Four free video editors bring out your inner filmmaker

Reordering the sequence of video is possible, though. Once you load all your clips into the timeline, you can then cut and paste footage segments. You do this by marking the beginning and end of the footage you want to move, cutting or copying it, moving the playback indicator to the point of the timeline to which you want to move the cut sequence, and then pasting it in there.

This isn't a particularly intuitive way to edit video. Because each clip loaded into Avidemux must be appended to the previous one's timeline, it's difficult to experiment with the playback order of your clips. (Professional editing applications such as Apple's Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere Pro allow you to load clips into a storage area and then drag-and-drop them onto a timeline in any playback order you wish.)

Avidemux has several tools to improve and adjust the picture quality of your footage — you can tweak its brightness, contrast and colors, adjust the resolution and sharpen the image. You can get an instant preview of how most of the picture enhancement and adjustment tools will alter the look of your footage, which is very convenient.

You can export your final video to one of several compression formats, including MPEG-4, MPEG-2 and FLV, and there are presets to create a file that will specifically work on one of four mobile devices (the iPhone, iPod, Zune and PlayStation Portable). You can fine-tune the compression settings, but I found it much easier and faster to just use the presets.

Now for the bad news: Avidemux is not very stable. It frequently crashed when I moved the video forward or backward frame-by-frame by pressing the right and left arrow keys — especially after I appended several clips to the timeline.

The program did function well when I used the mouse or on-screen "jog shuttle" knob to go forward or backward. But using the arrow keys is necessary to make precise edits on specific frames of the video. (This problem has been reported to the Avidemux support forum but awaits a solution.)

The bottom line
The good thing about Avidemux is that it gives you a lot of leeway in tuning the image quality of your video. However, its strictly linear method of video editing discourages you from playing around with the sequencing of your footage. Worse, it's prone to crashing.

JayCut 2.0
JayCut is a web-based application that was founded in February 2007. The Stockholm-based company just launched a revamped site, with improvements and more advanced editing features.

The user interface is presented as a two-video track layout, which is a standard among professional editors like Premiere and Final Cut. As someone who honed his video-editing skills on various versions of Premiere, I immediately took to JayCut. It will feel comfortable to almost anyone who has used one of the more high-end software packages.