YouTube adds Magisto automatic video editing tool

YouTube today announced it's offering Magisto's new automated video editor to users. Click on the Magisto icon in YouTube's video toolbox to get started.

Now any video being uploaded to YouTube can be edited automatically. No manual intervention is needed whatsoever--just one click of a button--and Magisto's tool instantly "finds" the best scenes in your video and cuts out the blurry, bad and boring bits. Music and effects (wipes, transitions, titles, and fades) can also be added with two button clicks. The tool is dead simple to use as it literally walks you through the editing "process" in seconds.

Magisto launched publicly just yesterday, asCNET reported. Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, the company also announced it has secured $5.5 million in a series B funding round led by Horizons Ventures, the private venture firm of Li Ka-shing. Ka-shing, the world's 11th richest man, is known for making smart early-stage investments in companies like Facebook and Spotify.

With online photo sharing exploding, especially on Facebook, where tens of billions of photos are uploaded annually, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine Web-based video also blowing up on the world's busiest social network. And when CEO Mark Zuckerberg says content sharing is the new metric (30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook every month), and music, TV, film, and publishers are officially hoisting themselves aboard the company's platform this coming Thursday at the company's F8 developer conference, the prospect of the leading social network becoming a top, if not foremost, video destination is almost a no-brainer.