Best free video editing tools

There are lot of video editing tools available in the market. Choosing one which suits your needs can be a tough task. Your problems become more complex when you consider the features vs price comparison. However, before buying a software have a look at these free video editing tools. You never know if you might like some of them and might be saved from buying one :)

• VirtualDub - Totally free (licensed under GPL) and a very neat utility for all your video capturing / editing needs. It helps you decompress and recompress both audio and video. You can even remove and edit audio tracks without touching the video. More virtualdub features here.
  
• Mencoder - Targeted for the geeky - mencoder is a free command line video decoding, encoding and filtering tool (licensed under GPL). Its a close sibling of MPlayer and hence can process almost anything under the sun.
  
• Avid FreeDV - A stripped down version of the Avid Xpress pro software but packed with a punch nevertheless. Interface is counter intuitive and might not suit everyone.
  
• Microsoft Movie Maker - Windows Movie Maker comes included with windows operating system (starting from Windows ME). It contains features such as effects, transitions, titles/credits, audio track, timeline narration, and Auto Movie.

For professional video editing Cinelerra would be my suggestion. Its a very high end non-linear video editing system (Wikipedia says - A non-linear editing system (NLE) is a video editing (NLVE) or audio editing (NLAE) system that can perform random access on the source material.)

Further Reading -
Comparison of video editing softwares.

A snipped list from wikipedia about other free video editing softwares is -

Closed-source freeware
Non-linear video editing software
Avid Free DV (Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X)
AVIedit (Microsoft Windows)
AviTricks classic
Clesh (Java on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)
Zwei Stein
Windows Movie Maker (Microsoft Windows)

Video encoding and conversion tools
CleshLoad (Java on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)
TMPGEnc (Microsoft Windows)
Windows Media Encoder (Microsoft Windows)
MPEG Stream (Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X)

Open software
Non-linear video editing software
Blender (software) (cross-platform)
HyperEngine-AV (Macintosh)
Jahshaka (Cross platform)
LiVES (Linux)

Video encoding and conversion tools
Avidemux (cross-platform)
AviSynth (Microsoft Windows)
FFmpeg
MediaCoder
MP4Box
Nandub
VirtualDubMod (Microsoft Windows) (based on VirtualDub, but with additional input/output formats)

Author - Sharad