YouTube remixer goes beta

• By Paul Crichton
• 4 Jul 07, 02:58 PM

Looking to tart up your homemade videos before showing them to the world? Is your skateboard movie crying out for credits and a soundtrack? YouTube has launched a beta version of a video-mixing tool that might be what you are looking for.

The YouTube Remixer is quite a clever little tool. It allows you to add effects, like fade in and fade out to slide shows of photos and videos, as well as add title slides, music or additional images. There are other similar applications available such as Photobucket’s Remix tool. But the great appeal of YouTube’s tool is that is convenient, and you can work on all your uploaded YouTube videos right on the website without phaffing around elsewhere.

I think this could be quite a popular tool with YouTube’s users. Hardcore filmmakers will already have state-of-the-art software for editing movies, but for everyone else, this will give them a way of adding a more sophisticated sheen to their clips.

The tool is a beta, but there are a few observations to be made. Firstly, it is a Flash application. Adobe has worked hard to make Flash accessible to screen readers. When I tried it with my screen reader, however, it was pretty hard to get around, never mind use. Not all of the buttons were properly labelled, making navigation a bit of a mystery tour.

Secondly, using the Remixer relies heavily on dragging and dropping various elements. Some keyboard shortcuts are available but this tool is near impossible to use by anyone who has difficulty with a mouse. You can, for example, see what images can be placed in a video, but you can’t actually add them.

Whilst it is possible to add titles in text for your video, this feature does not double up to provide subtitling, or closed captioning as it is properly called. Text added to a video using this feature is present for the entire length of the scene or video. It would be practically impossible to synchronise captioning with a video of a 30 second conversation. The video would need to be cut into segments one sentence long, making it a very complicated process. A more extensive review of the captioning limitations is provided by the Proud Geek, who concludes it by saying, “I was really disappointed in YouTube Remixer’s weak captioning feature.”

Is it churlish to regret that the Remixer does not include an easy way of adding captioning that would help hearing impaired users to get more from YouTube videos? I don’t think so. Adding that functionality would make more people aware of the issue. Some people will just want to try it out to see what it is like. Others will want their videos to reach as many people as possible. If you have spent ages beautifully crafting a video about the state of the environment, why wouldn’t you want everyone to be able to follow it? The net result (if you’ll excuse the pun) is that there would inevitably be more videos with captioning.

There are tools out there for filmmakers to add captioning to their video. We’ve looked at dotSUB and Project readOn recently. But they aren't as well known as YouTube, and there can’t be any doubt that the numbers of people who will use the Remixer will be considerable.

Google, who now own YouTube, has developed a facility to add captioning to film. It must go down as a missed opportunity that this tool could not be integrated into the YouTube Remixer in some way.

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