Cross-posted from the global YouTube blog

Until now, when you uploaded to YouTube, your video was hosted and shared, but couldn’t really be changed. If you wanted to trim off the end, swap out the soundtrack, or add an effect, you had to edit your video using a separate program and upload again.

Starting today, you can edit your uploaded videos right on YouTube and maintain the same video IDs. This means you keep your view count and comments, and all existing links to your video will continue to work.  No re-uploading necessary!

Here’s how it works: just click Edit video on the video’s page or on your My Videos page:


You can stabilize your hand-held footage, rotate a video, and boost the contrast and colors. Try “I’m Feeling Lucky” for 1-click color correction:


Or if you’re looking for a more dramatic change, try one of our effects (developed in collaboration with our friends at Picnik):


Click Save to begin processing the edits to your video. And if you don’t like the new version, fear not: you can revert to the original and save again. You can also save your edits into a new video and try out multiple versions. Note that popular videos with over 1,000 views and videos with third-party content can only be saved as new videos once edited (learn more).

Here’s a quick video showing what you can do:


We’ll be rolling this out to all users globally over the course of the day. We know you want your videos to look their best, and we’re excited to see what you come up with using YouTube video editing!

Posted by John Gregg, Software Engineer, recently watched “Shenandoah”.