I Love JayCut

Action-Reaction isn’t turning into an edtech blog, I promise. However, my students and I have been using JayCut (a free, online video editor) to create video lab reports and video demonstrations from clips taken with our Flipcams.

One nice feature that has great potential is JayCut’s picture-in-picture. It started when I saw this awesome video taken from the point of view of the edge of a sword:

I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a 3rd-person perspective synced up with the sword’s perspective? So I set out to create my own version using a Flipcam and a meter stick (not as cool as a sword, I know). I had a student use a second Flipcam to film me while I swung the “sword” around. We made sure we pressed the record buttons at the same time. Then I used JayCut to merge the two videos together. Here’s the result:

The picture-in-picture effect is really just a transition, but I made the transition last for the duration of both video clips, rather than having one clip transition to the other. In addition, you can see that JayCut allows you to add titles, still photos, and upload your own audio.

Do you remember my Visualizing Newton’s 3rd Law with Colliding Carts post a while back? Well, I just discovered that JayCut can also do variable playback speed. So today I merged the 4 videos from the post (plus 1 extra) and included slow-motion replays so you can see that both hoops are always equally compressed. Check it out:

(FYI: I snagged the royalty-free audio for both of my videos from Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com.)

My students have also been experimenting with video lab reports. Here’s an example from an activity about shoes, friction, and tug-of-war:

I know this group’s experimental design can be improved, but I wanted you to see some actual student work. Doing a video was a choice — other groups wrote a more traditional report or presented to the class using whiteboards.

When your movie is complete in JayCut, you can publish the video to YouTube, publish it to JayCut’s own site, or download the file to your computer. You can also get an embed code to put the video into a webpage, blog, etc. without publishing to YouTube.  (I find the YouTube version to be higher quality, though.) When my students made video lab reports, they got the embed code and put their video on our private Edmodo class page.

JayCut will store all the clips, stills, audio, etc. you upload into your media library so you can use them over and over again. You can save your work and finish later. I don’t know of any file size limit or storage limit. I really can’t believe the site is free, and there’s also no advertising. You do have to sign up for an account, but I have not received any email or spam from JayCut.

That’s it. I just wanted to show everyone what JayCut can do!

(NOTE: Some media in this post may not display in feed readers and must be viewed on the website.)

Speeding Problem?

The Problem:
New playing fields are going to be built on the lot across the street from our school. Unfortunately, people will need to cross Route 121 (a 2-lane highway) to get to those fields.  Currently, the proposed pedestrian crossing is a crosswalk with a flashing yellow light. Is there a speeding problem on Route 121? Do you think the proposed crossing is adequate?

The Solution:
We are videoing the traffic in front of the school with Flip cams and analyzing the videos in LoggerPro. Luckily, the fence posts are 10 feet apart and are perfect for setting the scale in the analysis!

(Feed readers may need to click through to view embedded video.)

If the school had put a police officer or a “Your Speed Is…” sign in front of the school, people would slow down, and the data would not be representative of real traffic. We hope that by recording traffic from a distance, drivers will be more likely to maintain their true speed. We also hope to collect lots of data during different times of the day (different classes) to help in our analysis.

This simple activity serves as an introduction to video analysis, so students will have another data collection and analysis tool at their disposal for future labs of their own design.