Video editing is easy and free with new JayCut
Posted on 20. Dec, 2010 by Kristy Roschke in Multimedia, Tips, Videography
About a year ago, I wrote a post about a new web-based video editor called JayCut. Not long after that post, the company took the site offline to make some improvements. Don’t you just hate when that happens?
Fortunately, for those of us who are technology poor, JayCut is live again with a new and improved free web video editor. My beginning journalism students recently put it to the test and came up with some pros and cons to the site.
Pros:
- It’s free. We’ve struggled with Windows Movie Maker for years. While JayCut is not a cure-all, it seems to cause fewer problems in the areas of upload time and crash-rate than Movie Maker.
- It’s easy to use. If you can upload video, pictures and audio, you can make a movie. Its simple and familiar time line interface is easy for even the most technologically challenged person to understand.
- It has some pretty cool effects. JayCut provides the standard transitions, text and clip trimming options you’ll find in iMovie and Windows Movie Maker. But it also has some nifty additional features, including the ability to speed up or slow down video, to grayscale, colorize and edit video and pictures and to freestyle draw right on video and photo clips.
- It’s embeddable. We have embedded a few videos on our website on My High School Journalism, and the player is clean and allows for easy sharing.
- Every time you preview your movie, it automatically saves. This pro came from one of my students. I think we’re all aware of how notoriously bad students can be about regularly saving their work, so this little gem of a feature gives some added peace of mind when working on big projects.
Cons:
- Very slow upload speed. Obviously this is the big one. It can take forever to upload a lot of media, so my students had to do a little at a time so that they weren’t spending an entire class period waiting for an upload. And although JayCut claims to have real-time rendering, my students earned new badges for patience as they waited for previews to load so they could review their works in progress. This may have as much to do with my decade-old computers and the school’s Internet speeds as the site’s real-time technology, but either way it posed some problems.
- It’s basic. JayCut is not a fancy video editing software, but it’s not trying to be. It’s tough to do superfine editing, and the audio controls can leave something to be desired. But for what it’s meant to do, it seems to do it quite well.
In the end, if you’re just getting started with multimedia projects or don’t have access to the latest and greatest technology, JayCut will likely fit the bill. It’s a quick and easy way to take the plunge into video without worrying about investing an arm and a leg. Our videos are all made using a Flip camera, Olympus digital audio recorders and JayCut. They’re basic, but the multimedia experience is invaluable for the students as they learn to get creative with the tools they have.
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2 Responses to “Video editing is easy and free with new JayCut”
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bryan farley
20. Dec, 2010
thanks Kristy. I will try this and see if it works on our old school computers and new filters. we can’t use the YouTube editor, but this might work.
bf
Michelle Harmon
22. Dec, 2010
Great info . . . I will share it with my newspaper students.