A Better Video Editor Than Windows Movie Maker

Video Spin (based on Pinnacle Studio) is a free video editing software for Windows that lets you make movies with no learning curve.

You simply drag-n-drop your video clips, digital photographs and music files onto the VideoSpin timeline, add a few 2D transitions, sound effect and your movie is ready.

With Video Spin, you can also create scrolling titles for your videos using the powerful title editor – a privilege available only in expensive video editing programs like Adobe Premiere. (see screenshot gallery below)

And once you are done editing the video, it can directly upload the clip to online video sharing sites  like Yahoo! Videos or YouTube. Another surprise – Video Spin can even output movies directly in Flash Video (flv) format.

Windows Movie Maker from Microsoft almost rules the market for free video editors but after playing with with Video Spin for some time, I consider this a more elegant solution than Movie Maker. (Related: "The Best Online Video Editors")  

Other than creating home videos, here are some alternate uses of Video Spin:

1. For editing Screencast Videos when you are using a basic screencasting software.

2. For converting between video formats – Video Spin supports AVI, WMV, FLV, MP4.

3. For extracting MP3 songs from Music Video – Video Spin can save any video file as an MP3 audio file.

4. For producing video podcasts (vlogs), stop motion animations and time lapse movies.

The software can directly import photographs from external media devices like the Digital Camera, iPod or the USB drive but the video footage cannot be , the files transfer the files from the camcorder to the hard drive. You will also need an external program to burn videos to DVD.

VideoSpin is a freeware video editor with no limits. The download is ~150 MB and the software works only on XP with SP2 or Windows Vista.

Pinnacle make money from VideoSpin by selling additional codecs that you will need for creating videos in MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 format. But if you are satisfied with creating or editing AVI and Windows Media files, you need not purchase these codecs.