Vival App Turns Your Video Into Montages As You Shoot

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I’m not sure if Kickstarter is the best place for software projects, especially complex ones involving video editing. That said, I like the look of Vival quite a bit. It look like the perfect way to sweep up all those little clips I snap on my iPad and iPod Touch, and automagically turn them into montages.

You can of course just select all your snippets of video and have iMovie stitch them together, but this requires work. Vival takes a far simpler approach: you shoot from within the app, and each clip is appended to the last. And that’s about it. Apart from the underlying social network, that is.

Vival will be powered by an online service that lets you share video with friends. And this looks to be the weakest part of the package. Many, many people have tried to make a kind of “Instagram for video,” but photos and video are fundamentally different. Even on slow 3G, Instapaper is, well, instant. You can scroll through all photos quickly, and stop when you see on you like.

Compare this to video sharing. You see a poster frame. You click. You wait. You spend time watching. And 90% of the time the clip will be a piece of crap. Until we have processors and mobile bandwidth which can load and run thumbnails of all these videos together on one screen, I doubt this kind of video-sharing will really take off.

Still, that doesn’t stop me wanting an easy way to make vacation videos. But I’m going to wait and see if turns up in the app store, whereupon I shall happily pay cash money for a copy.

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