Jan
I recently returned from a great ski trip over New Year’s to Heavenly with my best college friend Hyaat and his finance Sheila. We had a great time, despite a shortage of snow on the mountain.
Anyway, Sheila had bought Hyaat a new Casio digital camera for Christmas. I was impressed with the small size of it and the nice LCD screen. We took it out on the slopes with us and ended up taking a lot more video clips than actual still photos. This lead to a perfect opportunity for me to try out Jumpcut, a new online video editing and video sharing site that I heard about from TechCrunch not too long ago. Jumpcut is now owned by Yahoo!
So I got started by uploading about 20 video clips ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes. Most of Jumpcut’s interface uses Flash, and their Flash uploader tool is pretty cool—but it kept crashing my browser (Firefox 2.0.1 on Ubuntu Linux 6.10)! I only got about two clips uploaded with the flash browser before I gave up on it. I did notice in Jumpcut’s FAQ or Help page they mentioned Flash crashing on OS X, but no mention of Ubuntu or Linux. In any case, I think the have some stability work to do.
Luckily, Jumpucut also offers a standard HTTP upload which works fine, but it was slow even on my high-speed cable connection. The worst part was that I had to upload the video clips one at a time. It took me about two days (not continuously) to get ‘em all uploaded. This painful upload process was my biggest complaint. Jumpcut: either fix your flash uploader or offer a FTP/SFTP batch upload option!
Once all my video clips were in there, I really had fun arranging the clips and creating transitions between clips. I should say that I have very little video editing experience – I took one TV production class in high school years ago, but then we used two VCRs and a little jog wheel – nothing like this! I had also used Windows Movie Maker once or twice. And before trying Jumpcut, I played with Kino for Linux for a few minutes, but quickly abandoned that because it was too complicated.
The Jumpcut movie editor is very easy to use. I like how you can easily switch between editing a single clip and then back to the whole movie in one click. I did have a few problems again with Flash/Mozilla crashing on me, but Jumpcut lets you save your progress which saved my video from destruction a few times.
I has some problems with the ‘Undo’ functionality – it didn’t seem to undo change-by-change like I would have expected. Also, I think the audio overlay features could use some more work. I couldn’t figure out how to fade out an audio track into another track—so I ended up using one song for the entire movie.
Overall, I think Jumpcut is a lot of fun, easy enough for most people, and a great Web 2.0 business. I know I found myself glued to Jumpcut’s site for hours at a time, which could have presented them with ample opportunity to show me ads (but there were none!).
I knew you would ask. Here’s the video:
