Top 5 Best Video Editing Tools for Chromebook

People tend to think that Chromebooks are only useful for browsing online content, but that is not true. If you want, you can also do video editing on Chromebook with a combination of online and offline tools. Though you might be able to do what you can do with Adobe Premiere on your Windows or Mac computer, you can still do basic video editing on Chromebook to make your videos social media ready. We will be listing the top video editing applications for Chromebook in this article, most of which are available for free use and are as good as iMovie or Final Cut ProX.

Part 1: Top 6 Best video editing tools for Chromebook

Some Chromebooks now allow Android apps to be installed on them. With this, you can now use Android apps as video editors for Chromebook. Below we will be introducing a mix of both Android apps and Chrome web apps that can be used for video editing on Chromebook.

PowerDirector (Android app)

PowerDirector is an Android app that happens to work quite nicely on Chromebooks which support Android apps. It is capable of editing 720p, Full HD 1080p, and 4K videos and offers the familiar timeline-based interface for video editing for Chromebook.

Pros:

Ø  Lots of free special effects

Ø  Since it is primarily an Android app, touch is supported in addition to mouse and keyboard.

Ø  Slow-motion, transitions, or video styles effects are supported

Ø  Photo or voice overlays can also be done over the video with PowerDirector

Cons:

Ø  Takes too much time to import 4K or Full HD videos

WeVideo (Chrome extension)

While this is available as an Android app, we will suggest you go for its Chrome extension available on Chrome web store. It is available for free as well as a subscription-based service. The biggest USP of this application is its ease of use. There is no learning curve associated with this app unlike many other video editors for Chromebook.

Pros:

Ø  Upload and edit videos of up to 5GB of size

Ø  Lots of sound effects, transitions, and video effects available for free

Ø  Available as a Chrome extension

Cons:

Ø  The free version adds a watermark to the edited end videos.

Ø  Requires constant internet connection since it is an online service

Kinemaster (Android app)

This is a professional quality video editor for Chromebook. It offers almost the same functionality as PowerDirector but has an additional feature of theme support. It is also available as an Android app that can be installed on Chromebooks supporting Android apps. It comes with an inbuilt wizard which helps you in using its libraries of effects like the visual style, artwork, font selection and music or you can add all this manually too.

Pros:

Ø  Large library of visual and audio effects.

Ø  Supports multi-layer videos

Ø  Individual frame level editing is supported

Cons:

Ø  It doesn’t expand to a full-screen application on a Chromebook

Ø  The free version adds a watermark at the corner of the end video

OpenShot

This is a famous application for video editing on computers running Linux based operating systems. It is also available as a Chrome extension from the Chrome web store and therefore can be used for video editing on Chromebooks. It boasts of a host of capabilities starting from the basic abilities to trim, resize, rotate or crop a video to the advanced abilities of adding animations, time effects, scrolling motion picture credits and watermarks.

Pros:

Ø  It has a powerful animation framework that lets you do fade, slide, bounce, and animate anything within your video.

Ø  It is an open source application and is therefore completely free to use.

Ø  There is support for multiple codecs including WebM (VP9), AVCHD (libx264), HEVC (libx265), LAME, and AAC.

Cons:

Ø  None

Google Photos (Android app)

If your needs are very basic and you just want to cut off some parts of the video, Google Photos app is sufficient for you as an application for video editing for Chromebook. While there is a web Google Photos application but that doesn’t offer video editing capabilities. You need to install the Android app on your Chromebook. To start editing, click on the Edit button appearing at the bottom center of the screen and then drag the frame from the timeline to trim it.

Pros:

Ø  Google Photos has other use of handling your photos on your Chromebook too.

Ø  Though what it does is basic, all of this is available for free without any watermark on the end video

Cons:

Ø  Despite offering basic capabilities, it is available as an app and not as an online application.

Part 2: Further Reading on Converting and Editing Videos for Chromebook

The tools listed above are all powerful for video editing tools for Chromebook but they do lag in features. While you can trim, crop, rotate, do transitions and apply basic effects on Chromebook, you can’t do some advanced modifications without applications available on Windows and Mac operating system.

For this, you need an advanced video editing application that can not only do basic and advanced editing for your videos but in the end, should also be able to convert them to a Chromebook supported format like .avi, .mp4, .m4a, .mp3, .mkv, and more. We suggest using DVDFab Video Converter for this task.

With this tool you can first use the Converter feature to choose a format out of the ones supported by Chromebook. After that use the video editor to trim, crop and resize your videos. Change the brightness, contrast and saturation with the tool and also add text or image watermarks or embed subtitles in the video. You can use the tool to split the videos as well as even merge multiple videos.

The Advanced Settings window of DVDFab Video Converter lets you do advanced modifications to your video like changing the resolution, quality, frame rate, audio bit rate, codec, encoding method and a lot more. If you are frequently editing videos for not only Chromebook but for other platforms too, DVDFab Video Converter is a must-have utility.