For years, one had to depend on complicated and resource hungry software like Final Cut Pro or Windows Movie Maker in order to do basic video edits for videos that you wanted to put on YouTube.
If you had already uploaded the video to YouTube, you would have to edit the original video and then upload it again, and it would get a new URL, which meant you would end up having two versions of the same video with two different web addresses, with view counts and comments spread across them.
Online editing for YouTube videos emerged out of incubation to be launched globally for all users in September 2011. This means that all users can now edit all their uploaded YouTube videos online, without having to download them and upload them after editing. With easy to use and basic options that take the complexity out of video editing, this is really going to make life easy for YouTube video users. Here is a quick tour of the online video editor and what you can do with it.
The online video editing tool only works if your video has less than 1000 views and if there are no claims on any part of the video by anyone using the YouTube Content ID System. You can access the editor from the My Uploaded Videos section where you will find the option to Edit Video along with the Edit Info and Insights options. There are three tabs on the editor as of the initial launch, Quick Fixes, Effects and Audio.
In the Quick Fixes tab, you can do things like rotate the video, trim it, and apply changes to the fill light, contrast and color intensity of your video. In order to use the features, you have to click on the icon of the feature that you want to apply. There is a preview pane below the control panel that lets you see how your video looks before and after applying the change.
The icons themselves throw up a slider once you activate them. You can use these sliders to increase or decrease the saturation, color intensity, and fill light or contrast. The rotate option is useful for videos shot on mobile devices which often tend to display rotated to the left or right, making viewing difficult. With this option, you can rotate the video to the way you want it with one click.
The trim feature is very much like the ones you have on your professional video editing software programs with brackets that you can drag to reset the start and end points. The stabilize feature lets you automatically offset camera shake that typically accompanies hand held video shooting.
The accuracy of the stabilizer is pretty amazing though it does cause a slight deterioration of the video quality. Along with these there is the I’m Feeling Lucky option, which is an intuitive one click color correction tool. For most amateur videos, this option comes up with reasonably accurate color correction.
In the effects tab, you can choose from a variety of effect styles, mostly borrowed from the online photo editing application that Google acquired recently, Picknik. Along with the standard black and white, cartoon and pixilated effects, there are some cool ones like the heat map which turns your video into something that looks like it just came out of the Predator movies.
The audio tab lets you replace your existing sound track with free audio tracks from YouTube. You can choose from the recommended tracks or search for tracks. A neat feature is the ability to search for tracks that fit the length of your video.
Once you make the changes, you can save them, and your original video will be replaced by the edited one with the same URL. For videos that have more than 1000 views or videos with content that has been claimed by a third party, you have the option to save as, in which case it will be published with a new URL.
On the whole, the online video editor is an amazing tool for basic fixes. It still is no match to the powerful professional video editing programs. However, given the ease and versatility this editor packs in, even professional video fans will find it a handy tool for quick online video editing.