Photobucket Adds Free Online Video Editing

Online media hosting company Photobucket has announced a limited beta trial of lightweight online video editing tools from Adobe. The video editing tools are offered as a Flash-based application built with Adobe Flex, and aims to offer video editing capabilities Adobe first brought to market with Premier. The online tools offer a simplified, consumer-oriented interface enabling users to combine images and video with captions, bubbles, frames, transitions, music, and other effects via drag-and-drop. The tools enable users to re-order content and clips, trim elements, and split directly into the sceneline all from a Web-based interface. Via Photobucket, users have access to more than 2.5 billion public images and video clips they can use in their own productions.

Once an edit is complete, users can embed their handiwork in any Web page, blog, or social networking site just by copying and pasting a bit of HTML; Photobucket also offers its own sharing tools, and recently launched services enabling users to quickly post content to Blogger, Zanga, LiveJournal, Bebo, Facebook, and MySpace from within a Photobucket album.

"At Photobucket we’re committed to helping our users get the most out of their personal media, and have fun doing so," said Alex Welch, Photobucket’s CEO, in a release. "Collaborating with Adobe gives our millions of users a simple way to create mashups that showcase their personality and creativity. Users can either broadcast these mashups widely, or share with a small group of friends and family."

"Making Photobucket ‘Adobe powered’ with Web-based video remix and editing technology will radically change the user experience for millions of Photobucket devotees and also up-level the quality and variety of content being distributed by this passionate community," said John Loiacono, Adobe’s senior VP of Creative Solutions in a statement. "We aim to simplify the powerful editing and compositing capabilities that make Adobe software the undisputed creative leader, so that anyone can post eye-catching compositions online." Adobe characterizes its team-up with Photobucket as an indicator of future partnerships and "breakthrough user experiences."

Right now, the Adobe video editing tools at Photobucket are available via a limited public beta, but Photobucket says it will roll the software out to all its 35 million users in early March.

[Updated: 22-Feb-07: Photobucket says 2.5 billion items are available for use, not 2.5 million.]