A free video editor for Windows with no watermark
Video by Zaweba is a free multi-track editor for Windows that never stamps a watermark on your film and needs no account to export it.
There's no watermark on anything you export from Video by Zaweba, a free video editor for Windows. It's free software under the EULA, it works offline and it never asks you to sign in, so the MP4 you save is simply your film with nothing added to the corner. There's no paid tier waiting to remove a logo, because there's no logo to remove.
Plenty of editors call themselves free and then reveal a badge on export, or ask for an account before they let the file go. This article covers what you get instead and how to go from a folder of clips to a clean file you can upload anywhere.
What free means here
The whole editor is there from the first launch. You get the multi-track timeline with trim, split, ripple delete, linking, freeze frames and markers, plus titles, transitions, colour tools, masks, keyframes, a sound mixer and captions worked out from speech on your own PC. Nothing is greyed out and nothing is held back for a subscription.
Working offline matters more than it first sounds. Your footage is read from your own drive and the originals are never changed, so family films, client work and school projects stay on your computer. Nothing is uploaded to be processed somewhere else.
From clips to a clean file
Import your clips, music and pictures into the media bin. Video by Zaweba opens the common formats, including MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, AVI, WMV, MTS, MPG and 3GP for video and PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP and TIFF for stills. While you work it makes a small proxy of each clip in the background, so the preview stays smooth on a laptop, but the export always renders from the originals.
Drag the clips onto the timeline. Video tracks run from V1 upward and sound tracks sit underneath. Press S to split at the playhead, use Shift+Delete to ripple delete a gap, and lean on Undo (Ctrl+Z) whenever you change your mind, since every edit is a snapshot and Undo covers all of them.
When the cut feels right, press Ctrl+E to open export. Presets cover 1080p, 4K, vertical 9:16 and square 1:1, so a YouTube upload, a phone story and a square social post each have a sensible starting point. The file comes out as an ordinary MP4 in H.264 or H.265.
Why the export is quick
Video by Zaweba uses your graphics card's video encoder when it has one: NVENC, Quick Sync, AMF or Media Foundation, depending on the hardware. It runs a short test encode first and only uses the hardware route if that works, falling back to OpenH264 in software otherwise. You don't have to choose, and the result is the same clean file either way.
If you need something other than MP4, there are more routes. WebM, AV1, an animated GIF, Windows Media and sound on its own as MP3, WAV or FLAC are all there, as are professional formats such as ProRes and DNxHR for handing a film on to someone else.
A few habits that help
Pick the preset that matches where the video is going rather than always choosing 4K; a 1080p file uploads faster and looks the same on most phones. Keep the project file alongside your footage, because the project is what you'll reopen if you want a second version later. Autosave runs every minute in the background too, so a crash doesn't cost you the afternoon.
That's really the whole story. You edit, you export, and the file is yours without a mark on it.
