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Shwup - Sounds funny, but is it?

Another on-line editing tool is Shwup.

It is a web-based tool for gathering together photos and video, sequencing them and adding some music and background effects. I tried it out recntly and here are my thoughts.

Shwup is primarily intended for those who attended an event of some sort to centralise their memories and produce video based on that. The memories coud be in the form of video clips or photo's. As the FAQ says:

But Shwup is best enjoyed with family and friends. All you have to do is set up an album, then invite the people who were present at a party, sports event or wedding. They don't even have to sign up on shwup to view or contribute photos and videos to the album. And since your albums are strictly by-invitation-only, shwup is totally private so there's no way some Internet weirdo or psycho ex-girlfriend can find your album.

The site accepts photos in JPG, BMP, GIF, and PNG as well as videos in MPG, MPEG, WMV, MOV, AVI, QT, 3GP and MP4. When video is uploaded to the site it is transcoded into flash format (FLV) which - in my testing - did result in some loss of quality due to compression issues.

Using the site

The site is very simple:
You create a new album (which will assign it a URL you can share with others),

Schwup Create album

Then you add your photos and videos to it:

Schwup Add

This populates the album. You then end up with an album of videos and pictures.

Schwup Album

Now you can put these together in a movie (actually a 'Muvee' - the site uses a pared down version of the Muvee software)

Select your clips and pictures
Schwup Select your clips

Decide which theme and music you want:

Schwup Select your clips

Create your Muvee:
Schwup Select your clips

You can then share it on lots of other sites:

Schwup Select your clips

Points to Note

1) This is still Beta software so it's not totally stable
2) You will need a user profile and password to sign on (registration is free)
3) 'Editing' is not really editing. You can sequence clips but there is no 'trim' feature for shortening or lengthening clips
4) You decide who has access to the site to add clips etc.
5) There is a 100MB per file upload limit
6) Your original sound is replaced with the chosen soundtrack (and you HAVE to chose a soundtrack)
7) Titles are added automatically and cannot be altered (at least not in this version).
Presumably a number of these issues are meant to steer you towards using the full 'Muvee' software which is referenced on the final page of the 'Make Muvee' sequence

Summary

A neat little tool. Not too sophisticated. Meant for a specific target market and serves that well. I'm not sure, personally, that I will use this too much, but I can see that there are groups who will.

Here is the Shwup main page.

Click here to return from Shwup to Free video editing.com

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