Shotcut Portable

Whether you want to apply some small tweaks to your homemade videos or experiment with a variety of filters, you can resort to a free and open-source application such as Shotcut. In addition to the installer, it comes in a portable package ready to be deployed on any computer from an external storage device, without any setup necessary.

Considering the range of advanced settings offered for expert video editors, it's surprising to see such an intuitive and attractive interface as the one provided by Shotcut. It makes it enjoyable to learn video editing techniques, even if previous experience is absent.

Although the exact types of videos that can be opened with this program are not specified, it's possible to work with just about anything. The video can be played in the main window and stopped at any frame to make tweaks. Plus, you can display a filmstrip to be able to add or remove audio and video tracks with ease.

You can export frames as PNG images, save the edit edition list (EDL), as well as convert videos to a rich array of profiles, like GIF animations, MJPEG, HDV 1080 25p, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, Sony PSP, Flash, and DVD PAL wide. Parameters can be customized when it comes to the video (resolution, aspect ratio, FPS, scan mode, field order, deinterlacer, interpolation, parallel processing), codec (rate control, quality, GOP, B frames, codec threads), audio (sample rate, codec, rate control, bit rate) and others.

As far as filters are concerned, it's possible to control the brightness, contrast, color grading, fade in and out, volume, HTML overlay, rotation, and white balance. The deinterlace options are One Field and Linear Blend (both are fast), YADIF - temporal only (good) and YADIF - temporal + spatial (best). For interpolation, you can choose from Nearest Neighbor (fast), Bilinear (good), Bicubic (better) and Hyper/Lanczos (best).

Multiple monitors and languages are supported, along with two UI themes (light and dark). You can create and toggle jobs with different video editing projects, review steps in the application log, ask Shotcut to scrub the audio, as well as change the default app directory.

Taking into account its clear-cut interface and comprehensive features, Shotcut Portable should meet the requirements of many users looking for an advanced video editor wrapped in portable form.