If you have a penchant for creating music-backed video mashups, you’ll probably like Weavly.
The Berlin-based startup offers a Web app that helps you create video compilations simply by searching by keyword from sources such as YouTube and Vine, while pulling in background music from SoundCloud. Heck, it also lets you access animated GIFs from Tumblr, Loopcam and Imgur if that’s your kind of thing.
How it works
Weavly is all about ease-of-use – first enter any search term you like.
You then just drag the video and/or audio onto the timeline and you’re pretty much good to go.
It’s worth noting here, you can edit each video clip to narrow down on a very specific moment, this could be a goal from a football match, or chorus from a song, which is essential for any mashup.
When you’re done, you hit ‘save’ and you can share directly across the social sphere or embed it with the iFrame code.
Animated GIFs
Weavly has been in open beta for a number of months already, and during this period it seems that the demand for animated GIF-mashups has really come to the fore.
“We knew from the beginning that GIFs are even more fun when mixed with sounds,” explains Oliver Lukesch, CEO and co-founder of Weavly. “The first GIF mashups created by our beta community were a blast. But then we found out that teachers in the US started using Weavly in combination with animated GIFs for showing their students how to easy it is to create and publish multimedia stories and presentations online.”
Now, the Weavly team is looking to capitalize on the public’s insatiable desire for funky looping GIFs by introducing a standalone generator that taps Tumblr blogs to let you create music-backed videos.
With this new roll-out, Weavly now supports a broader variety of Tumblr GIFs, including individual posts. Also, you now no longer have to drag/drop media files onto a timeline – simply paste a Tumblr and SoundCloud URL into the respective boxes, and you have a neat looping GIF montage, backed by music.
You can also tweak the parameters, including the number of GIFs used, duration of each GIF and so on.
It would be good if there was scope to plug multiple Tumblr blog links into the mashup generator, but alas you are restricted to single URLs for now. But if you choose a page that has tens or hundreds of GIFs hosted on it, you could still have a pretty long feature on your hands.
Animated GIFs are a vestige of the Internet of yore, but they are showing no signs of dying out. In fact, we’re starting to see a real resurgence in recent years, with the likes of Cinemagram growing in popularity, and Vine (owned by Twitter) which offers GIF-like 6-second looping videos. It finally arrived on Android this week, as it happens.
“Video on the Web was the domain of YouTube for a long time, but there is a massive shift happening,” continues Lukesch. “While YouTube is more and more turning to original content, new formats and platforms like Vine and Loopcam start to appear. And we want to be at this intersection, we want to empower people to be creative and express themselves with the media they’re surrounded by every day.”
Weavly is a fun app, but it badly needs more effects such as cross-fades for YouTube mashups. Plus, I would love to see a feature specifically for mashing fan-shot footage from a single concert together, which would probably require the same audio track from one video to run throughout – as things stand, the audio switches with each clip if you don’t use a single backing track from SoundCloud.
Also, given it’s still in beta, you may find some bugs. For example, I encountered problems saving videos in Firefox sometimes, plus a couple of other usability issues here and there.
Meanwhile, check out this animated GIF montage I created in about 5 seconds.
➤ Weavly
Feature Image Credit – Thinkstock
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