Microsoft Clipchamp

Both Windows 10 and Windows 11 come with capable video editing software, including Clipchamp. This app has all the basic and some more fun video editing tools and includes templates for social media posts. That said, its slick design and ease of use are hampered by limitations and upsells to get you to the paid subscription version. Although neither is free, you get more powerful tools from Corel VideoStudio and CyberLink PowerDirector, our Editors' Choice winners.

What Is Clipchamp?

Clipchamp is a web-based Windows store app that's also available as a progressive web app (PWA) on any platform. It installed in just a few seconds on my test PC. Similar to Canva, Clipchamp focuses on the needs of marketers who want to make quick hits on social media using meme-like, template-based designs.

Being web-based doesn’t mean it’s less responsive than a native app. It uses powerful graphics hardware acceleration to perform mostly like a desktop application. And because it's web-based, it's easy to share anything you make with it, and it's easy to access the app from anywhere. 

How Much Does Clipchamp Cost?

Clipchamp’s editing features are free with limitations. A paid subscription gets you higher-resolution output formats, unlimited online storage, and more stock content. Subscription options have been streamlined, with only one paid level, Essentials, at $11.99 per month or $119.99 per year. You also get some of the Essentials features with a Microsoft 365 subscription.

For comparison, we can consider the illustration and video editing app Canva. A free plan with Canva lacks some editing features you get with the paid plans, but it includes thousands of templates, hundreds of stock photos, and 5GB of online storage in two folders. Canva's $12.99-per-month Pro plan gets you stock photos and video, and 100GB storage in unlimited folders. An Enterprise account costs $30 per month and adds team features, more branding tools, and unlimited storage. Another online video editor with a marketing bent is Promo, which starts at $25 per month.

Other installable video editing software can be had for a one-time purchase price. CyberLink PowerDirector goes for $139.99 (also available as a $19.99-per-month subscription); Adobe Premiere Elements and Corel VideoStudio both cost $99.99 outright; and Movavi Video Editor Plus is just $74.95.

If you don't want to pay anything for video editing software, the video editing features in Microsoft Photos are free, as is iMovie on macOS.

Get Started With Clipchamp

Though it’s included with Windows 11, Clipchamp also works in Windows 10. You can get it in the Microsoft Store, or the Windows app store. Clipchamp is also available on the web, in mobile app stores, and in the macOS App Store.

To use Clipchamp, you need to create a login for a Microsoft account; the app still says you can use a Facebook, Google, or Dropbox account, but those options are going away, as explained in this help page.

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Once you’re logged in, you see an attractive welcome screen with templates to get you started creating your video project. One qualm is that if your OS is set to Dark Mode, Clipchamp doesn't look like it supports Dark Mode until you start editing a video. Template options include slideshows, ads, social media posts, and more. Down the left side are choices for other views, including Brand Kit (for more businesslike uses of the app), Template, and Folders.

Creating a Movie Using Clipchamp

You now have two choices for starting your Clipchamp video project. You can click Create a new video to start a project from scratch, or you can use the new Create video with AI automated process (more on that in a moment). If you go the first route, you see the template options along the left. You also have tools for adding media, music, stock images, text, graphics, and transitions.

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You can add clips from not only local folders but also an attached or built-in webcam, and even an online media storage like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Photos, OneDrive, and recorded Zoom meetings. When using your PC’s webcam, you can choose to show a picture-in-picture with the camera view overlaid inside your screen.

The app has a standard three-panel layout found in most video apps for source media, a preview window, and a timeline along the bottom. The relative sizes of any of these panels are adjustable. Since our last review update, the left rail menu has changed. The Content Library button replaces the program's earlier stock video, Music & SFX, and Graphics buttons, streamlining the interface even more.

The interface is touch-friendly, as I found on my test Surface Pro 8. Video shortcuts like spacebar to play and pause, S to split a clip, and the arrow keys to scrub back and forth are at your service, but you don’t get pro editing shortcuts like J, K, L for reverse, pause and play, and I and O for in and out. A question mark icon not only has a search tool for help topics but also lets you chat with support reps. You can easily move back and forth in the timeline with the mouse wheel while holding the Shift key down or zoom it in and out with Ctrl.

An added benefit of Clipchamp being a web app is that a project you create on your PC will show up if you sign in to the app on another platform or in a web browser, though it doesn’t store media in the cloud unless you spring for a subscription. I expect this could change if you use OneDrive. One downside to Clipchamp being a web app is that web navigation sometimes works against you. For example, on a touchpad, swiping two fingers takes you back in web history, which means out of your Clipchamp project. 

Basic Video Editing

It’s a snap to drag a clip from the media panel on the left or click its plus sign to send it to the timeline. It’s rather iMovie-like in that you can drag above the top track to create a new one. I added ten tracks without the program breaking a sweat. Other video editors like PowerDirector boast about supporting up to 100 tracks, though most users will never need more than a dozen. 

When I added several clips to a timeline, the program decided that my movie should use a vertical format. That seems to have been based on the first clip being shot vertically on my smartphone, even though most of the images were in wide format. It's simple, however, to click on the format thumbnail at the top right of the viewer and to choose another.

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Trimming track ends is a simple matter of grabbing and dragging the mouse cursor on the side of a clip you want to trim. To split a clip, use the scissors icon. Grab a clip in the middle and you can drag it side to side or even up or down to a different track. If your editing creates a gap, a simple garbage can icon appears, letting you delete it. But there's no option to group content on other tracks so that they move together when you move a timeline element like you get in most video software.

Advanced Effects

The Transform tool makes it easy to resize, flip, rotate, or adjust the opacity of a clip. You add transitions by dragging one of the 32 good-looking options between two clips. It handles any required overlapping automatically. Just don’t expect the hundreds of creative transitions, such as 3D and seamless transitions, you find in tools like PowerDirector or VideoStudio.

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Over 40 filters deliver a range of looks, from Muted and Gloomy to Euphoric and Disco. You can hover over them to see them applied to the current clip in your preview window. Clipchamp's Effects are in a separate section with their own button on the right-side toolbar. Effects are stronger than filters, adding motion and effects like blur, zoom, and cartoon. You can now apply more than one effect to the same clip, which can be very fun to play with, especially since they appear instantly. Unfortunately, as with transitions, you can't search to narrow down the effect you're looking for.

Among these effects is a green screen (aka chroma keying) tool that's instant and accurate. You can even find sample green screen clips in Clipchamp's Content Library section.

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Picture-in-Picture doesn’t even feel like an advanced effect in the app, since a simple button to the right of the preview window lets you snap a clip to a corner. You can then resize it to taste, though you can’t rotate it. 

You find graphics overlays including bars, Giphys, and Stickers in the Content Library tab. If you subscribe to Clipchamp, this selection is a lot more extensive than for free users. With a lot of categories and subcategories, a search box at the top helps you find what you need. You can also search here for the other stock media types—video, photo, and music. Competitors like Corel VideoStudio and CyberLink PowerDirector have extensive libraries with editing and animation options. They also give you a wealth of effects and tools that you don’t see in Clipchamp, like motion tracking and keyframe editing. Those apps also greatly exceed Clipchamp in color grading, though Clipchamp does have adjustments for exposure, contrast, color temperature, and saturation. 

Another type of special effect is video speedup and slowdown, which Clipchamp does have. Its speedometer icon shows Slow, Normal, and Fast. You can set the speed from 0.1x to 16x, though there are no ramp-up or freeze frame options.

AI-Powered Automatic Movies

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Clipchamp's AI-powered automatic movie creation tool is now out of beta. You start an automatic movie by choosing Create a Video With AI. You give the project a title and add media files; you can add a bunch at a time. Then click Get Started. Next, you choose a Style or have the program choose one for you. While a Reviewing Media animation plays, you tell the program which styles you prefer by tapping a thumb up or thumbs down button.

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After that, you have to decide between vertical or horizontal formats and choose a time length, which for my test clips could be less than 30 seconds, about one minute, or full length. I chose horizontal at about a minute.

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You also have to choose a music style. I only got six choices, but you can choose from more soundtracks later in the editing process.

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At this point, you either continue to exporting or you can tap the Create a new version link. Changing the video's look with this option was quick, but I wish it were more prominent, like the big Remix button found in the previous Windows video editor, since my first results were seldom great. Finally, you press Export or Edit in Timeline. I tried the first option. My one-minuted movie took about 40 seconds to export. The program shows its progress and a preview. A vertical bar with a pattern on the side appeared in much of the result, which I wasn't thrilled with. A Keep Editing arrow button lets you perfect the project in the standard timeline editor, but after this point, you can't use the automatic remixing anymore.

Happily, I could unhide portions of a clip that the auto-edit feature had trimmed. It's better than a lot of the similar auto-movie features in other video editing programs, but it still didn't produce a usable end product in my testing. It doesn't create titles as other similar tools do, either.

Using Clipchamp's Templates

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Templates ease the video creation process for nonprofessionals. They are a strength for Clipchamp. YouTube options are especially strong. You don’t have to use a template for an entire video. You can just choose an outro template that urges your viewers to subscribe to your channel, for example.

You get both horizontal and vertical templates for TikTok and the like. You can search for a topic, and they range from the very personal (Grandparents' Day) to the very corporate (Marketing Intro). Indeed, Clipchamp has templates for ads, sales, and marketing—all useful for small businesses.

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Templates include stock footage and background music that you can use or replace with your own content. Many of the templates are for very short things like text overlays, social handles, TikTok vertical shorts, and split-screen layouts. Beware, however, that stock content can be withdrawn by its contributor, an issue I ran into when trying to open an older project.

Though you can see what kind of content is required for each replacement with your own content, I prefer Apple iMovie’s Storyboards (and previous Trailers) feature, which explicitly tells you what kind of clip to insert, like wide shot, group shot, and close-up.

Titles Tell the Story

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Clipchamp has dozens of text overlay styles, many with animation, grouped into sets for Title, Caption, Two-Line, Special, and Intro/Outro. The Special group includes quotes, credits, memes, and ratings. Most included styles resemble what you see in advertisements, though you do get a few fun ones, like Glitch, Groovy, and Smoke. I like that the font isn’t baked into these templates. You can select from more than 60 typefaces. You also have complete control over font color. Some of the styles let you move around and resize to taste, while some of the more stylized ones only let you resize and move to the corners or center. One slight knock is that the titles aren't WYSIWYG; that is, you don't type right over the video but rather in a sidebar.

Auto-Captions

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A nifty Auto-Captions tool is something you find in high-end applications like Final Cut Pro. In Clipchamp, auto-captioning is a one-button affair (well, a second button has you choose the language). You also get an option to filter profanity. The results are impressive if not perfect, and you can edit them to taste. You can also jump to the spot on your timeline where the caption words are being spoken, something Adobe made big noise about when it added a similar feature to Premiere Pro.

Working With Sound

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More than 180 free-to-use tracks are at your service for background music. As with other clip types, you simply drag a soundtrack onto your timeline. Clipchamp on Windows 11 lets you separate a clip's audio and save it as a separate M4A file (it didn’t work in the Windows 10 version of Clipchamp). You can then adjust the volume of both that and any soundtrack with a simple slider. 

The software lets you record voiceover audio and can automatically generate captions from it, as mentioned. You get to the voiceover options from the Record & create button along the left, which shows big, clear action tiles. As these show, you can record alongside your webcam image or just record an audio track.

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An interesting and potentially very helpful option is Speaker Coach, which gives you pointers to improve your narration. It only worked for me when I recorded with the camera on as well as audio, even though I'd turned it on for audio-only recording. I didn't see real-time suggestions, but got this summary after recording:

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If you're microphone-shy, Clipchamp's new AI text-to-speech tool has more than 400 natural voice styles in 170 languages. You can even choose a mood, pitch, accent, and gender for the AI voice.

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I like that you can simply tap the speaker icon within a clip to mute its audio, but there’s no sound editing like removing background noise, hum, or hiss—features you find in most enthusiast-level video editing software these days. You do, however, get some sound effects, such as fireworks, children shrieking, and a gong. The sound effects that you get for free are an odd collection, with many basics like footsteps and car crashes behind the paywall.

Exporting and Sharing Clipchamp Videos

One of the early digs against Clipchamp was that it didn’t let you export HD video without paying a subscription, but now free accounts can export to 1080p. That’s probably good enough for social and personal sharing since you don’t want to be transferring gigabytes of data for those purposes. 4K output, however, requires a subscription. You can also save your project as a GIF if it’s under 15 seconds.

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Buttons on the export screen let you share your movie as a video link from Clipchamp itself, as well as output your file to Google Drive, YouTube, TikTok, OneDrive, Dropbox, and LinkedIn. It works well as far as it goes, but you have no control over settings like the file type or bitrate. The option to save your exported file doesn't appear until after rendering is complete.

I couldn't do an exact head-to-head output speed comparison with other software since Clipchamp doesn't allow you to import 8K video, but I substituted another clip of similar file size. In my last testing, exporting took much longer than it did with competing video editing apps, at over 7 minutes; several other programs take less than 2 minutes for the test. This time, with a paid subscription, Clipchamp took a more reasonable 2 minutes and 39 seconds to render the project. I don’t expect Clipchamp users to be producing feature-length titles, however. It’s more for 30-second promotions or TikTok videos. 

Video Editing Champ?

Clipchamp is intended as a simple, mostly template-driven tool, and its text-to-speech captioning and voiceover tools impress. But don’t expect features like motion tracking, advanced transitions, keyframe effect editing, audio filters, output file settings, or quick rendering. Free users get a good selection of video editing tools but may become frustrated when features they want are behind the paywall. For a fuller feature set in an easy-to-use interface, look to one of our Editors’ Choice enthusiast-level video editing programs, Corel VideoStudio or PowerDirector.