Submitted by Fiona Beal

Today I had the problem of uploading a video that had sound
problems to YouTube. There had been some loss of Internet connectivity during
the recording of the video and I wanted to delete those blank spaces from the video. Normally I would have used Windows Live Movie Maker  but Windows 10 no longer supports Windows Live Movie Maker (oh how I miss that program). I decided to try
uploading the problematic video to YouTube first and then use the YouTube video
editor to attempt to trim and clip the video in its online form. It worked! I thought I would record the process.

What is YouTube Video Editor?

My first step was to look at what YouTube help says at https://goo.gl/Eh9Vgi. YouTube Video Editor is YouTube’s collection of online tools that enables one to edit your uploaded video in a number of ways:

• Combine multiple videos and images you’ve uploaded to create a new video.
• Trim your clips to custom lengths.
• Clip out pieces that you don’t want.
• Add music to your video from a library of approved tracks.
• Customize clips with special tools and effects
• Publish the new video to YouTube and choose its viewing preferences.

All of your uploads, while you are doing this, are added automatically to the Video Editor where you can make them private until your task is complete. The Video Editor tool at www.youtube.com/editor isn’t currently able to publish videos that are longer than one hour. You can still use the Enhancements or Audio tools to process longer videos.

How to get started

My task was listed in the things the editor can do. I wanted to Clip out unwanted blank spaces and Trim the video. You can get to the Video Editor  at http://www.youtube.com/editor if your video is already uploaded. Mine wasn’t yet uploaded so here are the steps:

Log in to your YouTube account

Sign into your Google account and go to YouTube https://www.youtube.com/ After logging in I clicked on the upward facing arrow icon in the top right hand corner, and uploaded the video as normal. Here is an image of the icon:

I set the video to private for now so that any subscribers wouldn’t be notified that a new video had been uploaded. In this step I added all the required information about the video.

                            

Edit the Video

1. Open Creator Studio

I clicked on the my name in the right hand corner and selected Creator Studio which is found right underneath my name. This opened a new section with information on the left hand side. On the left side under “Video Manager,” I clicked on Videos and selected the video I wanted to edit.

2. Select Edit/Enhancements

Under the video the Edit button was evident. I selected Enhancements. The two enhancements I was interested in were Split and Trim.

3. Work with Trim.

I decided to use Trim first when Enhancements opened, as I needed to cut a piece off the end of the video to shorten it. To do this I clicked on Trim and selected where I wanted to stop the video.

4. Working with Split.

When you click on Trim, the word Split appears at the very bottom under the image of the video breakdown. In this view I wanted to cut out any places where we lost sound.

a) To do this click on the actual video footage at the bottom at the actual place where you want to stop.

b) Select Split and a blue bar appears.

c) Continue to the place where you want to restart the sound again and click Split once more.

d) You’ll notice in the image below the trimmed section on the bottom right and the two split sections with a cross and the word Delete next to it. Select the cross where the word Delete appears and the section is trimmed. If you check this now by playing the video just before the split part, the video jumps over that part seamlessly as though it didn’t exist, and it continues.

e) This is what the video in edit mode looked like after the final trimming and splitting (see below). Notice all the greyed-out gaps representing the trimming and clipping. The next step is to click on the word Done. 

                          

f) After clicking Done I am taken to a view where you can see a preview and the original in case you want to revert to the original and start again after watching the preview.

Save as a new video

If you are satisfied with the job done, you can now move to the section on the right of the video and click on Save as a new video. If you want to you can just click Save and the video will replace the previous version. Because I felt unsure I decided to click on Save as a new video. After I saved this video as a new video I immediately set it to private so that no subscribers would be notified while the video is being processed. Incidentally, this processing takes a while.

Where did I learn how to do all this?

I watched a great tutorial from Derral Eves called ‘How To Trim Slice and Edit Your YouTube Videos’. I have embedded it below.