New Youtube Feature Automatically Edits Any Raw Videos

Uploading videos online has become a popular way among internet users to share experiences with friends, family and fellow internet users. But as evidenced by the plethora of long, unedited, raw video material on Youtube and the web in general, many people have no idea how to polish their videos.

YouTube has been working on simplifying the video-creating workflow, with projects like projects like “YouTube Create”. The project offers several video editing apps tools such as animation tool, basic online video editing tools and now the latest addition, Magisto.

Magisto is an algorithm-based automated editing system that enables users to upload their raw video and receive a short and edited video, ready to be shared with the world. Magisto analyzes the video, assesses which parts are most “interesting” and edits it into a “best of” type of video.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YL41fGxzvY[/youtube]

This way, a tiring 40-minute video of a baby playing becomes a cute 3 minute clip with music. Magisto can handle a number of videos as well, not only videos that were taken in one take – as long as the user lines them in order.

Oren Boiman, CEO and co-founder of Magisto, is a PhD student of video and image analysis at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. Together with Alex Rav-Acha, a-post PhD student at Weizmann, they founded the Nes-Tziona-based company in 2009.

Anyone that ever tried to video edit knows the frustration involved, says the company. Many formats introduced as “simple and friendly” editing tools turn out to be complicated, unintuitive and mostly a time consuming process.

Magisto, the company says, offers a simple solution to those who have no technical editing skills to those who want to create a short and sweet clip to share. After uploading a video or a number of videos to the system, all the user has to do is choose a soundtrack.

According to tech blog Techcrunch, “Magisto’s claim to fame is its ease of use; it is, to some extent, editor-less editing. You pick up to 16 videos, select some music, give the end project a title, click a button, and bam! You’ve got a rather slick, smoothly edited video to pass around to friends and family.”

During Techonomy3, an Israeli event for start-ups, Boiman talked about what led him to Magisto. “I filmed many videos of my daughter and when I viewed them they looked terrible,” he says. “After editing them for 10 hours I had a nice product but then I realized I cannot do that every time I want to send a video to my family.”

“Nowadays, people all over the world have hours upon hours of boring but precious videos and are facing two choices – One is endless work of editing them and the other is keeping them as filed on the hard-drive,” he explains.

Besides sorting the videos and adding a tune, Magisto takes care of video effects – stabilizing shaky shoots, fixing bad lighting, and adding video transitions and special effects.

Photo by Magisto