New ‘Star Wars’ animated shorts are now streaming on YouTube

Can’t get enough of the Star Wars universe? Here’s one more thing to sink your teeth into. The best part? It’s streaming for free on YouTube. The new Star Wars animated series is called Forces of Destiny and it shows some heartfelt moments of heroism in the universe, while also showing backstories of some of your favorite characters. It’s a 16-episode series made by Marvel alum Jennifer Muro with Lucasfilm Animation. Eight episodes have already been released and the other eight are coming in October.

Forces of Destiny is episodic and jumps around Episode 1 to 7 and we get to see the likes of Rey (Daisy Ridley), BB-8, Princess Leia/General Organa (Carrie Fisher), and even Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones). Each episode lasts around three minutes and focuses on the female characters in the Star Wars world. Each episode also beings with a voiceover from Maz Kanata (Lupita Nyong’o).

Source: Ars Technica

YouTube is getting rid of its built-in video editor & photo slideshows

You may or may not know that YouTube has a built-in video editor in its app. We’re banking on you not knowing this information as the streaming service cites this as a reason why they’re getting rid of it. YouTube announced that the built-in video editor and their photo slideshow features are both going away by September 20^th. What will stay is the “Enhancements” feature that lets you do things like trim videos, add subtitles, cards, and filters, among other things.

Source: YouTube Help Forum

YouTube is testing GIF-like video teasers for desktop users

YouTube wants to show you bits and pieces of a video while you’re browsing on the web. The streaming site started testing out video previews a couple of weeks back but they’re now rolling it out to more users. If you hover your pointer over a video, you’ll start to see a three-second teaser of the clip. It supposedly works for videos that are longer than 30 seconds. Not all creators are getting this preview though. According to YouTube, it’ll depend on “topic and content.” You’ll see the previews on the Home page, Search results page, Watch page, Subscriptions tab, and Trending tab on Chrome and Opera.

Source: YouTube Help Forum

YouTube’s set to introduce dynamic video resizing on mobile app

Having to adjust to the age of smartphone-shot videos where users sometimes don’t know they’re shooting in vertical (or prefer to shoot that way), YouTube is set to update its mobile app and accommodate the different formats people shoot videos these days. The upcoming update will have the software itself play the video in its appropriate size and not have it comply with a fixed area within the app. So in the future, you will see vertical, square, or horizontal videos as they were shot. You get to see a bit of that in the GIF above.

Source: TechCrunch