Nero Video

Nero Video costs less than most other video editing software, yet it includes support for 4K effects and templates, along with the ability to export HEVC H.265 and import even 8K content. Furthermore, Nero's software can do some impressive tricks with your digital video content. That said, when you choose Nero over a more expensive app, you give up advanced capabilities, interface polish, and speed. Nero's project rendering speed is slower than that of the competition, and don't expect support for techniques such as multicam, AI art effects, or formats like 360-degree VR. For those features, look to our Editors' Choice winners among video editing programs, CyberLink PowerDirector for enthusiasts and Adobe Premiere Pro for professionals.

How Much Does Nero Video Cost?

Listing for $49.95 and almost always discounted, Nero Video is priced to sell. The program comes as part of the Nero Platinum suite, which includes separate apps for screen recording, image upscaling, motion tracking, home media management, audio mixing, and disc authoring. By comparison, Adobe Premiere Elements costs $99, while CyberLink PowerDirector and Pinnacle Studio both list for $129.99. A free 15-day trial of Nero Video for the price of an email address lets you try out the software—no payment details required.

The Nero Video software requires Windows 11, 10, 8, or 7 (32-bit and 64-bit are both supported), but its latest AI features require Windows 10 or 11. To get going, you first download a small stub program that downloads and installs the actual program, which takes up only about 450MB on your disk—less than most competitors. But note that several ancillary apps and content are installed at the same time, so the total is closer to 1GB. Installing optional acceleration utilities brings the disk footprint up to over 3GB.

A Dated Interface

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When you first run the video editor, a registration dialog pops up, and then you get to the redesigned Start launcher for the whole Nero suite, even if you only want to install Video. It looks more like the Adobe Creative Cloud account management app than it used to, letting you install, run, and update all the suite apps. But when you launch the actual video editor, it looks different from most other video editors you may have used.

It feels dated, using something like a Windows Vista design, though it does have rounded corners à la Windows 11. A simple improvement would be a dark mode, which nearly all other video editors have. Still, the way to get going is clear enough. You can start capturing media from a device, open the editor or an existing project, or start a disc-burning project.

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Dragging and dropping files onto the program window work just fine. One outdated choice is Open Windows Live Movie Maker Project because that product has been replaced by Windows' Photos app and Clipchamp. Another option is Edit Vertical Video, which smartphone cinematographers will appreciate.

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Nero Video's Live Guide is a separate panel with links to the manual, FAQs, and video tutorials. It's not searchable, but the similar KnowHow panel is. KnowHow also has FAQs, manuals, tutorials, a glossary, and links to user forums. With all that duplication, I don't know why anyone would need both tools. You can turn Live Guide on with a toggle at the top of the interface, and it gives you feedback options.

When I tried importing 8K content from a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, the app prompted me to activate support for the format. Ditto for the efficient H.265 HEVC format. (Neither format is available in the free trial.) After activation, the program let me add 8K footage to a project, but it took a while to load and the playback performance was jittery. Enabling graphics hardware-accelerated decoding smoothed it out completely. The editor also boasts 4K effects and templates. I also noticed that one HEVC clip from an iPhone showed up tinted green in the program, though it previewed with the correct colors in Windows Media Player.

Another problem occurred when displaying Dolby HDR video with hardware acceleration enabled on one of my test PCs, giving the image a green tint. It turned out that my Nvidia card was causing the problem. Turning off hardware-accelerated decoding solved the issue. Of course, doing so will also cause you to lose some interface performance.

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The default timeline view—Express Editing—shows clip thumbnails in a storyboard format. Tapping the big vertical tab on the right labeled Advanced Editing switches you to the more standard timeline track view. You can't switch back to Express if you make edits in Advanced. When you drag a clip onto the timeline, it nicely snaps next to the last clip. The timeline is easy to expand and contract with the mouse wheel.

One limitation is that right-clicking on a clip doesn't have an option to see its file information. If you double-click, a trimming window opens, which has a tab with clip details like video format, resolution, and frame rate. Fitting smaller (for example, 720p) to a larger project such as 1080p isn't a simple matter of right-clicking on the clip and choosing Fit to Canvas as it is in Premiere Pro. Rather, you have to go into the effects and choose Adjust, then Crop, and then Scale, and then choose the Fit to Screen dropdown.

There are plenty of undo and redo levels, with big buttons for those purposes along the bottom of the program window.

You can easily start full-screen playback with a button, or even view it on a separate monitor, thanks to the Extended Screen button. I did it successfully on an external HDTV. Double-clicking a clip in the timeline opens a trimmer window, which lets you precisely set start and end points down to the single frame. You can set markers, but to mark in and out cuts, you need to open the Trimmer window. Cutter, slip, and roll tools accommodate more advanced editing styles.

Express Editing, accessed via a vertical tab on the left, is of course much simpler. If even that is too much effort, Five 1-Click themes comp preloaded into the app, but you can download dozens more through the Start app. Themes automatically add intros, titles, transitions, and background music based on activities and styles, such as sports, kids, and retro. It's actually less labor-intensive than Adobe Rush, the media software giant's attempt at accelerated video editing and sharing.

Templates, Both Custom and Community-Shared

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Nero states that, based on user feedback, it will be constantly offering new templates in its online Nero Creative Center, which you can access and preview from the Nero Creative website. Here you can choose among SD, HD, and 4K, and even 8K templates. Once you download the .NVT file, your timeline is filled with placeholders into which you then drop your only video clips or photos. The templates include appropriate titles, background music, and transitions for the theme (holiday, vacation, and so on). You can also save your own timelines as templates and upload them to the Creative website for others to use.

Advanced Video Effects in Nero

Under your source media, you tap the Effect Palette to open speed effects, stabilizer, keying, color, audio, text, transitions, and clip art—in short, everything you'd use to jazz up your video. You get a healthy selection of transitions, but nowhere near as many as Pinnacle Studio has. A few are creative, but there aren't any true 3D choices among them. It's the only editor I've tested that doesn't have sample animations for the transitions, so you don't see exactly what they do until you apply them to your clip. Nero Video also lacks Final Cut Pro's easy way of adding cross-fades by simply pulling down the clip corners on the timeline to add the transitions.

On the one hand, adding transitions to the timeline is easy since the program figures out the clip overlap for you. On the other hand, you can only adjust its duration, not the precise clip positioning, which may prove irritating at times. There's no search for transitions and effects, which is unfortunate since they're all in one long list. Once you find transitions you like, you can add them to your Favorites section, however, which lets you find them again more quickly.

If you're looking to do green-screen work, look elsewhere. Nero delivers the worst chroma-keying results I've seen in a video editor. I used the same actor on an imperfect green screen background, which other programs like Adobe Premiere Elements were able to convincingly superimpose on background forest and beach scenes almost instantly. With Nero Video, the initial application of the effect was completely unusable, with parts of the model made transparent, even when I used the eyedropper tool to sample the green background shade. Using the Similarity slider to add back the missing parts of the model made things no better, as it also added back green background. Other editors get a better result on first click than Nero does after tweaking. PowerDirector even lets you choose multiple key colors. On the plus side, Nero lets you create a mask or invert the selection.

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For picture-in-picture (PiP) effects, I like that Nero's video preview window has handles at the corners for resizing PiPs. There's even a Nero PiP editor with dozens of preset PiP designs. It also includes animated caption templates. Using it can be trying, however, since your clip has to be longer than the template's clip length. The program also includes stabilization, speedup and slowdown effects (though no specific freeze-frame tool), and tilt shift. Some of the animated text options, clip art, and backgrounds are decent, too.

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Nero Motion Tracker

Nero has added a motion-tracking tool in recent years. It's great for blurring moving parts of a video such as faces or license plates that you don't want to be visible to viewers. The MotionTracker is a separate utility from the main editing app, but it's accessible from the latter through a button or right-click menu. New features include adaptive scaling, which lets you track objects that change in size due to distance, and multiple tracks.

MotionTracker features a dark more modern-looking window than the rest of the program and is easy to use and worked well in my testing. As with most of these tools, you place a rectangle or circle over the object you want to track and click Start Tracking. You can also choose auto face tracking. In my test, tracking stopped when the object being tracked disappeared behind another object, which makes sense, though some really advanced tools can even find the object after it reappears. I was able to remedy the situation by tracking in reverse from the end.

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When tracking completes, you get a choice of handy textures, text, or clip art to apply to the tracked object, but you don't get the option to use an image or a video to follow the track, as you can in Corel VideoStudio. Like that program, Nero MotionTracker makes it easy to add multiple tracks on a single clip with a button called +Add Tracker above its tracks.

The Auto Face Tracking option is of particular interest because it lets you determine a minimum size the faces can be, and it creates as many tracks as are needed based on the number of faces tracked. In the example below, I set the minimum face size to a very small 2% of the image, and it created 10 tracks.

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With Nero, you have to save the tracked clip with the added effect to a new file; it doesn't just update the clip in the timeline with the tracking. If you're only interested in adding tracking to your clip (though it also lets you trim the entire clip), you can export to an MP4 file directly from the MotionTracker utility.

More Advanced Tools

Nero includes keyframe support for gradually applying effects between frames you mark. Color correction is there but pretty basic. You can adjust HSL and lighting or apply drastic effects with the Creative Color tool, but there are no color wheels or CLUT support. You also don't get some tools that you'll find in several more sophisticated competitors, including multicam editing, AI art effects, and 360-degree VR support, to name a few.

Audio Editing in Nero

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Nero has a decent selection of background music, and it lets you unlink audio from video clips. One very nice audio editing tool is Fit Music, but it just faded my test song, rather than recomposing it as VideoStudio's tool does. Noise reduction, compression, reverb, de-ess, high-pass, and other standard audio effects are included.

A microphone button above the timeline lets you record voiceover, but you can also use the Nero Suite's separate Screen Recorder app to record your screen and voice at the same time.

Sharing and Output

You get to Nero Video's output options by tapping the big Next arrow at the bottom of the editor screen. The program lets you output to a good selection of video file formats and can burn DVDs, Blu-rays, and AVCHD discs. Supported file types include AVI, WMV, MPEG-1, -2, and -4, 4K AVCHD Ultra HD, and now HEVC H.265. You can also export audio separately or send your movie via email. One missing option is the ability to share video directly to online social networks, something found in most of the competition—even pro-level tools like Adobe Premiere Pro.

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Nero Video includes a Multi-Export function that can auto-detect scenes in a long video and create shorter clips of a length you've specified. So you could be working with a 20-minute video but just want 30-second clips. When I tried it on a three-minute music video, it broke my clip into a dozen separate clips, each starting with a new shot, though it did miss some scene changes. The Ad-Spotter tool uses the same detection tool, in case you download broadcast shows and want to clean out the ads. But back to the Multi-Export tool: It simply lets you export all clips within a video in one action, including those clips you create with scene detection.

You can see checkbox choices in the Export window's Configure dialog box. If possible, enable hardware-accelerated AI enhancement and Nero AI upscaling. I tried exporting once with these turned on, and to my eye, the enhanced version did indeed look sharper and richer.

The web output option simply saves a file in online-friendly formats. But after I chose Export to Web, rendered the video file, and installed another program update, the option to log into a YouTube account and upload to that site appeared. Facebook, Instagram, and Vimeo were nowhere to be found. Nero's own online storage has been discontinued, and the company doesn't have an equivalent to CyberLink's DirectorZone for sharing movies and effects.

Nero Performance Testing

Nero Video did not exhibit slowness or wait periods during simple and advanced video editing and importing, except when dealing with an 8K video clip. But it's much slower at rendering a movie project to a video file compared with most competitors.

For render speed testing, I have each program join seven clips of various resolutions ranging from 720p up to 8K. I then apply cross-dissolve transitions between them. I note the time it takes to render the project to 1080p30 with H.264 and 48Hz audio at a bitrate of 16Mbps. The output movie is just over five minutes in length. I run this test on a Windows 11 PC sporting a 3.60GHz Intel Core i7-12700K, 16GB RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, and a 512GB Samsung PM9A1 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. I also shut down all other applications and unnecessary processes.

Nero renders the test project in 256 seconds (4 minutes and 16 seconds), even with graphics hardware acceleration enabled. It's the second slowest performer among tested video editing software; the fastest ones do the same job in less than a minute. Nero claims that it has updated hardware acceleration for the program, but even after downloading and running Nero's acceleration optimizing utilities, the rendering speed remained slow.

Verdict: Nero Is Fine for the Price

If you're looking to save some coin while getting a decent set of video editing tools, Nero Video could work for you—that is, as long as you don't mind a somewhat dated interface and missing support for some techniques found in competitors. Nero Video is also slow at rendering compared with other software. For faster performance and a much fuller palette, look to our top pick for enthusiast-level PC video editing software, CyberLink PowerDirector. At the professional level, we recommend Adobe Premiere Pro.