Who needs apps? Online video and image editors are here

Everybody's familiar with the new model for distributing video, thanks to YouTube, but most of the good videos on YouTube and other services are edited the old way: on a PC or a Mac. That may change soon, as online video editors roll out.

There's a very good one that's live now: JumpCut. With this tool, once your videos are uploaded, you can splice them together, overlay audio tracks, and add effects similar to the ones you'd find in a traditional software-based editor. Since all the editing happens online, you suffer through the slow upload only once.

You can also re-edit other people's videos, which is fun and may be a big hit with music tracks. I can see artists and labels posting their own video resources online and letting fans make their own music videos. There's a danger when you open up material like this (see the GM ad contest fiasco), but it could give a big boost to artist/fan relationships.

I first saw this product when the CEO demonstrated it, and I was blown away by its capabilities. In trying to use it, though, I ran into some frustrations. No matter how good the tool, editing videos is hard from both a technical and a creative perspective, so you'll need to put some time into it before you can churn out acceptable results.

There's another good online video editor in development, MotionBox [via TechCrunch]. Also, interesting photo-editing tools are coming online. Try Pixoh and Pxn8. These let you do with your online photos what you're probably doing right now offline, in Picasa or a similar app.