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

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without complex and expensive hardware or software. Here, we look at four of the best free online video-editing suites. Needless to say, you'll need a reasonable broadband internet connection to take advantage of them.

The editing interface of Eyespot isn't as refined as Jumpcut, relying more on HTML than Flash. In practice, this means changes you make - adding filters or transitions, for instance - requires you to reload the entire page before you can see what it looks like. On the plus side, the list of compatible video formats is larger than Jumpcut's - ASF, AVI, DIVX, DV, FLV, MOV, MPEG, MP4, RM, WMV, 3GP and 3G2 are all supported - and you can upload footage via email by sending it to yourusername@eyespot.com. Pictures and audio can also be uploaded. There's a little added value in Eyespot's media sets, though, where you can find video clips, images and sound provided by commercial film-makers. These might prove an interesting diversion, but we prefer the all-out power of Jumpcut.