working with Mozilla's PopCorn Maker

Popcorn Maker helps you easily remix web video, audio and images into cool mashups that you can embed on other websites. Drag and drop content from the web, then add your own comments and links ; all within your browser. Popcorn Maker videos are dynamic, full of links and unique with every view. Popcorn lets users link social media, news feeds, data visualizations and other content directly to moving images. The result is a new form of multimedia storytelling that lives and breathes more like the web itself: interactive, social, and unique each time.

Mozilla's Popcorn Maker is an initiative by the Mozilla Foundation to create a software that uses the Popcorn.js API to add web-rich features to videos, without having to learn programming. The software can be used by video creators and editors in so many ways ranging from creating an instructional video almost from scratch, to editing an existing video to add text, hyperlinks, annotations and so many other features. This, in turn, can be used to clarify the video, to add more information, to add nice effects, etc. Popcorn adds interactivity and context to online video, pulling the rest of the web right into the action in real time.

On the down side, it doesn’t have an option to create videos from scratch, and hence you cannot upload videos from your computer. There is no option to customize the workspace or at least resize the panels. You also cannot group elements and hence have to apply effects to individual elements. However, connect a video in the web with the content around it, and you get a video that behaves like the web itself, constantly changing and evolving, interactive, and sharable. That is what Mozilla has managed to achieve with the Popcorn Maker. [1]

A quick explanation of the Popcorn Maker Interface Components can be found on WikiHow here (last section) and here. In addition, “Using Mozilla Popcorn Maker to Create an Interactive Video” Tutorial by Miriam Posner, available here, and as a pdf download here.

[1] Ref. http://web.appstorm.net/reviews/media-reviews/mozilla-popcorn-maker-the-future-of-media/

Further reading / viewing :

Introduction to Popcorn.js on Vimeo, available here.

Documentation on Popcorn.js, available here.

Mozilla’s Webmaker Tools page here. Links to X-Ray Goggles (allow you to see the building blocks that make up websites on the internet) and Thimble (which makes it ridiculously simple to create and share your own web pages).

Want to get started, but don't know what to make yet ? Here are some projects you can remix now.