In December, Yahoo all but killed its Jumpcut online video site by disabling new uploads and telling users to head to Flickr. Now the company said it's closing the site altogether in two months.
"After careful consideration, we will be officially closing the Jumpcut.com site on June 15, 2009," a note on the site says. "This was a difficult decision to make, but it's part of the ongoing prioritization efforts at Yahoo."
The closure is no surprise. Yahoo, with its own financial issues compounded by the recession, is under pressure to cut expenses. It's getting a $120 million infusion by selling its stake in South Korean e-commerce company Gmarket and could announce a new round of layoffs when it reports first-quarter financial results Tuesday.
Jumpcut let people upload and share videos, but also combine them into larger works. This option is still available for existing videos, but people's remixed videos can't be downloaded.
In December, Yahoo had said it would keep the site available "for the foreseeable future." Now it's telling people they'll have to retrieve their videos if they want to keep them.
"Very soon, we'll be releasing a software utility that will allow you to download the movies you created on Jumpcut to your computer. We'll send instructions to the email address on your Jumpcut account when the download utility is available," the company said.
Via All Things D
Jumpcut let people upload, combine, and share videos. Now it's in maintenance mode.
(Credit: Yahoo)Yahoo's belt-tightening has led the company to shut down new uploads to its Jumpcut service for sharing and combining videos, steering people instead to its Flickr service.
"We're sorry to announce that we are no longer accepting uploads to Jumpcut," a note on the site said Wednesday. "It was a difficult decision that we wish we didn't have to make, but it was necessary in order to focus resources on other Yahoo sites."
Jumpcut now steers users to Yahoo's photo-sharing site Flickr, which got video abilities earlier this year. Jumpcut won't be shut down, and existing videos won't be deleted, but without the ability to upload new videos, it's clear the site doesn't have a shining future before it.
Yahoo acquired Jumpcut in 2006, but the service never made it out of beta testing.
Yahoo laid off 1,520 employees last week and is in the midst of a review of all its business units to see which should be preserved. The company is under fierce financial pressure that only got worse with the recession and increasingly gloomy forecasts for online advertising.
Jumpcut let people upload and share videos, but also combine them into larger works. This option is still available for existing videos, but people's remixed videos can't be downloaded.
"Jumpcut was built to assemble your movies in real-time so you wouldn't have to wait for rendering. The flip-side of this design means there's no single 'file to download,'" the site said. "There are third-party tools like http://www.clipnabber.com that you can use to get a partial download of your Jumpcut movies in .flv format, but the files created won't include any titles, transitions or effects that you added using the Jumpcut editor."
For video editing, the site steered people away from the cloud toward PC-based applications: Windows Movie Maker and Apple's iMovie.
(Via TechCrunch.)
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
One of the most frequent questions I get from CNET Download.com users is "What free software can I use to edit video?" If I didn't respond to you personally, it's likely because there's not an easy answer. It depends on what type of video you have, and what you want to do with it.
Let's start with the basics. If you didn't know, you likely already have Windows Movie Maker, which was included with Windows XP Service Pack 2 and recently beefed up for Windows Vista.
Windows Movie Maker offers a simple interface, but frustations may abound.
(Credit: Microsoft Corporation)The XP version of Movie Maker is adequate for putting together clips into larger videos, adding simple transitions, and making basic edits, but I can't recommend the experience. The review on CNET Download.com is overly harsh, but it encapsulates several problems you may encounter. ... Read more
Note: This post has been updated from it's original publishing. It now contains a hands-on video overview of Remix.
Adobe's Remix is a new Web-based video editing tool that will be provided free to all Photobucket members in the coming weeks. Remix allows you to string together and edit short video clips. We covered the announcement of the online video editor last week, but got our hands on it this morning.
Remix is essentially a stripped-down version of Adobe Premiere Elements. You get a timeline with clips and transitions, along with a source bin containing all the media from your Photobucket account. Adding clips to your movie is as simple as dragging and dropping. There's also a handy clipping tool if you feel like cutting out the boring bits. There are only three transitions to choose from, and they're all fades. This might seem like a letdown, but honestly if you've ever edited video before, you know some of the flashier transitions aren't necessarily better than the fundamentals.
To put the finishing touches on your movie you can add titles and all sorts of cheesy digital overlays, like a police hat or gingerbread people (both genders are provided). You also can add thought or chat bubbles with customizable text. What really feels off about adding all these effects is that you can only add one to each clip. There is a way to get around this--by cutting your clips into pieces to make them separate--but it would be nice to have a separate timeline for overlays, as the majority of video editing apps provide.
You also can add music to your film, though not your own. The library of music clips is fairly large, although you've probably never heard the tracks. There's no way to add voice narration.
When you're done with your masterpiece, there are the standard URL and embed links, but no way to locally save or export your video to other formats. No doubt Adobe wants you to buy one of its video editing programs for this. This also means there's no way to archive your videos--you've got to rely on Photobucket to keep running.
I like Adobe Remix for the casual stringing together of clips. It's really easy to use and quite fast. The Photobucket integration is spot-on, but don't be surprised if you see Remix popping up in other sites, since the partnership isn't exclusive. It will be interesting to see where it shows up next.
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