Best Sports Video Editing Software in 2024

Whether you coach high school sports or work with the pros, you can’t deny the value of quality sports highlight videos. You can show them to the team to help players improve, and you can even post the videos to social media platforms such as YouTube to share with fans.

To do all of this, however, you need a sports highlight video maker software. If you plan to share the videos with the public, using raw footage just won’t do. A proper video editing software will enable you to splice the best clips together as well as add transitions, titles, effects, and exciting background music for a fully edited highlight reel. Video editing software will even let you export the videos directly to social media.

Depending on your computer, budget, and sports video editing skill level, you have several options for video editing software. Reviewing them all yourself would take too much time, so we’ll walk you through some of the best to help you make your decision.

That said, we believe that one video maker stands out among the rest as the easiest sports video editing solution: CyberLink’s PowerDirector. With endless features, an intuitive interface, and a low price, this software will help you create professional-level sports highlight videos with ease. 

Download PowerDirector to get started today.

• Best Sports Video Editing Software
1. PowerDirector
2. Adobe Premiere Pro
3. Final Cut Pro
4. iMovie
5. GoPro Studio
• Comparison Chart
• Tips on Shooting Sports Video
1. Film at High Frame Rates and Shutter Speed
2. Favor Wide Shots over Close-Ups
3. Use a Lens with a Deep Depth of Field
• Summary

Best Sports Video Editing Software

1. PowerDirector

Regularly heralded as a top-notch video editing software, CyberLink’s PowerDirector combines ease of use and advanced features to give you a complete video production platform.

In particular, PowerDirector comes with a set of dedicated “action camera” features that make it an excellent sports video editing software. For instance, you can easily: 

• Fix fisheye
• Stabilize shaky video footage
• Adjust speed to highlight movement
• Zoom and pan to focus on the best framing of the movement

Another helpful capability is motion tracking allowing you to track moving objects, such as a particular player. Tracking a player will come in handy when you want to highlight a score, a block, or any other major moments involving an individual player. PowerDirector simplifies the task that’s often much more complicated in other video editors. All you have to do is select the object and click “track”—PowerDirector will do the rest.

To further polish your sports highlight video, you can add customizable motion graphic titles to introduce players or game halves. Plus, PowerDirector comes with a transition designer to help you create your own stylized transitions.

Furthermore, a sports highlight reel without any music would be dull. Fortunately, PowerDirector gives you free access to a massive Shutterstock library of songs as well as sound effects that you can use to keep the energy high.

PowerDirector provides the fastest rendering and video production in the industry, and the editor also supports the latest video formats. Want to know the best part? You get all of these features and more for only $5.83 a month, a tiny fraction of what you’d pay for competing video editors.

PowerDirector from CyberLink gives you everything you need to create the best sports highlight videos, simplifying even the most advanced tasks to the click of a button. To see for yourself, download PowerDirector today.

2.Adobe Premiere Pro

Compatible with Windows, macOS, and Linux, Adobe Premiere Pro has gained widespread popularity for its expert video production capabilities, including a handful of complex features native to Premiere.

When looking at Adobe Premiere Pro from a sports video editing perspective, it comes with several features that will help you create high-quality highlight reels, such as: 

• GPU-accelerated H.264 and HEVC encoding
• support for ProRes RAW
• auto reframe

If most of those features sound like jargon to you, that’s because Adobe Premiere Pro tends to cater to experienced video editing professionals, resulting in a steep learning curve for beginners.

The price of Adobe Premiere Pro also reflects its intended audience, ringing up at $239.88 per year. And if you pay month-to-month, the cost jumps to a whopping $377.88 per year.

As a high school football coach, for instance, you may have trouble affording that price, as well as getting the hang of the complicated Adobe Premiere Pro tools. Basically, if you got lots of extra time and money, this is the one for you.

• Great for professionals
• Sophisticated tools and features
• Motion graphic capabilities

• Expensive
• Steep learning curve
• Slow rendering speed

3.Final Cut Pro

Apple created Final Cut Pro to give its users a more prosumer-level video editing experience than what its free iMovie offers. With exceptional organizational tools, you’ll have no trouble organizing your sports clips to make highlight videos.

When you import your videos into Final Cut Pro, you can opt to have the software automatically analyze them for unwanted camera movement, color balance, and other helpful aspects. The program can also organize these analyzed videos into Smart Collections based on certain factors like type of shot.

In addition, the video editor’s library system allows you to keep clips together to use in multiple video projects, which is helpful if you want to create different types of highlight reels using the same clips, such as a video for a particular game, an individual player, or an entire season.

However, Final Cut Pro comes with one major downside: a price of $299.99. Fortunately, though, you’ll only have to pay that download fee once.

• Multi-camera support
• Quality organizational tools

• Expensive
• Nontraditional timeline editing may confuse some users
• No search box for finding clips in import dialogue
• Not compatible with Windows operating system

4.iMovie

Compared to Final Cut Pro, iMovie is undoubtedly the simpler Apple product—after all, it’s included on all iPhones, iPads, and Apple computers for free. iMovie is a basic video editor that enables you to work with sports footage. 

Despite its simple interface, iMovie provides several helpful tools and special effects for creating sports highlight videos. Some examples include fade transitions, speed, soundtrack, as well as the basics such as trimming.

However, you can only get so much without paying a cent. Apple’s free video editor only comes with two video tracks, a far cry from the 100-plus that other video production software offers.

And unfortunately, iMovie lacks some crucial features for sports video production, including motion tracking or multi-camera synchronization, which may reduce your video quality a little bit and increase editing time.

• Mostly good  for beginners
• Includes some  templates

• Limited features
• No motion tracking or multi-camera abilities
• Only two video tracks
• Not compatible with Windows operating system

5.GoPro Studio

If you want to create a video without any fuss, GoPro Studio could be the video editing software for you. As the video editor’s name implies, GoPro actually created this product in-house, so you may prefer this software if you film your sports footage on a GoPro.

GoPro Studio boasts a simple interface that even beginners can navigate without any instruction. You’ll have an easy time marking and splicing your sports clips together for your highlight reels, as well as using titles, music, and audio tracks.

However, that’s basically where GoPro Studio’s capabilities end; it certainly isn’t the most advanced software for sports video editing, lacking features like motion tracking, stabilization, and multi-camera synchronization. With GoPro Studio, you get what you pay for, and you don’t pay anything.

• Easy to use
• Free
• Good for GoPro users

• Very basic
• Can be slow to work with

Comparison Chart

Take a look at PowerDirector compared to the other four video editors side-by-side. You’ll notice that our favorite video production software is the only one to include all of the key sports video editing features:

Software	PowerDirector	Adobe Premiere Pro	Final Cut Pro X	iMovie	GoPro Studio
	Price
Price	$69.99/yr	$239.88/yr	$299.99	Free	Free
	User-Friendly
User-Friendly	Easy, Beginner Friendly	No, Professional	No, Professional	Yes	Yes
	Updates & New Features
Updates & New Features	Constantly/Year Round	Yes	Minimum	Occasionally	No
	Video Stabilization
Video Stabilization	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
	Lens Correction
Lens Correction	Yes	Yes	Yes	Limited	Yes
	Motion Tracking
Motion Tracking	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
	Video Speed Control
Video Speed Control	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
	Motion Graphic Templates
Motion Graphic Templates	Yes	Limited	Limited	Limited	No
	Free Stock Library
Free Stock Library	Videos, Photos & Music	No	No	No	No

Tips on Shooting Sports Video

1. Film at High Frame Rates and Shutter Speed

When you film with a faster shutter speed, you’ll end up with crisper, higher-energy footage. Having a higher frame rate will make motion tracking easier during the editing process.

2. Favor Wide Shots Over Close-Ups

When filming team sports in particular, you never know which player will suddenly become the center of attention, so you don’t want to zoom in on one player only to have another make the big play. Wide shots enable you to catch all the action so that you don’t miss a thing.

3. Use a Lens with a Deep Depth of Field

A shallow depth of field will result in a blurry background, which, like close-ups, won’t serve you well when filming team sports. To keep all areas in focus, you need a deeper depth of field, which you can attain with a wide-angle lens and a narrow aperture. 

Summary

While many of the video editors we’ve reviewed today can help you create a sports highlight video, PowerDirector will clearly enable you to create the highest quality sports videos for the lowest price.

So, what have we learned about editing sports videos? Let’s take a moment to review some key points:

• PowerDirector provides features that particularly cater to sports video editing, such as motion tracking, stabilization, multi-camera synchronization
• Adding motion title graphics, transitions, and music will jazz up your sports highlight video to make it more engaging
• Some video editing software like PowerDirector lets you export sports videos directly to social media
• Filming at a higher frame rate and shutter speed will make sports video editing easier down the line

Are you ready to begin creating cinematic-quality sports highlight videos for your team? Download CyberLink’s PowerDirector today to get the ball rolling! You’ll soon wonder how you ever coached or promoted your team without having such professional sports videos in your arsenal.