Welcome. We’re really excited to have all of you here with us, and we hope you’ve enjoyed using Jumpcut so far. If you’re just joining us, we’re looking forward to seeing your movies, and if you’ve been with us for a few weeks, thanks for participating in our launch.

Every morning, we watch the most recent movies on the site, and we’ve seen some great work, including this from specialk:

We’ll be using this blog to communicate with the Jumpcut community on a number of topics, and it will be an active and (we hope) interesting forum. Look forward to:

• Featured Movies & Users
• New Feature Announcements
• Usage Scenarios
• Help & Guidance
• Jumpcut News

You are more than welcome to comment on any post in the blog. Keep in mind that this is a public forum, so write your comments accordingly. If you want to communicate with us in private, you can always email info @ jumpcut.com.

This morning, as promised, we released Groups & Events along with some other great new features. Our engineers are nuclear powered and passionate, so please send us your feedback.

Today’s New Features

• Groups & Events
• Bigger Player
• Emails On Comments
• Tag Navigation
• Changed Rating to Love
• General UI Updates
• Editor: Multi-Line Titles
• Editor: Keyboard Command Help

Groups
Groups are simply collections of people organized for any reason. Your family is a group, your friends are a group, people interested in motorcycles are a group. It really is up to you what kind of group you create. Some groups are organized formally (such as a club or a team) and some are less formal, like fans of a particular band, video game or football team. Create any group you want, but first look to see what others have created. You may want to join an existing group.

Events
Events are different from groups since they are related to moments in time. Like groups, there are many types of events: New Year’s Eve, Hurricane Katrina, Full Moons, political protests, road races, concerts, your birthday, school graduation, your wedding. These are all events. Anyone on Jumpcut can create an event, so make sure you look to see what’s been created before creating your own.

Click here to check out Groups & Events

Now, if you think about this a little bit, you’ll begin to see how interesting it really is. Imagine, for example, coming home from a concert and having immediate access to everyone’s pictures and video from the concert that you can use to make your own movies. Imagine if the band made professional video footage available for you to use to make your own music videos. How fun is that!

Concerts are just one example, and the possibilities really are limitless. In our view, collaborative creation is what “sharing media” is all about, and it’s the number one reason why we’re so excited about this release. As opposed to just watching what other people have uploaded, you can reuse their media and create great looking movies online with music, images, video, titles, and effects. This is only possible on Jumpcut.

So, we’re really looking forward to seeing what you do with these new features. We also have some exciting promotional events coming up soon, so be sure to check back regularly. Oh, and one more thing: we’re still moving fast, so there may be a hiccup here and there. Let us know if something doesn’t work for you (email to info @ jumpcut.com)

Jumpcut received a great review in the New York Times today.

“Their shared objective, the founders of the sites say, is to reduce the complexity of video editing and to reduce the cost to zero.”

The article begins by highlighting a very entertaining music video for the surreal folk song “I Got a Bunny,” written and performed by Juanito Moore.

“The video was assembled, not in a traditional cutting room or with PC-based editing software, but entirely on the Web, using an online service called Jumpcut.”

Below is the result. I give you “I Got a Bunny”

RES Magazine and Jumpcut are pleased to announce the winners of the A Scanner Darkly Trailer Remix Contest. The winning trailer, “Scanner Monitors Remix” was created by Robert Rugan III of Birmingham, Alabama; the runner-up, “Scramble Suit Remix” was created by Dorian Ramirez of Austin, Texas; and the Audience Award winner, “A Civil War Of The Mind” was created by Peter Butler, also of Austin, Texas.

The Grand Prize winner and a guest will be flown to the U.S. Premiere of A Scanner Darkly in Los Angeles, Thursday, June 29th, 2006 and a Microsoft Windows 64-bit powered professional video editing workstation with Adobe Production Studio Premium featuring Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop and more. Runner-up and Audience Award winners will both receive XBOX360 video game consoles, Adobe Production Studio Standard software and an autographed A Scanner Darkly movie poster.

“We were inspired by the response and the number of submissions,” said A Scanner Darkly’s producer, Tommy Pallotta. “The dedication and the quality of work exceeded our expectations in our little experiment. Hopefully this will be a catalyst in even bolder ideas of remixing movies, music and culture.”

Grand Prize: Robert Rugan III - Scanner Monitors Remix

“I wanted the trailer to feel like there were many layers,” said Rugan. “Many different trailers lurking under the surface of this one…that there is an alternate trailer if you just flipped one over.”

Runner Up: Dorian Ramirez - Scramble Suit Remix

Audience Award: Peter Butler - A Civil War Of The Mind

From all of us at Jumpcut, congratulations to the winners and thanks to everyone who participated in the contest. We’re looking forward to the next one!

Check out the Contest Page to see all of the submissions.

By now you’ve surely noticed that we’ve made some big changes to the site. We pushed our latest release (code named Chili) out to jumpcut.com very early Saturday morning. We’re very excited, and we hope you enjoy the new features.

Why Chili? Well, there’s a sandwich shop just down the street where we almost always eat lunch, and the Jumpcut special is a cup of chili, gyros and a bottle of Orangina. That’s quite a combination; eclectic, tasty and oh so satisfying - kind of like Jumpcut.

Back to the good stuff. We’ve got some great new features. We’ve listened to your feedback and have made it much easier to get started making movies. We’ve also updated the look of the site and have deemed it very attractive, we hope you agree.

So, what’s in the Chili?

Multi-File Flash Upload: It’s an alpha version, so be careful! Select multipile files to upload at once and then let the Uploader automatically make a movie. Apply styles and go. Very easy, indeed.

Enhanced HTML Upload: Automatically makes a movie.

Explore: Blog view for movies, enhanced tag navigation, popular movies and active users on the right

Movie Page: Complete UI overhaul, My Movies, In This Movie, Remix History, AJAX info & tag editing

Post To Website: Publish movies directly to your blog, MySpace or other sites, and quickly share movies via email. Access via the Movie Page.

In addition to these new features, we’re also running several promotions that are a lot of fun. Check out our Groups section for even more.

CurrentTV: This is why they invented camera phones. Current TV wants to put your mobile video on television and pay you for it! Shoot some footage with your mobile device and submit it to this group. If your short is chosen by Current, you will get paid $100 and your video will be piped into 28 million homes via cable and satellite TV. Have an opinion on something in the news? Obsessed with street fashion? Pull out your phone, point, shoot and upload here at Jumpcut.

The San Francisco Marathon: RunSFM (www.runsfm.com) and Jumpcut want hear your story. Go to the San Francisco Marathon Group and tell us why you run. For yourself? A charity? We want to know your cause. Once the event is over, return to share your photos and videos with the thousands of people making the journey across the Golden Gate on Sunday July 30, 2006.

Stay tuned in to Jumpcut this week for more announcements.

Chili my soul.

We just pushed a new release (code-named Mango) earlier this week. The majority of the changes were performance enhancements and additions to our commercial API - things that are behind the scenes for most of you. However, users of Jumpcut.com should see snappier performance on the website, particularly on the Home Page and in the Explore section of the site.

In addition to the technical stuff, we did add a couple of neat new features:

Views From Other Sites: Now you can see the number of views each movie is getting from other sites where it’s embedded. The stats are in the Details section of each movie page and include a link to the site where the movie is embedded. The total view count includes views from other sites.

Reply To Comments: You can now reply to comments on Jumpcut! Just click the [reply] button next to any comment and say what you want to say. We’ll notify the author of the comment that you’ve responded. No more page surfing to communicate!

If you’re new to the site, be sure to check out our Multi-File Flash Uploader / Auto Movie Generator. It makes uploading and moviemaking a breeze. Click on Upload in the top nav bar and then “multi-file flash upload”

That’s it for now. The team is cranking on a new release that’s packed with features for the website. Stay tuned and keep making movies.

We’re very excited to have been named one of Time’s 50 Coolest Websites for 2006.

Here’s a link to the story: Time’s 50 Coolest Websites 2006

“You could burn multiple DVDs and drop them in the mail — or you could save yourself the trouble and just upload your masterpiece to Jumpcut.com, add music and visual effects using the site’s own editing tools, and then email everybody the link. Give your friends access to your stuff and they can remix it or blend it with their own footage of the same event (What’s a little video mashing among friends?).”

In other news, sources say that one of our engineers Ashot is in the running for Time’s Man of the Year, but only if he checks his code in consistently for the rest of 2006.

Jumpcut is excited to announce today that we are being acquired by Yahoo!

We have worked hard to pioneer great online video editing technology that can truly enhance the online video world by enabling anyone to become a creator. Joining forces with Yahoo! Video will provide the resources to bring Jumpcut users and our partners more great social media experiences. As part of Yahoo! we’ll be working on bringing video editing and remixing to everyone with an Internet connection.

Yahoo! has a reputation for supporting the vision of its companies and we’re happy to join Flickr and Del.icio.us as leading social media companies within the Yahoo! family.

What does this mean for Jumpcut.com? More creators, more content and more exciting things to do. In addition, we’ll be able to make things happen faster and on a larger scale (and we’ll have a brand new foosball table). We’ll be working with Yahoo!’s media and advertising partners to bring everyone high quality content for remixing into movies. In addition, we will continue to offer and expand the Jumpcut APIs to any partner website wanting video creation and remixing inside your website and offer branded editing and remixing experiences on jumpcut.com.

Jumpcut is the next step in the evolution of social media from simply sharing and commenting on video to remixing, interacting with and creating a social dialogue around media resulting in new forms of cultural and artistic expression. We’re excited about this development and look forward to more innovation in the online video space. Most importantly we’d like to thank the Jumpcut community for your support, enthusiasm and creativity that inspires us and guides our vision.

If you have any questions, please leave us a comment!

We have a great group of people making movies on Jumpcut, and adria is one of our favorites. Here’s a little something she made to commemorate yesterday’s announcement.

Thanks Adria! We love it.

Look at all these features. If you thought getting bought was going to make us lazy, think again folks.

Your very own personal home.
All your media is listed in a easy-to-sift-through fashion. Latest activity shows up on your right, where you can see comments on your movies, who loved your movies, what your friends are doing on jumpcut, and other stuff we knew you wanted to know.

Open movies.
You can now make open movies that everyone can edit together! When other jumpcut users edit your open movie your movie is updated with their changes instead of splitting off into a seperate version (this can be good, or bad, so be careful). Think wiki video.

Editor stuff.
Undo/redo (by popular demand), resize your workspace, new styles (try the jumpcut), high quality preview (see what your movies will look like without leaving the editor), clip indicators on tiles, help, and so on.

The you-can-organize-your-media-without-pulling-your-hair-out feature.
Use check boxes to select multiple items and tag/delete/put them in a set all at once.

Sets make their public debut.
So hide the bad stuff. On the other hand, you can organize your media and send a link to your friends without making a movie. You can also quickly make a movie out of content another user has organized. On top of all that, you can send your friends a link to your page that doesn’t look like garblygook ( here is mine: http://www.jumpcut.com/ashot ).

Also, jumpcut looks better, is easier to understand, and is much improved in ways I don’t care to continue listing here, so you’ll have to try it yourself. It’s just cool, man, you know.

-Ashot