YouTube Adds an In-Browser Video Editor

A lot of YouTube videos, entertaining though they may be, have a tendancy to be sloppy and amatuerish. Sometimes it’s poor lighting, or excessive shaky cam or, most commonly, five to ten seconds of garbage footage before or after the big payoff. In order to try and combat this, YouTube has introduced a new in-browser editor that will let you perform some basic video editing after you’ve uploaded your video.

The editor will let you do things like adjust brightness levels, control for shakiness, control contrast levels and much, much more, all while your video sits on the web and can be viewed. The problem that a lot of users ran into before was that after the video was uploaded, editing it and uploading it again meant you had to have a new video, link, and page. You had to start from square one. No more. Sort of.

If you’re at all in touch with the current photo editing fads, there’s a question you’ve probably been asking yourself, up to this point, in fear or anticipation: Will there be stylish filters? You bet there will be stylish filters. Using its recently aquired service Picnik, Google has arranged for a collection of 14 awesome, annoying filters based on the photo filters you know and love and hate to be included with the other options.

There are a few caveats to be considered. While you can upload a video and edit it without having to save it as a new video, that only applies to videos with less than 1,000 views, no matter how trivial said edit might be. This editor also provides YouTube an excellent opportunity to finally introduce a subscription service where the complexity of the in-browser editing (and maybe even the view count cutoff) are related to whether or not you have a subscription. After all, Picnik has premium filters, which isn’t too dissimilar.

So given that this editior is in-browser and free, you can expect two things to start happening to YouTube videos. One, some of them will be edited better, no garbage footage, proper lighting. Two, a lot of them will have completely irrelevant, obnoxious effects slapped on top of them until they look like they were done by a 5th grader because a lot of over-enthusiastic YouTubers just got handed a box of toys.

(via CNET)