With a slew of video editing tools hitting the market to complement the social networking sites boom, you don’t have to be Spielberg to put together a slickly edited home movie or video. It’s the age of ‘personal video.’ These new tools allow absolute non-professionals to put together a well-edited video. The tools are all simple to understand, easy to use, necessitate no graphics degree for you, require no software to buy, and yes they are all free! A relatively powerful windows XP PC or a Mac (which is even better), lots of hard disk space — at least 50 GB — and a proper interface to connect your camcorder, is all you need to start off.
Just the last one year has seen at least half a dozen new tools (some that don’t quite qualify, hence the half) — each one more ‘cool’ than the other — that can capture, edit, trim, loop, add preloaded sound effects and insert captions. They are all online tools, so you can work on your browser. Here’s a quick look at five video editing tools that can make your video a compelling and envious watch.
Jumpcut, www.jumpcut.com, definitely gets my vote to move to the top of the class. I guess yahoo thought so too; Jumpcut was acquired by Yahoo recently. Jumpcut is easily the most developed of the editors that have been launched in recent times. What makes this tool so cool is its web-based online video editor. Its easy to use Flash interface helps you simply drag and drop your film clips into a timeline, trim and loop them and add exciting transitions. But what’s really cool is that it blends fun and functionality; you can email video from the video camera on your mobile phone to the site, where you can then use the “remix” button to edit or mix it with other content to make your video. You can also import Flickr photos and audio from mp3s or lay other audio clips.
The depth and range of its interface makes it great for detailed edits and mashups. One drawback, however, is that it may be a tad too heavy for the Internet.
Eyespot, www.eyespot.com, is a fully loaded editor pretty much in the same genre as Jumpcut. This tool also lets you rip, burn videos, photos or audio on which you can add transitions, special effects, titles, and music. The interface is a little different, though and is not as easy to use, but a few other features makes this tool fall into the ‘cool’ segment. Eyespot lets you mix together your own content or use scenes from their promotional media packs from partners like The Colbert Report, Public Enemy and Dreamworks Pictures. However, what makes this tool stand apart is that it lets you publish directly to sites such as Blip.tv and Veoh. One dampener, you can’t grab video from other networks. But Eyespot’s white label editor is getting more popular and is available on more sites such as the NBA. So watch out!!
Motionbox, www.Motionbox.com, though a little conservative on the fun quotient, makes up with some cool functionality that gives it the edge. Say you want to share only a specific section of a video clip. Well, now you can. Deep linking lets you link not just to a video clip, but allows you to single out and link to a specific segment or point within the clip itself. What Motionbox effectively does is enhance the granularity level at which video and audio content can be accessed, making this tool more effective for serious video editors, like if you are making a video for a presentation.
Another really useful functionality of this tool is the ability to provide highlights on your video and assign them with tags. So each video will have a 'film strip' under the main image enabling you to choose what you really want them to see. Like I said before, this is really useful in a presentation video, or when you want to highlight “Dan getting drenched in a cocktail mix when he forgot to hold down the lid of the cocktail shaker at the New Year party.” Your friends cannot download this video easily and that is one of Motionbox’s drawbacks.
If you already are a Photobucket member, then Adobe has a suite of cool editing tools freely made available for you, the Adobe Remix, http://photobucket.com. If you are familiar with Adobe Premiere Elements, then this is esentially a watered down version of the same. It is a web-based mashup tool using which you can create video remixes, clip, cut, snip what you don’t like, add captions or chat bubbles with customizable text, add digital overlays and music from the extensive library provided; no, you can’t use your own music. Standard URL and embed links let you upload easily, but you cannot save or export your masterpiece to other formats. Typically of Adobe, they keep you parasitically dependent on their other tools, you need to buy one of their video editing programs to save or export and you can archive your video only using Photobucket.
You also need to have Flash Player 9 to run this tool.
Cuts, www.cuts.com, is relatively a new entry into the domain and focuses on remixing viral video. It lets you take videos from other sites such as YouTube, Google or Myspace. All you need is the URL of the video or simply click a bookmarklet to import the video to your current page, then you can edit, trim, loop add preloaded sound effects, and insert captions to personalize the original. You can also recut what you have already cut; kind of like some music remix sites that lets you take bits of different music and put them together. So you can do a Kurosawa on a Spielberg. It’s currently a bit like what YouTube is already offering, but Cuts apparently intends to extend their tools to facilitate simple editing for digital movies and TV shows.
These five tools certainly are some of the coolest video editing tools available in the virtual world today, but there are new ones cropping up every other day. There certainly is no dearth of choice. However, what’s really interesting is how the ever-mushrooming online communities have helped in the evolution of technology. Take the case of Kaltura, a free online site for group video making. It’s the wiki of video making; it allows a group of users to collaborate on the creation of a video. A user picks a topic, invites friends to contribute video, photos or music. They can edit it together and embed it on any site, blog or social network.
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