Avid Media Composer

Video-editing software, especially for professionals, needs to be feature-packed to allow for a thorough process, modular to fit many use cases, and most of all, dependable. It's thus understandable why there are so much more clip editing tools suited for the beginner audience than for professional use.

If you're looking for such a solution, then Avid Media Composer might be what you're after. It's a comprehensive, fully-featured video editor with a modern, customizable interface and a host of many options you can take advantage of to make your footage look its very best.

The capabilities of this program's toolset are truly expansive: if you're new to this, things will seem quite overwhelming at first. To start, insert the source folder that contains your footage, then drag what you want to work with on the timeline.

There are lots of menus and windows, each suited to enhance specific parts of a video. Some of those are accessible from the right panel in the main window: Edit, Color, Effects, and Audio. These are also referred to as Workspaces in the app, and they can also be reached via the Windows menu.

As mentioned earlier, this is software designed to tackle even the most demanding of workloads, allowing users to modify their footage down to the most granular of details.

To that end, the design's modularity contributes to the power-user-centered approach. You can drag the windows around as you see fit and focus only on what's required for the current project. You can have more than two players in the playback menu, handling more than two videos, and if your current task concerns color-correcting some footage, you can prioritize the Color workspace and make it take up the entire interface.

The Effects panel contains some tweakable presets to quickly modify your video, so if you don't want to tamper with color correction, the templates can help. Thanks to the interface being able to host multiple players in the playback menu, your footage can be readjusted on the fly.

As for the Color workspace, it can get pretty stuffy. Users can adjust the HSL sliders of their footage, while also affording to employ per-color editing in the Curves and Channels tabs. It's worth noting that such work is best conducted on a calibrated display to ensure color accuracy.

There's a lot that can be said about Avid Media Composer: it's some of the most intricate video editing software we've tested yet, and whether that's something positive or negative depends on the person. It's almost intimidating at first, but this is a program one can depend on if they're serious about video editing.