posted by Admin on 9/16/11 · Comments
YouTube Rolls-out in Browser Video Editing
On September 9th YouTube rolled out video editing tools that can be used in your browser to tweak various elements of an uploaded video on your channel. The current set of tools includes features that allow you to tweak the brightness, contrast, color temperature, and the start and end points of the video. There are also built-in tools to automatically stabilize shaky footage and an option to rotate footage 90 degrees at a time in any direction.
Beyond just basic editing tools, YouTube, in collaboration with Picnik, also included a selection of various color filters and effects that can be used on your video.
These features are a great addition to YouTube’s already fantastic interface and make it significantly easier for users to tweak their point and shoot videos for optimal format without having to purchase an expensive video editing suite.
You can check out some of the tools in action via YouTube’s preview video below:
The YouTube clip does a pretty good job depicting what exactly you can do with the new editing tools. I recently gave the tools a go myself and here are some of my initial thoughts:
The “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, which automatically optimizes the Fill, Contrast, Saturation, and Color Temperature of your video, is actually quite good. The video I tested came out looking considerably better after using this filter.
The stabilize button is hit or miss. Dependent on the quality of the video you provide, the stabilized version may come out quite pixilated, which seems to be symptomatic of the fact that the stabilize button more or less just zooms in on the action of the video to create stabilization.
The trim feature is fine and does what you would expect, allowing you to cut the beginning or end of the video off. Unless your video is just a tad long or has a long dead-air lead in, it’s not all that useful. It would be awesome if they could incorporate some more legitimate trimming / cutting / editing functionality, but I imagine it’s actually probably quite difficult to do well in an online setting.
The Picnik style effects filters are fun, but fairly generic. Unless you’re going for a particular old-timey feel or something just out of this world (neon/cartoon filters abound) you likely won’t end up posting your video using any of them.
I also like the intention behind the audio tab in the editor, in that it allows you to replace the audio of your video with one from youtube’s library of approved audio selections. This of course prevents your video from being pulled or having the audio pulled due to a copyright claim. That said, it’s not particularly flexible. You can really only replace your own audio with a full song or leave your audio as it is. There is no option to kind of splice in a section of audio or add a particular song as backing music behind the audio of your original video.
All in all the available editing features are quite good and extremely easy to use. The tools provide users that are new to video a great jumping off point and I think in the end it may interest more consumer only YouTube users to start contributing. I think it’ll also improve the overall quality of content on YouTube.
If you’re into video, editing, or just YouTube in general I would definitely recommend checking out the new tools, and if you’ve had a chance to give them a go yourself, drop us a line in the comments and let us know what you think of the new tools!
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