Clipchamp Hack Day

Clipchamp Hack Day: a day where we saw almost the entire company spend the day experimenting and creating something new. This hack day was the second company-wide one that we’d run, and the team did a lot of great projects during it. Representatives from a few of the teams have written about what they made. Check them out below!

Share Page Themes

Hi, I’m Clare. I was part of the Share Page Themes team.

We wanted to create an easy way for people to be able to imagine what their final video will look like on the different social platforms it eventually gets posted to. We prioritised more popular social networks and ended up with a good mix of fairly different UIs to play around with.

It was the first hackathon I’ve participated in and I was surprised at how easy it was to communicate and collaborate remotely, we had a great mix of skill sets and everyone got really into it — the more the project started to come together, the more competitive it felt like the team got, which was very motivating.

Improved Onboarding

I’m Liam, and I worked with a team of 6 on the Clipchamp Onboarding project. For this project, we wanted to make our signup experience more interactive and personalised, while also giving a good introduction to our product and what it can do. Our result was a signup form that created a personalised video for the new user and brought them into our video editor straight away.

This project didn’t end up being fully functional, so the biggest challenge was making it look like it worked well enough to sell the rest of the company on the idea, which I think we were successful at.

Storyboard Editor

Hey, I’m Timo, and I worked on the Storyboard project. Back in the day, when we first started to flesh out the vision for Clipchamp’s in-browser video editor, we always thought we’ll offer an easy-to-use storyboard editing approach next to the more advanced timeline editing. Clipchamp is all about lowering the barrier of entry to the video editing space, so this project still fits quite well in our grander vision for the platform. So for this hack day, we brought this idea back and worked on a prototype that unifies our current timeline editing experience with a simpler, more streamlined storyboard experience. We also introduced a new concept of scenes, that will make it even easier for users to create a stunning video quickly! One thing that surprised us, was how simple and painless it was to integrate a new drag and drop library into our editor. This again shows how great the React ecosystem is for developers.

Mobile Background Replacement

I’m Roger. On hack day I worked with Dewi on the Mobile Background Replacement project. We tried out background blur and background replacement for live camera recording on Clipchamp’s mobile app. Since a lot of people have been working from home lately, everyone knows about background replacement! It was fun to work on something so topical. We learnt that applying just the right amount of blur to the image mask for background, and choosing nicely textured background images allowed us to get pretty good results for background replacement.

Fingerprint Login

Hey, I’m Chris, and together with Byron, I worked on implementing fingerprint login. Back in August, we attended the online Web Directions Code conference, where we heard about Web Authentication (WebAuthn), a W3C recommendation for strongly authenticating users against hardware devices. That seemed like a cool idea, so we went to work implementing it. We successfully got the fingerprint reader to trigger for login, and then to keep it fun, we added a cool scanner animation and chiptune soundtrack!

Clipchamp Cards — Rich Text in Motion Titles

Hey, I’m Maddy, and I worked on the Clipchamp Cards project. We made a special motion title that allowed for rich text to be entered using Markdown. As this was the first hack day I’ve done remotely, it was cool to try out a lot of remote collaboration tools. My team was only two people, and we found the Visual Studio Code LiveShare plugin alongside screen sharing in a Google Meet call to be almost more productive than pair programming in person.

I’m Josh, and I’m the Head of Engineering at Clipchamp

Clipchamp hack days are always a lot of fun. Trying to build a demo of an entire feature in a day can seem like an impossible task, but we’ve seen some technically impressive projects go from idea to working prototype in just a few hours. There’s healthy competition to build the best hack, and there’s a mad rush to get everything running as the deadline for end-of-day presentations approaches.

It’s a chance to work with different software engineers, designers, copy writers, marketing and product managers. It turns out that people who work at a video company are usually pretty creative. Not only do we end up with technical prototypes, but they’re often accompanied by polished designs and fun pitches. My favourite demo included a sea shanty that convinced us that Clipchamp should accept vim key bindings — and only vim key bindings — as user input.