Online Video Editing

There is no doubt that video is a very powerful medium for websites to use to help promote themselves, help sell their products, and generally use to reach a wider audience. Creating video has gotten a great deal easier with most digital cameras and webcams able to record short video clips, desktop software to record desktop actions and with digital video cameras dropping in price. Creating video clips has gotten considerably easier, however editing those clips together can still be a difficult process. Video editing has gotten better over the last six months with several online applications that you can use to edit your video clips into a new video complete with transitions, effects and titles.

I recently visited the Western Development Museum in North Battleford Saskatchewan and they had two old steam tractors running so I captured three clips of the tractors in the parade. I took those three clips and compared the editing of them with the following online video editing sites.

Jumpcut

Jumpcut is a Yahoo company and offers a good selection of transitions, effects and title options. Perhaps the largest set of options that I came across in the online video editors. The only issue I had was I could not find a button or way to save my edit when I was done. The button is hidden way at the bottom of the edit page. It would be nice if they moved that menu up above the fold.

eyespot

Uploading and mixing the video clips was easy. There is a good selection of effects available, but they do not offer a large selection of transitions and titles. The only other problem I had was the site consistently crashed Firefox. I had to restart Firefox three times before I completed the mix. They also give you several options to save the remixed videos to your computer.

muveeMix

This was probably the easiest one of the online video editing websites that I tried. You simply select the files you want to include in your video and follow the wizard. I had no problems quickly creating two videos. I had to choose music or upload some for the video though, so the original sound was removed and replaced with the the music I choose. In making it extremely easy to use they kept the number of options down.

One True Media

I was able to create an account, but I was unable to upload any files. My browser keep crashing whenever I tried uploading. The site looked promising but after several tries I gave up trying to upload the clips.

YouTube Remixer

The YouTube Remixer offers a good selection of transitions, effects and titles. You can mix together all of your public video clips. I had a number of problems with the YouTube Remixer. Titles before and after the video clips appeared to cause the remixed video to not save to my account. Overall it is an easy video remixer, but don’t try anything to fancy. It took me four tries before I could get anything to save out to my account, and there is little to no help in typical Google/YouTube/Blogger fashion. I could not even find any help on the web. You can see the remixed video on YouTube. The embedded player shows all three video clips but not the remixed version.

Final Thoughts

If you are looking at doing some quick mixing together of some of your video clips and need a simple solution then muveeMix was the easiest to use. Jumpcut was my favourite, with the most options and possibilities. eyespot gives you the option to download your video, and that is a great bonus. You could then take your mixed video and upload it to another service if you like. The YouTube Remixer is a good start for YouTube, but they should really look at some of the options available at Jumpcut and fix the embedded video to play the mix properly.