Mixbit is a fee app available for iOS devices (and soon, for Android) as well as on the Web.
It was created by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, through their new company, AVOS Systems. (Sign up at the Mixbit website or download the mobile iPhone app from the iTunes app store.)
The Mixbit mobile app lets people shoot video clips of up to 16 seconds apiece, and then splice up to 256 of those clips together to make a longer movie than most mobile video sharing apps allow. (Twitter's Vine imposes a 6 second limit; Instagram clips are up to 15 seconds.)
Because you can string together up to 256 "bits" (as the app calls video clips), each final video can be up to an hour-- extraordinarily long compared to other mobile video platforms.
Two features that distinguish Mixbit from competitors are the ability to remix your own clips with those of other users and the anonymous nature of the video posting.
Anonymity: The Anti-Social Video Sharing Platform
Unlike Titter's Vine and Instagram Video, Mixbit does not readily identify the publishers or creators of each video shared on the Mixbit website or mobile platform.
There is no ability to "follow" or "friend" people whose videos you like. Through interviews, the founders have said their reason for this semi-anonymity is to focus the Mixbit platform more on content and less on the personalities of individuals.
Remixing: A Collaboration Platform
Perhaps the most interesting and innovative aspect of Mixbit is the feature which gives the app its name -- mixing. This platform aims to encourage people to collaborate in the act of creating videos, not just watching them, which was the main point of YouTube.
In a blog post announcing the debut of Mixbit in August 2013, co-founder Chad Hurley wrote that one of the services' goals was to "remove the barriers to video creation" to help people tell "meaningful stories through video."
"It means inventing new ways to encourage and enable people to collaborate with each other," he wrote.
The "remix" feature is basically this: Video clips that users upload to Mixbit are public by default (though there are settings to make them more private) in a video gallery, where they become available for anyone else to include in their edited videos.
When you browse the public video library, you can click a little checkmark to the right of any video you think you might want to insert into one of your movies, and it will be stored in your "saved clips" video library online.
Sign up and Get Started on Mixbit
It's easy to sign up for a Mixbit account. You provide a verifiable email address, create a password at least eight characters long, and then Mixbit will send a verification link to your email address. The app also lets you sign in with your Facebook or Twitter user information.
You can sign up on your phone or on the Web, but you'll need to download the mobile app in order to make a movie with any of your own videos. You can only upload videos from a phone, not a desktop computer.
Record and Upload and Edit Videos
Recording video with Mixbit is easy and similar to using Vine. You simply aim your phone's camera at the scene you want to record and touch the screen, holding your finger on the screen for as long as you want to shoot. Lift your finger off the screen when you want to stop. The time limit per clip is 16 seconds
Mixbit allows you to trim clips to shorten each clip, a nice touch. To trim, look for the little icon shaped like a diamond. Position your cursor where you want to start or end the clip and click the diamond to trim.
You can also move clips or bits around to reorder the way they appear in your finished movie. Once you are in the edit mode, click on the clip you want to rearrange and hold it until the clip wiggles, at which point you can drag it to another position. If you want to make a clip appear twice, you can copy the clip. Select the one you want to copy and then click on the icon containing two little squares.
Shooting Mode
You can turn hour camera vertical or horizontal to shoot video, but you will get much better results by shooting mostly with your camera turned horizontally, known as "landscape" mode.
That's because if you shot vertically, Mixbit will automatically trim your footage to make it rectangular so it can match the aspect ratio of its finished movies, which is widescreen or 16:9. And that likely means zooming in on your images. Much better to just shoot with your camera turned sideways.
Sharing Mixbit Videos
Mixbit offers three levels of visibility for videos you create-public, which means everyone can see and use it; limited, which means it isn't indexed or shown in the gallery and people have to get the link from you to see it; or draft, which means only you can see it.
Mixbit also offers social media buttons to make it easy to post a link to your video on Twitter or Facebook. And it supports video embedding, so you can grab HTML code to embed any video into your website pages or blog.