I quite like the look of this:
Novacut Slice and Sequence Prototype from Jason Gerard DeRose on Vimeo.
It’s an open-source video editor, currently up on kickstarter, looking for $25k… I’ve punted $25 at it, just because I’d like to see what they do.
I think their pitch is slightly out… they’re specifically go on about $299.99 – but this isn’t a “buying” decision, it’s a “giving” one… in which people (in their minds) want to maximise feelings of largess, which they do by giving in multiples of 2, 5 and 10. Something they specifically do not do, is knock a cent off to make it appear just that little bit less. People don’t “give” to “get a bargain”.
There’s also this nagging thing… where them asking for $299.99 for open-source software – when there are already about 5 different open-source video-editing projects out there, who have managed to launch without $$$… still… there are things the others are doing which aren’t quite right – most notably, they’re based on a model/metaphor that hasn’t had Web-Dev UX expertise applied to it.
None of them are designed by proper Web-Designer UX people… and that’s a fairly core thing, because Web-Design UX has been through the crucible of 100% free-market, natural-selection. TV Remotes (for example) are not designed by Web Designers… nor are video-recorder controls.
Nor are any of the existing video software offerings.
I’m quite interested in the way they’re taking the whole process apart – incorporating storyboarding as a fundamental metaphor, quite early on. I’ve kindof been working on this myself – on radically reducing the time it takes to get from A to Z by making storyboarding a deliverable of the reccy/blocking process.
This would be really cool if HTML5/JS (etc) was actually a layer that took user commands and fed them to FFMPEG (or whatever – the video-crunching engine) to process. This would allow a lot of flexibility for adaptation from the vast resource of people who are already pretty good at HTML.
Another way that this is different from the other open-source offerings is that it’s specifically Web 2.0… it’s actively soliciting input from the people who are using the thing, and the development is kindof front-loaded… ie: a lot more work is done at the wireframing/prototyping stage than at the coding stage. I know the others solicit input etc as well, but it’s usually via processes that are too arcane for non CLI people to deal with. I’m not interested in learning how to do .svn checkouts and builds etc. HTML and JS I can do.
The Cloud thing is interesting… not so much for storage (because I don’t trust the cloud, and neither should you)… but for rendering – because it absolutely kills my local machine.
Trouble is though… I’m guessing that means I have to upload stuff to the cloud… which is fucked up, because in NZ, at about 93k/s it’ll take (if I’ve got this right) around 3.45 hours to upload a Gigabyte file… which is about 3 minutes worth. So what’s your shooting-ratio? 10/1? – if you want to make a 5 minute movie, it’ll take about 2.5 days to upload the raw footage, and by “days” I mean 24 hour days in which your web connection is swamped, assuming none of the uploads crash on you, which they almost always do. And in NZ, we have data-caps.
So… maybe it’ll work in the future, or in Korea. But it ain’t going to work here – not the cloud-rendering aspect of it anyway. Even if it’s 10x faster, it’s still going to work out slower than rendering locally.
But you know… the future is coming, so who knows. If you’re into this stuff, then $25 isn’t a lot… just to see what happens.
Best vote for net-neutrality though eh :)
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