How to be an almost pro video editor without pricey software
YouTube has been rolling out features you didn’t even know existed
As the number 2 search engine, and still the most popular source for video, YouTube has value for any business owner. The platform is more than just a player, or the place to learn how to change a flat tire. Over the last few years, and especially in the last 18 months, while everyone has been watching video metrics on Facebook (myself included), YouTube has been adding stellar features to the platform that have gone un-noticed. Unless you are already a YouTube video creator (which I am) and have been wisely dividing your time between Facebook video and your YouTube channel (which I haven’t).
Let’s start way back in 2013, when YouTube launched the Creator Academy.
The what? 
The Creator Academy is a free resource library full of tips on everything you need to know about video. How to make money with video. How to grow your audience. How to properly light your set. How YouTube even works.
And hardly anyone even knows about it.
A year later, the creator studio was showing up on admin dashboards. Here we could access all our statistics,analytics and videos. There was a lot of noise when it launched, mostly because creators had no idea what happened to the video manager that allowed us to edit the settings, descriptions and titles for our videos. We found those features in the creator studio.
The ability to edit our videos within the YouTube platform has been in place since 2011, but over the years additional features have been added to make YouTube a somewhat robust editing suite.
You can now upload your video to your YouTube channel, and within the Video Manager, edit that video. Here’s a short list of the editing features enabled in YouTube:
- Adjust lighting
- Adjust colour
- Speed it up or slow it down
- Trim out the bits you don’t want
- Change the contrast, saturation and temperature
- STABILIZE YOUR IMAGE (OMG, THIS IS CAPS-WORTHY)
- Combine multiple videos or clips into an entirely new video
- Add audio from the growing library of YouTube’s royalty-free music
- Add a call to action card at the end of your video
ALL FOR FREE!
The most wonderful part is the “revert to original” button. You can play around, make all the changes you want and dump everything to maintain your original video.
With all these new tools, YouTube is probably the most under-utilized video editing suite.
With great SEO.
And global reach.
And cloud storage.
All for free.
So if you haven’t been to YouTube lately, claim your channel (if you have a gmail account, you already have a channel), and put your creativity to the test with your own video.