I Spy…

I had a bit of fun over the father’s day weekend with my son Connor. We sat down and decided to make a little movie using only my phone and the editing features of the site JumpCut.com which allows you to upload clips directly to their site then use their web 2.0 tools to cut, crop and edit your clips online for free.

We wrote about JumpCut.com before when it was first launched or rather when I first found it in January. You can see that article here (Make Movies Online for Free.

To see the movie and read more about the whole experience click the “continue reading” link.

Connor and I decided it would be fun to make movie about him and his favorite toy, his tractor. He received his tractor from Santa in December and on every nice day you can find him riding around the neighborhood working away.

It’s been months since I took a look around the site JumpCut.com and to be fair this is the first time I actually tried to make a movie from beginning to end. For being a free online service it’s very robust and very easy to use. The only thing easier to use would be Apple’s iMovie which comes free with every new mac. Importing movies was painless and being able to upload as many clips as you want all at the same time is huge plus for the site. I was using the stadard file format on most phones for movies which is 3GP and since these files are normally small it didn’t take long to get them online. However, when using jump cut your able to use pretty much any format you want which I can’t say about Apple’s iMovie. It didn’t even see the 3GP files so I would have had to convert them to another format just to use them in iMovie.

The only problem I had using JumpCut.com was the output options and how they make you use their site just to view your finished work. I would have also liked to keep a copy of the finished work on my local hard drive so I wouldn’t need to be online to watch my finished product but since it’s free you can’t really complain.

Making the movie with the phone was quite easy we only had to think out the scenes we wanted to include then between each one I was able to pause the recording mode using teh built in tools included with the phone. Jumpcut.com made it very easy to trim the clips so to avoid adding the small bits we didn’t want included. I think we will be making more of these in the future just for fun. The quality is not very good since it was a phone doing the recording but you have to admit it’s pretty cool for a phone movie.