YouTube Is Testing a Video Editor

YouTube is synonymous with online video and, while there are plenty of people uploading videos with great production values, most users don’t really employ an editor more advanced than Windows Movie Maker. Most of the times, videos are uploaded in their original form, so YouTube is now testing a web-based editor to help people trim their videos before making them public.

The video editor is as basic as it gets, you can choose several videos from your YouTube gallery to stitch together. The interface is simple and intuitive, just drag and drop everything where you want to place it. The simplest thing you can do is have several related videos merged into a single one. With the YouTube editor, this takes just a few seconds.

Unfortunately, there are no transition effects of any kind, at least not at this point, so the finished thing may look a bit choppy. Since this is clearly just an early experimental build, this should be fixed in the future.

You can also edit individual videos to select only the portions you need from them, by clicking on the scissors icon that brings up a pop-up overlay. Again, this feature is also very limited, you can select the portion of video you want to keep and that’s it.

Finally, you can also add an audio track to the masterpiece that is shaping up. YouTube actually provides a decent library of songs to choose from, but, if you use them, YouTube retains the rights to show ads next to your video. There’s no way to add your own tracks, a very useful feature to have, but there’s a very good explanation for this, YouTube doesn’t want to get any more, unwanted, attention from the music labels than it already does.

The YouTube video editor is as basic as it gets and it’s not even listed in the Testtube section of the site, where experimental features and tools usually reside, so it’s fair to say that this is a very early iteration. If YouTube decides to pursue this, the editor may get more fleshed out in the coming weeks and months. [via Google Operating System]