Twitter user renatoghio posted a tweet earlier today with a link. He asked this simple question: The future of video editing?

When I first watched this video of Super LoiLoScope in action I thought … woah! That’s crazy. The creators of this unique editing product look to be taking something that today has an established paradigm, video editing and its timeline based way of working, and turning it on its ear. Most all editors we use today utilize the clips in a bin, preview and edit monitor, timeline way of working. This was established long ago and has served the video editing industry well for many year now but it’s nice to see someone thinking way outside the box when creating a new editor.

Just one look at the LoiLoScope website and you know it’s Japanese. The company info says it was eatablished in 2007 by an engineer and an art student and is “dedicated in creating simple and fun to use software making everyone’s creativity possible. We are good at processing super high-speed movie processing and develop intuitive user interface.”

From the company’s press room:

Super LoiLoScope also pioneers a brand new user interface that improves on other existing video editing software. With its unique ‘infinite desktop’ users can freely drag & drop video clips onto their workspace. By cutting and copying movie clips with a simple touch and arranging them on a timeline, even first timers can easily master the software. With Super LoiLoScope, users can also have more than one infinite desktop running concurrently which allows for many different projects to be open at the same time. Other new features include HD resolution support, a new text feature, and more device export variations.

An intuitive user interface is what really struck me when watching the video. All I could think about was Tom Cruise and the gesture based computing he was doing in Minority Report … only Super LoiLoScope is doing this with a mouse. That’s the one thing that I think would totally hinder an application like this in a professional editing environment: its reliance on a mouse to do so much of the editing, trimming and effects work. In fact it looks from the video like the majority of the features are very mouse dependent. But if you think about using something like this with a graphics tablet and pen then it becomes a bit more exciting. I’ve often watched Flame artists use a graphics tablet with envy. But when I try to use one for everyday Avid and Final Cut Pro editing tasks it seems to really slow me down since the interfaces really aren’t built for one. But just looking at how the user is zooming, scrolling and tossing clips around in Super LoiLoScope it seems like it could really benefit from a graphics tablet and get an almost tactile feel from using one.

One thing that I really like that I would love to see implemented in pro-NLE software is this idea of zooming in and out:

Can you imaging having your thumbnail view selected in an Avid or Final Cut Pro bin and being able to have that kind of control over the thumbs? Moving and scaling and playing the clips with that kind of ease would be a great addition indeed.

There’s more cool looking stuff where that came from. Check out the description page for more on this unique editing application. I just wish it was available for Macintosh!