Written 12/15/2025, Published 12/17/2025
For November, I worked on continuing my personal project of exploring what the best free video editing software available to Grinnell Students were. I remarked on this in my last reflection, for my October guide on how to pick which software is best for specific types of projects, but I’ve found that Grinnell digital humanities doesn’t have the best support for video editing and video software. That kind of stuff seems to frequently fall to the Film and Media Studies department, or other arts departments. That being said, it seems like a lot of students outside those departments would like to use video in their projects and may have less experience using it. So dually, there exists a problem that students in film may not be able to seek help at Vivero on their projects due to using more complex software, and students in the humanities might want to use something that gives them more options then just WeVideo. The guide I worked on this month continues after my last one, and shows students how to download and quick start all of the programs I recommended priorly. Also like last time, I hope that the guide can be used as a tool for Vivero Fellows to give more personalized recommendations for when students come in looking to do video editing.
Creating this guide was fairly easy, but quite time intensive. Ultimately, what I did to make it was download each software, screen clip various steps throughout the process, and create a step-by-step guide towards getting them set up. I ran into a couple bumps throughout the process–one time, my file didn’t save after working on it for two hours, and I had to go back to redo the work–but ultimately everything came out fine. I believe that it could be a tad more detailed, but for those who are seeking the next steps after the first guide I made, this should be able to help them a bit.