YouTube, the home of grainy videos of drunken cats farting the lady of spain while driving a all terrain vehicle during their guitar shredding performance of Flight of the Bumblebee, just before they fall off the ATV in an amusing manner onto a buxom coed, has just gotten more interesting, if that's possible. Thanks to their pals at Adobe, YouTube has now added basic video editing to its bag of tricks. It's called Remixer. Now, instead of just uploading webcam footage, cellphone clips and snippets of popular TV shows to the video sharing site, users can stitch clips together, add transitions, graphics, captions, effects and frames. It's a pretty slick, browser-based interface although the choices of frames and transitions (the candy candy frame stands out for me here), are just an invitation to YouTubes to create the video equivalent of ransom notes, crazy text choices, whacky transitions and frames that would give a Mary Kay selling aunt dry heaves. Of course, if you're on a computer that has basic video editing software, like iMovie, you don't need this. But, I can imagine it would be great if you haven't learning any video editing tools or if you're in an Internet cafe and want to give your vids more polish (or, less, as the case may be). Remixer is a subset of Adobe's Premier video editing tool and might be Adobe's way of sparking interest in a software tool that's sort of fallen off most folks radar screens. Remixer isn't going to replace Final Cut Studio Pro or Avid, consider it more like Kid Pix for video. So, Remixer from YouTube and Adobe, for the love of all that's sacred, don't use it for the purposes of evil. Yes, Aunt Fran, I'm talking to you. For my emerging tech company w8nc I'm Wayne MacPhail.
Links:
[1] http://rabble.ca/taxonomy/term/144
[2] http://rabble.ca/taxonomy/term/1921
[3] http://rabble.ca/audio/by/artist/wayne_macphail
[4] http://rabble.ca/audio/by/title/episode_sixteen_-_remixer
[5] http://rabble.ca/audio/by/album/online_tools_for_the_21st_century
[6] http://rabble.ca/audio/by/genre/podcast
[7] http://rabble.ca/audio/by/year/2007
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