Liberate Your Video with Pixorial

We human beings have come almost a full circle in communicating with each other. From the paintings in caves during stone age, we have now come to communicating with images & combination of fast moving images (videos) in this modern age. When a picture speaks thousand words, it is only logical that videos speak about a few thousand more. Most importantly, when it comes to sharing memorable moments in life with loved ones, videos are indispensable.

Pixorial claims to have been created to liberate the world’s video – to empower people of all ages to share, create and connect with friends and family through video. With Pixorial, people can easily send, upload, edit, organize and share their video memories. Today, we are going to put their claim to test.

Overview

Pixorial is an online video service where personal videos and people interconnect. Pixorial empowers its  users to collaborate with others by adding and sharing clips taken on mobile or full resolution home movies using tools offered by Pixorial. You can edit and remix this video content to create unique & personalized clips of any duration. Regardless of the source of origin, the final video clip retains the full quality and resolution of the master clips.

Sign Up

You can sign up with Pixorial directly using their sign up form or login instantly using Facebook Connect. Login using Facebook account happens via OAuth & your credentials are never stored at Pixorial.

After signing up for the service, a pretty looking window showed up explaining how the service works in just three steps. I clicked on the video upload option in the first step to see what happens next.

Uploading a Video

After a ToS page, we are taken to the actual upload page and I uploaded the Toy Story 3 movie trailer in MP4 format. You can upload upto 10 files at a time. I found the upload process to be pretty quick and the status bar kept me informed of the time remaining and percent of upload complete.

Uploaded videos are sent to the conversion queue and you can go grab a cup of coffee while Pixorial does its magic. An email will arrive shortly after the conversion is done and I found the process to be very quick taking into account my experiences with YouTube & Vimeo.

Dashboard

The dashboard has a clean, three column layout without much fluff that could confuse a newbie. The layout is simple – folders & filters on the left column, the video files in the center column and once a video is selected, the meta data is shown in the right column.

Tagging Scenes

Tagging scene is an option with which we can clip scenes from a video. Consider this essential to create the highlight reel with just the good stuff. Pixorial has done a great job in creating an online video trimming tool. Move the trimmers, one to the starting point in the timeline of your choice and the other to end of the scene.

Add a name to the scene and some meta data if needed & click on Tag the Scene to create a clip. Once the clip is created, you can move the trimmers along the timeline to create as many clips as you want. Once you are content that all the clips have been created, save the project.

Remember to name each and every clip or else the clips cannot be tagged.

Creating Stuff

Time to head back to the dashboard to create an awesome video from the clips we have created. You can select multiple clips using the Ctrl key in the keyboard and click on Create Stuff.

Select clips from the bin and add them to the storyboard. From the transition tab, select any of the four transition effects to spice up the video. The effects in the storyboard and clips can be moved around by dragging them left & right. Titles can also be added from the Titles tab.

When all things are upto your satisfaction, click on continue to explore the sharing options. The video created can be shared in popular sharing networks like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and YouTube among others. A free low resolution video download is readily available and higher resolution downloads will cost you a bit. Video download link is mailed to your email address and you also have the option to mail it to your friends & family.

The Facebook App

Pixorial also provides an exclusive email address and videos mailed to this address are added to the Pixorial video library. You can also connect your social network profiles and publish videos to designated sites in just a few clicks.

Besides the great web app, Pixorial has a fantastic app on Facebook too. Now that Facebook is becoming the go to destination for sharing multimedia content with friends and family, Pixorial will help you enhance the video content you share.

With Pixorial’s Video and VideoAlbum applications, it is now a cake walk for Facebook users to upload, edit, share and archive their videos without leaving Facebook.

Posting a Video

The Pixorial Facebook app launches to a simple looking page with two options – Post a video and Create a Video Album. Let us go ahead to post a video using the app. As with the rest of the apps, Pixorial will also require access to your account information before allowing access to the app. If you are comfortable with the data they pulling from the account, allow the app to proceed.

After approval, Pixorial takes to a page from where we can upload videos. There are three video upload options to choose from. First is the webcam option which captures the video using the webcam and then uploads it to the Pixorial library. To the app’s credit, it recognized my webcam quickly and the video captured was uploaded without any issues.

Since I am not interested to showcase and edit the webcam video of me sitting in PJs, I chose the option to use the existing video from the Pixorial library. For those who do not have a Pixorial account created in the first place, there is always the Upload from desktop option which works in the same way the web app does.

Pixorial Facebook app was pretty snappy when pulling videos from my library at the web app and the video we created showed up in not time.

Editing the Video

I was surprised to see that editor worked the same way as it did in the web app and editing happens by way of moving the trimmers. In the Facebook app, there is an option to add a soundtrack to the video being edited. A lot of tracks are available to select from multiple genre and am pretty sure this collection of music tracks will fit the mood of any type of video. One downside is that you cannot upload your own song into the app.

The volume level of the soundtrack and that of the video can optimized using the volume slider below the player. After the mixing is done, Pixorial allows you to post the video not only in your wall but also in the walls of your friends too. I chose to post in my Facebook page instead.

Creating a Video Album

A Pixorial video album is like a video playground where you and your friends share videos of an event, experience or interest in one album. Here too we have the same three options to upload videos from. Once the video is in the system, we have a editor which almost looks like a standard PowerPoint template.

There are different templates to select from. In each template we have the option to edit the Title, add some text alongside video describing it. For those of us very particular about the template design, you have the option to create a custom template with colors and fonts of your choice.
Once you are done, click on continue to select the list of your friends who will get to see and comment on this video.

Final Thoughts

I really liked the way Pixorial uses overlays to help you with instructional videos during every step of the creation process. Some may find this window popping up multiple times to be annoying, but it  is a great way to make first time users familiar with the web app. Pixorial could consider redesigning the player to bring it more in line with the stylish design of the rest of the web app. Current player design looks totally out of place and a bit cheap.

When editing videos or templates in the Facebook app, it takes a while before we move from one step to another. May be that is because the app has to communicate with the Pixorial server. But the wait is a bit longer than normal and a progress bar or a status message of some sort will make us not to rush to refresh page again. All said and done, Pixorial is a fun app to play with and share memorable moments with your kith & kin.