Kaltura Video Editing Suite | Bringing Social Networking To The Art Of Video Editing

Kaltura is a new video editing tool which aims to bring video
editing out of the solitary endeavor that it has been for a while now
and take it in to the realms of social networking.

Online video editing capabilities are slowly but surely continuing
to improve, with new programs and free tools available for most types
of editing you’ll ever need to produce a good online video.

Because of this, it is now
relatively simple to remix
your clips online. Kaltura marks itself out from the rest of
the web video editing market by attempting to turn it in to a social
activity, and
doing a good job of it.

Ever since the
release of JumpCut and Eyespot last year
it has been possible to upload your video clips and edit them right
from your browser. Since then other players have joined the web video
editing game – including the peoples’ favourite YouTube
with its Remixer tool.

Certainly Jumpcut
and Eyespot
have run their fair share of promotions whereby users can remix
commercial footage. But until now there hasn’t been a tool
that places community and social editing as its core focus.

Kaltura aims to fill that gap,
supplying an award
winning service centered around groups building and collaborating on
community driven video projects.

If you have thought about using video
to expand your blog community, to market your business through
interactivity, or to promote your organization or group, Kaltura might
just be worth checking in on.

Here are the details:

Video Editing Meets The Wiki Paradigm

As I have mentioned if you want to get down to some video
editing on the web, you already have a number of options, including Jumpcut, Photobucket, YouTube Remixer
and the soon to launch Brightcove
Aftermix
tool (currently in closed beta).

But the focus of each is on the
individual as remix artist. Sure you can join groups in Eyespot or
Jumpcut, but any remixes you make are all your own.

For me, the unique selling point of Kaltura
is that it takes the wiki
paradigm
– i.e. the notion of open-to-all, easy-to-edit documents – and applies
it to web video. In so doing Kaltura has also placed a huge focus on
making the process as simple and straightforward as possible.

Here is a tool with group collaboration at its heart – anyone
with
access to your group can upload or import media, and anyone can then
create their own edited mashup
from this content.

And just as wikis have versions, so that you can
track back through the history of a document, so Kaltura separates out
each edit.

Broad Potential

So who is Kaltura for? What is
the target audience
that will get something from these capabilities? Kaltura has done a
great job of putting use-case scenarios right at the forefront of its
website – suggesting how it might be used by different groups, and even
supplying examples of each.

This strikes me as a smart move, as very often the technology
is
highlighted at the expense of what it might actually be used for.
Kaltura suggest that the following broad groups will get something from
giving the service a spin:

Musicians
and bands, who can hand over their music video to their fans,
or even have them build one from scratch for an uploaded music file
Film-makers,
who can set up collaborative film-making projects, have users remix a
movie trailer, or open source a finished piece for remixing
Friends
and family, who can get creative with their home movies
NGOs
and activists, who could get people involved in their cause
through collaborative video editing
Several others, including X-sport fans and travellers

Of course the use case scenarios are very broad, and to my
mind this
could make for an excellent tool for podcasters, bloggers and online
businesses looking to enhance the community participation element of
their web destination.

This is made possible via the video embedding
capabilities offered by Kaltura and the personalized focus of each
Kaltura page set up.

The first thing that Kaltura asks you in the set up process is
in
fact which type of group you are setting up, so it’s clear that
community creation is high on the agenda. Among the options, you’ll
find some great suggestions for how the tool might be put to use.

Creating A Kaltura

Getting started with Kaltura is
nice and easy, and
is made more so by the inclusion of a straightforward wizard that
guides you through everything you need to do.

From here you can choose a name and tag your Kaltura, load in
a
background image from a number of online services, a URL or your
desktop, and then select a colour
scheme
from a fair range of alternatives.

This makes customizing the look of
your community page quite simple and means that you can set it apart
from the other Kalturas out there.

Other options include the ability to choose from a range of
preset font
styles for the header of your Kaltura page, each of which have certain
connotations, from the extremely pop to grungier looks.

In the space of a minute of two,
then, you have the
foundation for your community project. All you need to do from there is
send out invitations to your contacts, and create an introductory video
clip letting visitors know what your project is all about.

The wizard
guides you through both of these things also, and all in all does a
great job of streamlining the set up process. No thought is really
required on your part beyond the selection of your images and colour
scheme, and that’s the way it should be.

Kaltura pages don’t have to be open to all,
however, and the wizard will also prompt you as to how open you would
like your project to be. If you would rather work with a particular
class, group of colleagues or just within your family you can create a
password protected Kaltura.

Equally, if you decide that you aren’t
interested in the social aspect of the service at all, it is possible
to create a Kaltura that only you will have access to.

You can determine who will be able to view, contribute media
and
edit using separate settings, which gives a nice granular degree of
control over projects.

And that’s it, once you have created your video invitation,
and sent
out your promotional emails you are ready for other users to start
contributing to the project.

Uploading Content

Thankfully uploading and editing
are just as
simple, and Kaltura has done a good job of supporting external,
third-party media-hosting services to make the task of brining in media
as simple as it should be.

Visitors to your Kaltura page simply click on an “Add media”
button and
a new wizard opens up to guide them through the process.

They can
choose to upload media from the desktop, transfer it across from
destinations including Photobucket, YouTube and Flickr, and even run
searches from within the wizard.

As you can see, it’s even
possible to record
content right from the wizard using your webcam. This openness to other
services is a positive move on the part of Kaltura, and comes as a nice
antidote to other silo-like services that insist on you upping content
to their platform, even if you have it elsewhere.

This is a trend I’m
seeing more of lately, and hope continues as it makes a whole lot of
difference to consumers.

In addition to being able to bring in photos and images from a
similar range of sources, or a URL, Kaltura also has sound
covered.

What’s cool here is that you can record narration straight
from your
mic – which is great news for anyone who might be thinking of putting a
video presentation up on the web – and can also search two different
sources of free, royalty-free music for your soundtrack.

Thanks to the joys of Creative
Commons licensing, CCMixter
and Jamendo
can be searched from right within the wizard, and tracks can be
previewed and selected right then and there. This is something I
haven’t seen elsewhere, and is a very cool addition, filling out the
range of media available for your mashups.

Editing Content

The editing console built into Kaltura
does a
pretty good job of stripping back to the basics, while supplying all
the things you’d expect from a consumer-grade video editor:
transitions, limited effects, titling capabilities and a timeline-based
editor are all present.

If you’ve ever used iMovie
(at least up to the current somewhat odd version) or Windows
Movie Maker you will be instantly familiar with what’s on
offer here.

Any clips in your project will automatically be loaded in,
ready for
you to drag and drop onto the timeline. Just as is the case with other
video editors you can easily edit the in and out points of your video
using a simple scrubber tool that appears directly beneath your
currently selected clip.

This way you can trim down your footage and
get rid of anything that you don’t want to include.

Once on the timeline, you can click on a little tab next to
your clip
to apply a transition. This will open up a new dialogue in the control
panel of the editor, from which you can preview the small handful of
transition types on offer, and apply your choice when you are happy
with the results.

It’s also possible to make use of a text tool to add captions
and
titles, and you have a choice of colours and fonts to select from, in
addition to having control over how long your text will stay on screen
– measured in seconds.

These are the kind of basics you would expect
from a simple video editor on or offline, and Kaltura treads the right
line between simplicity and inclusion of key features.

Finally, and this is something missing from the latest edition
of iMovie to many users chagrin, you can alter the volume of your
soundtrack at any point in time by simply tweaking the levels within
the timeline.

This means that you can bring your soundtrack up and down
in the mix in relation to in-video sound, as well as being able to
create your own fade-in and fade-out effects.

In short Kaltura provides a
functional, effective
editing tool that isn’t going to wow the pros, but likewise won’t scare
away newcomers to video editing, which strikes me as a happy medium.

The Good

Kaltura
has managed to create an innovative tool that sets itself apart from
the growing competition in the
online video editing
sphere by placing a strong emphasis on community media making.

The
addition of third-party media sources, which are very nicely integrated
into the media creation wizard, is also a great feature, especially
bearing in mind the almost infinite musical possibilities opened up via
the Creative Commons licensed music sources featured.

Not only is the concept a simple and effective one, but the
execution of it is for the large part excellent. Simplicity and the
ability to quickly customize content have been foregrounded here, and
it really pays off.

FInally Kaltura should be
commended for the excellent
screencast video support
offered onsite, which guides you through the three phases of
production, from the creation of a page, to the addition of content,
and finally the editing of videos.

There are a lot of services that
could learn a thing or two here about easy-access “documentation”, and
the video format works perfectly.

The Bad, and The Ugly

My biggest complaint is that the
quality of the
video created within Kaltura – or imported into its player – is
somewhat lagging behind the overall industry standard.

As we move
towards Adobe HD support most players in the market have upped their
game, offering reasonably sized players and improved quality, even when
utilizing Flash 8 rather than Flash 9. The Kaltura player is on the
small side, but this could be forgiven.

The biggest issue for me is the relatively poor quality of
video in
all of the clips that I visited – there is noticeable pixelation
throughout which really detracts from the viewing experience.

When
YouTube outperforms you in video quality (and by a long shot) you have
something to worry about. Hopefully this will be addressed in future,
as obviously a medium as visual as web video is won’t do so well if the
quality remains low.

On a much lesser note and far
more dependent on
personal taste, the aesthetic sense of allowing users to upload a
background photo is to me questionable. Let’s put it this way – Kaltura
pages look a lot more like MySpace profiles than they do Facebook
profiles, and that is all that needs saying.

On several occasions my
eyes politely requested me to turn away from some of the garish
colour-clash riddled pages on display.

Like I say, this is more a matter of taste. Video quality on
the other hand is something that anyone will
notice, and this is the only thing letting down an otherwise awesome
service in my humble opinion.

Sample Embed

You can see below a quick clip I created with Kaltura, using
the webcam
recording mode:

Web TV Wire Meets Kaltura

A Kaltura Video started by Michaeldpick

Add a Clip Edit Kaltura Video Get Widget

Note that the video player above gives you options to grab the
widget for your own webpage, but also to add video of your own, or edit
the current clip, which are cool features.

Review Summary

Kaltura
is a social video
editing tool that makes it very easy to set up a simple community video
page, bring in media from around the web, and open it up to be remixed
and contributed to by members of your group or the entire web
community.

As such it places a much stronger emphasis on the creation
of single-function video communities than its nearest competitors.

The support for third party services
like Flickr, YouTube and even ccMixter
are very welcome, meaning that it is possible to get your project
started with a minimal of hassle.

If you have music, photos or video
uploaded to existing services, you won’t have to go through the process
of re-uploading to yet another closed silo, which is a smart move on
the part of Kaltura. This kind of data portability is what Web 2.0 is
all about.

Kaltura offers a simple, intuitive editing interface, and has
provided excellent screencast video support for the key tasks of
starting a community, uploading media, and mixing it with the video
editing application.

It’s clear to see why this was popular enough to
beat 39 other services to the Peoples’ Award at the recent TechCrunch40
event.

On the downside, video quality is
quite low, with
noticeable pixelation in many of the clips I took a look at. This
aesthetic issue is compounded by the somewhat MySpace-esque design
capabilities offered to users.

The results of being able to upload
background images, for instance, can make for some utterly unpleasant
design, and I would recommend that Kaltura look to Facebook for design
tips and utilize a less-is-more approach in future.

Nevertheless, these are small issues and to some extent
matters of
taste, far outweighed by an innovative concept likely to appeal to
bloggers, podcasters, businesses and organizations looking to promote
their work through community, interactivity and the ever popular video
medium.

Well worth a look.

Additional Resources

If you’d like to learn more about Kaltura, you might want to
check out the following links:

Originally written by Michael Pick, a professional screencaster, web video maker and blogger. Some Rights Reserved.

Author

Michael Pick

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