The short version: you do not need Adobe Premiere Pro or a £2,000 laptop to edit good video, you need a laptop with 16GB of RAM, a free or cheap piece of software that matches your skill level, and a workflow that stops your machine from choking on 4K footage. I have edited client videos on a five-year-old laptop with integrated graphics and made it work, and I will show you exactly how.
The bit nobody tells you before you spend money
Here is the uncomfortable truth: most people who ask “what software should I buy” have a hardware problem, not a software problem. I have watched clients pay £22.99 a month for Adobe Premiere Pro and then message me confused because it crashes every time they scrub through a timeline. The software is not the issue. Their laptop has 8GB of RAM and an integrated Intel graphics chip trying to decode 4K footage shot on an iPhone 15. No editing software on earth fixes that.
So before we talk about which app to buy, we talk about what your computer can do. That order matters more than any review site will tell you, because review sites make money from software affiliate links, not from telling you to check your RAM first.
What your computer needs before you buy any software
You do not need a £3,000 rig. You need these four things, and they cost far less than people assume:
- 16GB of RAM minimum. 8GB will run basic editors but will stutter on anything past two video tracks. A RAM upgrade on an older laptop often costs £40 to £80 if it is upgradeable.
- A dedicated graphics card if you can get one. Even an entry-level Nvidia GTX 1650 or an AMD equivalent will cut render times in half compared with integrated graphics. Plenty of £500 to £700 laptops now ship with one.
- An SSD, not a spinning hard drive. Video files are large and constant, and an SSD reads and writes far faster. If your current machine has a mechanical drive, a 1TB SSD swap costs around £50 to £70 and is one of the best value upgrades in computing.
- At least 100GB of free storage per active project. Raw 4K footage eats space fast. A ten-minute video shot in 4K at 60fps can easily hit 15 to 20GB before you even start editing.
If your machine ticks those boxes, almost any software on this list will run. If it does not, spend your first £70 to £100 on upgrades, not on a software subscription that will just crash anyway.
My own budget setup and the mistake I made with it
A few years ago I was producing a run of short client videos for a webinar series on a laptop I had owned for five years, a Dell with 16GB of RAM and integrated graphics, nothing special. I shot everything in 4K because I assumed higher resolution meant a better final product. It did not. DaVinci Resolve, which I was using for free, ground to a halt every time I tried to scrub the timeline. A twelve minute video that should have taken an evening to cut took me three days, mostly spent waiting for the playhead to catch up.
The fix was not new software. I switched to editing with 1080p proxy files, which is a lower resolution stand-in that the software uses while you edit, then swaps back to full resolution only when you export. Once I did that, the same twelve minute video rendered in under five minutes on export and the editing itself became smooth again. That one change, proxy editing on a free tool, saved me more time than any paid upgrade would have.
The actual software, ranked by what it costs
Here is what I recommend at each budget level, based on what I and clients have used for real projects, not just what looks good on a comparison chart.
Free, and capable
- DaVinci Resolve (free version). This is the one most people underrate. It is used on real Hollywood productions in its paid form, and the free version has colour grading, audio mixing, and multi-track editing that rivals paid tools. The learning curve is steeper than CapCut, expect two or three evenings to get comfortable with the interface.
- CapCut (desktop, free tier). Built for speed rather than depth. If you are making short social clips, reels, or quick promo cuts, this gets you from raw footage to finished video in under twenty minutes for a sixty second clip. It lacks the fine control of Resolve but you will not fight it.
- Clipchamp. Comes free with a Microsoft account and is fine for basic trims, captions, and simple transitions if you are not doing anything technical.
Under £15 a month
- Filmora, around £5.99 a month billed annually or a one-off perpetual licence for roughly £59.99. Good middle ground between CapCut’s simplicity and Resolve’s depth, with a template library that speeds up marketing videos specifically.
- PowerDirector, similar pricing, strong for anyone who wants motion tracking and green screen without a huge learning investment.
£20 plus a month, only if you need it
- Adobe Premiere Pro, £22.99 a month as a standalone subscription or bundled into Creative Cloud for around £54.99 a month if you also need Photoshop and After Effects. This is industry standard for a reason, integration with other Adobe tools and near-universal support from freelance editors if you ever outsource. But paying for it on a machine that cannot run it smoothly is money down the drain.
If you want a longer breakdown of how these compare feature by feature, I wrote a full guide on how to pick video editing software for professional results that goes deeper into the professional end of this decision.
The step-by-step budget workflow that renders
This is the exact process I now use, and it works on modest hardware.
- Shoot at 1080p unless you specifically need 4K for cropping or reframing later. Most social platforms compress your video down anyway, so the extra resolution often buys you nothing but slower editing.
- Organise footage into folders by date and project before you open the software. Five minutes of file organisation saves an hour of scrolling through a cluttered media bin later.
- Generate proxy files if your software supports it (DaVinci Resolve and Premiere both do). Edit on the lower resolution proxies, not the raw files.
- Cut the rough structure first, on one video track, before adding music, captions, or colour. Layering everything at once is what causes most stuttering and crashes on weaker machines.
- Add captions and titles near the end, not throughout. Text layers are surprisingly heavy on processing power in most editors.
- Export at the platform’s recommended bitrate, not the maximum your software offers. For YouTube, that is roughly 16 Mbps for 1080p at 30fps. Going higher just makes a bigger file with no visible quality gain on most screens.
Follow that order and you will get through a project in a fraction of the time, on hardware that would otherwise choke halfway through.
Where people waste budget without realising it
I see the same three mistakes repeatedly with clients trying to keep costs down.
First, buying a subscription before checking if the free tier does the job. DaVinci Resolve’s free version has no watermark, no time limit, and covers ninety percent of what small business marketing videos need. Most people upgrade to the paid version for features like Neural Engine tracking or advanced noise reduction that they never use.
Second, ignoring audio quality while obsessing over the visual editor. A £30 lapel microphone does more for perceived production value than any software feature. Viewers forgive shaky footage far more readily than they forgive bad audio, and no editing software fixes a muffled recording after the fact, not anyway.
Third, editing on templates without adjusting them to fit the brand. If you are using something like PosterMyWall for quick social graphics and video snippets, which I covered in a separate piece on the easiest way to create graphics and videos for your business, the templates are a starting point, not a finished product. Swap the fonts and colours to match your own branding or the video will look like every other small business using the same template.
What this looks like for marketing videos specifically
If your main goal is business marketing rather than personal content, the calculation shifts slightly. You are optimising for consistency and speed more than polish, because you will be making dozens of these, not one perfect film. I covered this in more detail in a piece on creating great marketing videos without breaking the bank, and a separate look at using WeVideo for the same purpose in creating marketing videos on a browser-based budget tool. Both are worth reading if your priority is turning out a lot of content quickly rather than a single hero video.
For that kind of output, browser-based editors like WeVideo or CapCut’s web version make sense, because they take the hardware pressure off your own machine entirely and render in the cloud. You trade some fine control for speed and consistency, which for a weekly content calendar is usually the right trade.
A quick note on security, since you are editing on the same machine you run your business from
One thing that gets overlooked when people are focused on saving money on software is what else is running on that laptop. If you are downloading free trial editors from unofficial sites to avoid the £22.99 a month fee, you are opening yourself up to malware bundled into cracked installers, which is a common way small business accounts get compromised. I wrote about locking down business accounts in a guide on keeping your Facebook Messenger account secure, and the same caution applies to any software you download for free from a source that is not the official website. The £60 you save is not worth the account recovery headache.
Building this into how you work
Editing on a budget is not just about the tool, it is about the habit around it. Batch your filming so you are not opening the editor for a single thirty second clip five times a week. Set a render queue running overnight rather than sitting and watching a progress bar during your working hours. I talk about habits like this more broadly in 25 productivity habits for entrepreneurs, and video editing benefits from the same discipline as any other repetitive business task. The software matters less than the routine you build around it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the cheapest software that still produces professional-looking videos?
DaVinci Resolve’s free version is the cheapest option that still delivers professional results, including colour grading and multi-track editing used on real film productions, and it costs nothing.
Do I need a new computer to edit video on a budget?
Not necessarily. You need at least 16GB of RAM, ideally a dedicated graphics card, and an SSD, and a five-year-old laptop upgraded with more RAM or an SSD swap for £50 to £150 often outperforms a brand new budget laptop with weaker specs.
Why does my editing software keep crashing even though it is a well-known program?
It is almost always a hardware issue, most commonly not enough RAM or trying to edit raw 4K footage directly instead of using lower resolution proxy files, which most editors including DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro support.
Is a paid subscription like Adobe Premiere Pro worth it for a small business?
Only if you need its specific integration with other Adobe tools or are collaborating with freelance editors who expect Premiere project files, otherwise free tools like DaVinci Resolve or CapCut cover most small business marketing video needs at no ongoing cost.
Related reading: How to Choose the Best Facebook Ad Creator Software (Without Wasting a Month’s Budget on the Wrong One) and How to Use ChatGPT to Create Trending Photo Edits for Instagram.
