Design-Design - Designing for business, academia and the arts

Overview

The YouTube Video Editor is free to access and use to edit clips together if you have a YouTube account. I created a Simcoemedia YouTube account and channel for my video portfolio and a hidden channel called VisualSnippet for my experimental videos. These hidden videos give me opportunity to try out some of the YouTube features without the risk of interfering with a channel I use as a portfolio of Simcoemedia commercial productions.

If you upload some videos to your YouTube Channel you can view them and edit them together with the YouTube Video Editor using a variety of transitions and titling tools. In addition you can add a soundtrack and even incorporate creative commons video to add additional clips appropriate to your narrative.

During experimentation with the system these features were tried out and 1080p HD video edited together. For maximum compatibility I used Google’s Chrome browser.

Advantages

• The YouTube video editor will handle video up to 1080p and will edit clips together with a variety of transitions, most of which I would not recommend for the majority of video work. However, having used the fade and horizontal wipe to join clips these provided some useful alternatives to cutting clips directly.
• Titling is simple but reasonably stylish if used carefully, though the choice of a single font and centre alignment of text does prove limiting if text goes onto two lines. The titler will only handle three lines of text.
• The built in royalty free audio library is extensive and varied. With a bit of patience a suitable soundtrack can be found for the majority of circumstances. As audio makes up a significant proportion of the video experience, it is worth spending time selecting the best track.
• Video is created on Google’s own YouTube servers therefore rendering 1080p video quickly and without using your own computers resources which is valuable if you need to get on with other tasks and onlt have one PC. Usually a 5 minute video can be ready within 40 minutes.

Disadvantages

• When adding a soundtrack to the edited 1080p sequence, the audio noticeably stuttered and restarted within the first 10 seconds which essentially made it unusable. This problem was replicated several times.
• Fade transitions were not completely smooth. The final part of the fades on 1080p video noticeably seemed overcompensate on the bright areas of the video creating a distracting oversaturation on bright areas just prior to completely fading.
• When using both fade transitions and audio an internal server error occurred when I tried to publish the video. This occurred on all attempts until the music track was removed and only the original audio used. Audio can be added once the clips have been edited together but this is not clear during the main editing processes.

Conclusion

The YouTube video editor provides a useful tool for those people who want to create video but do not necessarily have the processing power to deal with the high volumes of data used when processing HD.

The online editor is not without its problems such as dubious transition accuracy and some of the fine tuning related to audio but overall it makes editing 1080p or 720p video accessible to those users with severely underpowered machines by allowing ‘The Cloud’ to do all the work.