Wondershare’s Filmora offers the standard trimming, transitions, and overlays, along with effects we’ve come to expect in enthusiast-level video editing software. Since our last look, the company has added more advanced and modern features like those you find in more-established competitors—it now offers motion tracking, for example. Filmora can get the job done, and its interface is clear and pleasing, but you’ll have to do without some of the fine control you get with competitors.
How Much Does Filmora Cost?
Filmora offers a free trial download, which lets you export footage only 10 times and emblazons a Filmora logo on your exported projects. When you’re ready to pay, Filmora offers a subscription model (as Adobe does for Premiere Pro). For a bit more, however, you can get a permanent license. Both the macOS and Windows versions cost $51.99 per year or $79.99 for an outright purchase (note these prices are frequently discounted). That’s less than you pay for market-leading Adobe Premiere Elements, at $99.99, or for CyberLink PowerDirector Ultimate, at $139.99 (with a $69.99 per year subscription option). If Filmora meets your needs, it offers decent value.
Paying for either type of Filmora license gets you a bunch of effects to use in your video projects, removes watermarks, and adds 24/7 technical support. New effect collections are also added every month for subscription-paying customers. I primarily tested the Windows software, though I also ran Filmora on macOS for this review; the two versions are mostly the same.
The software, which is strong on support for old operating system versions, can run on Windows 7 through 10, or macOS 10.7 to 11. Support for the new Apple Silicon M1 processors is through Rosetta 2; while native support would be better, Filmora is ahead of Movavi in this respect, as the latter failed to run on my M1 MacBook Air in testing. Filmora took up 800MB on my test PC, which is in the midrange for this type of software. Adobe Premiere Pro takes up 3.3GB, while Movavi Video Editor Plus needs only 285MB.
Pleasing Interface
Filmora’s Full Editor view resembles that of most video editing applications, with a three-panel layout for source content, video preview, and timeline across the bottom. It has a clean, simple, and dark interface, with non-skeuomorphic controls. You can switch between black and light-gray window borders, and the program respects your system dark or light mode setting. You can’t pull off panels, but you can full-screen the video preview and adjust the relative sizes of the panels.
When you start a project, you have a choice of Widescreen, Instagram (1×1), Portrait, Standard, or Cinema aspect ratios. From File > Project Settings, you can set a custom size if you like, as well as choosing the frame rate.
Important mode-switching buttons are always at the top left of the interface: Media, Audio, Titles, Transitions, Effects, Elements (graphics), and Split Screen. At the top right are buttons leading to tutorials, help, your account, the Save feature, the app’s message center, and the ability to download more content from WonderShare FilmStock, such as effects, videos, photos, and audio.
You can easily shrink and expand the timeline with Ctrl-Mouse Wheel or move back and forth with Alt-Mouse Wheel. There’s a search bar for anything you have in the source panel, and clear Undo and Redo arrows. Buttons above the timeline offer Delete, Crop, Speed, Color, Green Screen, Motion Track, Keyframing, and Edit—the last of which opens a panel showing expandable entries for most of the previous ones.
The number of tracks looks limited at first, but whenever you add another video clip below your main one, another track is added so you can keep overlaying. As with the Connected Clips in Final Cut Pro, these added clips in new tracks move in sync with the main track above them. It’s a great way to keep your effect overlays where you want them. PiP works easily, with WYSIWYG resizing handles in the preview.
The program enforces a magnetic timeline approach: Whenever you drag a clip onto the timeline, it snaps right to the previous clip, so there’s never any empty space in the movie. Auto-Ripple is also on by default to keep your movie gap-free, but you can turn this off if you prefer. You can trim from the start or end of a clip, but the current-position line shows a scissors, letting easily split the current clip. There’s no trimming in the source tray, however, so professionally trained editors may not feel at home. Also missing are advanced editing modes like slip, slide, and roll, but for consumers, that’s probably for the best.
A plus sign on each clip lets you easily add it to the timeline at the insertion point. In addition to the timeline view, there’s a Storyboard view that simply shows clip thumbnails, with spots for transitions in between. Helpfully, tracks on the timeline show audio waveforms.
Instant Cutter
Instant Clutter is a tool you can use during clip import and is intended for use with large high-res content. It’s very simple, with but one purpose, as its name implies. You can drag multiple clips onto its window, but only if you’ve selected its Merge sub-mode. The Trim mode is just for trimming the ends of a single clip, and its interface doesn’t even show more than one clip in the left-size source tray. You can Add Segments, which means creating a new clip based on your trimmed original, but you can’t explicitly split a clip. For some test clips I got an error saying they weren’t supported, however.
Plenty of Transitions
Filmora offers 100 transitions, and now you can search for them by name as you can in PowerDirector and Adobe Premiere Elements. There are ten categories, including Basic, 3D, Ripple & Dissolve, Speed Blur, Warp, Lifestyle, Slideshow, Linear, Plain Shape, and Filmstock. You can designate those you use often as Favorites, for easy access. Filmora uses unusual schematic diagrams to show what the transitions do; most programs simply show a sample A to B animation.
When you add transitions either with the plus sign on the right side of its thumbnail, the program places it inside the edge of the clip—I find this odd, since you normally want the transition to span the current and next clip. Thankfully, you can do this easily by dragging the transition’s timeline entry with the mouse; it automatically snaps to the midpoint between clips. You can also edit the amount of time a transition spans by dragging its edge. Double-clicking a transition entry opens a panel where you can decide whether the transition is overlapped, prefixed, or postfixed to the clips.
Special Effects and Color Editing
As mentioned earlier, it’s easy to create PiP (picture-in-picture) effects, and you can move and resize PiP windows right in the video preview by clicking on the appropriate timeline clip, dragging the crosshairs in the middle of the edges and corners. Chroma Key (aka green screen) worked very well and automatically for my test footage even with frizzy hair, which can often be difficult to mask.
The Effects panel includes 12 categories from Shake to Night Life to Instagram-Like, which uses familiar names like Amaro, Brannon, and Hefe. These can add drama to your video just as they to do still photos. Distortions like mirror and water ripple, as well as a set of light leak and film style overlays are also included. Nearly thirty LUT (lookup table) effects are included, many named after the movies and shows whose colors they emulate—Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and so on. Those who pay for the subscription version of Filmora get more effects and objects, including movie templates, and color filters.
The Motion Tracking tool works simply and fairly well. There aren’t a whole lot of settings in it, but that’s actually a refreshing change from the overstuffed collections of options the competition often includes. You draw a box around the object you want to track, hit Start Tracking, and then choose what you want to follow the track—a file of your own or a selection of mosaic blurs. Filmora does a good job tracking objects and people, and even displays a message saying the object you’re tracking must be visible the entire time. The mosaics aren’t placed on top of the track automatically, and it would be nice to be able to use text or graphics as well as the mosaic blurs.
The advanced Color options button above the timeline can open up either Color Correction or Color Match. The first offers presets (such as Warm, Vignette, Walking Dead) as well as adjustments like Exposure, Brightness, Contrast, Vibrance, and Saturation—all while displaying a live histogram. The control is impressive, though you don’t get the color wheels that more-advanced editors now have. Color Match was slightly counterintuitive, but I finally figured out that the Reference image’s color would be applied to the Current frame (along with its entire selected clip); the tool performed this operation convincingly.
I don’t love the stabilization tool’s stretchy rubber-band look, though it does show you how much of the edges of your content will be cropped out—the more severe the crop, the more stabilization. Filmora’s tool works, but products like PowerDirector, Adobe Premiere Pro, Movavi, and Final Cut Pro X have more advanced and effective stabilization tools.
The Speed adjustment tool, once again, is simple and effective. I’m pleased to see that it also offers a Freeze Frame option. You simply tap its button above the timeline, choose Slow, Fast, Normal, or Reverse, and then the fraction for slow and a percent for fast. The time change is conveniently and clearly written at the top of the clip in the timeline. You can even combine reverse with a speedup. The freeze frame simply adds a 2 second still clip of the current frame.
Keyframing, new since my last look at the app, can only be used with position, rotation, scale, and opacity. It’s a good start, but some programs, like Pinnacle Studio, let you time pretty much any effect or transformation available with keyframes.
Text and Title Effects
Adding titles and text is a snap, and Filmora includes over 200 well-designed text and title templates, some with cool animations. Even the highly designed title templates are editable right in the video preview window. If you want even more customization, the Advanced Text Edit dialog lets you change the animation, font, and color fill for your text.
One frill missing is PowerDirector’s and Premiere Elements’ ability to use video fill in your text characters, but you can use a photo, which is pretty cool. In addition to text, you can choose from a good selection of objects and shapes to overlay onto your movie.
Music and Audio
Filmora’s Music section includes 172 background tracks, which you can augment by adding your own music files. Included music is organized into categories like Young & Bright and Tender & Sentimental. But there’s no auto-fitting capability like you get in Premiere Elements. A full audio mixer lets you adjust each track’s volume and panning. Dragging the timeline’s audio waveforms up and down makes it easy to duck audio. You can remove background noise and set ducking, but you don’t get acoustic effects that simulate concert halls and other environments like those in PowerDirector.
Two newer tools marked beta, are Auto Normalization and Silence Detection. You do get a Denoise checkbox, but that’s not as powerful as the audio tools in Adobe and CyberLink’s products. On the plus side, one handy sound tool, a microphone button right below the video preview window, lets you easily record a voiceover.
Sharing and Output
Filmora offers most of the output options you could want, including AVI, FLV, HEVC, MKV, MOV, MP4, and WMV. There’s even an animated GIF choice. When outputting to one of the many supported file formats, you can choose quality settings of Best, Better, and Good. There are also buttons for creating and uploading Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo movies, as well as DVD burning. You don’t, however, get DVD menu screens and chapters as you do with some other video editors. 4K is supported, as is the newer, more efficient H.265 codec.
Performance
Filmora generally felt snappy on my test computers, but a couple times it stopped responding when I started exporting, and one export to Vimeo failed. I tested on a PC running 64-bit Windows 10 Pro with a 3.4GHz Core i7 6700 CPU, 16GB RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 with 4GB GDDR5 RAM. As with Corel VideoStudio, by default, GPU acceleration is not enabled. This is easy to change in the Settings menu, however.
To test render time, I create a movie consisting of four clips of mixed types (some 1080p, some SD, some 4K) with a standard set of transitions, and render it to a 1080p MPEG-4 clip at 15Mbps, H.264 High Profile. The clip’s audio is MPEG AAC Audio: 192 Kbps.
For rendering the test movie, whose duration is just under five minutes, Filmora turned in an impressive time of 1:16 (minutes:seconds). That was only a smidge behind Corel VideoStudio’s time of 1:12, slightly better than PowerDirector’s 1:32 and Premiere Pro’s 1:40, and much better than Adobe Premiere Elements’ 4:10 and Magix Movie Edit Pro’s 7:38.
WonderShare Filmora on the Mac
The macOS version of Filmora is largely identical to the Windows version, though it adds a few more features, including Auto Reframe, which (similar to features that recently appeared in Final Cut and Premiere Pro) crops wide content to fit into social-post sizes, either the square Instagram format or the vertical phone view for “stories.”
To use Auto Reframe, you can start a new project or use its two-finger tap menu choice on a clip in the source panel. As with the similar tools from Adobe and Apple, my results were unconvincing when I tested this using footage from a football game. Auto Reframe failed to keep the action in the center, just as the other two had.
I was also unable to test the other major new feature, support for the soon-to-be-discontinued Touch Bar, since my Air lacks a Touch Bar and my previous MacBook Pro with one suffered a recent fatal hard drive error while running Final Cut.
On my performance test on the M1 Air, Filmora took 4:55 (min:sec) for the same project that took 1:12 on my Windows test PC. Of course, that’s not comparable. What is comparable is that the same project rendered in just 50 seconds in iMovie—that exemplifies the difference between a program that’s M1-native (iMovie) versus one that uses Apple’s Rosetta 2 translation engine to run existing apps. A Wondershare rep told me that a native version would be coming out in July 2021.
Filmora, or More?
Wondershare Filmora has an eye-soothing interface and offers lots of nifty effects, text tools, and filters along with basic video cutting and good output options. Enthusiast video editors should be fine with Filmora, and its rendering speed is among the best. Those who really dig into various effects like denoise and stabilization, however, will wish they’d spent a bit more for more-advanced software. Filmora is reasonably priced, but we still recommend our slightly more expensive Editors’ Choice winners for enthusiast video editing software, Final Cut Pro, PowerDirector, and VideoStudio, because of their fuller toolsets, better effects, and more-extensive support for new techniques and formats.
