Lightworks is a remarkably powerful application, with tools designed for speedy and precise editing. While I jokingly refer to the Lightworks interface as UI by Playskool, this is not “My First Video Editor”.

Depending on your expectations, philosophy, and available resources, Lightworks may or may not be a wise investment for your production studio. While Lightworks is still technically free (as in beer), it’s utility as free software is dubious at best, and it’s future as open-source software is uncertain. With this broader scope came a quiet restructuring of Lightworks’ roadmap which as of this writing has yet to be sufficiently addressed by EditShare, the current owner of Lightworks.

Eventually the software was ported to Linux and Mac with promises of open source code in the near future, making Lightworks the only professional, open-source, cross-platform video editor. Traditionally marketed as a turnkey solution for production studios, Lightworks was not available to the general public until 2013, when it was astonishingly offered as a free download for Windows users. Lightworks is an Academy and Emmy award winning professional-grade non-linear editor that, in the past 25 years, has been used to edit numerous large-scale feature films including but not limited to Pulp Fiction, Batman, and The King’s Speech.

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