Google Vids: The Complete Tutorial Series
I've always been a big fan of Google Workspace, right from the beginning. I like the way it works, the way it's cloud-based, accessible from anywhere, and collaborative so that files can be shared with others. I think Google has done a great job of building a set of tools that are accessible, easy to use, full featured and that just works as you would expect. Starting with Google Docs (back when they bought Writely) and expanding the suite over the years with a presentation tool (Slides), a spreadsheet (Sheets), a website builder (Sites), and so on, the whole suite of tools has came to have everything you'd expect.
Unless you expected a video editor. That was always the missing part of the puzzle for me. I remember years ago I got a call from a friend at Google asking if I'd like to do a Chromebook pilot at my school. We were a heavily Workspace school, but our computing devices were all Windows machines, so we would have been a great candidate for Chromebooks. My first question to him was "can I edit video on these Chromebooks?" The answer was, not really. So I said no. As a media teacher, and I believe even as a non-media teacher, the ability for your students to create video content is important.
Fast forward to today, and we have had Google Vids now for a while. Google finally added a video editor (Vids) to the Workspace suite in April 2024, and it has continued to evolve and grow since then. I was an early user of Vids and thought it was pretty good in the beginning, and it has continued to improve.
One of the clever things that Google did with the design of Vids is to have a significant level of UI sharing with other Workspace tools, especially Google Slides. A lot of people seem to feel a bit intimidated at the idea of editing video, but Vids has been built to share a lot of the look and feel of Google Slides, so it's an easy transition. If you know Slides, you'll feel at home with Vids very easily.
I recently created a series of training resources for Google, taking learners on a path through all the cool stuff that Vids can do. The more I used it, the more impressed I became with the way it's been designed. It doesn't work exactly like other video editors, but it turns out that's a real strength of Vids.
Vids works in the browser, so is perfect for Chromebooks, and of course any platform that runs a browser. This means that whether you use Windows, Mac, Linux of ChromeOS, it works the same. It's not a high end NVLE (Non Linear Video Editor) like Final Cut, Premiere Pro or Da Vinci Resolve, so there are still things it can't do, but for most people who just want an easy way to edit video those things are very much overkill. It's more sophisticated than the simple end of the video editing field, like Capcut or Windows Movie Maker. It competes more with something like iMovie. The area where it wins over all these other tools is that it's fully collaborative. Other than Wevideo, which is also very good, none of these other tools allow multiple users to work on a video project together, and in schools where video projects lend themselves well to groupwork, this is a huge plus.
As someone who edits quite a bit for video, I'm really enjoying Google Vids. I still have some video projects where I'll reach for something a bit more sophisticated like Da Vinci Resolve or Premiere Pro, but if I want to push out a quick video with minimal fuss, Vids is ideal.
While there were some notable features missing when Vids was first launched, Google has been busy adding them. For example, two really obvious omissions were the ability to make vertical 6:19 videos rather than the standard 16:9 landscape mode, and the ability to duck the audio so that the mix of music and narration tracks don't compete with each other. Both these are now fixed.
I'd still love to have some way to add transparency to a video layer to get that "green screen" effect. Chromekeying, (or "Green screening") would be useful, and I'm sure Google will bring it to the product eventually. I'm guessing they will adapt their Remove Background tool that currently works on still images to also work on video, which will be a much simpler approach to the problem.
And while the current 10 minute limit on video length is a good way to force you to be more concise with your videos, it would be nice to have the option to go longer.
Overall though, it's a solid product that fill a much needed void in the Workspace lineup. If you want to learn more about how to use Vids and to deep dive into some of the cool things you can do with it, check out the videos.