Update: CMA member Pat Parish points out this NYTimes article about similar video-editing sites. See if you can spot the connection between Parish and the article. 
Jumpcut is a web-based video editing site that lets you upload, edit, and publish videos entirely through a web browser. It’s one of at least two such “web 2.0″ sites that are in “beta” (the other is Motionbox which isn’t open to the public yet).
There are plenty of caveats to the idea: 50MB max. video upload, slow uploads, no download of finished video yet, and the fact that it’s “beta” software.
Still, I was able to complete this little 35 second movie in less than 30 minutes (including the time it took me to convert music and movies to acceptable formats). The editing interface is pretty easy to get used to if you’re using iMovie or another editing software.
Take a look:
(I shrunk the size of the video to make it better fit this web page. You can see a larger version here)
What does this have to do with college media? Plenty. If you don’t have access to video editing software, this might be a good tool to get your students into posting video content on the student web site. Right now, the video is hosted at Jumpcut (sort of like YouTube), and it can be linked or embedded into a page on your site, like this.
Scenario: You’ve got a student who shoots some video of an interview they conduct for the newspaper. You can take the video of that interview, splice it up and post it online with minimal effort - from any computer that’s logged in.
I’m not sure how this will work in the long run from an economic model for Jumpcut, but for the time being, it’s something worth experimenting with for college media outlets.
