I take lots of short video clips with the handy video feature of the camera I carry around in my purse, but never feel comfortable uploading the “raw” clips to YouTube, Vimeo, or the other service out there. I don’t have any video editing software on my PC mainly because I can’t justify the cost of the decent editors so if I want to polish anything I have to jump on my son’s iMac and use his iMovie app which, though very powerful, I don’t like using for two reasons: 1) in the most recent version, they have changed the output options so it’s extremely confusing to get the quality/filesize combination that I want and 2) any use of the Mac is a frustrating experience for me because I’m so completely PC indoctrinated that the supposed “intuitive GUI” of the Mac is not intuitive at all.

Enter Jumpcut. Mike Arrington and Pete Cashmore had reviews of this site last week and I thought I’d give it a try with a clip I shot yesterday at a RC Airshow that I attended with my family.

Overall, using Jumpcut to upload and edit the clip was a good experience, though I encountered a few usability issues, I was still able to add a couple of effects and some titles to my short clip of some RC aerobatics. Here are the pros and cons:

Pros:

• Accepts most major raw video formats, like AVI (what my camera uses) unlike some other services. Though they said that they’ve seen problems with AVIs, mine worked fine.
• Uploading can be done by email attachment so you can email yourself video from your cameraphone
• There is direct import from Flickr for pictures (to create slideshows or mix with your clips)
• I didn’t see any limitations on how much stuff you can upload. I would be pleasantly suprised if things remain that way, but for now that’s a nice feature!
• Adding titles and effects was relatively easy once I’d figured out the steps
• Titles, effects, transitions, audio, etc, can be placed on a clip and controlled by sizing a slider bar, a nice intuitive way to do things once you realize that’s what the bar is for.
• The preview feature is very handy for testing out the entire effect of your additions to clips
• There are lots of ways to share your clips with the world and with your friends/family, including integrating it as an object in your blog (as above).
• Remixing other people’s clips into something your own looks like it might have some interesting potential

Cons:

• There’s no way to review the FAQ’s or Quick Guide once you’re in the editor: the footer links on the rest of the site don’t appear on the editor page. This makes it difficult when you’re learning and not sure what everything does from the tooltips.
• Uploading a clip while in the editor didn’t give me enough feedback to know that my clip was in the process of being uploaded and I ended up aborting the upload. I had to go back to My Home to upload my clip and see the progress.
• Sometimes the effects simply did not get applied. Even when I added them and they appeared in the effects list. I had to remove the effect and re-add it before things corrected themselves.
• There needs to be persistance of entered data even though the user has encountered an error. When publishing my finished clip, I carefully and thoughtfully filled out the title, tags, description and several other fields on the publish page. When I tried to save my information, I got an error saying that one of my tags was shorter than 3 characters and was not allowed, but it also got rid of all the information that I had entered. This was more than a little annoying since I hate duplicated effort and I’m sure that my second set of entries wasn’t as nice as the first.
• There is no way to download your edited video that I can tell, and even if you could, it would be in Flash format.
• Where is the RSS?? I want to be able to subscribe to “directors” and tags for topics that I’m interested in so that I can be updated when new content appears.
• There doesn’t seem to be a way to resize the blog widget for your video. That’s unfortunate since it kind of wrecks my layout being about 100px too wide. It would be nice if it was adustable (considering that the clip doesn’t even fill the whole width of the widget anyway!)

Despite the cons, I was able to register on the site, upload a clip, add a title and two effects and publish it in about an hour. I think now that I have the learning curve down, I should be able to do the same thing in about 15 minutes or so. That’s about the right amount of effort that I’m confortable with for publishing clips to the web. Jumpcut certainly isn’t a tool to produce professional quality video, but for the purpose of polishing and remixing some less-than-professional clips from my small camera or phone with the intention of quickly and easily sharing them with friends, family and blog visitors, the service fits my needs pretty well. I think I see more video in my future!

Bonus: Here are a couple of other videos on Jumpcut I thought were creative:
Save the Peeps!
Box-Car Racers