This past week Google integrated video editing functionality into YouTube. While basic, the toolset brings much needed capabilities like trimming and clip combining to the world's most popular video sharing site. It also allows users to swap out background music using AudioSwap.
Web-based editing tools are nothing new, but what starts here as a simple set of tools for trimming clips might eventually grow into an actual NLE. I'm not saying that we'll be tossing our copy of FCP to edit video in our web browsers, but I do believe cloud-based encoding is the future, and just as I've dropped Microsoft Office for Google Docs for the majority of simple tasks, cloud-based editing might have a place in everyone's toolkit. Of course, video is different from word processing because of its datarate and storage requirements; to that end, I'm curious as to what a NLE would look like running on Google's forthcoming Chrome OS.
