Best way for people to submit short videos for a group project

May 2, 2020 6:32 PM

I'm looking for a simple way to have a group of about 40 people submit short videos to me. The videos will be less than two minutes long.

I will need to edit the clips and then compile them into a single, longer video. What is the simplest way for people to submit those videos to me? People aren't specifically required to use cell phones to create the videos, but I imagine that everyone, or almost everyone, will use their phones (as opposed to an actual video camera).

I see that there is a site called FilmFreeway that seems promising, but it almost seems like it's overkill for this purpose. I also don't want people to upload the videos to YouTube or any other site where the videos will be public. I just want the videos to be available for me to download to my PC, where I can then edit them locally and combine them.

Ease of use is important here, because very few of the participants are going to be techies. And cost is a factor, although I'm willing to pay a reasonable fee (say, $100 or less) if necessary.

posted by alex1965 to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

I'm a teacher, and sometimes get my students to do video assessments. The best way I've found to get them to get the files to me is to use Google Drive. We all have department of education google accounts, so I just have to get them to log in and go from there: ymmv on getting everyone to sign up for google accounts if they don't have one. But if they have a gmail address, they have google drive, even if they don't realise it: just go to drive.google.com and log in with the gmail credentials.

There are two ways to use Google Drive:
If I don't care that they see each other's files, I share a folder with them, and they upload to that folder.
If I don't want them to see each other's files, I get them to upload the video to their own Google Drive, and share it with my account. I then look in the 'shared with me' part of Google Drive to find it.
posted by freethefeet at 7:16 PM on May 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

(kids are using iPads, usually, so it's pretty simple to import the video into the google drive app.)
posted by freethefeet at 7:17 PM on May 2, 2020

We just did a birthday video like this through tribute.co. I recorded mine in the web browser. Super simple on my side. Not sure how it was for the editor. The final video was an hour long!
posted by advicepig at 7:33 PM on May 2, 2020

Not sure if this is the tool that you want, but Clipisode might do what you need. Full disclosure: someone I know made this. It was developed to be used by influencers, but it's very easy to use and may do just what you want.
posted by rednikki at 3:05 AM on May 3, 2020

I’ve done this for online focus groups using WeTransfer. Just make it clear that they should use the browser and not the app version. It’s free and the videos will only be available to whoever has the link.
posted by Fuego at 9:10 AM on May 3, 2020

Flipgrid is what my kids school uses to submit videos. It's pretty nifty.
posted by ramix at 5:49 PM on May 3, 2020

doing this right now for biiiiiiiiiiig files. create file requests with dropbox, send them the link, and they upload that way. they do not need a dropbox account to send you the files with the link you send them.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 12:59 PM on May 4, 2020

Best answer: We decided to go with FilmFreeway. Thanks everyone
posted by alex1965 at 11:35 AM on May 16, 2020