Video · guides

Video editing software, recording and AI video

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated · 5 min read

This is the entrance to the video tower. Video editing software, screen recorders, converters, compressors, subtitles, and the newest wing of all — tools that produce video from a description.

One thing this tower says repeatedly, because it keeps being true of the tools it covers: a free option exists for most of these jobs, and on several of them it is the one the floor ends up recommending. Where that is the case the floor says so and says why; where a paid tool earns its price, it says that too. Neither is asserted as a rule about the industry.

The other recurring theme is that a great many video problems are not editing problems at all. They are export problems: a file too large to send, a format a platform refuses, audio out of sync, subtitles that will not burn in. Those floors are short and exact, and they are the ones somebody with a deadline is usually looking for.

The screen recording wing is separate for a reason. Recording a call, a lesson or a bug report is a different job from filming, with different software and — importantly — different rules about consent, which the floors state rather than skip.

Video generated from a description is the newest corner of this subject and moves faster than anything else on this island. Nothing here covers it yet: what these tools can do changes every few months, and any page that arrives will carry the date prominently and describe capability rather than making promises about it.

Three levels, and you are on the first. This atrium lists the floors; a floor covers one job completely and holds the shorter guides underneath it. Nothing here is more than three clicks from the front door.

One choice shapes how this whole building is arranged, and it is worth having at the door. The trouble in video often arrives after the edit: the file turns out to be four gigabytes, the platform rejects the format, the subtitles vanish on somebody else’s player, the audio drifts a second out by the end. Those problems have exact answers that take minutes once you know them and hours when you do not. That is why a whole wing here is devoted to them, sitting at the same level as the editing wing rather than tucked underneath it as an afterthought.

Where to start

Five ways in. The middle three are the ones people are usually surprised to need.

“The file is too big to send.”
That is export problems
“This format will not play anywhere.”
Also export problems
“I need to record my screen.”
Go to recording
“I need subtitles or a transcript.”
That is a floor in export problems
“Am I allowed to record this call?”
The consent floor is in recording

Export problems

The floors that solve the actual complaint. Short, precise, and free of products wherever the job can be done with a single free tool.

MOV to MP4Apple documents that QuickTime will not do this. Windows ships something that will, at a fixed frame rate.Open this guide → Compressing videoUsing a video compressor to get under a limit while keeping it watchable, and what to sacrifice.Open this guide → MP4 to MP3Getting the audio out of a recording without re-encoding it, and how to tell whether yours did.Open this guide → Compressing a video on iPhoneThere is no compress button, and for most reasons you do not need one. What Apple documents, in order.Open this guide → MP4 and convertingAn mp4 converter changes a box, or its contents. Knowing which explains four seconds against four hours.Open this guide → SRT filesFour lines repeated, in plain text — plus the two constraints that get a file rejected.Open this guide → Uploading to YouTubeThe settings YouTube publishes — including the one rule about frame rate that runs against habit.Open this guide →

Recording

Capturing rather than filming: screens, calls, lessons and demonstrations. One floor here is about permission rather than software, and it is not optional reading.

Screen recording on iPhoneThe control is not there until you add it, and the microphone hides behind a long press.Open this guide → Screen recording on WindowsTwo recorders are built in, they do different things, and neither is advertised.Open this guide → OBSIt opens with a blank scene and records nothing until you add a source — and which one depends on your system.Open this guide →

Not covered here. It will not tell you to buy an editor before it has told you what the free ones do. In this category that would be actively misleading, because the free options are genuinely excellent and are used professionally.

It will not send video files to online converters when a free offline tool does the same job better. Uploading an hour of footage to a website to change its container is slower, worse and entirely unnecessary.

It will not make predictions about AI video. Any page here will describe what was true on the date it was written and say so at the top; anything else in a field moving this fast is entertainment rather than information.

And it will not carry affiliate links, including for the editing subscriptions, which pay recurring commissions and are the reason most comparison pages in this field look the way they do. What holds instead is simple: the free tools are named before the paid ones wherever they are genuinely as good, and no floor here carries an affiliate link.

Written by Alberto Gulotta

Founder and editor of AI Tools Primer, writing from Palermo, Italy. Thirty-five years of taking computers apart, starting with a Commodore 64 — the long version is on the about page.

Something wrong on this page? Write to aitoolsprimer@gmail.com and it gets fixed.

Written on 20 August 2026 · last checked 9 September 2026.

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