14 DAY TRIAL // YouTube is doing its best, and pouring large amounts of money, to get professionally produced content on the site. It's debuting several new "professional" channels each week now. Even so, the heart and soul of YouTube still are all the amateur videos that people keep uploading, by the millions each day.
Some of those videos go on to become huge YouTube hits with hundreds of millions of views, yet many of them are of very poor quality.
That's mostly due to the cameras used, phones, webcams and so on, but also to the conditions, when you're running with your phone, late in the evening, trying to shoot something, it's not going to come out very pretty.
"Whether you’re perfecting your double backflip at the park, capturing a flash mob on your phone, or enjoying singing in a subway, it’s not easy to get your video quality perfect," YouTube writes.
"Sometimes videos suffer from symptoms like 'shaky-camera-itis' or 'augmented-darkness-levels' that keep viewers from seeing just how awesome your video really is," it adds.
Of course, some of those videos can be enhanced alter, most video editing software can at least try to improve them. But YouTube has a better solution, an even better one than the built-in video editor it introduced last year.
YouTube now has a one-click fix feature which is activated for videos it detects could use a touch up. When uploading a shaky camera video, or one shot in poor lighting conditions, users will see a notification that their video could be improved.
If they click on the fix button, they'll get a preview of what the enhanced video will look like and will be able to use that version instead. The original will still be available and users can "undo" the fix.
As you'd expect, the feature is based on the "I'm feeling lucky" button from the video editor, it's just applied in a different way. If you've used the feature though, you'll know it's far from perfect, but it should come in handy for plenty of videos.
