* Create movies from video clips and still images
There’s a wave of new Web services emerging that provide facilities that a few years ago would have been unthinkable: Video editing and delivery.
One of the most talked about of these services is Jumpcut. Jumpcut allows you to upload video clips and still images and create movies from them as well as from content already on the system.
You can use the content’s audio tracks if they exist or add new ones. You can clip, duplicate and split video segments, define transitions (box in, box out, fade, and so on) and use effects (blue tint, distortions, etc.) to enhance your “footage.”
Once you’re happy with your content you can publish it for just your friends to see or turn it loose on the whole world and Jumpcut even allows you to embed your movie in another site. The results can be surprisingly good but more often than not, they are as amateurish as you’d expect.
What interests me about this service are two issues: how it is used and what is expected of it.
How it is used is, for the most part, essentially personal such as showing the grandparents what the grandkids are up to. While a lot of this content is publicly available, the majority is neither particularly interesting nor compelling unless you are a family member.
The minor use is art for art’s sake – a smaller group of enthusiasts edit things like music videos and make “mashups” for fun.
A good example of this is a competition on Jumpcut that has now been closed. This competition was to edit your own version of the trailer for the movie adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s “A Scanner Darkly” (I so want the movie to be good but given that it stars Keanu Reeves that is probably a forlorn hope).
What is expected of these services is quite a different matter. Much has been written about how these services will democratize content creation and distribution implying that we might expect the next blockbuster to emerge, unbidden, from the depths of the likes of Jumpcut.
While this isn’t impossible, it is unlikely. The fact is that Jumpcut and its kin provide an entry into video content distribution is far more profound than the editing features.
So if you are looking for the next big thing don’t expect that the output from Jumpcut to be “Star Wars” or “The Matrix” – it is far more likely to be “The Kids at Disneyland” or “Baby’s First Birthday.”
On the other hand, while the cultural impact may be less than a blockbuster movie the profits from making it easy to edit and distribute the family videos are likely to be more durable … especially if Keanu Reeves isn’t in them.
