MixBit Intends to Unite Larger Communities Within a Social Network.

By Brian Parker

Mixbit, a new video creation app for iPhone and Android, launched last week and looks to challenge its contenders, Instagram and Vine.  The app, developed by YouTube’s co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, combines the record-and-share familiarity of its rivals with a few new elements intended to unite larger communities within a social network.

Of course, with expanded functionality also comes a learning curve, but MixBit sports an intuitive interface on a sleek dark background. At first glance, MixBit runs very smoothly, with nice loading animations and simple iconography. You can jump to the menu on the upper left to check out featured videos and personal videos, as well as access account settings.

The top right button will take you to camera mode, and prompt you to record your video in landscape orientation to ensure full quality. The flash is accessible with an easy on-off button, and a 4×4 grid features a built-in X-Y axis meter.

From here you can record video clips up to 16 seconds long and combine up to 256 clips, equalling about an hour of footage. Each clip is signified by small band of color under the video window, like a digital DNA strand.

When the phone is turned back to portrait orientation, you can navigate to the edit window, which is the crux of MixBit’s functionality. Within this window, you are given the option to re-arrange, delete, duplicate, and even edit the lengths of the individual clips.  You can also import a clip or a photo, or save a clip to your iPhone’s memory.

Once your video is complete, the next “publish” window allows the video to be published publicly, to a limited audience, or saved as a draft. Facebook and Twitter are linked here for easy sharing. You can also navigate to your videos using the menu icon in the top left corner, where like in the “featured” screen, swiping the video will reveal its comprising clips.

MixBit also allows the user to download clips from other user’s stitched videos, which opens up long-form video sharing to a much larger community.

With this in mind, multi-camera recording could be an interesting new format for mobile videos with the right production and editing skills, and it probably won’t be long before we see more advanced iPhone films taking advantage of this feature.

Already, many published videos from events like Outside Lands Festival have been stitched to make long-form videos, including a compilation of Paul McCartney’s performance.

This option could make MixBit a social hub for fans to compile clips of their favorite artists’ concerts. Already, compilation videos like “MixBeard” (a video comprising clips of guys with beards doing weird things) can be found throughout the featured videos section of the app and the website.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The question remains whether MixBit will generate as large a following as Vine and Instagram. MixBit’s unique editing and splicing options are really its edge, but these elements may also deter users who are comfortable with Vine’s straightforwardness and Instagram’s integration with other social media applications. MixBit will have to push strategically to get new users comfortable with the basics of the app, but it does offer interesting options for digging into much more creative mobile video production.

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