Google Adds Simple Video Editor Functionality To Workspace With Google Vids
If you like the whole online, cloud-based, and collaborative flow that Google Workspace tools allow you to have, then you’re going to be glad to hear this. All those traits will now find their way to Google’s new video editor, which it has quite concisely named Google Vids. This is going to be the first new tool in Google Workspace in several years and it’s hard to think of something that would have been better to add to the suite of tools.
Google Vids was announced earlier this year, but now, it seems that you’ll actually be able to use it now, though there hasn’t been some big fancy announcement regarding it. That’s because it is still only available for users who are enrolled in the Workspace Labs program (which I am). It apparently only works on PC for now, in addition, as I only got an error message when trying to open it on my phone.
At the moment, Google Vids is relatively basic. If you’re trying to make videos where you use incredible CGI to make it look like you’re going head-to-head with Optimus Prime, this might not be the tool for you. It provides relatively basic video editing tools, such as those that you might find on your phone’s built-in video editor, though not as simple as that. Here are some things you’ll be able to do:
- Upload your own media
- Use stock media, including images, videos, GIFs, music, sound effects, etc.
- Layer and transform multiple videos in a single scene
- Input video recorded from your device’s camera and microphone
- Insert text boxes
- Insert shapes
- Trim videos
- Fade audio in and out
- Put in basic animations and transitions for videos, images, GIFs, etc.
- Write scripts for scenes
I don’t think I’m surprised, especially considering the existence of Google Veo, but Google Vids has Gemini AI integration and as soon as you open a new project, you get greeted with a Gemini prompt in a “Help me create” tab. You can describe what you want to Gemini and it’ll try its best to use an appropriate template, put together appropriate slides, and even use stock media where it can.
I gave this a go, and it’s a bit scary how much it can do based on you giving it a sentence. I asked Gemini to put together a video comparing a phone and its successor, and even though I didn’t necessarily like the design of the video slides, it put in stock videos, determined the aspects that it was going to cover, and wrote a script for me, and handled transitions on its own.
I do think the music was very dramatic, some of the stock videos didn’t fit perfectly, and it wrote incorrect information at times, but it does carve out a lot of the work that you might have needed to do otherwise.
