Some people may be surprised that they can edit photos without installing any software locally. If video editing online is concerned, it's undoubtedly a resource-intensive task. Is it really? Here we will review five online services that allow you to perform tasks like scene transitions, clipping, continuation, audio overlapping, etc. All five services are free.
These free services do not require installation of video editors like Pinnacle Studio or the $800 Adobe Premiere. If you're willing to spend $50, you could use Pinnacle Studio or Ulead VideoStudio. But these free online services enable ordinary users to skillfully handle their digital multimedia content and provide them with an easy way to share with friends and people in any corner of the world.
Figure 1
Cuts
This newcomer in the online video editing field aims to make the "video experience more controllable." This web application is still in testing and allows you to remove unwanted parts from a video, add titles, insert sound effects, and create loops. It also allows you to share via email or by embedding the video on your blog. This service does not actually edit the original video but creates layers that produce the effect of editing.
Figure 2 Cuts homepage
Cuts operates directly on online videos and cannot directly edit works from your home camcorder. Of course, you can upload the video to YouTube, MySpace, or Google Video, and then edit them using Cuts. Cuts plans to regularly add video management and sharing sites to their website, but currently, this is just a plan, so we wait and see.
Using Cuts for video operations mainly involves three steps:
• Import a video — input the video URL
• Edit — clip scenes, add titles, add sound effects
• Share
Besides entering the addresses of videos from the three websites mentioned above, you can also directly edit videos with direct FLV addresses, such as those provided by blip.tv. YouTube, Google Videos, Yahoo! Videos, and MySpace all use FLV format videos.
After entering the video URL, it will be loaded, which takes some time, and then you will be taken to the Cutter (editing tool) interface:
Figure 3 Here contains all the editing options; different editing operations can be seen under each tab.
All effect applications are completed by dragging these buttons onto the timeline at the bottom. There is a feature named "coming soon" that allows you to zoom in and out on the timeline. When you move the pointer on the timeline, the video window does not immediately display the frame of that moment but instead shows the first frame of the next scene. Note that you cannot use your own voice but must choose from 25 pre-recorded sound effects available through the buttons.
We found that the options available are very limited, yet we hope we can select our satisfactory ones and apply them to the video. People might prefer to add custom soundtracks to their videos, as other websites we will review later can do.
Adding titles is also a simple operation: you just select "Captions" (title), drag the button to the timeline, and then enter some text. The length limit for adding titles is 50 letters. You can control the duration of the title display by dragging the edges of the title bar on the timeline.
The skip frame and loop tools require this web application to analyze the video, and for every 1.5 minutes of video, it only takes 6 seconds of analysis time. However, this time may vary depending on server load. Through analysis, it marks "scene transitions" on the timeline with vertical rulers. When you click the "Skip/Loop" tab again, you can drag the required function buttons to these vertical lines on the timeline.
Figure 4 Adding skip frames and loops
When you select "loop," a drop-down list will let you choose how many times you want the scene to loop, up to 5 times.
Cuts does not offer scene transition features, but it provides a tool that can determine scene changes while you edit the video, which surprises us.