The short version: iMovie, which is already sitting on every Mac, handles 90 percent of what small businesses need, and DaVinci Resolve’s free tier covers the rest, including proper colour grading and multi-track audio. You only need to pay for Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro once your workload or your client’s brand standards demand it, and for most people making social content or webinar cutdowns, that day never arrives.
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The bit nobody tells you before you buy software
I spent £54 a month on Adobe Creative Cloud for three years because I assumed that was the cost of doing business. Then in 2023 I sat down to cut a 40 minute Zoom webinar into a 90 second LinkedIn highlight reel with a deadline of that evening, and Premiere Pro crashed twice on my M1 MacBook Air because I had too many browser tabs open. I gave up, opened iMovie out of pure frustration, and had the clip trimmed, captioned, and exported in nineteen minutes. It looked exactly the same to the client. That was the moment I stopped paying for software I barely used and started using what my Mac already had.
Here is the uncomfortable truth most of the “best free video editors” listicles skip over: the software was rarely your bottleneck. Most people who buy Premiere Pro use about 8 percent of its features and spend the rest of the time fighting a steep learning curve for capabilities they never touch. The thing that slows down your video output is not having a repeatable process, not the absence of a £250 a year subscription. Fix the process first. The tool comes second.
Start with what’s already on your Mac
iMovie comes free on every Mac sold since 2011. If you’ve deleted it, it is a two minute redownload from the App Store, no subscription, no watermark, no trial period ending. It exports up to 4K, has a built in green screen tool, auto stabilisation, and since 2023 an automatic caption feature that transcribes your speech and burns subtitles onto the clip, which matters enormously now that most social platforms autoplay muted.
Here is exactly how I cut that webinar clip, step by step:
- Imported the full 40 minute MP4 by dragging it into a new iMovie project.
- Scrubbed through and marked three sections worth keeping using the I and O keys to set in and out points.
- Dragged each selected clip down to the timeline in order, which automatically joined them with a hard cut.
- Trimmed the edges of each clip by dragging the yellow handles until the cuts landed on a natural pause in speech.
- Added captions via Captions in the top menu, chose Auto, and let it transcribe the audio, then fixed two misheard words.
- Applied a simple cross dissolve between clips two and three by dragging a transition icon from the browser onto the join.
- Exported via File, Share, then File, choosing 1080p and High quality, which took under two minutes on an M1 chip.
Total time: nineteen minutes, including the export. No subscription, no watermark, and it went straight up on LinkedIn.
If you’re brand new to editing entirely and wondering whether you even need to learn a paid tool eventually, it’s worth reading how to break into video editing without expensive software because the skills you build in iMovie transfer directly once you do move up.
When you need more than iMovie: DaVinci Resolve
iMovie has real limits. It won’t do multi-camera editing, its colour tools are basic, and it caps out if you’re cutting anything with more than a handful of audio tracks, like a podcast recorded on four separate microphones. That’s where DaVinci Resolve comes in, made by Blackmagic Design, the same company that builds cinema cameras used on actual Netflix productions.
The free version of Resolve is not a stripped down demo. It supports 4K and even some 8K workflows, has a full colour grading page with scopes, a proper audio mixing page called Fairlight, and multi-camera editing. The paid version, Resolve Studio, is a one-off £245 purchase, not a subscription, and adds things like noise reduction, facial recognition for organising footage, and support for higher frame rates. Most solo creators and small business owners never need to pay that £245 at all.
The catch is the learning curve. Resolve is built for professional colourists and editors, so the interface has seven different “pages” (Media, Cut, Edit, Fusion, Color, Fairlight, Deliver) and the first time you open it, it feels like sitting in a plane cockpit. Budget two or three hours of watching tutorials before you cut anything real in it. I’d recommend the free official Blackmagic training videos on YouTube over any paid course, because they’re made by the people who built the software.
What free software cannot do
This is where I’ll be blunt because most articles on this topic pretend free tools do everything, and they don’t. Free software struggles with three specific things:
- Team collaboration. If two editors need to work on the same project simultaneously with shared bins and version control, iMovie and Resolve’s free tier make that clumsy. Premiere Pro’s Productions feature and Frame.io integration were built for exactly this.
- Advanced motion graphics. If your brand needs animated lower thirds, kinetic typography, or anything built in After Effects and dropped straight into a timeline, free tools force you into workarounds.
- Plugin ecosystems. Paid software has decades of third party plugins for niche needs, like specific noise removal tools or LUT packs matched to specific camera sensors. Free tools have a fraction of that support.
If any of those three apply to your actual workload every week, not occasionally, then paying for software is the right call and you should stop feeling guilty about it. If they apply once a quarter, rent a month of Premiere Pro for £22.99, do the job, cancel it. Adobe lets you do this and nobody at Adobe will stop you. For a proper comparison of what each Adobe product offers versus what you’d get free, this breakdown of Adobe video editing software for small business is worth ten minutes before you commit to any subscription.
The tools I’d recommend, ranked by use case
Not every free tool suits every job. Here’s how I’d split them:
- iMovie for quick social cuts, webinar highlight reels, simple talking head videos with basic titles. Free, preinstalled, fastest to learn.
- DaVinci Resolve (free) for anything with multiple cameras, multiple mics, or where colour consistency across a batch of videos matters to your brand.
- CapCut for Mac for short form vertical content, Reels and TikTok specifically, because its auto captioning and trending audio library are built for that format in a way iMovie isn’t. It’s free, exports without a watermark, and it’s owned by ByteDance so factor that into any data sensitivity decisions for client work.
- QuickTime Player for the simplest job of all, trimming a screen recording down before you even open an editor. Command-T opens a trim tool most people never discover.
If most of your output is short social clips rather than long form video, it’s worth reading through how to streamline social media editing for your brand, because the batching approach there will save you more time than any single piece of software will.
A workflow that saves you hours, not just money
The habit that changed my output more than any tool switch was recording rougher and editing less. I used to film ten takes of every intro because I assumed I’d fix pacing in the edit. Now I script the first fifteen seconds word for word, record it three times maximum, and pick the best take rather than trying to stitch two takes together. That single change probably saved me more editing time over the past year than switching from Premiere to iMovie did.
If you’re recording tutorial content or screen based demos rather than talking head footage, the software you record with matters as much as the software you edit with. A clean recording with no background noise and consistent screen resolution needs almost no editing afterwards. It’s worth reading how to choose screen recording software for tutorials before you even open an editor, because fixing a bad recording after the fact costs far more time than getting the recording right first.
And once your video is cut and exported, don’t skip the thumbnail. A flat auto-generated thumbnail on YouTube can cost you half your click through rate compared to a custom one, and it takes about ten minutes to fix using free tools like Canva or even Preview on Mac. The exact steps are laid out in this walkthrough on adding a custom thumbnail to a YouTube video.
How to decide if you should ever pay
Ask yourself three questions before opening your wallet:
- Am I hitting a wall with a specific feature at least once a week, not once a year?
- Is a client or employer specifically requiring a Premiere or Final Cut project file, not just a finished video?
- Would the time I’d save with paid software’s better organisation tools be worth more than what the subscription costs me monthly?
If you answered no to all three, stay free. If you answered yes to even one, read through how to pick video editing software for professional results before you buy anything, because the “professional” tier of software has three or four different products underneath it and picking the wrong one wastes both money and a fresh learning curve you didn’t need.
Frequently asked questions
Is iMovie good enough for a business YouTube channel?
Yes, for most business channels. iMovie exports clean 1080p and 4K, handles titles, transitions, and basic colour correction fine, and the only time it falls short is multi-camera setups or heavy colour grading, where DaVinci Resolve’s free version is the better next step.
Does DaVinci Resolve really have no catch on the free version?
There’s no watermark and no time limit, but the free version lacks noise reduction, some advanced colour tools, and facial recognition for organising clips, all of which sit in the paid Resolve Studio version at a one-off £245, not a subscription.
Can I edit video on an old Intel Mac without it crashing constantly?
iMovie runs fine on Intel Macs from as far back as 2015 as long as you have at least 8GB of RAM, though 4K footage will export more slowly than on an Apple Silicon chip. DaVinci Resolve is heavier and struggles on anything older than a 2017 Intel Mac with a dedicated graphics card.
What’s the actual cost difference between free and paid tools over a year?
Adobe Premiere Pro runs about £22.99 a month, so roughly £276 a year, while iMovie and DaVinci Resolve’s free tier cost nothing, meaning most small businesses cutting social clips and webinar recaps save that full £276 with no drop in output quality for the average non-agency use case.
Related reading: How to Edit Videos on a Budget With the Right Computer Software and How Do You Edit Videos Professionally Using Premiere Style Software (A Workflow From 200+ Real Edits).
If you want the full breakdown, here is everything I know about productivity.
