Greetings,
WEVIDEO is a free, online video editing service which promises to be fast, convenient and easy.
I should say, right up front, that I’m not a big video editing fan. While I try to include lots of video in my online courses, editing and manipulating the clips is not a favoured activity. I’ve found virtually all video editors (at least the ones I’ve tried) to be clunky and difficult to use – even iMovie so, imagine my delight to learn of a free, online editor – WEVIDEO – that claimed to be fast, convenient and easy to use. Could it be true? Could there really be a fountain of youth, aliens hidden at Area 51 and a magic diet pill?
A sign-up is require to use WEVIDEO and that allows access to the movie editor which looked similar to an iMovie interface, circa 2005. Users can upload images or movie clips which can then be placed on a timeline. To separate each clip, WEVIDEO provides a selection of transitions. An assortment of music clips are also available for movie sound tracks. Numerous frames, animations and effects are also included to embellish and enhance a production. All these items can added to a movie by dragging and dropping on the timeline.
To give WEVIDEO a work-out, I shot two quick video clips of “Silken”, my cat, plus a title and ending clip and uploaded them to WEVIDEO. That went very well – quick and easy. Once inside my project folder, I could drag them down to the timeline to begin the process of creating my master piece. Unfortunately, WEVIDEO treated my video clips as still images so that when I previewed my movie, each clip appeared for about a second and there was no action or movement. It took awhile to figure out that I had to stretch the clips out so the time on the timeline matched the length of the clip. Next I added some transitions which was easy thanks to “drag and drop”.
Next came the music track. I wanted to use a creative commons song but could find no way to upload it to the audio library. Apparently, the only options are those selected by WEVIDEO. To be fair, there is a large selection but the ability to add personal music would have been a nice extra.
Cropping the song so that it was the same length as the video also proved to be a challenge. 15 minutes of experimenting final revealed a solution.
Unfortunately, no amount of experimenting revealed a way to share my clip with others. WEVIDEO indicated that was possible and perhaps it is. I just couldn’t find it. Luckily, WEVIDEO did allow me to export to VIMEO which is where the link below goes to, should you wish to view my video project.
I suspect most of WEVIDEO failing could be rectified with a decent help section or some form of documentation. Unfortunately, neither is available. Instead, WEVIDEO employs a type of “sticky note” help system instead. When a new user first accesses the program, small yellow sticky note screens pop up every time a new function or command is used. Initially, it’s helpful but soon becomes annoying. When help is needed however, the “stickies” are nowhere to be found nor is much else.
Bottom line? To be fair, WEVIDEO is still beta and may improve with age. At the moment however, it’s just one more video editing tool to validate my theory that there is no such thing as an easy to use video editing tool.
The site is free to use but does require a sign-up. There are also several pay options which add more options and features.
You can take a look by going to
Thanks for visiting DE Tools.
John Goldsmith,
detools01@gmail.com
Hi John, thanks for trying out WeVideo. If you are further interested, the WeVideo team can better help you handle the issues you had with the tool at . This is where all users are contributing with ideas and problems in using the tool to help improve it.