YouTube Video Editor

» see youtube.com/editor as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

When the editor launched on 16 June 2010, YouTube had been blocked in Turkey for two years. The ban ran from May 2008 to the end of October 2010, so the entire first season of this product happened behind a wall that everyone here got around with a proxy anyway. We watched YouTube throughout. We just did it sideways, and nobody in that situation was uploading a carefully edited video through a web proxy.

What YouTube put up was a real timeline in a web page. You pulled in clips you had already uploaded, trimmed them at the ends, put them in order and published the result as a new video. No install and no license key, and no worrying about whether your laptop could render 720p before the battery went. For a generation of people whose only camera was a phone and whose only computer was whatever was in the house, this was the first editing tool they ever touched.

It replaced Remixer, the Adobe-powered editor YouTube had run since 2007, and it grew for about three years. Transitions and a Creative Commons library came in 2011, text and titles in 2012. Then the additions stopped, the interface aged in place, and it sat there in the corner of the upload page until somebody at YouTube looked at the usage numbers.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the free music problem ~

The editor's best feature was the one that solved a legal problem rather than a technical one. Music is what gets a video muted, and in 2010 an amateur upload with a pop song under it was a copyright claim waiting to be filed. YouTube's answer was AudioSwap, a library of tens of thousands of licensed tracks you could drop onto your timeline knowing in advance that nothing would happen to your video.

The Creative Commons integration in 2011 extended the same idea to footage. Anybody could license their upload as CC BY, and anybody else could pull those clips straight into the editor and build something on top of them, with attribution generated automatically underneath the finished video. That was a remix culture with the paperwork already handled, running inside the biggest video site in the world. The CC license option on an upload survives to this day. The place where you could actually pull those clips onto a timeline went out with the editor in 2017.

~ the notice ~

On 20 July 2017 YouTube posted that the Video Editor and the photo slideshow tool would both be switched off on 20 September, citing low usage and pointing people at the many free and paid editors available elsewhere. That is a defensible reading of a dashboard. It also ignores what a tool built into the site does for the people who would never have gone looking for a separate one.

The shutdown had a sharp edge. Videos already published stayed up untouched, but unfinished projects in the editor were not exportable and did not survive the date. Whatever you had half-assembled on that timeline in September 2017 is gone, and there was never a file on your disk to recover it from.

~ the next chapter ~

A trimmed-down editor survived inside YouTube Studio and is still there: cut the start of a video, blur a face in it. It exists to fix problems in a finished upload. The actual descendant of the 2010 editor is the phone that took the market out from under it. By 2017 the free app on the device that shot the video could do more than the browser timeline ever could, and YouTube's own answer to short video arrived in 2020 wearing a different name.

What was lost is the specific arrangement where the place you published was also the place you edited, for free, with the music rights already cleared. Nothing has put those two things back in the same window since.

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