Does anyone know a good WordPress editor for Mac OS X?

In fact, it’s very expensive. If you’re already out of pocket from purchasing a rather expensive Mac then you’ll likely want some financial relief in the form of free software. While nothing is going to match the premium might of Adobe and Apple’s in-house software, there are a few free video editing applications to sink your teeth into.

If you’ve just bought your first Mac then you might not have realised that it already comes with a basic video editor called iMovie. This is Apple’s own software and comes as part of the iLife suite. While you won’t necessarily be cutting up the next Hollywood blockbuster using iMovie, it’s a capable video editor for small projects.

For personal use, iMovie offers an easy introduction to video editing with support for face recognition, themes, easy to use effects, a simplistic timeline view and built in sounds and animations. It will leave you hungry for more if you’re after a powerful video editing solution, but then again you’ll be hard pressed to find an easier way to bring your moving images together into one professional looking production. At the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of user friendliness and raw power is Blender, an application usually associated with 3D modelling and compositing that’s been used in some pretty high profile productions.

We’ve written about Blender before at MakeUseOf, though with a focus on the 3D modelling aspect with only a brief mention of Blender’s potential as a non-linear video editor. The open source powerhouse might take some getting used to but with a few tutorials and some practice you’ll be surprised at what you can achieve. Here is an excellent site with a heap of tutorials for those getting started with Blender.

Better known for its compatibility with Linux (of which it’s one of the better video editors), Kdenlive plays nicely on OS X thanks to the help of MacPorts. The project is very much alive, with a March 2012 donation drive exceeding expectations allowing the developer to work on the project for two solid months. The community managed to raise over $7,000 and that’s bound to help Kdenlive reach version 1.0 in the near future (as of writing the most recent release is 0.9.2 released in May 2012).

While there are a lack of features found in the big commercial suites, Kdenlive is a straightforward and functional non-linear editor with plenty of friendly folks on the forum to help you out if you get stuck. Jahshaka was previously known as CineFX and is aimed at being an editor, effects and compositing engine that runs cross-platform over Mac, Linux and Windows. It is probably best compared to Adobe After Effects in its aspirations, though there has been a long time between version 2.0 and the long-awaited version 3.0 leading some to question the project’s future.

There is clearly still a lot of work to be done but it’s nice to see a truly open source cross-platform stab at a market dominated by Adobe. There seem to be quite a few users hungry for a new version judging by the comments left on news items, which hopefully will spur developers to deliver the update sometime this year. Still in the early stages of development, VideoLan Movie Creator (VLMC) is a non-linear editor based on the daddy of all media players, VLC.

I’m not entirely sure whether the project is still actually alive, though according to the minus project page the last unstable release was nearly a year ago and the latest version is nearly 2 years late according to the roadmap. Not to worry, because it’s free and potentially very promising indeed.