Making Videos Faster

Funny how one thought can spawn another. Latham’s post on Locale Best Practices of The Marriage of Online Video and Real Estate got me thinking about something relatively random I read earlier this week. In his Salon Machinist blog earlier this month, blogger Farhad Manjoo details a comment made by Apple’s guru-in-chief Steve Jobs about the new iMovie program that comes on the new machines.

An Apple employee whom Jobs identified as “one of our most brilliant video engineers” took a vacation recently to the Caribbean and, when he came back, tried to make a movie of his trip in a half-hour. “He couldn’t do it,” Jobs said. The old iMovie—not to mention Final Cut Pro, the company’s professional video-editing program—just didn’t have the tools to do a good movie so fast. So the fellow created his own program. “We were so blown away that we decided to use it,” Jobs said.

With this new software and its productivity-enhancing features, one might suppose they will have the ability to create simple videos even faster and easier than they can right now (that is, if they’re doing so on a Mac). Hard to say exactly how that might manifest, but one can guess that entrepreneuring folks like Andre Kendall (who, according to this referenced Wired blog post, himself admitted that editing his MiniDV movies in iMovie “was too lengthy of a process”) might take advantage. The first wave of the short-form, online (call it what you will) video revolution has barely begun to crest.

—Chris