The next time you're sharing a video, do your friends a favor and get right to the good stuff.
SceneMaker, A new video-sharing tool from Gotuit lets you identify scenes within videos from YouTube and Metacafe, then share just those scenes with your friends. You can also add tags to the scenes to better identify the content within the videos.
SceneMaker is pretty easy to use. Feed it the URL of any video on YouTube or Metacafe, and the video loads into the tool. Then, skip to the part of the video where you want it to start playing and hit the "Start Scene" button. When you've reached the end of the part you want to share, hit "End Scene." The fragment that you've identified gets added to a scene list next to the video. The clip fragment can be embedded in a blog post, stuck into a profile page or sent around via email.
There are also some tagging and description features which are really straightforward. Add whatever tags you want to the video, and they get indexed by Gotuit's search engine so other users can find and watch fragments that you've created.
When you embed a "scene" on a blog, the YouTube/Metacafe video is served within Gotuit's web player. The original video is never altered in any way. All Gotuit does is wrap the original video with a non-destructive metadata file that tells the player where to jump to once the viewer hits play. The meta file also holds all of the user-defined tag and description information.
I met with Gotuit CEO Mark Pascarella and product marketing director David Laubner last week, and they gave me a demo of the service.
Afterwards, I took this video of Ween playing "Freedom of '76" on a talk show in 1993 and chopped it up myself. The first 2 minutes of the 5 minute clip are an interview, and I know not all of my friends are super interested in the guys' stoned, rambling answers to the host's inane questions, so I cut the video into two scenes – picking the point right where they start playing the song. The result is a video of just the song that I can share whoever I want. (BTW: It's a legal clip that was posted to YouTube by the band's guitarist.)
The closest thing I've seen to this is the URL hack that forces Google Videos to start playing at a specific minute and second mark. Obviously, Gotuit's tool is much more than a simple hack.
While making my own scene within the video was easy, I had a hard time figuring out how to share it. You save your results, then you have to go search for your video in order to find it, view it and get the embed code. Furthermore, I had to wait 15-20 minutes before my video showed up in the search results. Why not just add a button in SceneMaker that lets users view their videos (and grab the embed code) immediately? [Update: Gotuit has added the ability to instantly share a video.]
Scenemaker also works with the Gotuit browser toolbar. If you have the toolbar installed and you're browsing YouTube and Metacafe, just click the "Make Scenes" button in the bar and the video you're watching will load into SceneMaker, ready for chopping.
Gotuit has deals with YouTube and Metacafe to serve chopped versions of their videos right now. Pascarella says that more partnerships will be announced at a later date. The company contacted me to let me know that they don't have "deals" with any video sharing sites. Rather, "SceneMaker
simply works with any video posted to those sites."
Gotuit also has a distribution arrangement with EMI to serve the record company's music videos.
The Boston-based Gotuit has been working in video since 2000. The company has made significant inroads in the worlds of broadband cable and mobile VOD, so this is a step to improve their video portal and search service. If SceneMaker catches on, we'll be able to search "deep tagged" (Gotuit's words) video fragments containing exactly the stuff we want – without all that boring jibber jabber.
