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Create your own movie mashups with Cuts

Rafe Needleman Former Editor at Large
Rafe Needleman reviews mobile apps and products for fun, and picks startups apart when he gets bored. He has evaluated thousands of new companies, most of which have since gone out of business.
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Rafe Needleman
2 min read

There's a new video editor launching at DemoFall 2006, and boy is it weird. Cuts, still in closed beta, lets you take video content, like a movie from a DVD or a TV show from iTunes, and create your own edit of it. For example, if you want to create a version of "Rain Man" without any references to airplane crashes (just like the airlines did), you can easily cut out those scenes. Or you can create kid-friendly versions of your favorite films. Or even mash together multiple videos; one demo shown here has President Bush playing golf mashed together with a scene from "Caddyshack."

The weird part is that Cuts does not actually create new video files. Instead, when you want to watch a Cuts edit of a video, you need to provide the original source material. Got a great edit of "The Godfather" that you want to send to a friend? Fine, you can send them your edit file, but they have to bring their own "Godfather" DVD (or downloaded version).

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Video: New video editor makes its debut
Cuts CEO Evan Krauss introduced his service at DemoFall 2006 in San Diego on Sept. 26, 2006.

This mechanism keeps Cuts in the clear, legally. It also hampers some of the functionality: You can't record commentary tracks, since there's no voiceover function like there is in Sharecrow (see also Rifftrax). An audio commentary tool could also be used to dub videos with new voices, which would run afoul of current content protection laws. (You can create commentaries in Cuts, but only as text pop-ups.)

When you want to view your creation, you have to merge the edit file with the original content using Cuts software. So you can only play back your Cuts videos on a computer -- you can't watch Cuts videos on your iPod or Tivo, at least not yet.

The separation of edits from source material is a revenue opportunity, though. If you download a Cut and need to buy the source, Cuts can help broker the transaction, and may possibly kick back a bounty to the editor who created the edit or mashup. Cuts CEO Evan Krauss told me he also plans to tap into the Netflix API so customers can automatically get notified if there are edits of movies they're about to get.

Cuts is weird but it's cool. Parents groups could use it to circulate versions of movies with the naughty or scary bits removed (see ClearPlay for another company that does this); fans could share libraries of commented TV shows; and ideologically based organizations (churches, political groups) could remix video to agree with their messages. Meanwhile, the underlying content--the director's vision--is not actually getting erased. There's a lot of potential in this tool.