Hands on: Online video hosting sites

Jumpcut
Jumpcut.com is a video-sharing website with a difference: you can edit online. It allows you to edit not just your own movies, but other people’s too. So if you see a movie that you like, but think it would be improved if the beginning was at the end, you can change it and post the result.

Other people can edit your movies too, unless you don’t want them to. And you can use any part of any public movie as a source clip, which can produce some interesting results.

One of the shortcomings of the service is that with all this cross-editing going on, privacy issues can get complicated.

For example, if you upload a movie that’s private, then use an excerpt from it in a public movie, the whole of the previously private movie becomes public. So, you need to maintain a clear separation between what you want people to see and what you don’t. Possibly the safest bet is only to use Jumpcut for material that you want in the public domain.

Free server space
Most video-hosting services, with perhaps the exception of jumpcut.com, provide free video server space and a variety of features to add value to the experience of video sharing for both content providers and viewers. You’ll have to decide which one offers a service that’s best suited to your needs. If audience reach, community features and privacy options rank high on your features list, then your best bet is to go with Youtube.

Formats and limitations
Most sites, with the exception of Google Video, implement a limit either on encoded file size or running time – or both. Youtube’s limit is 10 minutes and 100MB, the exception being for Director accounts, to which the time limit doesn’t apply.

If it’s an audience you’re looking for, unless your movie is exceptionally captivating, it’s unlikely many people will get beyond the first minute or two, so it pays to keep it short anyway. For longer movies you should comfortably be able to fit 10 minutes-worth of good-quality video at 240x320 resolution into a 100MB file using the Windows Media video (Wmv) codec or Mpeg4 codecs, such as DivX or H.264.

If you’ve just finished your first full-length feature and are frustrated by the 10-minute rule, there are two ways around this. One is to get a free Youtube Director account. The alternative is to upload your magnum opus in several 10-minute instalments.

One thing you don’t need to worry about is whether or not viewers will have the necessary codec installed to play back your movie. Most of the hosting services get around this by transcoding, or wrapping your video in a plug-in player. Google, Youtube and Go Fish convert movies to a Flash Video file (Flv) so anyone with the Flash player installed can watch it.

Tags, groups and value addedVideo-hosting services are more than just disk space repositories for video files. Like their photo-sharing forerunners, most offer searching and social networking features that enhance the experience for video producers and viewers alike.

Nearly all of them categorise videos into familiar groupings and allow you and others to add tags. Tags make searching possible, but they also provide other interesting ways to make use of so-called ‘folksonomies’ – essentially, taxonomies with categories defined by the users, rather than imposed from above.