Video Editing Tools That Rock

With mobile video views up 300 percent in 2012, accounting for 44 percent of total audiences by year-end, online editing tools have proliferated to keep pace, TechCrunch reports. Editing videos online conserves local computer resources, saves time transferring files, makes previews closer approximations to actual appearances, and makes sharing easier.

But the growing number of editing tools available might leave you wondering which one is best for your purposes. The answer is that whatever you need to do with your video, there's probably a free tool you can use to edit it online.

For Instant Editing: Magisto

Let's say you just shot a home video, and you want to share it with your friends using your DSL.com connection, but the raw footage has a lot of extra junk besides the highlight clips. You'd like to clean it up a bit before sharing it, so your friends don't get bored with the slow parts, but you don't have much time to edit. Magisto is a free tool designed to help solve this situation. It uses smart image and sound analysis tools to automatically filter your raw footage and turn it into clips that focus on the most exciting sights and sounds. With a few clicks, your video can be ready to share.

For Mobile Sharing: Loopster

If you want a free, simple editing tool to use from your mobile device when you're on the go, you might want to try Loopster. The tool offers an intuitive interface for performing basic editing operations on raw footage and sound library elements to create videos up to 10 minutes long. It supports sharing with social media sites or with your own groups, nicknamed "loops."

For YouTube Users: Video Editor

YouTube serves as the primary sharing platform for many budding videographers. To support this, YouTube supports its own free Video Editor. It can apply basic editing procedures to your own footage, to videos that have been uploaded under Creative Commons license, and to a limited library of soundtracks. YouTube's editor enables you to perform simple operations such as trimming the beginning and end of videos, but more advanced operations such as editing middle clips require creating and combining separate tracks. You can also use a limited range of transitional and text effects. This tool is thus not a full-powered editing program, but if your main goal is trimming a clip you want to show on your YouTube channel, it's a useful free service.

For Professional Production: Lightworks

At the other end of the technical spectrum, Lightworks is a free, professional-quality editor to use from your mobile device. This open-source program provides Hollywood-quality editing functionality comparable to expensive professional tools such as Final Cut Pro and Avid, but its basic version is free. Unlike other services mentioned, Lightworks is not itself hosted online, but can be downloaded free for use on a tablet device for professional mobile editing.

Guest Author

Sonia Piper - Sonia is a writer who covers the tech industry.