an understanding of video editing and were looking for a program that might suit their skill level a bit better. I hope that my guide can be used internally as a tool at Vivero, so that Vivero Fellows can give more personalized recommendations for programs when students come in looking for help with video related projects. While WeVideo is incredibly helpful, and a easy tool to learn, it just might not suit someone working in Film, per say, and I ultimately my hope with this guide is to inform people what programs may fit them better.
I started out my work on this guide by identifying the various programs I wanted to include in the guide. This was actually much harder than I thought it would be, and took a fair bit of time to go through. I was looking exclusively for programs that would be free to Grinnell students, meaning that I had to sift through a lot of programs with limited capacities, not great interfaces, little to no tech support, or permanent watermarks upon export. Ultimately, I think I came up with an okay list, but there is no program that’s going to be perfect across the board. I also included Adobe Premiere Pro, which although is free to students through Grinnell’s subscription and a very good software, can sometimes be difficult to actually access digitally (that subscription is sometimes finicky).
Once I’d determined my list, putting everything together was fairly easy. I wrote out little descriptions of each software, what it’s pros and cons were, and make some tables of fast info for easier reading. While not super detailed, as to go in to every software and put every bit of information needed to utilize them would take more than a month to compile, I do think that the guide I made covers the basics enough that someone could determine what software would work best for them. Hopefully it does! In the future I think that I’d like to find ways to add more detail within the limited amount of time I have to work on my professional development projects. Maybe that just means picking less items, and going deeper into a single one, or something else like that. Maybe I’ll crack the code in November! I haven’t completely decided my next project, but it make be a “next-steps” sort of document that explains how to download and open each of the programs I described.