Following up on the last post about HTML 5 and OGG video, here are some ideas that I’ve been thinking about in preparation for the Open Video Conference. If you have some ideas please leave a comment here or email me.
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Steal anything you want
16 Comments
Along the lines of peer-to-peer transfer of the final HD edited version, tell the developers we’d also like P2P transfer of either the proxy footage or all the footage. The way you described it was as if one person shot the whole thing and it was collaboratively edited, but I can see you probably also want to be able to collaboratively shoot, work with footage from multiple sources – how handy that would be for collaborative storytelling across communities.
This really does feel like a report from the future. One of the things that keeps me from post videos is the time and the steps that you have to go through. What you are speaking of is a way to open this up to for folks to post with out all the obstacles. Cheryl mentioned “how handy that would be for collaborative storytelling” and I think that is right on.
Beautiful stuff, Michael. I think the key things here, coming from my perspective, are:
1. Ensure the codecs and collaborative web software sings rather than just exists.
2. The potential for mass convergence here is great, but a collaborative effort to get across-the-board buy-in means we will have to be more introverted as an open video community than ever, and will have to start engaging with people and entities that we consider unfriendly or just plain douchy.
3. So with the above, a macro-plan for getting the word out and finding powerful advocates is, to me, just as important as the micro-plan for the tools and codecs themselves.
Does this help? If you could tell us more about what you’re looking for between now and the OVC, I’ll come back and give more.
This is a great idea. The obvious problem being convincing the camera manufacturers to decide on a standard. This has been going on since VHS vs Betamax and now to the differing HD standards.
I think a compromise solution would be to have software companies agree to try to make their software work natively with whatever codec is decided upon as the open standard. That way, at least the “what happens to it once it’s in the computer” part only deals with one codec, instead of waiting for the camera manufacturers to get on board also.
Another useful item would be timecode for these videos that would go along with something you might send in for collaborative editing. This way, if you DID have to send in your HD footage and have it crushed, size-wise, you’d be able to create an HD version from the work that was done by the group, using that timecode.
I recently sent a similar idea to Kultura creators. Here is what I proposed;
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Have you considered using bittorrent technology to allow people around the world to contribute their HD footage stored on their hard drives? In other words it’s like a fusion of Kaltura’s advanced video editor and Dropbox (online storage), two cloud services merging together allowing ability to find, edit and publish video creations never before possible. So, when a user that shoots a lot of footage installs the Kaltura P2P app on his machine and allocates a folder filled with HD video footage, the app takes each HD video file and creates a equivalent low-res H.264 file, storing it in that same folder, of course the transcoding is done on the user’s end. There would need to be invented a deep in-video “search-and-recognize” algorithm that detects things in a given video and then automatically creates tags to describe that video. These tags then live within that low-res H.264 video file (think EXIF but for video tags). This way the end user won’t have to sift through hundreds of videos to tag them by hand.
Imagine ability to have access to world’s HD footage at your finger tips. You’re editing a piece on something that requires and HD shot of NY skyline for example, or a San Francisco trolley going up hill; You search the keywords within Kaltura’s search engine and it brings up a list of video thumbnails that play the preview when hovered over, you check mark the interesting ones and it loads them into the video editor’s project window. You edit that footage in low-res, proxy approach, and when the video is edited the user can publish it to Kaltura’s proprietary flash video player or youtube and etc.
So how would Kaltura benefit from this world video repository? More and more videos will be edited and published online using Kaltura’s advanced video editor, and by offering the cloud video editing to anyone for free, Kaltura adds in stream postroll video ads that coincide with the video tags of published videos. Of course it would make more sense for Kaltura to only allow publishing videos to its own platform because the in-stream video adds can be inserted using RSS data that serves the adds targeted to the viewer’s locality/demographic. So if a person from London, for instance, watching a video gets a post-roll video add that is local to him, though the video was created by an American videographer.
What are your thoughts on this?
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I live in NYC, but I wish I could afford visiting the Open Video Conference, I have many innovative ideas to share related to how to streamline the film-to-publish process.
Sincerely,
Renat Zarbailov of Innomind.org
Cheryl: Yes – good ideas.
Billy: I’m not certain this would make things any easier than than sticking stuff on YouTube. That’s about as simple as it gets. Hopefully we can open things up so that people don’t feel so locked into YouTube.
Jeffrey: I hear you. It seems that there are lots of people interested in this that aren’t necessarily video makers – which is a good thing. I just want to help give them some perspective from the people who would love to use what they build. Just trying to bridge that gap between the programmers, planners and the artists.
Bill: I cut out a piece from the video where I talked about camera manufactures (trying to shorten and simplify) but I don’t think we have to get them to necessarily agree on a standard. If we have a free, open-source codec that works, it means (especially for smaller manufactures like Red or Flip) that they don’t have to spend $ to develop or license their own codec. This will be more attractive the more the rest of the ecosystem is developed.
Nice, simple, clear, 5 mile view of end to end video architecture. Wasn’t/isn’t the video proxies called offline editing?
yes the proxy editing was called ‘offline’ and the final was called ‘online’. this was my life at WGBH. get all the offline (low res) footage in and then online (up res) everything 3 months later. i think we need to avoid that terminology because of what ‘offline’ and ‘online’ mean today in terms of the internets. might confuse people. online your offline footage y’all.
love the presentation! i’m excited to talk more with people at the conference.
I think the codec/ease of production idea is critical to carry open source video forward. There are a bunch of time pressed bloggers who want to include video but do not have the time or technical ability to grasp the process.
There is no lack of desire about creating work. As most of us who tried to educate folks you know there is that point of eye glaze/I’m overwhelmed that occurs. We can get folks over it but certain the process should be as easy as snapping a still photo and printing.
The process should accommodate the creators and potential users who don’t necessarily want to vlog but need to explain a process or document a bit of their life.
In other words, yeah, hell yeah, the codec thing.
Renat,
Yep, I’ve been talking about similar things for a while now. A couple of years ago Jay Dedman and I worked for SpinXpress which I’ve used numerous times to send giant video files back and forth across the globe. Here’s a video I made about what we were up to.
I’m not a business guy but I do know that I wouldn’t want to use a editing program that had ads built into it. I would however pay for services – hosting, backups, extra features, etc.
This is great stuff and it echoes a lot of thoughts I’ve had about video workflows. I really like the idea of using proxy videos to collaboratively edit and having them matched to the original HD content.
Maybe with an open video engine, people could edit together with some kind of remote access to each others’ computers – even if one is PC and one is Mac.
While I think the bittorrent idea is a great one, my experience has been that for the everyday user p2p might not work for them (Digitalbicycle project). To clarify, if I am working on a specific project and I want to ‘up res’ the final cut to HD – yeah – I’d be willing to let my machine sit open and do that. There would be a window open for that, but then I would want to close the window.
In the long run, for older projects, for ongoing collaborations, I would want some access to these archives, and to the source material from years past.
In this case, even the source material needs to have standardized metadata, but moreover I guess I am thinking that there should be some kind of archive (and obviously there are) that would be for source footage, specifically. Is that what Kaltura is up to?
We all know how challenging it is to search the Internet Archive, so I’m not sure what the answer is.
My main point is that bittorrent is only part of the answer. Working in a public school as I am, there is no way I can use any p2p, and the high school TV program never get to take advantage of this.
although…….I do like Miro’s bittorrent client that is built in to their player. But the always on thing is not great for people with laptops only. Am I wrong?
I love how you have a TV with “turn dials” behind you. Where’s the rotary phone run on steam?
Ha! There is actually an old school Bell touch-tone phone just out of frame. The TV I used a few years ago to do some cool old B&W crappy video effects.
Great Video Michael,
I’ve been teaching this digital media class the last three semesters, and technology is a huge barrier to creativity.
First, we only have PCs, so we can’t go with FCP, so we go with Premiere Pro, which is functionally find, but has all sorts of issues dealing with different types of files/codecs. I had to teach stuff like, if you have an .mp4 file, you must first convert it to .mov with quicktime, and sometimes the audio won’t import so you have to export separately – etc.
This doesn’t even cover the always pragmatic issue of compression, disc space, and problems with the university’s secure network and new adobe programs not working etc.
It’s so frustrating, and it would be so cool if there was one “video engine” as you describe, because, at least there would, hypothetically, only be one set of issues to deal with.
I look forward to continuing this conversation.
…peace…richard
p.s. If I want to subscribe to all Verdi videos, how would I do that?