Web edit tools, phone cams blowing the doors off video

David Johnson February 2nd, 2007

Meet the new auteurs: they carry cell phone camcorders, shoot in murky natural lighting, roughly edit their clips online at Jumpcut or Eyespot, and there are millions of them. Nearly 350 million cell phones with camcorders were sold last year, this year the number may brush against 500 million, and we already know the numbers that YouTube is taking in and dishing out daily. One of the main catalysts in the explosion is the sheer simplicity of the online editing tools. “The reason we started was that we had DV (digital video) phones and DV cameras and were trying to edit video, but it was really hard. Packaged software is like a freaking space shuttle, it’s so difficult to use,” said Eyespot co-founder David Dudas. Hans van Haagen, the video editor of news and documentaries at Dutch public television broadcaster NOS, says, “Cutting a news item is something you can learn. There’s not too much to it.” In the future, which may already be here, shooting and cutting simple video may be a skill as common as burning a cd or typing, widening opportunities outside the industry.