Integrated video editor in Windows 10

Not everyone knows this, but standard Windows 10 apps also include a video editor with basic video editing capabilities, which is actually part of the built-in Photos app.

This review is about how to run the built-in video editor in Windows 10 and its features that may be of interest to a novice who needs to trim or merge videos, add music, text, and effects. If you need to perform more serious editing tasks, I recommend the article Best Free Video Editors, you may also be interested in video editors for Android.

Using the Windows 10 video editor

You can run Windows 10's built-in video editor in the following ways:

• Look for the "Video Editor" item in the Start menu (but note that in previous versions of the system it was not available in the specified location).
• Right-click on any video and select "Open with" - "Photos", then click the "Edit and Create" button on the application bar that opens and select the desired action from the menu : trim, create video with text, add music and more.
• From the Start menu (or otherwise) launch the built-in "Photos" application, then select "Video Editor" from the main menu (if it doesn't appear, click "Advanced" and then select the desired item).
• Also in the Photos application, you can open the menu and then create a new video project or, if you wish, create an automatic video with music (from your photos, for example).

Here's how to use the Windows 10 video editor when creating a video project from scratch, after starting with the first, third, or fourth method.

The order of use in this case will be as follows:

1. Click on the "New Video Project" button.
2. Specify a name for the video to be created.
3. In "Project Library", click the "Add" button and add the video files, photos and images and music that will be used in your project.
4. Once you have added the elements you want, you can select them in the project library and drag and drop them at the bottom of the video editor to place them in the order you want (the process is shown below in the video editor overview) .
5. By clicking on the Crop, Divide, Text or Motion buttons you can perform the appropriate actions on the selected video or image at the bottom of the video editor.
6. Look at the two buttons in the menu: the lower one works with the selected video fragment, the upper one allows you to change the parameters of the entire final video (add background music, change the aspect ratio). They can be useful if the items do not fit in the video editor window: when the window is narrow, some of the control buttons are hidden in these menus.
7. The use of the video editing tools is implemented in a way that is understandable to even the most novice . For example, in the following image - add animated text to the current video: select a template, enter the text, use markers to indicate in which segment of the video you want to display the text, and the "Structure" section is used to organize it in the frame .
8. Below is the "Filters" window to add an effect to the highlighted video, nothing complicated either.
9. With the «3D Effects» element you can add something on top of your video, the effects include a sound Bands that you can also deactivate.
10. In addition, I recommend that you explore the context menu that opens when you right-click a fragment of your video.

All the actions you perform are saved in a project file, which is available for further editing, but it is not a video file that you can share.

If you want to save your finished video as an mp4 file (only this format is available), click "Finish video" at the top right, specify the video resolution (you can also open "Advanced" here and enable encoding of hardware-accelerated video), and then click "Export."

After clicking the button, you will need to specify where to save the finished video and wait for the export to complete - note that in some cases it can take a long time. Once the process is complete, the finished video will automatically open.

Video summary

To summarize, Windows 10's built-in video editor is a handy thing for the average (not a video editing engineer) who needs the ability to quickly and easily "shape" a beautiful video for personal use, without having to learn a third party video editing software.