Hi everyone, Kevin here. Today I want to show you how you can edit video on Windows 10 using an app that comes with Windows 10. Yes, Windows 10 includes a free video editor and I’m going to show you step-by-step how you can take advantage of it. Now if you’re running Windows 7 or Windows 8, you don’t have to feel left out. You can actually upgrade to Windows 10 entirely for free. I have a link in the description that’ll show you how you can do that.

In the past, Microsoft used to include an app called Movie Maker on Windows 7 and Windows 8 that allowed you to edit videos pretty well. In fact, the first video that I have on this YouTube channel is a drone video of my hometown Morristown, NJ, and I edited that video with Movie Maker. Yes, I’m not lying. I admit to it. I used Movie Maker to create my very first video, and it worked fairly well. It had lots of customer love, and it had a huge fan base. Unfortunately, Microsoft decided to discontinue the app and for a long time many people thought there was no free video editing tool that came with Windows anymore.

That has changed. Microsoft includes a video editor, and it turns out it’s actually bundled together with the Photos app. So, we’re going to leverage the Photos app today to edit video. Yes, that’s right, the Photos app.

Now, don’t let that deceive you, the video editor that Microsoft includes as part of the Photos app is a fully functional video editor. You can do all sorts of things like trimming and splitting clips and reorganizing clips, and I’m going to walk through a sample video today. We’re going to go ahead and edit it together and I’ll show you the full functionality of the video editor.

The great news is you don’t have to go out and buy video editing software. You don’t have to search for free video editing software. Instead, if you’re on Windows 10, you already have some awesome software to edit videos with.

All right, well, why don’t we jump on the PC, and I’ll show you first off how we could start using it and then we’ll edit a video together. Here I am on my Windows 10 desktop and first off I want to show you how we can open the video editor that comes with Windows 10.

Let’s go down to our task bar and within the search field, we’re going to type in video editor. You’ll see that the best match here says video editor. We’re going to go ahead and click on that. This opens up the video editor that comes with Windows 10. The benefit of typing in video editor and launching that way is it opens the Photos app but drops us directly into the video projects view. If instead we had opened the Photos app, we would then have to navigate to the video view within the Photos app, so it’s a little bit quicker going this way.

On the main video editor screen, you have a bunch of different options, and I want to walk through what you can do here. In the top left-hand corner, and perhaps one of the most important things that we can do here is we can kick off a new video project. When we click on this, this will drop us into a blank project where we can put our video together, and we’ll do that in just a moment.

Down below, I have all of my recent video projects. Here they’re ordered by recency. Now over here under sort, I could select a different way to organize it as well. Maybe I just want to see the newest, or maybe the oldest first, or even alphabetical, so I could sort this view in different ways, and this helps me get back to video projects that I had been working on.

Down below is another interesting view called created for you. This is videos that the video editor automatically pulls together based on video clips and photos that you might have within the Photos app.

Now let’s go back up to the top and let’s create our very own video by clicking on new video project. This drops me in a new video project and first off, it’s going to ask me to name my video and by default it says new video. Now a little bit of background before I start this video project. My wife, son, and I were recently in Mexico, and we stated a resort that had an amazing slide. So, I’m going to go ahead and title this video Mexico slide adventure.

Once you type in a name for your video, click on OK. This drops us into the main video editing interface.

If you’ve used any other video editors before, this likely looks very familiar or even if you’re a graduate of movie maker, you’ll likely feel very comfortable here.

To give some overview of what we have here on the screen, over here in the top left-hand corner, this area is called the project library. This is where we’re going to place all of our video clips and all of our photo files. We’re going to use this to build our video.

Over on the right-hand side, this is a preview of the video as it starts coming together.

Down below, you have your typical video controls like play, or fast forward, rewind. Over here, we have a timeline progress bar that’ll show us how long the video is, and we’ll be able to scroll through it, and then down at the very bottom, this is perhaps the most important part. This is our storyboard. We are going to use this storyboard to start organizing and laying out our video. The order in which we put our clips down here on the storyboard will determine the order in which the video plays.

I mentioned that I want to have a Mexico slide adventure video, and it’s not much of an adventure if we don’t have any content here, so let’s get some content into this view. Right up here in the project library, to get content in, you have two different options. One, you could drag and drop content from say, your desktop or File Explorer directly into the project library. Alternatively, there’s also this plus button up here where we can add content. I’m going to use the plus button.

When I click on that, I get a drop-down menu and there are three different ways I can pull content in. One of them is by selecting content on my PC. This will open up a file picker. The second option is from my collection. So, let’s say you have a collection of videos or photos within the photos app, you can pull them in to create a video from, and then the last option is to pull content in from the web. This will open up Bing where you can then pull in images from Bing.

In my situation, I have all of my videos and photos on my PC. I’m going to click on from this PC.

This opens up the Windows file picker and within here you can navigate to where you have your videos and where you have your photos on your computer. Luckily, the file picker opened up directly in the in the folder where I have all of my videos and photo files.

I can go through and press the control key to select multiple items or I could simply click on the first, press the shift key and then simultaneously press my left mouse button to select all the photos here. Once I’ve selected all the videos and photos that I want to bring into the video editor, I’m going to click on open.

This adds all of my photos and videos into the video editor.

Let’s say that maybe I have additional videos or additional photos that I want to bring in, once again, I can go into, say, File Explorer, I can drag more files in, or I can click on the plus button again and I can add additional files.

Right now, when I look at my project library, these thumbnails are fairly large, and I’d rather have them be a little bit smaller. Over here, I could control how I view all of these previews. By default, it’s set to view medium. Instead, I could click on view small, and this will show me smaller thumbnails. Because I have a number of thumbnails, I’d rather switch to this view. That way I could see all of my different clips that I’m going to be building a video from, so I’m going to stick with this view.

I have all my clips in the project library. How do we start pulling together a video? Well, the very first thing I want to do is I want some type of introduction or some type of title for my video. Down here, on the storyboard, there’s an option to add a title card. Let’s go ahead and click on that.

This now adds the very first item to my storyboard. I see my title screen right here. When I click on an object on the storyboard, I see controls that I can take related to that object. For instance, I could set the duration of my title, I could also modify the text, and I can modify the background. If I want to get rid of it all together, I can also just trash it if I want to do that.

Let’s go ahead and click on text. Within this view, I want to type in a title for my video. By default, it simply says title. Let me go ahead and once again, I’m going to type in Mexico slide adventure. I have my title on here but to me this doesn’t really seem that adventurous. It’s just a simple font. Instead, let me go down and take a look at all the different styles that I can apply. Some of the styles, you’ll see a diamond on them, this indicates that it’s a premium style that you need to have a Microsoft 365 subscription for; however, all the ones and most of them don’t have diamonds, and anyone with Windows 10 can take advantage of these other ones. Now nothing speaks adventure like the adventure style. I’ll go ahead and click on this one.

Now that I’ve selected an animated text style, I can also select a layout for it. Down below, I see six different layouts that I can choose. By default, it’s title one or the center one. I could also place it on top, over on this side, or I could place it right in the center, along with a few others. Now I think this layout and this style looked pretty good. What does it actually look like? Well, over here on the left-hand side, I see a timeline view and here’s a marker that shows me where I am in the animation. It’s the seek marker. I’m going to go and pull this over to the left and if I drag it over, I could see what the animation will look like. I’ll bring it to the beginning and hit the play button and we could see what this title looks like.

Now that’s pretty cool. Now I have a simple blue background, I think that doesn’t quite speak adventure, so to change the background, if we go up to the top, I’m going to click on background color, and this exposes a whole bunch of different background colors that I can choose from. Of all these background colors, I kind of like this teal color down here, it looks like it’s called seafoam teal. Let me select that. I think that matches Mexico and a Mexico slide adventure a little more, so I’m going to go with this color. If I don’t like any of the colors that are presented here, I could click on this plus icon, and then I could choose a custom color, and I could pretty much pick from any color imaginable. Everything looks good now. I’m satisfied with the background, I’m satisfied with the text, I’m going to go ahead and click on done.

Up here in the preview screen, I can now see the title that I added, and you’ll see now that the video is only three seconds long. It’s not much of a video unless I have some content in there, so I want to start adding some of my video clips to the storyboard.

To do that, I need to get content from my project library down onto my storyboard. Now I have a collection of video clips of my son and wife going down a water slide at this resort. I want to start off with an establishing shot of the water slide, and my first video clip has that establishing shot. I’m simply going to click on this item in my project library and you’ll see that it expands indicating that it’s been selected. I’m going to pull this down onto my storyboard in the second position. Now I could go through all my different video clips and start pulling them down onto my storyboard.

Let’s say for instance, I pulled this video clip down of my wife and son sitting at the top of the slide, and I’m going to pull this onto my storyboard. One thing I did though, is I actually would rather have my wife and son going up the stairs before they’re sitting at the top of the water slide. But it’s very easy to adjust. All I have to do is click on this clip, once again, drag it down, and I could place it wherever I want on the storyboard. So, there’s a lot of flexibility in allowing me to define how this story unfolds in the video.

I’ve inserted a few clips onto the storyboard. If I want to put all of my clips on the storyboard, I can go up here, select one of the video files, and when I click on it, it exposes a check mark. I can go through and then check all the different video clips I want to pull down. Alternatively, I could also use Windows shortcut keys. For instance, I could go over to the last item, press the shift key, and then press my mouse button, and that’ll select all those files.

I have all these different video clips selected. I’m going to click on one of them, drag it down to my storyboard, and release, and now I see all my videos included on the storyboard. Once again, the storyboard represents the order in which the video will play. Up here in the preview area, you can see now that my entire video is about 1:44. Now that’s pretty long for video on going down a water slide.

Now I want to show you some of the editing capabilities that the video editor has. Just like we did with the title slide, to edit an item on the storyboard, we simply click on that item, and when we click on it, we see a whole bunch of different options that we can take on the file. I’m going to walk through what all these different options do and how you can use them.

One other way to expose these actions is you can right click on the file itself, and when you right click on it, this exposes a context menu. You’ll see, though, as you go through the context menu, all the different actions that appear here within the context menu are also available here, and because this doesn’t require an extra right click, I prefer simply using the actions right here.

With this first video clip, this is going to serve as the establishing shot. Now a few things on the video clip, you’ll see down here that it says 11.28, and this is the duration of the clip. Now almost 12 seconds of time for an establishing shot is a very long time, so I’m going to trim this down. Let me go ahead and click on this clip, and now we’re going to click on trim to cut it down a little bit. When I click on trim, this opens up the video editor, and to trim a clip, I have some nice tools here on the time bar. So, here I see that it’s 11 seconds or it’s about 11 seconds or a little over 11 seconds. If I click on this trim tool, I could go ahead and shorten it to whatever length I want it to be, so maybe for the establishing shot, I really just want about 2 seconds. Once I choose that, I could play it to see what the clip looks like and that looks great. I’m going to click on done and at this point now you’ll see the duration of the video file is about 1.7 seconds now.

For the next clip, I want to do something similar. This is my wife going upstairs and here too I want to trim it as well. The nice thing about trimming is you can define when the trim starts, and you could also define when the trim ends, and for this portion, I just want to get our midway through the stairwell going up. This looks pretty good and I’m going to keep about, let’s say about 2 seconds or so here again. So, let’s click on done.

This third video clip here. This is almost 30 seconds long. That’s a pretty long video clip, and I want to keep two different portions of it. I want to keep this beginning portion where my wife and son are sitting on the slide, and then they start going down the slide, and I can see them sliding down the water slide. So, here instead of trimming the clip, I’m going to click on split, and this will allow me to split the video clip, and this marker appears. This is where I’m going to apply the split. Let me move up to maybe about this point here, and I’m going to split the clip right here. By splitting the clip, this will create two separate clips, one that contains the beginning portion and another clip that contains the end portion. This looks good. I’m going to click on done. Now on my storyboard I see the two clips because they’ve been split.

Let me click into this one and I’m going to trim this down. For this clip, I’m going to go with about a three, almost a four second clip. It shows my wife smiling and then my son is also sitting in the slide. This looks good and I’m going to click on done.

The same thing with the next clip, I also want to trim this down as well. This is the second part of the split, so let me click on trim, and here I’m just going to keep one portion of the video clip.

I’ve edited a bunch of these video clips and the video is starting to come together. Now one thing I see here is two of these video clips are in the wrong order. Luckily, it’s very easy to move things around, just like how I could pull different videos from the project library down onto my storyboard. Once items are on my storyboard, I could click on them and then shift them to a new position, and I like that position better. I’m going to go ahead and trim a few more of these files.

I’ve gone through and I’ve trimmed, and I’ve also split a whole bunch of the video files. I also want to show you some of the other actions that you could take on your video clips on the storyboard. I’m going to go ahead select this video clip right here, and once again, this exposes all of the different actions that you could take on a video clip. The next action here after trim and split is text. So, one of the things that I could put in here is a caption for this video clip. So maybe I’ll simply type in big slide and this time I’m going to go with a simple animated style and we’ll simply place it at the bottom and I’m going to click on done.

Along with inserting text, you also have the ability to insert motion. I just clicked on the motion option and here you could do things like zoom in, zoom out, tilt up,

Getting Started with Free Windows 10 Video Editor

Introduction

Video editing has become an essential skill in today’s digital world. Whether you are creating content for social media, a school project, or a work presentation, having the right tools can make a world of difference. With Windows 10 Video Editor, you can easily create professional-looking videos without breaking the bank. In this article, we will guide you through the basics of using this free video editing software on your Windows 10 computer.

Installing Windows 10 Video Editor

Before you can start using Windows 10 Video Editor, you need to make sure that it is installed on your computer. Fortunately, Windows 10 comes pre-installed with this software, so you don’t have to worry about downloading it separately. To access Windows 10 Video Editor, simply search for it in the Start menu or open the Photos app and click on the "Create" button.

Creating a New Project

Once you have launched Windows 10 Video Editor, you can start a new project by clicking on the "New video project" option. You will be prompted to give your project a name and choose a aspect ratio for your video (16:9 or 4:3). After that, click on the "Add" button to import the video clips and images you want to use in your project.

Editing Your Video

Windows 10 Video Editor offers a variety of tools to help you edit your video clips and images. You can trim and split clips, add transitions, apply filters and effects, and adjust the speed and volume of your audio. To edit a video clip, simply click on it in the timeline at the bottom of the screen and use the editing tools on the right-hand side of the window.

Adding Text and Music

To add text to your video, click on the "Text" option in the toolbar and choose a preset style or customize your own. You can also add music to your project by clicking on the "Music" option and selecting a song from your computer’s library. Windows 10 Video Editor allows you to trim and adjust the volume of your music to fit the length of your video.

Saving and Exporting Your Project

Once you have finished editing your video, it’s time to save and export it. Click on the "Finish video" option in the toolbar and choose a resolution and quality for your video. You can also add a title, description, and tags before clicking on the "Export" button to save your project to your computer.

Conclusion

With Windows 10 Video Editor, you can easily create professional-looking videos without spending a dime. By following the steps outlined in this article, you can start editing your own videos in no time. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced videographer, Windows 10 Video Editor has all the tools you need to bring your creative vision to life. Try it out today and see the difference it can make in your video editing workflow.

How to use Free Windows 10 Video Editor:

To start editing a video using the Free Windows 10 Video Editor, first launch the application and import your video files by clicking on the “Import” button. Next, drag and drop the video files onto the timeline to arrange them in the desired order. You can then use the various editing tools available, such as trimming, splitting, adding transitions, and applying effects to enhance your video. Once you are satisfied with the edits, click on the “Export” button to save the edited video to your computer.

Optimizing your video for SEO using HTML format:

To ensure that your video is optimized for SEO, it is essential to include relevant keywords in the title, description, and tags. You can also use HTML format to improve the searchability of your video by adding metadata such as meta tags, structured data, and schema markup. By optimizing your video using HTML format, you can improve its visibility on search engines like Google and increase the chances of it being discovered by a wider audience.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, using the Free Windows 10 Video Editor is a simple and effective way to edit your videos. By following these steps and optimizing your video for SEO using HTML format, you can increase its visibility and reach a larger audience. With the right tools and techniques, you can create engaging and professional-looking videos that stand out online.
Source: Youtube Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6yQwLuoO3w of Channel Kevin Stratvert.