A new YouTube app allows you to do very basic video editing

YouTube has now introduced an online editing site, for people who want to do very simple video editing.

To use the site, at youtube.com/editor, you must first upload all of the individual video clips to YouTube. You may want to upload the individual clips under the "private" setting, since you don't necessarily want to make your raw footage public. You can then drag the clips onto a timeline and use a very basic editing feature to adjust the start and end of each clip. There's also free-to-use music if you'd like to set your video to a musical soundtrack.

Keep in mind that your final video is limited to 10 minutes in length, just like any video you upload to YouTube. The editor isn't labeled as a beta version, but YouTube isn't yet promoting it. I found out about it through an online magazine article.

Flip Video cameras come with a similarly stripped-down editor, built into the FlipShare software. FlipShare's editor will at least let you put a title on your movie, a feature YouTube doesn't offer yet.

The new YouTube editor won't replace even the free video editing programs that come with or are available through your operating system -- Windows Movie Maker, Windows Live Movie Maker or Apple's iMovie. Either of those programs has many more features. But sometimes you need a quick way to string a few quick clips together, and YouTube's online editor serves that purpose.

It may also be useful when your camcorder produces better video than your computer can handle. Let me explain:

When I got a Flip Ultra HD last year to take on a mission trip, I was dismayed to find out that the version of Windows Movie Maker on my old and underpowered desktop computer, using Windows XP, would not edit HD video. Most of the HD video editing software I could find was probably not going to work on my old computer.

That left me with only a few options. In the case of last year's mission trip, I used a freeware video-conversion program to bring my HD footage down to standard definition, and edited the standard definition footage in Windows Movie Maker. I kept HD copies of the raw footage in case I needed them in the future; I do plan to upgrade to a newer computer one of these days.

For Windows Vista or Windows 7 users, Windows Movie Maker has been replaced by Windows Live Movie Maker, which you can download for free from explore.live.com as part of the Windows Live Essentials package.

Downgrading my footage to use it in Windows Movie Maker was easy enough, but it seemed like a shame to lose that HD picture quality.

Since that time, for my personal videos, I've tended to use the FlipShare editor. Even if it doesn't give me as much flexibility as Windows Movie Maker, at least it preserves the original image quality. Happily, when I'm editing videos here at the newspaper, I can use Apple's iMovie. I didn't like it at first when iMovie dropped its timeline approach in favor of thumbnails, but I've gotten more and more used to the new interface.

If you're just looking for a way to string together some vacation or birthday party or Christmas footage so that you can share it with friends and family, the YouTube editor may be a useful option.

--John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government. He is also the author of the self-published novel "Soapstone." His personal web site is lakeneuron.com.