Product Reviews

Posting videos to the internet is an appealing prospect, but you need serious hardware to do it. Not only does rendering video require a decent processor and plenty of RAM, but cutting clips and storing them on your PC is a sure-fire way to start seeing "out of disk space" warning messages.

But with the huge market for watching short videos online, there's also a need for places to edit the raw footage without complex and expensive hardware or software. Here, we look at four of the best free online

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video-editing suites. Needless to say, you'll need a reasonable broadband internet connection to take advantage of them.

First up is Jumpcut, which uses an impressive Flash-based interface to provide an experience to rival many pieces of entry-level software. Uploading videos is easy, with a generous size restriction of 100MB. While you can't upload best-quality footage from a DV camera, virtually any footage that's already been compressed (including video from compact digital cameras or mobile phones) will be suitable. A good number of file formats - MOG, MP4, MOV, FLV (flash videos), AVI and WMV - are supported. You can also upload images and sound, the latter in either MP3 or WAV format. Jumpcut can automatically add titles, transitions and a soundtrack, or you can control everything yourself - from which type of transition or subtitle style to use (there are 14 to choose from) to their duration. You can then embed your video in an external website using a flash video player. Its spectacular ease of use means you get from raw footage to edited video in less than 10 minutes.