How to Tweak Marketing Videos on YouTube

By Kevin Daum, Bettina Hein, Matt Scott, and Andreas Goeldi from Video Marketing For Dummies

YouTube gives you some functionality to tweak your marketing video after you upload it. If your video is well-edited in the first place, editing probably isn’t even necessary, though it can be handy if you’ve uploaded relatively raw videos.

To edit a video, click your username in the upper-right corner and choose Video Manager from the menu. In the list of videos that appears, click the thumbnail picture of the video you want to change. Then click the Edit Video button above the video player.

On the editing page, you can change a number of elements:

Trim: Shorten your video from both sides — simply click the Trim button, and drag the gray sliders from both sides. Play the video to see whether you have achieved the effect you want. When you’re happy with your choices, click the Done button.
Rotate: Turn your video to one side 90 degrees, using the two rotation buttons. This feature is useful if you’ve recorded a video on a camera phone and the video is in portrait (upright) orientation rather than landscape (horizontal) orientation.
Stabilize: Remove the shakiness (a common problem) from your footage. Processing longer videos takes a while, but it’s typically worth your time.
Color correction: The four buttons on the right side let you change the brightness, contrast, color saturation, and color temperature of a video. This process works much like the color correction available in most editing programs. Use color correction to fine-tune the look of your video.

Overly dark videos particularly benefit from a bit more brightness.
Effects: Applies one of several predefined looks to your video. Simply choose the look you like, and click the Apply button.

As always, less is typically more when you’re adding effects to a video.
Music: Replace your video’s audio track with music from the YouTube library. This action doesn’t replace proper audio editing, but if you need a soundtrack quickly, it’s helpful. The Audio tab has a style for almost every situation. Experiment with different keywords, which you can type into the Search Available Tracks box to find appropriate tracks for your video.