Ashot said it well: “O, my. Look at all these features.” The team has been cranking for the past few weeks and we’ve just released our latest version of the site, code named Brickhouse. What’s Brickhouse? It’s our local watering hole and fine dining establishment where we are often spotted at lunch or late at night . . . some more than others. Here’s a ink to their site so you can see more.

We called this release Brickhouse mainly as a thank you to the folks over there for treating us well, and for serving up some tasty goodness. We also tried to put more cool features in this release than items they have on their menu, so let’s see how we did:

Here’s All The New Stuff

• Remember Me - There’s now a checkbox on the Sign In page that says “Remember Me”. If it’s checked when you sign in, the next time you come back to Jumpcut, you’ll be signed in automatically. This makes life a lot easier if you’re a frequent user. Just remember to clear the checkbox when you’re signing in on a computer that’s not your own, or sign out when you’re done.
• Personal Home Page - Now, when you sign in to Jumpcut, you’ll be taken to a page we call your “Personal Home”. This page displays all of your media on the left and also (and we think most importantly), a list of the most recent activity on your stuff and movies from your friends. Now you can finally see who loves your movies, keep track of comments and see what your friends are up to. Your old “My Home” page is still available, except now it’s called “Your Page”. This is what everyone else sees…it’s your public profile.
• Sets Are Visible - We’ve made sets visible so other users can see the fruits of your organizational labors. This is a great way to collaborate: One person organizes, another creates. Very helpful for the right-brain types who know a few left-brainers with spare time. And don’t worry, if there’s private media in one of your sets, nobody will be able to see it. Just the set is visible, not necessarily the contents.
• Actions On Multiple Items - If you go into your movies page (or sets or clips or photos or grabbed stuff), you’ll see litle checkboxes next to each thumbnail. Off to the right, there’s a section called Actions. The actions apply to everything you have checked. Now, finally, you can select a bunch of stuff and easily add tags, change visibility, add to sets, send to groups and even delete. If you’re looking at someone else’s stuff, you can select a bunch of stuff and grab. We call this “mouseclickelimination”. More to come in this area soon.
• Personal URLs - Now you can send your friends links to your Jumpcut page. It’s as easy as http://www.jumpcut.com/username. For example, Steve’s page is http://www.jumpcut.com/weibel. He’s a funny guy and he makes good movies, so make sure you come back and finish reading my serious blog post.
• Explore Gets A Facelift - We gave the Explore section of our site a bit of a facelift. Notably, we added “breadcrumbs” so you can easily see where you are, and we made search results much more clear and usable.
• 100MB Uploads - You can now upload individual files of up to 100MB each. Of course, your overall storage on Jumpcut is unlimited, so upload away. We’ve made our nifty Flash Multi-File Uploader the default for this release, so you can have some fun too.
• A New Way To Create - We’ve built a simple wizard that helps new users get started making movies. You can check it out by clicking on [Make A Movie] from the home page, or if you’re signed in, by clicking Create in the top nav and then “Create Using A Simple Wizard”. The cool thing about this is that you can make a movie without signing in and then Sign In or Register to save your movie when you’re done.
• Import from Flickr and Facebook - We’ve always had the ability for users to import their photosets from Flickr and we’ve enhanced the interface quite a bit with this release. We’ve also added similar functionality for you to import your photo albums from Facebook.
• Open Movies - Quite possibly the coolest new feature in this release is what we call “Open Movies”. You know how with Jumpcut you can edit your movies from anywhere at any time? Well, we thought it would be neat for you to let other people edit your movies too - not remix and make a copy, but actually edit the master version. So, if you’re ready to unleash the creativity of the masses, you can make a movie open by setting the visibilty to Public and selecting the Open checkbox. You can do this from the Publish page or on the View page. If you have some free time and you want to work on someone else’s movie, just go to Explore and click on Open Movies. You can work on anything you see.

  Right now, we consider this to be an Alpha feature, meaning it works, but it’s not 100% complete yet. Very soon we’ll be adding more capabilities around open movies that will let you control access and retain a history of people’s changes. But for now, be careful. If you make one of your movies open, anyone can edit. Also, if two people are editing at the same time, one person’s changes may be overwritten by another’s. Still, it’s very fun to collaborate like this, so check it out and let us know what you think.

• Make A Copy Of A Movie - Lot’s of people have asked for this. We put a link on the View page that lets you make a private copy of a movie with a single click. If you want to save a version of one of your movies at any point in time (its a good idea to do this before you make a movie Open), just click [make a copy] in the Details section of the View page. It’s the equivalent of Save As and it’s instant.
• Undo Changes While Editing - Yes, it’s finally here: when you make changes in the Editor, you can now click Undo and it will, um… undo your last change. In fact, if you make many changes, you can click Undo many times, and we’ll step back through your changes one by one. So many of you asked for this, so we decided to move it up in the schedule. Actually, Ashot decided to put it in this release and he kicked butt to get it done in time. This is a great feature that lets you really experiement safely with changes to your movies. Do and Undo, there is no Spoon.
• Apply Styles While Editing - You know those nifty styles you can apply on the Jumpcut Upload page? Well now you can apply them inside the Editor. You’ll see a new tab called “Styles” that lists your options. Once you apply a style, we’ll automatically tweak your movie. This is a great way to get things done quickly, so give it a try. After all, you can always undo. Note that applying styles may work a bit more slowly on the Mac.
• Resize The Editor Panes - The Jumpcut Editor always resized nicely to fit your browser window, but sometimes (especially on laptops or lower resolution displays), the tile pane just wasn’t big enough to see enough of your tiles. Now you can resize the tile pane by dragging the horizontal bar that separates the tile pane from the preview window and tabs. If you make movies with lots of stuff, this will save you heartache and get you home for dinner.
• High-Quality Preview In The Editor - If you want to see a high-quality preview of your movie while you’re editing, just click Preview. We’ll dim the lights and present your movie in it’s full resolution. This is a great way to check your work as you go.
• Basic Help - There’s now a help link inside the Editor that brings up a page with basic feature assistance and another tab that lists available keyboard commands. It’s a good quick reference. Outside of the Editor, you’ll notice new Help links at the top right of each page on the site. These links are context sensitive, so you should get relevant topics. We’re updating this stuff as we go, so let us know what you’re having trouble with and we’ll post a new help topic as soon as we can.
• New Stuff In The Player - You’ll notice that when you’re looking at one of your own movies, the big green button on the player says “Edit”. This means you have access to edit the master copy of the movie. If you’re looking at someone else’s movie, the button says Remix, meaning you can edit, but you’ll be creating your own copy. Not really a functional change, but we felt the distinction was important
• Photos as JPEGs - We’re now displaying your photos as JPEGs instead of in a Flash player. This makes everything look better and retains the correct aspect ratio. Oh, and we now call your pictures Photos instead of Images. We figured everyone knows what a Photo is, and the people who understand why we were calling them Images would also understand what Photos are. Make sense?
• Thumbnail Embed Code - If you want to post your Jumpcut movies to a website that doesn’t allow Object tags (e.g., free LiveJournal accounts), you can now easily post a Thumbnail image. Just click on Post To Website under any Jumpcut movie and copy the Thumbnail embed code.
• General UI Overhaul - We took a pass at the site UI and made some much needed changes. We hope you like the new look.

That’s quite a list. As you might expect, not everything goes perfectly with such a big release, so we’re working hard to clean up any loose ends that we missed. If you come across something that’s broken, you can always send an email to our support guys (support [at] jumpcut.com) and they’ll help you out.

We’re very excited to be launching such great new stuff in conjunction with our recent Yahoo! acquisition. As always, we’re committed to making Jumpcut the best place for you to be creative online and we’re determined to keep breaking new ground. We feel that what we’ve built so far is only the tip of the iceberg. With this release, we made it a point to listen to our users and prioritize what we felt were the highest value features. We know there a lot more things you’d like to see, so keep in touch with us. We love hearing from each of you.

I also want to thank the Jumpcut engineering team for their efforts on Brickhouse. Ryan, Justin, Karen, Ashot, Ben, Ramin, Jesse, Jason, guest developer Stephen Weibel . . . Thank you all very much.

Jumpcut releases these secret videos highlighting the technology that allows you to make your own movies.

You can now share your Jumpcut movies on facebook by clicking ‘Post to Website’ underneath the player on the view page. Choose “Share on facebook” and your video will be added to your Mini-feed. The title and description of your video will be included with your embeded video. It’s an easy way to add and share video to your profile, and this is how it will look:

(it’s a screen grab so the video doesn’t play.)

You can also create a slideshow from one of your facebook albums. Click on the following link to see how it works:
Create a Facebook Slideshow

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a contest winner! Our winner for the My Cubicle contest is Ruediger Post from Berlin, Germany. When we contacted him to inform him, his famous winning words were, “Thats great, fantastisch, das ist grossartig, fabulös, ich freue mich.” Ruediger wins a much coveted, vintage Jumpcut T-shirt for his entry. Check out his heartfelt video here. You really get that he is bored in his cubicle. More winners for other contests to be announced soon…

We’ve got three winners for the STARZ Stand UP Now Contest which ended on September 22. Our Grand Prize winner, Mike Anderson (chinomike55) from Layton, Utah wins a video iPOD pre-loaded with the entire season of Stand Up or Shut Up, among other prizes. Our first prize winner is Jake Sharon (jakeisfantastic) from Denver, and second prize was won by Don Barnhart (barnhartjr) from Las Vegas. They both got lots of cool STARZ shwag and all three will have an opportunity to have their entry aired by STARZ on its programming services. Congratulations!

New Line has announced that the winner of the Your Nightmare Comes True contest is Troy Foote (phantom_prowler) of Baldwin. His winning movie is titled EVER SEE A DREAM…?. He wins $500, a collection of horror DVDs, and his trailer movie will be featured on the official site. Congratulations to Troy!

The Vega4 Life is Beautiful contest ended last week and we have winners. terry_provence, williamdouglasb, camitoba, stokes_stfc, imelill and hixeldice have all won an autographed copy of Vega4’s new album, “You and Others”. Congratulations everyone!

EA Sports announced today that the winner of the March Madness Replay Contest is ckfoot01 of Plymouth, MI. ckfoot01 wins a trip to the EA development studio in Vancouver, Canada for a campus tour and an introduction to the NCAA® March Madness® video game development team. 2nd place was ssflaherty and his winning video was “EA Sports NCAA 2007 and Jumpcut present”. In 3rd place was maundo with his movie “No Mercy”. Congratulations to all of our winners and thanks to everyone who participated! Check out ckfoot01’s winning video below.