Feature: clip video

[Matthew Exon]

The gallery currently allows editing photos by cropping them or rotating them. By analogy, it should be possible to extract a short portion of a video clip and save it as a new video. Note that saving as a new video is critical, do not overwrite the original. This is because you might want to extract multiple clips from a single video.

Justification for why this is important enough to add to a core app:

A phone is a communications device. The reason for adding a video camera to a phone is so that you can quickly share a moment with your friends, on the spot, immediately. It's not really so that you can shoot footage for the feature film you're developing in your studio.

You don't want to waste data and you don't want to waste your friends' time. You want to send as short a clip as possible, normally just a few seconds. But you have to shoot a fairly long video, several minutes, to be sure of capturing the right moment. So without the ability to clip the video it's almost impossible to capture something worth sharing.

Mucking around with a specialised video editing app is complicated and loses the spontaneity. There is definitely a role for a feature-rich, sophisticated video-editing app. I would certainly want this for more interesting cases. But I would only resort to that on rare occasions.

It could be argued that this is the responsibility of individual social media apps. But if you use multiple social media apps that wastes time. It also wastes developer time and increases the UI surface area.

Adding a video clip feature would take the video recording functionality from a "maybe I would use that sometimes" to a "something I couldn't live without" level of usefulness.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Arthur Mello (artmello)]

Adding ubuntu-ui-extras to this bug since editing features from gallery come from ui-extra's editor component.

[Bill Filler (bfiller)]

we could certainly use a generic video editing component that any app could use