Wondershare Filmora 12 Review: The Beginner-Friendly Video Editor Gets Even Better
Are you looking to get started with video editing but feel overwhelmed by complicated professional programs? Wondershare Filmora has long been a favorite among beginners for its intuitive interface and wide range of fun, easy-to-use features. The latest Filmora 12 release builds on these strengths while adding some powerful new capabilities.
In this in-depth review, we‘ll take a detailed look at everything Filmora 12 has to offer to help you decide if it‘s the right video editor for your needs and skill level. Even if you‘ve never edited a video before, by the end of this article you‘ll know exactly what Filmora is capable of and how to make the most of it.
Let‘s dive in!
What is Filmora?
First, a quick overview for those completely new to the program. Filmora is a consumer-level video editing application for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android developed by software company Wondershare. It aims to bridge the gap between very basic editors like Microsoft Photos and professional industry standards like Adobe Premiere Pro.
While not as powerful as those high-end programs, Filmora provides a robust set of tools that will meet the needs of most casual to semi-professional users. It‘s intuitive enough for total beginners to pick up quickly, while still providing room to grow for more advanced projects.
Some of the main use cases for Filmora include:
- Editing personal video footage like travel highlights or family events
- Creating videos for social media like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram Reels, etc.
- Putting together engaging presentations with mixed media
- Producing marketing and promo videos for business
- Simple post-production work for short films and other creative projects
Essentially, it‘s a versatile, affordable, user-friendly program that can handle most common video editing needs. Now let‘s take a closer look at the interface and core features.
User Interface
One of Filmora‘s biggest selling points is its sleek, uncluttered UI that makes it easy to jump right in, even with no prior video editing experience. The main layout is quite standard, with a few key sections:
- Media library: All your imported video, audio, and image files are organized here
- Preview window: Where you can watch your video playback and see edits in real time
- Timeline: The main working area where you arrange and edit your clips
- Toolbar: Quick access to important tools like splitting, cropping, adding text, etc.
While it looks basic at first glance, there are a lot of features and customization options tucked away in the various panels and menus. Fortunately, most of it is very discoverable thanks to clearly labeled icons, intuitive right-click menus, and subtle design cues that help guide you.
For example, to apply a stylistic preset or effect, you simply drag and drop it onto the clip. Additional options will pop up that let you fine tune the intensity, duration, position, and more. The ability to easily preview everything is also super helpful.
Another big timesaver is the magnetic timeline that automatically snaps clips into position. You can quickly rearrange your scene order, overlay clips for cool effects, align multiple tracks, and more just by dragging them around.
Plus, if you ever get stuck, Filmora has great built-in tutorials and online support. The interface is overall very welcoming to beginners who may be easily overwhelmed by more complex programs.
Basic Editing Tools
Of course, the real test of any video editor is how well the actual editing tools work. Filmora provides a solid array of essential functions for cutting, modifying, and enhancing your footage.
Some of the key editing features include:
- Splitting, trimming, and combining video and audio clips
- Adding transitions between scenes like fades, wipes, dissolves, etc.
- Adjusting playback speed and direction
- Cropping and rotating the frame
- Correcting color and exposure levels
- Stabilizing shaky footage
- Chroma key green screen removal
- Keyframe animation for motion effects
- Picture-in-picture, split screen, and video overlay
Most of these work as you‘d expect. Simply select the clip on your timeline, choose the relevant tool, and adjust the settings in the pop-up panel. Everything is very visual and responsive, making it easy to experiment and undo changes.
Filmora also does a great job of providing presets and templates so you don‘t have to start from scratch. For example, it comes loaded with color filter packs, animated transitions, title card templates, and more that you can simply drag and drop into your project.
This is where Filmora really shines for beginners, as it provides an instant creativity boost while eliminating a lot of the technical work. Even pros may appreciate the convenience for quick, repetitive tasks.
Visual Effects
Going beyond the basics, Filmora stands out for its huge library of attention-grabbing visual effects. These let you transform your videos with Hollywood-style graphics like explosions, light leaks, motion blurs, glitches, and much more.
Many of the effects are practical and help enhance the mood and visual interest of your videos. Others are wild digital distortions better suited for edgy, experimental content.
The effects are helpfully organized into categories like "Artistic," "Trailer," "Movie," "Lifestyle," etc. to guide you towards looks that fit your project. There are hundreds in total, ensuring you‘ll never get bored.
Applying effects is a simple drag and drop, with plenty of customization options to dial in the intensity and duration. For example, with the "Flame" effect, you can set the size, color, amount, and length of the flames, sync it to your footage, and composite it realistically using the Chroma Key tool.
With a little creativity, you can use Filmora‘s visual effects to majorly level up your videos and achieve impressive results without a ton of work.
Audio Editing
While Filmora is primarily a video editor, it provides capable tools for working with audio as well. You can adjust levels, pan between speakers, change pitch and speed, and remove background noise.
The interface lets you tweak your audio waveforms directly or apply effects like EQ, reverb, and compression to enhance the sound. You can edit tracks separately from your video and move them around the timeline independently, which is great for syncing multiple clips.
Filmora also comes with a built-in library of royalty-free music tracks and sound effects to flesh out your videos. You can easily loop clips to extend them as needed or match the length to your video.
A handy audio mixer lets you set levels across all tracks simultaneously and monitor recording levels from a mic or other input. While not as full-featured as a dedicated audio editor, Filmora handles most common post-production needs.
Titles and Graphics
Filmora includes tools to create professional-looking titles, captions, and other graphic overlays without leaving the program. You can start with the built-in presets or design your own from scratch.
The title editor provides a good amount of customization, with options for font, color, size, alignment, letter spacing, and more. You can also apply animations like fading or flying the text in and out.
In addition to basic titles, you get a variety of graphic elements like speech bubbles, arrows, icons, and shapes to annotate your videos. Filmora makes it easy to integrate these into your footage for informative and eye-catching results.
Advanced Features
While much of Filmora is geared towards beginners, the latest version adds some powerful features for more advanced users. A few highlights:
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Motion tracking: Filmora uses AI to automatically track a selected object and let you attach text, images, or other clips to follow it through the scene. Great for adding interactive labels, censoring faces, or replacing objects.
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Keyframing: Animates the position, scale, rotation, or other properties of clips by setting different values at specific points in time. Allows for complex motion graphics and special effects.
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Color correction: In addition to basic color filters, Filmora now has tools for precisely adjusting exposure, white balance, contrast, saturation, and more. You can match footage from different sources for seamless cuts.
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Multicam editing: Easily sync and cut between multiple camera angles by placing them in a grid and switching between them in real time. The process that used to take hours is now possible in minutes.
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3D LUTs: These allow you to simulate different film stocks and color grading styles with a single click. Filmora‘s library has many cinematic looks to experiment with.
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Audio ducking: Automatically lowers the volume of background music or other clips when dialogue or key sound effects occur. Helps keep your mix balanced and clear throughout.
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Masking: Use the Pen tool to outline a specific part of the frame, then apply effects to only that area. Allows you to brighten faces, blur backgrounds, create vignettes, and more.
These advanced features help Filmora compete with more expensive programs while still keeping things accessible to newer users. You can ignore them entirely until you‘re ready to take your projects to the next level.
Performance
One of the downsides of many entry-level video editors is sluggish performance, especially when working with HD footage or applying a lot of effects. Fortunately, Filmora is well-optimized and makes efficient use of your computer‘s hardware.
The new version is faster across the board, with quicker loading times, smoother playback, and speedier exporting. It supports GPU acceleration for tasks like encoding and decoding to take some of the load off your CPU.
You still need a decent machine for bigger projects, but Filmora‘s system requirements are quite reasonable:
- Windows 7 or higher, Mac OS X 10.13 or higher
- Intel i5 or better, AMD Ryzen 5 or better
- 8 GB RAM minimum, 16 GB recommended
- Integrated graphics ok, 2 GB VRAM dedicated GPU preferred
- 10 GB free hard disk space
In my testing on a 2021 MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro chip and 16 GB RAM, 4K timelines with multiple layers of video, graphics, and effects all played back smoothly. Exports are also quick, with a 5 minute 1080p video taking around 2 minutes to render.
Of course, less powerful systems will see some slowdown with complex projects, but Filmora does a good job of keeping things running as efficiently as possible. Tools like proxy files and pre-rendering help take the strain off low-end hardware.
Overall, performance is a definite strength of Filmora compared to many of its budget-friendly competitors.
Comparison to Other Software
With so many video editing options on the market, you may be wondering how Filmora stacks up. Let‘s quickly compare it to a few popular alternatives.
Adobe Premiere Pro is an industry standard for professional video work. It‘s massively powerful and used on big-budget films and TV shows. However, it has a steep learning curve, high system requirements, and a premium price tag at $21/month.
Final Cut Pro is Apple‘s flagship editor and another popular choice for pros, especially those already in the Mac ecosystem. Like Premiere, it offers much more advanced tools and granular control but also a lot more complexity. It retails for $300.
On the beginner side, software like iMovie (free), Microsoft Photos (free), and OpenShot (free) provide very basic trimming, transitions, and effects. They‘re super easy to use but extremely limited. Filmora fits in nicely between these extremes.
It‘s much more affordable than the pro options at a one-time price of $70 or $50/year while still including many of the same core features. And it offers a huge step up in functionality from the basic free programs while keeping things beginner-friendly. For many users, it will be the perfect middle ground.
Value
Filmora is very fairly priced for the features and performance it offers. A perpetual license costs $70 and includes unlimited updates and new features for the version you purchase. The subscription is $50/year and ensures you always have the newest version.
Compared to pro software that can cost hundreds upfront plus monthly fees, Filmora is a bargain, especially considering there‘s no arbitrary project limitations, watermarks, or other surprise costs.
Beginners and hobbyists may still balk at paying for software, but Filmora is absolutely worth the price if you‘ll be doing any amount of regular video editing. The time and frustration it will save you versus wrestling with limited free programs is immeasurable.
Schools and businesses can also get a great deal with bulk discounts for multiple seats. The option between subscriptions or perpetual licenses provides welcome flexibility for different budgets and usage needs.
Wondershare offers a free trial of Filmora as well so you can test it out before buying. If you‘re at all unsure, I‘d highly recommend downloading it and taking it for a spin.
Conclusion
Filmora hits the sweet spot for casual to semi-professional video editors who want an all-in-one solution that‘s both powerful and easy to use. The intuitive interface, huge library of effects and presets, and great performance make it a joy to use for beginners and experienced users alike.
While it may lack some of the very advanced features found in expensive pro software, the vast majority of users will have everything they need and more. And with each update, Wondershare continues to close the gap and innovate with new AI-powered tools.
Whether you‘re looking to splice together some vacation clips, create an engaging social media video, or produce a polished business promo, Filmora is up to the task. It‘s accessible enough to learn in an afternoon but deep enough to support you as your skills and ambitions grow.
If you‘ve been holding off on diving into video editing, Filmora is the perfect place to start. Head to the Wondershare website and download the free trial of Filmora 12 today to see what you can create!