Go pro with your GoPro video editing
VAIL, Colo. – The young skier tightens his boots, zips his jacket, and then in a final move, taps the "record" button to turn on the camera stuck to his helmet before pushing off down the slopes.
He's not alone. Thousands of skiers a day shoot video of themselves as they schuss downhill, capturing jumps, bumps and powder-filled face shots. Add in camera-wearing surfers, mountain bikers, motorcyclists and skydivers, and all of a sudden there's thousands of hours a day of action-sports video generated.
But who watches it? A lot is simply recorded and never shared on Facebook or YouTube because, well, no one wants to sit through six hours of your ski day to see a minute's worth of interesting stuff.
Surfer Shahar Solomianik was one of those action-sports enthusiasts who realized he was accumulating hours of video that just sat there, unviewed.
"I wanted to make an awesome clip with music and narrative and edit, like the ones I see occasionally on Facebook and surfing forums. I just didn't know how," he said via email from Tel Aviv. "You buy a GoPro because you see all those awesome GoPro clips, and you want to be able to make such clips of your own, so you buy the camera and you think it's enough but then you end up with footage and a huge gap between the footage and proper clip you can share on Facebook and Youtube..."
YouTube alone sees 300 hours of video uploaded every minute. Facebook gets more than 100 million videos uploaded monthly. A chunk comes from amateur athletes wearing cameras.
GoPro itself is creating a content service where it will highlight best-of videos, available on Roku and XBox, among others.
Solomianik said he tried to teach himself how to edit video but discovered that just wasn't his forte. He tried hiring a video editor, but struggled to get the large files transferred successfully. So he started XCut, an online video-editing service. Users upload their raw videos to a Dropbox account, tell XCut to get going, and then only pay if they want to post the completed and edited video to Facebook or other social media account.
XCut's contract editors around the world, from Canada to Serbia and the Great Britain, cut customers' raw footage into a complete video about 3 minutes long in a day or two, charging $5-$50, depending on complexity. Similar services already exist, but charge far higher rates. Edit My GoPro, for instance, charges about $60 to make a 2-minute video.
"We actually prefer to make the clips shorter and interesting rather than longer and boring," Solomianik said. "They simply have so much better reception on social media when they are that way and after all, social media is the target for those clips. People who want the clip usually don't want them for themselves, but rather to be able to share with friends and family."
MORE FROM Paste BN