Video Editing in the Cloud With WeVideo

Marla Shaivitz Oct 26, 2011 Tweet

First the purview of professionals, then available to the masses via the desktop – quality video editing can be added to the software services now available in the cloud thanks to WeVideo.

WeVideo is a web-based, collaborative editing platform.  It’s a fully-loaded video editor that allows users to craft a story with others, add effects, royalty-free audio, transitions, and/or graphics or simply edit raw footage from a mobile device or camera.

Sign up via custom login or a Facebook, Google or Yahoo ID, and you’re greeted with a dashboard displaying the elements of projects, associated collaborators, and online file storage space. The payment structure is tiered, beginning with a free version up to a commercial version for $79.99/month that includes features such as 50 GB of storage, 720p High Definition resolution and 24 hour support.

Based in Sunnyvale, California, WeVideo was founded in 2011 by Norway-based Inspera to remove “the barriers traditionally associated with video editing—namely the cost, complexity, and the need for major computing resources”.  The service launched in early September and on October 20^th, YouTube announced WeVideo as a partner in its editing services toolkit called YouTube Create.

The beauty of cloud-based software is that you can work on a project while on YouTube or on WeVideo with little lag time in the availability of the elements you’ve uploaded. And there is no misplacing of files or projects as it’s centrally-located. Users in all package levels leverage the distributed computing capabilities of the cloud; WeVideo ramps up the processing time and rendering on demand in each tier.

If you’re used to the non-linear concept of many video editors like iMovie or Windows Live Movie, the software is easy to use. Videos can be exported or uploaded to social media sites based on your account level with WeVideo .

WeVideo Dashboard View

The software is tailor-made not only for individuals looking for an easier solution to produce videos for fun, but for organizations looking for low cost ways to tell their story, as well as for social and political movements, which have demonstrated the rise of citizen journalism.  WeVideo was used recently during the Contact Summit, a social change conference that took place in New York City, to make a collaborative video about Occupy Wall Street.

If you check out WeVideo let me know what you think. I found it easy to use with enough effects to spruce up a video and make a decent slideshow out of some photos with more flexibility than other web-based services. Contrary to the woman by the pool in the WeVideo piece below though, I couldn’t edit on the iPad or the iPhone since the the platform is Flash-based.   Correct me if I’ve missed something here.