Mozilla releases Popcorn Maker 1.0, a web-native video tool

Mozilla has released Popcorn Maker 1.0, which allows journalists to create web-native video that includes real-time tweets, Google maps, images and more.

The video creation tool, which will be familiar to journalists who have used video-editing software such as Final Cut, was released at this weekend's 'MozFest', a festival from the software community best known for producing the Firefox web browser, held in London this weekend.

At last year's festival Mozilla announced the release of an early version of Popcorn Maker; the new release is of a tool that is further developed and easier for journalists and anyone who wants to create 'contextual video' or 'social video' to use.

Popcorn Maker requires no coding knowledge, instead it runs in the browser and the finished videos can then be shared or embedded in blogs and news sites.

Popcorn Maker allows users to drag and drop video from YouTube or Vimeo or audio from SoundCloud and then add other other elements such as images, tweets and links to content on the web. For example, tweets that include a hashtag can be added and will be automatically updated with new tweets containing that hashtag after the video is published.

For those with coding skills, there is a Javascript library called Popcorn.js, which was launched at last year's MozFest.

Many of the videos created using Popcorn.js are documentaries. Examples include 'History in the Streets', which links to Google Street View, and, on Wired.com, there is 'One Millionth Tower'.

Speaking at MozFest this weekend, Brett Gaylor, director of the Mozilla Popcorn project, said he hoped the release of Popcorn Maker would see the creation of an increasing number of web-native contextual videos for news stories.



Popcorn.js was used to create this visual story, which shows the last movements of Ian Tomlinson, who died after being caught up in G20 demonstrations in 2009.

That was created by Laurian Gridinoc, who was funded by Knight-Mozilla to spend 10 months working in the BBC newsroom.

At this weekend's MozFest Gridinoc and Knight-Mozilla-funded fellows Nicola Hughes and Mark Boas used the Ian Tomlinson story example to show how the same visualisation can be built using Popcorn Maker.

A step-by-step tutorial that allows you to create the story using Popcorn Maker is at this link.

There is more on the release of Popcorn Maker 1.0 on the Mozilla Blog.

Popcorn Maker was also discussed at news:rewired in February. See this blog post and the session liveblog.

For details of the next news:rewired, which takes place on 6 December 2012, see the agenda.

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