Jumpcut.com: Stream your media….and your friend’s media

Jumpcut.com is quite an interesting concept: edit, remix and publish your short film without having to buy editing software…or a computer for that matter.

I had looked into Jumpcut last quarter as part of a brainstorm I had that people could now shoot, edit and publish short films at almost zero cost. By using a cell phone or cheap point and shoot digital camera, a person could record video, upload to Jumpcut, and then edit and publish using Jumpcut’s film editing cloud application.

Gone would be the day that a person needed a film crew, a big budget, and lots of assistants to create a successful film.

Looking again at Jumpcut, I am perplexed at how they can manage online film editing AND allow editors to grab other people’s clips, and use those within their own movie.

In this share and share alike film editing network, I wondered how a system could be setup to link this all together while providing a smooth viewing experience. It is quite alot to ask a server to stream a complete movie file….it’s entirely another thing to have a server stream the same movie, but have it made up of multiple video clips form different authors, rendered in real time with special effects and basic film grading.

So far my personal experience with Jumpcut has been a mixed bag. On one hand the interface is simple and quite powerful, on the other the streaming can be quite unreliable depending on the time of day that I try to use Jumpcut.

As bandwidth and server power/storage continue to improve, I imagine that even complex tasks like film editing will take place in the cloud.

-Kirk