Last week, we met for the second editing session. Participants in the editing team each worked on laptops to edit their “chapters” for our group video (chapters include home life; church life; school or work; out & about). They worked for hours in iMovie to create rough cuts, selecting favorite or interesting clips and arranging them on a timeline. Some people went so far as to add transitions and titles.

And then tragedy struck!

I discovered, to my horror, that nearly all of the computers experienced a software bug wherein the video projects did not save. [Technical note: apparently this has been known to happen with iMovie 9 running on Macs with an older OS; my newer MBP and one other newer laptop had no problems auto-saving in iMovie.] Fortunately I had been able to export tiny versions of most people’s edited sequences before they disappeared. This allowed me to see what clips participants chose to include, and I made semi-edited versions of several chapters based on this footage.

I also added a few people’s footage to the online editing platform, Jaycut, so they could play with editing their own content from home. However, being free, online, and nearly the only service of its kind available, the system is often slow and buggy due to its relative newness as an open editing platform and the large amount of traffic bogging down its servers.

Today we met for a third editing session, this time working entirely on one computer, using on Final Cut Pro. The irony is that, while this is exactly what I didn’t want – being shackled to a proprietary and expensive piece of editing software – it is more comprehensive than iMovie and in many respects, actually easier to use (making simple cuts, for example, is much easier in FCP). It also allowed the participants to be exposed to a third editing system, identifying interface similarities across different platforms (bins, timeline, viewer, editing tools, tracks, etc.) and make decisions as a group.

At this point I’d like to reiterate that my original intention, to edit this project in a free and open source online platform like Jaycut, still stands. I just wish the platform could be stable, or that there were several to choose from. However, a collaboration is possibly in the works between me and a colleague at MIT to design a platform for mobile video content that doesn’t necessarily offer editing functions, but rather detailed filtering and tagging options (pre-upload) as well as drag-and-drop features to arrange one’s clips in a sequence. Stay tuned; this might be a great help for future projects.