Well I had these video clips

I took my son to a party for one of his friends at a local jumphouse called PB & J’s that has 5 jumpers set up for the kids to play on. And with it all being inside, it’s a nice idea for bad weather and such, or just an affordable way to keep the kids entertained and in one place. While there I was bored so took some pictures and video… well a couple turned out funny so I decided to try this service I had heard of called Jumpcut.

A Web 2.0 website using a mix of ajax and flash, it allows one to put together and edit a video using just the site and the material you give it. They provide some basic clips and you can upload video, music and photos to fill out the finished product. With the ability to edit via standard timeline adding in titles and effects and also you can overlay or replace the sound in the video with music. A nicely powerful interface allows you to fairly simply put together a nice web quality video.

Now the bad. I kept running into errors. The fancy Ajax upload would quickly go to 58% and then stay there, so I had to use the html upload. Also at one point I added a title, and it was refusing to show, in fact the credits sequence never seemed to be able to be previews… unless I actually used preview. I was so glad at actually getting it to work, I didn’t edit out my cheesy arrow that I had in it.

Over all if they fix the minor issues of when I couldn’t preview the stock clips, or the other minor issue sI had, then they’ll have a very popular alternative. One thing I should say is that the clips from my cell phone where not normal Quicktime Movies, but 3G Special Compressed.

I’d post a play by play on how to use it… but it really wasn’t necessary. Once you got that clicking the magnifying glass zoomed into the clip to edit that… I found it fairly easy. Below is the simple movie I made.

Edit: I was pointed to the fact that YouTube had started a beta on their own editor. And it looked promising in that the interface is much faster. The ability to easily edit titles are nice. And all in all it looks like it a much better product (Its a project with Adobe). But:

• The quality of the video itself is terrible
• They mention adding in pictures, but don’t have an ability to upload them
• The music options don’t seem as full
• And the heart-breaker, I was trying to drag my clips in to be edited. But it tends to error out and say it wasn’t able too.

I was not able to recreate the above video (using its transitions and titles) because of these issues.

Tags: Design, Interesting, Video, Web 2.0