Implementing Plugins into Autopost (like regular post process)?

Hello,
I've been looking at this plugin for a while as I'm very interested in starting a video site that runs on user submitted content. I've got everything set up at the moment and I'm at the point where I would like to purchase Gravity Forms (preferred) or hire a developer to custom build a solution for me. Basically, I would like a logged in user be able to submit a YouTube video URL to be detected by SimpleVideoEmbedder with a custom field (working); I have a theme I customized that has a video player section, so the YouTube video would autoplay in a pre-specified place. The user would also be able to insert a description of the video which would be used as the article body text. The only part I'm not so sure about is how to handle thumbnails; I've read around this forum and found a couple recent posts on Wordpress.org about users having a tough time getting them to work. I'd like for a plugin, Video Thumbnails (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/video-thumbnails/) to be able to detect the YouTube video from the custom field which SimpleVideoEmbedder uses, but be able to do so when a user publishes their video with Gravity Forms. I'm aware you can use hooks and add code to Gravity Forms, but I'm not very code-savvy and I just would like to incorporate some normal post-publishing plugins into Gravity's publishing mechanism. Is this possible? If so you have earned yourself a happy customer.