Review: WeVideo is a cloud-based video editor that makes editing in your browser fun and simple

The cloud is all the rage these days. We've got email in the cloud, backup in the cloud, not to mention project management, image editing, and pretty much everything else that you use your PC for in the cloud. WeVideo wants to add one more type to the mix: A cloud-based video editor.

What makes it potentially hard to get off the ground with a cloud-based video editor is that all of your raw footage must find its way into the editor. A decent five-minute video could require hours of raw footage to create. Since most users have connections with slower upload than download speeds, you could be uploading footage for hours on end before you can even begin editing. Fortunately, WeVideo's seamless connection with Dropbox and others cloud-based file storage services makes this less of an issue.

Erez ZukermanWeVideo makes it easy to export to connected cloud services, but its free option is watermarked.

When I use my Galaxy S III to shoot footage, it is automatically uploaded to Dropbox. The upload takes time, but I don't need to think about it or do anything to make it happen. Once the files are in Dropbox, I only need to point WeVideo at them, and it pulls them into the editor very quickly. Feeding WeVideo with a gigabyte of footage took less than ten minutes, once it was all on Dropbox.

Once your footage is in the editor, the editing experience is simple and pleasant. WeVideo offers a timeline you can drag clips onto. It is easy to trim clips as needed and add transitions, and there's a rich library of soundtracks you can use. Fading audio in and out takes just a couple of clicks, and the whole system felt responsive and would be familiar to anyone with experience with desktop video applications.

One advantage of WeVideo's cloud-based nature is collaboration: You can invite friends to upload footage to your project, and even create different edits based on the same footage. This collaborative workflow is one of the service's main selling points.

Once you're done editing, it's time to export your work. Free accounts can only export very low resolution (480p) watermarked video. I understand the limitation, but I wish WeVideo was more upfront about it and made it clear as part of the registration process, rather than reveal it at the last possible moment when the editing work has been done. It is easy to connect WeVideo to YouTube and other Web video services, so you don't have to download a file and upload it to YouTube yourself–WeVideo does the whole thing on its own.
If you need to collaborate on a video project with a distributed team, WeVideo offers important benefits and can let you share footage and edits in ways that aren't possible otherwise. It can also come in handy for the occasional solo project, as long as you don't mind uploading your footage to the cloud prior to editing.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can use the latest version of this Web-based software.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
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Free, Cloud-Based Word Processor Zoho Writer Shows Promise

Zoho Writer is an online (with offline and syncing functionality) word processing application that offers a nice amount of functionality, especially given the limitations of the Web as a platform for productivity tools. After creating a free account with Zoho, you can access Zoho Writer. It looks a lot like most word processors, so if you've used any major program in this category, it will take no more than a few minutes of poking around to learn how to do things. This is good, because the "Help" is in the form of a FAQ, not a tutorial or index of functions.

Zoho Writer offers a clean, user-friendly interface that packs a lot of functionality for a Web app.The interface for Zoho Writer is well designed. Each button serves as both a tab which reveals a toolbar, and as a drop down menu. This is really, really, nice--you can have the Format toolbar showing, then click the "Insert" dropdown and choose a command, without the current toolbar being replace. There is no need to click back to your preferred "main" toolbar. On the other hand, if you prefer switching toolbars, just single-click the appropriate button, and there you go.

Overall, using Zoho Writer was simple and pleasant. I experienced a very slight mushiness or lag when typing, in terms of the time it took between hitting a key and seeing the screen update, as compared to using a non-Web application. The font selection is limited to the usual assortment of Web fonts. The most advanced and complex features of programs like Word, which border on layout/desktop publishing software, are not available, but a number of features that add real utility to document creation, such as the generation of a table of contents, are. Other features are available which would be useful if they worked.

Zoho Writer is listed as a beta, which means it can be forgiven some sins, but the last entry in the blog for Zoho Writer is almost a year old, as compared to other Zoho Apps with newer entries. This is unfortunate, as some useful features are currently broken. For example, footnotes are malformed (appearing with %20 instead of spaces). The ability to set multiple columns for your document is nice, but there are some oddities--you must save or print to see the columns, instead of working with them in the direct editing mode. This isn't too much of a problem, but during my initial tests, the columns did not appear in my saved document. Subsequent tests to confirm what I thought was a bug, though, did produce correctly saved documents. Zoho Writer exports in a variety of formats, including .doc, .docx, LaTeX, and HTML.

As compared to Google Docs, Zoho Writer is close. The Zoho Writer interface is less Spartan, and there are some features (such as columniation, or being able to highlight a word and add it to the table of contents, without styling it as a header) that Google Docs currently lacks. However, the beta state makes me a little hesitant to recommend it unconditionally for those happy with Google Docs. It's certainly worth checking out--it's free--and the offline save and accessibility means the risk of loss is small if you like it and decide to use it. I'd very much like to see Zoho move this product to their front burner and get it debugged and out of beta. I'd like to take a look at it when it's fully baked.

--Ian Harac

Easily share your documents online, with friends on an individual basis and in group. Collaborate on them in real time. ccess and edit existing documents even without an internet connection. Offline document edits will be synchronized when you are online. Make use of Zoho Writer's feature rich WYSIWYG editor for publishing your documents to blog. Upload documents from your desktop, Google Docs or anywhere on the Web. Download and save them to your computer too. Experience the joy of writing documents in a real paper like environment. Edit them the way you wish to see in print. Build your document by picking up from a collection of readymade templates from our template library.

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