We first heard of video startup Cuts.com a year ago, although details were scarce. After spending over a year in development, the company is just about ready to launch to a small group of beta users, and expand from there. They let us take a quick look at the current product last week – look for an expansion of their private beta in two weeks or so.
Like Jumpcut (acquired by Yahoo) and Motionbox, Cuts aims to help users edit video online using the latest Flash tools.
Cuts lets you pull in and cut apart videos from sites like YouTube and Myspace, with wider support upon launch. To edit a video, you just need the URL of your favorite video or click a bookmarklet to cut the video on your current page. Cuts imports the video and takes you to their editing suite. As of the private beta, Cuts will let you add captions, add a group of sound effects, loop sections of video, and trim out parts of the video. Each of these functions runs on a separate track you use to sync the effect to a time frame in the video.
Not only will you be able to cut up a video once, but each video made with Cuts will also be able to be cut up again, and again. It’s sort of like the video version of music remixing sites JamGlue and SpliceMusic. Cuts will add a few more bells and whistles after their public launch. Check out some screen shots of the service below, or sign up for the beta on their site.
We’ll be waiting for YouTube’s response to Cuts, as users begin to take YouTube videos and start to remix them. YouTube hasn’t been shy about protecting its turf in the past, and they are not going to like what they see at Cuts.
I agree that it will be interesting to see how YouTube reacts, especially if this service becomes popular.
What’s this startup’s goal? Is it a hobby service, or are they looking to become a major competitor in the video field?
it will get popular since its demographic is the youtube audience and who doesn’t want to mess around with videos?
How is the editing experience. Can you only cut on keyframes within the Flash video or can you cut at any point? I play around with Flash video as a hobby and am wondering how startups like Cuts and JumpCut allow seeking within a Flash video to non keyframe locations. Any ideas?
Am I missing something? I doubt that this online video editing tool will even come close to windows movie maker for stability, features and speed.
Never mind the dozen or so real editing tools out there. It sounds like a neat-o, look what we made, kind of deal, but what is a real purpose. Where is the demand, who needs this? This sounds like a project for 3 high school students to look back on one day when they have real code jobs and say “remember when we made that video thing”
Are they really going to extract clips from YouTube? How long before they get the entre IP Block banned, in the works now?
Ideas like this one bother me, Just because you can do something does not mean you should, it sure don’t mean there is demand for it. What is the purpose? This is where people start to blur web 2.0 and Desktop, some things belong on the desktop! In fact, I would say cool if it was. You tube could not ban the desktop client on every workstation worldwide.
Real Idea “Cuts Video Editor” “Built for YouTube Editing” Desktop Program $29.95 in stores now, and at download.com. That would make more sense and more money.
If you are going to piggyback on the YouTube name, make sure they can’t just unplug your company through the web interface of a cheap firewall.
I hope I am wrong because I hate the idea that anyone or any group of people spending a year on something and have it flop as much as I think this is going to.
As for the domain name, they would be better off making a hair style social network.
YouTube already has something in place for this type of piggybacking. YouTube is now selectively transcoding clips at a slower FPS, and the YouTube Flash player plays it back at a higher FPS, resulting in a normal looking and sounding video.
When you take the same video file and open in something outside the YouTube player, the video and audio are distorted.
I certainly applaud the concept as we at vSocial.com released such funtionality weeks ago with our vQuote application. Easy to use and does not require piggybacking on the content of another service – which may or may not work in the long-term. A short demo can be found at http://www.vsoc.../video/?d=66237
vQuote facilitates such conversations by allowing viewers of a video to sample just the portions of the clip that are interesting or memorable to them. When such an element is sampled, the derivative sample is automatically linked as a trackback to the content master. Trackbacks ensure not only that links are maintained between the sample and the master, but that mastered content owners can easily determine who is sampling their content. We have also built in the ability to index via deep tags and time-boxed portions of videos that can have inline comments instanced within them.
vQuote changes the equation for mastered content owners and consumers by reconciling the desire of consumers to personalize meaningful content and make it their own, and content owners’ fears of losing control, integrity and monetization of their content. We at vSocial believe it is important to think through the entire life cycle of the online video sharing experience – both from facilitating the “you” conversations of viewers to the crediting the mastered content owners.
It is ironic that YouTube gets tough when it comes to messing around with videos on their site, but when copyright owners get tough on them…well, YouTube acts like angels.
I will be anxious to see how this turns out.
Josh: Exactly.
Myspace for that matter too.
I bet half of their budget was spent on that domain name.
It would be nice if they had a live rec support like Youtube does with Quickcapture, so that the users could edit their own videos
The speed of all these audio sites are stinkingly slow at 256kbps.
http://www.tekn...ld.blogspot.com
Do you think you could do something as cool as this When Harry Met Sally Mashup (http://www.reel...harry_met_.html) on a site like this? If so, I will be cutting away.
Stan
Idea Thunderdome
I think the attraction here is something like this: your three friends upload some video online in various locations. You take those three videos along with some of your own and make a new fourth video.
It basically allows for dialog in terms of video. People can now make edited video conversations online. I think this is great.
I don’t think folks will use it for longer video pieces in general but splicing together stuff online quickly and easily for a video dialog makes a lot of sense.
I created a “budget” version of this in november, it’s called “SeriesOfTubes” and is at
http://www.stubes.net
There is no money behind the service but i continously developing it. You can create a “TV channel” from YouTube and other videos, plus publish the channel in your blog with an embedded player.
It has some limited start from/play to functionality and the videos are streamed from the original sites. And random play… no seek option… blah blah.
Unfortunately, without professional marketing knowledge/support i couldn’t make attention from the important sites like TechCrunch.
Please check it out, every feedback is welcome and thanks for reading.
Gabor
I think this brings up some of the same terms of service issues as we see with SplashCast. You have original copyright holders, you have the sites, like YouTube, that gain rights when someone uploads video, and, the biggest deal will be when we see more instream advertising — anything that can cut out instream ad impressions will be a serious threat to the business model. I think we will see a kind of DRM-style arms race in terms of control of those Flash streams.
What happened to the ability to cut and remix DVDs that we saw at DEMOfall in Sept 06? Cuts had introduced a social network for editing movies where like-minded people could find edits that suited their taste. Whether that meant a mix of Star Wars & Spaceballs, the State of the Union with Animal House or a simply removing offensive scenes (or adding them for that matter.) That was a killer app for a family with small kids that wanted to be able to watch PG or PG13 movies with the whole family. Cuts demo’d the ability to mute audio tracks so I can watch Breaking Away with my 5 year-old cycling fanatic daughter without introducing her to the few four letter words in the movie.
OMG they stole my idea! these people are going to be immensely rich!!!
mmm i need to replicate myself so that i can develop and implement my plans faster
Nick, thanks for mentioning jumpcut in this review, I am looking forward to seeing what cuts.com comes up with. In an effort to help clarify what features the different online video editing websites have, I would like to offer a definition of video editing on wikipedia. “Video editing is the process of re-arranging or modifying segments of video to form another piece of video… clips are arranged on a timeline, music tracks and titles are added, effects can be created” (http://en.wikip...i/Video_editing). Motionbox offers some great features for tagging and sharing all or pieces of a single video. I’ll quote the first sentence in the “about us” page of their website, “motionbox makes it easy to upload, organize, enhance, and share your personal videos with family, friends & groups.” The trimming process could technically qualify as video editing but motionbox does not currently offer re-arranging, combining, adding titles and effects remixing or the many other things that are included in video editing software. TechCrunch mentioned them when they profiled Jumpcut and I continue to see them offered as a comparison to online video editors. I invite you to take another look at their website, see the great features that they have but evaluate whether those features truly qualify as online video editing.
Wow, what an awesome and relevant domain name you got there! There are some many start-ups out there with terrible domain names. It’s nice to see a start-up with a great and relevant domain name and it’s a 3-letter domain name!! Wow! Wonder how much you paid to acquire the domain?
Wow.. these are really cool.. They make it easier for users to upload their stuff.. Thanks for sharing this cool posts..
What’s the difference between Cuts and Eyespot? They seem the same to me….
I think there is value in an online editing platform…makes it more available to the masses.
Hi everyone Evan Krauss – CEO of Cuts here. Thanks for all your comments and questions. Here is an aggregate response to some of the statements and questions so far.
What is our Goal?
Today we can watch whatever, whenever and wherever we want. Tivo, broadband, iPod, YouTube, and On Demand have radically changed the way we consume video. Cuts mission is to enable the next logical step – easy control of the video experience itself.
Our platform controls how video is played back and allows for easy creation of new experiences from existing videos without altering the original. We are focused on developing the simplest way to create and share your version (aka your take) utilizing the amazing quality and breadth of media already available and being created everyday.
What happened to the service Cuts announced at DEMO last year?
Based on user feedback, we decided to launch our online video service as the first of three services that will leverage our Cutlist platform. First to launch is the service covered here, next is our full length service designed for DVD’s and downloaded videos, which will offer users the ability to create Cuts that control the playback experience of movies and TV shows. Lastly, CutsTV is being developed for cable and satellite providers and will enable them to deliver new forms of parental control and premium services on top of their On-Demand and DVR products.
Legal, Corp, Product, etc?
Some major points of clarification – we do not host video, import video, or alter the original in anyway. Our technology controls playback and offers users the ability to create and share their take of videos already published and open for sharing.
We respect the editor communities such as Jumpcut and Eyspot tremendously, though we see it as a bit heavier than most users want. Our experience is that people want to quickly tweak videos and share it with their friends, not actually fully edit them. They want to add commentary so that they can communicate while the video is playing versus sending an explanation in email. They want to skip certain parts because the video is too long, or add sound effects and loop scenes to call attention to specific moments or just be funny. Our goal is to make this “stupid easy” and quick so that everyone can get involved. We also felt the world has enough video hosting sites at this point.
Domain Name?
And no our domain name did not cost half our budget – it only cost a few thousand dollars and a very happy hair dresser
PS> Beta is launching very soon – keep signing up.
Hi Evan,
i’d like to comment your
“Some major points of clarification – we do not host video, import video, or alter the original in anyway.”
I don’t know yet which video sharing services will be supported by Cuts, but as the STubes guy i know that even grabbing the YouTube flv’s source path isn’t a straightforward/documented/api based thing, which could create some legal problems – depends on them.
) you are not altering the original dvd… but create a new “presentation”.
And YouTube is an easy example, other services’ sources are harder to figure out.
Plus, both Cuts or STubes alter the _presentation_ of the original, which is the important part: for example if you are using a cracked software (i know you’re not, nobody, it’s just a fiction
Cheers for the hair dresser.
G
Evan, do you have to pay royalties to this guy?
http://www.nissim.com
http://www.customplay.com
Susan
Here’s the story of why I was interested in using an online editor/remixer and my expereince with various sites. It doesn’t deal with cuts directly but does indicate how youtube+cuts may compare to jumpcut.
I had a video (”huff and puff”) that I thought web people could do exciting stuff with. It showed me losing my shit- angry to the point of speechlessness, shaking my arms, facial muscles locking, etc. A site like Jumpcut (or Motionbox) seemed like the ticket.
I uploaded “huff and puff” and a few other clips and was impressed with the jumpcut technology. In order to mix, editing must be possible and jumpcut has a slick editor. These are two major technologies and abilities that youtube doesn’t have.
I was able to simultaneously upload multiple videos and they quickly showed on the page dedicated to new videos. I received 2-3 comments in the first days and maybe 40 views. And where would I have been on youtube? The reason (assumedly) I got those views is because the videos went to showed up at the top of an important page on the site. Where as on youtube it would have been washed away in the tens of thousands of new videos uploaded daily.
I’d been asking people I knew to leave comments on jumpcut but no one had. I thought part of this was that people were reluctant to login to a site they are unfamiliar with. After a month I decided to go onto youtube. It was a disappointing decision because it meant a triumph of market share over technology.
I was wrong about getting videos seen on youtube. In some cases the numbers are much higher, in others lower. The only thing definite is people I know are more likely to leave comments on youtube. The jumpcut numbers are solid and I don’t believe posting to one hurts the other. I don’t know who finds my videos- are there people out there who look at everything? Do they hang out on both jumpcut and youtube or search in a way that combines the two? If so then it would be better to post to only one site. That way the video will be pushed higher in the rankings and more people would be likely to find it. This doesn’t appear to be the case. My “football” video from a month ago seems to be dying down on youtube but it has gained some new views over on jumpcut since I posted it yesterday.
Conclusions- There’s a lot of uncertainty. Getting real statistics of views/time would be helpful. I don’t know how people find videos on sites or If they watch more than a few seconds when they do.
People may be more comfortable leaving comments on a large site. There may not be any harm in posting to more than one site. Online editing/remixing may not be really here yet (see comments below).
Some other comments on the sites
Both Jumpcut and Motionbox support teams are very quick to respond to questions. Both allow editing/remixing.
jumpcut- Plus: Good jumpcut instructional video editing with accessible founder.
Uploader allows multiple uploads. Email notification of comments say what the comment is.
Minus: Experimenting with different start points is difficult. This is something required for editing. Slight delays when clicking on part of clip. Not yet competitive with imovie or other desktop editors. This may be a high bar but until it’s met I don’t see a reason to switch. The site doesn’t let you email people directly. You can only send them a public comment.
If you put more than one clip at a time in the uploader it wants to package them into one movie. That’s not how I roll. In fact, Jumpcut’s separation of movies and clips tends to create extra steps.
The site shows a posting time for clips but this only reflects when it was last edited (even if only the description was changed). This definitely made writing this harder as I could not tell how long ago I had posted the videos on jumpcut.
motionbox- Plus: Has deep tagging a very good function. For example in the “huff and puff” video, I could title parts something like “face starts shaking” and another part “unable to keep screaming” and then someone else can come and grab just the face shaking sections, or whatever. When editing it displays the individual frames of the clip which is probably even more important for editing. Minus: The deep tagging is only available for your own videos. A lot of ads on the site now. It requires the newest flash player.
Youtube- Minus: Email notification of comments doesn’t say what the comment is.
Myspace- Minus: Attracts 0 random viewers (for me). Let’s you rate your own video. Puts a myspace logo overlay on the video.