So this is pretty nifty, both because of the tool and because of the apparent business model. YouSpins.com allows you to remix tracks from 40 or so artists with a simple to use Flash-based interface. Once remixed, the new track can be saved back into the community space (which is very much ‘social software’) potentially serving as remix fodder for other users, posted on your blog or saved as a ringtone (which is where the business model seems to come in). The artists retain the copyright to the original songs AND the remix. It doesn’t seem to be a service that you could just upload any track to and start remixing – the remix tool appears to have access to the original unmixed tracks and so it works only with the artists who are in partnership with the site, but it is an interesting app and an interesting attempt to marketize the remix/ringtone culture. – SWL

Staying with the Sakai-theme for a bit (but in fact the more interesting theme emerging for me is “affable web-based tools for rich media manipulation,” more to come), in the Sakai wiki I came across Project Pad from Northwestern University. It is a suite of audio and video annotation tools, including tools to annotate quicktime a/v files, flash movies and mp3 audio streams, still images, and do audio transcription. The suite includes two tools for searching and managing content stored in external digital media repositories such as Fedora systems, Z39.50 library catalogs, and Google and uses the Common Query Language. And it looks to be becoming integrated with Sakai. Not sure this is a flickr-killer (but who says it needed killing anyways) but maybe one alternative worth investigating for those attracted by some of that functionality (it is actually much broader) but uneasy with sending their faculty off to 3rd party commercially hosted services. – SWL

Via Mark Oehlert’s post I came across these two new tools with the promise of “online video editing tools” and I just had to check them out. With more and more services popping up allowing people to share and find media, this is another logical step, online remix tools, and one that I am interested in as well because I don’t have any video tools of my own (or ANY skills with video for that matter, making myself a perfect test candidate) (read more…)

I checked out One True Media first. The site lets you upload video clips, static images and audio files, and then create ‘movies’ by ordering these. Not bad, very easy to use, but not exactly what I had in mind. You have to use the clips ‘as is’ and the interface to edit your movie is slightly clunky – you assign numbers to each clip or image for its sequence, but you don’t get a great sense of when any particular image or clip is going to occur in relation to your soundtrack, which means if that’s important you would need to be using the sound on the clips as the main source. There are some neat features though; there are controls for each clip or image to control the fade in and out and the effect whilst the image or clip is being viewed. So a quick way to get a nice montage of home movies or images strung together with a soundtrack and that’s probably what they are going after. To that end, you can see my little experiment; it took about an hour to do

has some photos and clips of family and friends (spot the famous edtechbloggers in there if you can and is accompanied by the sounds of The Flaming Lips “Do You Realize?” (which I think breaks all the copyright rules I agreed to, oh ooh).

Much more exciting was Eyespot. Once you enable your account (which offers to populate your media account with some free clips, both a clever marketing ploy for some bands but also helpful for folks wanting to get started and not having a ton of digital clips handy or wanting to try it out without having to upload media) you can then start uploading clips or go straight to the mixer. What made Eyespot really stand out for me was the ability to edit and create new clips from existing ones – in the ‘mixer’ view, if you click on ‘play/trim’ for any clip, it allows you to set new start and end points within the clip and then save it as a new clip – meaning by uploading one longer file, you can easily segment it online into many smaller bits, making for very easy remixing. The other cool part – this is social software (in the best sense of the word) – you can offer your clips and mixes up to the community for further remixing and start to find new content for your own projects. Expect lots of taggy goodness and other Web2.0 tricks to abound. You can see the results of 30 minutes tinkering below – this is just small clips from 4 different movies cut together, 2 uploaded from the Prelinger Archives over at the Internet Archive and 2 found already on Eyespot.

Now it’s maybe not great, but surely you can make out something like a narrative here, and if an absolute video duffer like me can do this, anyone can.

Sure, these are pale imitations of what Mac users enjoy with iMovie and the rest of us try to do with the other video desktop apps we might get our hands on (I’m talking about us amateurs, right) but it’s web-based, can be used from anywhere, and is built to forment a remix ecology to boot. Awesome! Try it out for yourself, I know I am hooked. – SWL

I’ve noticed a number of folks picking up on Inkspace, a new open source SVG editor, and rightly so – the development of open source apps that are not infrastructural or aimed back at the development community itself is exciting and growing at an incredibly rapid pace. But frankly I was still blown away to come across Blender, an open source 3-D rendering program, as I hadn’t expected to find this level of sophistication in this type of application available as open source quite yet.

A quick read of the software’s history offers an explanation and is a fascinating case study – the software has been around for some time, and the rights and code were bought by a group of ex-employees and enthusiasts after a public fund-raising campaign explicitly so it could be released as open source. And their e-shop offers another vision of how, given the low overheads now to create online stores and create products on demand, open source projects can create small revenue streams to fund at very least expenses like website hosting and bandwidth costs. – SWL

I hunted around for some free options, and didn’t come up with much. But below is a list of possibilities and pointers if you are interested in following up on this:

- OpenOffice’s presentation tool allows you to export as flash presentations; unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to do voice narration (yet)
- PowerPoint does actually allow you to do voice narration of your slides, and you may be able to export these in IE-specific formats that preserve the voice narration on the web (though I couldn’t get it to work). You could also investigate one of the many Powerpoint-to-Flash conversion tools that exist and see if any of them preserve the audio narration
- there are quite a few commercial products that offer screen capture and voice narration capabilities. One that I have used is Qarbon’s Viewletbuilder. I seem to think we got it for a couple of hundred bucks. This presentation groups such products under the heading of ‘Demo Software’ (that is, software to create software demos) and lists a bunch of others one could consider, some for as little as $80.

I’m really interested to hear Brian’s own reflections on how big a part Breeze played in this presentation. I get the sense that while one could have produced this using other software, Breeze definitely can help the process along. – SWL