The Two video editors hidden in YouTube | Tech Help for Churches

Hi, and welcome again to another episode of “Tech Help for Churches.” This is the show where every week we talk all about using the Internet, new media, social media, etc in your church. My name is Paul Alan Clifford I’m your host and I’d love for you to ask your questions leave your comments, etc. So just do that below the video if you’re listening to the audio then that’s no problem whatsoever just head on over to TrinityDigitalMedia.com/contact. There you can find all my contact information as well as leave a comment right there. That’s fine as well. I do have my e-mail address listed there so you can drop me a line at Paul at TrinityDigitalMedia.com or hit me up on Twitter PaulAlanClif (P A U L A L A N C L I F).

So a lot of people don’t know that you can actually edit video online. You don’t need to buy software and you can actually do quite a lot of effective things. Now, you’re not going to create a blockbuster. You’re not going to edit an Academy Award winner. But, if you need to do something simple, YouTube actually has a couple of different video editors that can do simple things. The downside is neither of them have everything and you may not find it easy to find either one of them. So I’m going to go through those things right now.

First off, in order to find what I called the “Basic Editor” in YouTube you upload your video or you go to your video manager where all the videos are already uploaded and then you click on “edit.” Once you’re at the next page, then you need to click on “enhancements.” Having clicked on “enhancements,” you’ll find you have a lot of choices. So you can do the quick fixes which include auto fix, stabilize, changing the speed, making it slower. Basically, you can take your clip and make a slow motion clip, although it’s not going to be beautiful slow motion like you sometimes see in the movie it’s going to be less than ideal but you can do that in YouTube.

You can tweak the color or brightness/contrast, etc/ of the image. You can trim it to make it shorter or once you’ve trimmed it you can undo the trimming to make it longer again.

There’s also another tab called filters. Now filters, if you’ve played with Instagram, basically the same thing. With filters you can give your videos a certain look. You can make it look black and white. You can make it work over-saturated. You can make it look more green or more red. There are quite a number of different filters you can use and it could be that with your video just adding one of those filters is really going to give it a great look.

Finally, there’s a tab called special effects. Normally you’re not going to use this but I will tell you an instance where you would let’s say that you have a video where you want to obscure the people. Maybe it’s out in public and you just want to be absolutely sure that you’re OK to use the video so you can obscure their faces. Maybe it’s an interview with someone that doesn’t want to be known for what they’re dealing with. You can obscure their faces. So that would be instances where you can do that.

Now the downside of using this what I call the “basic editor,” the enhancements editor is it really isn’t all that powerful. You can’t add in another video clip you only can work with the video that you have. You can’t change the audio really very much at all if at all. I don’t think you can actually.

You can’t add a picture you can do a lot of the things that really are necessary to do good editing. But if you upload a clip and you want to cut off the beginning of the clipping cut off the end of the clip. Let’s say like me you reach up and you reach around the camera and you start recording and then later at the end you reach up and you reach around the camera and you stop the recording. You probably want to cut that out. This editor can do that but if you wanted to put let’s say a picture at the beginning or an opening video, I really can’t do that. So that’s kind of the limits of it.

The advantage is if you’ve got a video that’s up there and just needs one of these things that it can do. It doesn’t reset your viewer count; it doesn’t mess with that video. You’re working with the original. So that’s the advantage; I guess that’s a disadvantage too because you’re working with the original. So if you do something and you save it and you decide and that it’s totally wrong. Well, you’re kind of out of luck.

The more advanced editor you can get to by going to youtube.com/editor. When you go there you’ll notice you have access to your full video library so you can potentially cut clips from multiple videos and put them together, make an interesting story. You can add in stills, jpgs, pictures, whatever you want to call them. (I know that all stills aren’t jpegs, by the way), but you can add those into your video. You can add some music. You can do a lot of the more interesting things that you can do with the basic video editor.

So while I called the first one the “basic video editor,” the editor in YouTube is actually on par with a basic video editor like iMovie or Windows Movie Maker or something like that. It’s not on par with a high end video editing system. You’re not going to be creating special effects with this, despite what the basic enhancement editor said about blurring faces. That’s interesting but I wouldn’t call that a special effect. So the more advanced editor allows you to do some things that you can’t do with the more basic editor.

But here’s the problem you can’t… Let’s say you wanted to trim off the beginning and the end of the video and put it in a picture at the front and then use that video as is and that’s your whole thing. Let’s say you have had this video up for two years and it’s got a few hundred views and you want to keep those you’re outta luck. If it’s been up for two years it’s got a few hundred views, you can go into the enhancements editor and clip off the beginning and end, but you can’t put that picture in. If you want to put the picture in, you need to go into the other editor (the more advanced editor) and you will save a new video. Now it will be based on your old video and you’ll still have your old video, but none of the views, none of the analytics, none of that stuff go with the new video. So that’s a downside.

So you can see that neither of these are really perfect. They both have their limitations and you need to figure out which you want to do with in order to get around those limitations.

One thing that I’ve done myself is I have uploaded a video, kept it private (so that’s a choice in YouTube), kept the video private and then gone into the editor and created a new video based on the private video. Once you do that, the new video is there for all to see with, let’s say, a picture at the beginning, trimmed down, let’s say, with new music underneath it, etc It’s able to be seen in its new form, but it’s not the case that it is really that your editing the original video. You’re creating a new video based on the original video and some additional media, so that might be a way for you to look at it and think about it.

Do I need to just do some very minor things maybe change the color, maybe do a stabilization, maybe trim or the beginning in the end? The enhancements editors for you.

Do you need to do something more intensive? Do you need to put a picture in it? Do you need to change the audio? Do you need to put multiple video clips together? Then, the regular editor is for you.

Well I hope that helped you; I hope that that gave you some ideas of what you can actually do online, things so you can even do from a Chromebook that maybe you haven’t even considered before.

If you like this information and some of the other information that I’ve given you another videos. Well, first off watch even more videos. But secondly you can get a free subscription to my e-mail newsletter by going to TrinityDigitalMedia.com/gifts — G I F T S and over there you can pick up some free church tech gifts and get a free subscription to my e-mail newsletter, where I give even more tips and tricks and tell you some of the great things that are happening over here at TrinityDigitalMedia. Until next time, go out and change eternity. This is Paul Alan Clifford with TrinityDigitalMedia.com.

Hi, and welcome again to another episode of tech help for churches. This is the show where every week I help you learn all about using me…Take two.