There are plenty of dedicated video editors available, some free, some costing a small fortune. But for the most basic editing options and tools, YouTube has now entered the fray with its new cloud-based video editor.
YouTube
is, and has been for a long time, the biggest and most-popular online video site. It has a full range of videos, from long, professionally-produced clips, to a lot of user-generated content.
The site is now five-years-old, and celebrated its birthday by hitting the two-billion video views a day milestone. However, one thing that’s been missing from the site is a video editor, apart from the short-lived YouTube Remixer from a few years ago.
2007’s YouTube Remixer was a Flash video editor based on Adobe Premiere Express. It was quickly discontinued after users complained it was slow and buggy. So YouTube has gone back to the drawing board.
YouTube Video Editor
is pushing for cloud-based services to become the norm. Google Docs offers office applications in the cloud, Picnik offers photo editing in the cloud, and now the YouTube video editor brings simple editing into the cloud as well.
Make no mistake, this isn’t going to compete with video editing software suites such as Final Cut Pro or Premiere Pro, but that’s not the intent. Instead, YouTube is trying to make it easier for normal users to be able to do simple video editing on the fly.
The YouTube video editor has a simple and intuitive UI which operates by dragging and dropping videos and segments of video to create a new clip. Trimming videos to give them new start and stop points is easy, as is adding a title, tags, and metadata.
There’s also the option to add music from Google’s AudioSwap library. Overall, it’s simple and effective, and could help non-geeks improve the quality of video they upload to YouTube.
Conclusions
The YouTube video editor could prove to be very useful, particularly for YouTube users uploading video clips to the site via mobile devices such as smartphones and the Apple iPad.
Cloud-based services aren’t perfect, or suited to every product. But on this occasion I think it’s a good fit.
[Via Google Operating System]
Related Ad
Ad: Video Editing Software on eBay
[phpbay]Video Editing Software, 3, “”, “”[/phpbay]
