Three Good and Free Options for Mobile Video Editing

One of the elements that is common to almost every video recorded on a mobile device is "throw away" footage at the beginning and end of every video. "Throw away" footage is the five seconds of giggling, shaky shots of the ground, and other nonsense that is captured at the beginning and end of a video. Your students can save time in the final editing of a video if they clip the "throw away" footage before they upload it to their desktop video editor of choice (iMovie, Movie Maker, Kdenlive). Here are three free tools that students can use to trim videos on their mobile devices.

Magisto is a free video editing app available for Android and iOS. The app allows you to add music tracks and some simple effects to your raw video footage. If you have a series of clips you can string them together in one video. To create your video you can use footage that you have captured with your device’s native app or you can use Magisto to capture new footage. In addition to editing the length of clips and stringing them together, Magisto allows you to draw on frames in your video clips and add borders to your frames.

Using the YouTube Capture app for iOS you can quickly record videos and upload them to YouTube with just a couple of taps on your screen. The first time that you open the app you will be prompted to sign into your Google account and choose your sharing settings. After that you’re ready to start recording and sharing videos. YouTube Capture includes a few options for quickly editing and enhancing your videos. Within YouTube Capture you can trim the length of your video, stabilize the images in your video, add a soundtrack to your video, and touch-up the colors in your video.

WeVideo for Android puts many of the same features of WeVideo's web-based video editing platform on your Android tablet or phone. Through the app you can capture pictures, sounds, and videos. You can use the app to trim raw video clips. The app also allows you to put together short audio slideshows.

Of course, if your students have purchased or your school has purchased apps like iMovie for iPad then you can just record directly into the app and trim all of your video clips there. iMovie costs $4.99 which is why I've left it off this list.