Digital Home Thoughts: Edit Your YouTube Videos With YouTube's Own Video Editor

"YouTube's new video-editing feature comes at good time. Three years ago, there was a healthy choice of budding new online video editing sites, with names like Cuts, Jumpcut, and Eyespot. Today, most have been abandoned. Video editing is too processing intensive to easily serve a mass audience over the Web. It requires a compelling business model with an enormous audience to make the necessary investments over the long term. Google is one of the few players with the user base and the server power to overcome such obstacles. Google's YouTube is therefore an obvious place to offer basic editing capabilities...."

If you have a YouTube account, and want access to a simple video editor, you can give the new YouTube Video Editor a whirl - just bear in mind that it provides only basic functionality, at least for time being. To be fair, this is still an experimental application, and must be accessed via the YouTube TestTube page, where you will also find a number of other YouTube features that "aren't quite fully baked." Although the reviewer, Michael Muchmore, clearly supports the Google / YouTube effort in creating this new video editor, he also states that he thinks a locally installed application is preferable for most editing jobs, even those that are relatively simple. What is your opinion? Does an online video editor make sense? Or, if your prefer an installed application, is one of free options powerful enough for a video hobbyist?