• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 16, 2010

YouTube execs confirmed Wednesday that Google's video site plans to release an editing tool later today aimed at those who know little about editing videos. The tool will have editing features that allow people to trim videos and remove background noise, replacing the hum or buzz with music. That's for starters.

The free YouTube Video Editor tool will not require people to download complex software. The tool becomes perfect for those who take a quick video, find the first five seconds jumbled up, and want to trim it off quickly.

Video Editor will use the Audio Swap library of tracks, so people can add them for free. Replacing the background noise with music will allow people to choose from a library of tunes that YouTube made available for free, too.

The ability to splice and remove a piece of the video and move it to another location in the clip is not available today, but YouTube Product Manager Josh Siegel, and Google and YouTube engineer Rushabh Doshi explain that could come in time based on member feedback. As a workaround, people can drag the same video twice into the timeline -- trimming the beginning of one and the end of another and slicing them together.

Although YouTube will target the tool at a segment of consumers that may not have heard or thought about video editing before, the tools will allow them to edit and render 1080p, which is full high definition. "The tool is based in the cloud and it's totally in line with Google's cloud computing strategy," Siegel says. "We're pushing it out as a bare-bones video editor, and as we improve the product in time based on user feedback, we can push out the new features in real time without requiring anyone to download them."

Marketers and advertisers have a heavy product department, but once they upload it to YouTube they might find portions don't fit the experience they want to capture, so they can trim them in the editor.

It's not clear whether YouTube will build different versions of the tool if the company decides to expand on the services. It's a product, marketing and engineering discussion that will require careful consideration, Siegel and Doshi agree.

The tool will go live later today, if the push is successful.