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Mobile videos. There seems to be no end to the virtual mountains of them created daily. What to do with it all? How to better organize, store, edit and enjoy them? Chad Hurley and Steve Chen did the world a service with their creation of YouTube, back in 2005. But eight years later, they say, people are uploading 100 hours of video to the site every minute.
While YouTube is a great way to share videos, Hurley and Chen have since focused their talents on helping people create better videos.
“We are experimenting with new forms of expression and collaboration through photos and videos, including removing technical and social barriers that prevent people from creating higher-quality digital content, working on it with others and distributing it online,” they wrote on the front page of the AVOS Systems Website.
“Just like YouTube was born from our personal experience,” they add, “so is AVOS (pronounced ah-vohs).” And so, by extension, is MixBit, a new mobile-video editing platform from the company.
It’s currently a free app in the Apple iTunes store, but an Android version is in the works, according to TechCrunch.
MixBit is a way for people to edit together their videos and photos into something more viewable. Users can capture up to 16 seconds of video and edit together their clips—as well as others’—into videos between a few seconds and 68 minutes in length. Up to 256 video clips can be edited together into a single video.
Editing the clips is said to be as easy as dragging and dropping them to rearrange, trim or delete them.
The videos can then be shared on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and in MixBit.
So far, user reviews are overwhelmingly positive.
“The most awesome app I have ever used to create my stories,” wrote one user. “5 stars!” wrote another. “It’s quickly becoming my default video capture app.”
According to TechCrunch, the experience of using MixBit is very unlike Instagram and Vine—it’s not instant, and videos are lengthier.
“The overall experience is closer to opening the YouTube app on your phone,” writes TechCrunch’s Romain Dillet. “You are presented with a feed of videos, and select which one you want to watch based on its title and thumbnail. The main difference with YouTube is that it’s 100 percent user-generated content. You won’t find a movie trailer or a music video on MixBit.”
MixBit seems to have a lot in common with CrowdFlik—an iOS and Android app introduced in June that likewise lets users edit together videos that they and others took at an event. An event can be a huge concert or a baby shower. Anyone can set up an event that other CrowdFlik users can sign in to, to contribute video.
CrowdFlik, uniquely, tightly synchronizes the timing of all videos from an event and cuts them into 10-second portions, so a person—viewing all the clips in a neat grid—can choose to use his or her own videos or a slice of someone else’s from the exact same moment.
CrowdFlick CEO Chris Hamer, speaking of the pleasure of editing mobile videos in this way—the ability to watch one moment from dozens of different angles, or to create video remixes of sorts, designed for specific recipients—the “gamification of video.”
“Right now you go somewhere, you shoot video, and the fun is over when the event ends,” Hamer told eWEEK ahead of CrowdFlik’s launch. Now, he added, “It’s when the event ends that things really begin.”