Isaac Whatever

Crowdsourced movies like Iron Sky are being produced by distributed teams. These teams face some interesting challenges because video is resource intensive to share.

I propose a source control system based on non-destructive editing, where the raw footage is left untouched, and different cuts of the film are recorded in flat files which reference that footage. In this way, the teams only need to share expensive video files when raw footage is produced, and all of the editing can be shared in small flat text files, which are easily handled by source control.

To view another collaborator's edits, you only need to download the text file which describes their cuts.

Pros-

• The raw footage, the actual heavy lifting, is downloaded only once, when it becomes available. You could obtain it from somewhere else, like take your iPod to another collaborator's house and get the raw footage from him.
• You could even download a low-res version of the footage, or only the most heavily used sections.
• Since edits are non-destructive, and serve as references to the raw footage, and do not change the video files, they can be represented in a file format approaching flat text. In this way they can be very small and quickly shared.
• Hundreds of revisions from hundreds of collaborators can all be viewed on demand, all pulling from the shared raw footage and taking a minimum of space.

Cons-

• All of the editing needs to be non-destructive. I don't think totally nondestructive video editors exist.
• Effects which can't be produced programmatically would have to be shared with their footage sections. A long section of effects might destroy the pro of easily shared edits. Perhaps layers?
• Have to create not only a source control system, but a suite of editors, players, converters, effect systems, and possibly even codecs. Hard, hard work.
  

Workflow scenarios:

Individual contributor collaborator-

I read about a crowdsourced movie being produced by hobbyists. I go to the website and find the source repository. Their website asks me nicely to use bit torrent when possible to download the raw footage. I spend two weeks with the torrent client going and end up with 30 gigs of raw footage.

I fire up the movie source control and get the latest edits, which takes about 1/2 hour. I see that there are several major branches, "long-intro", "bryan-edit", "off-dialog-indie-songs-only", and "action-focus". I only download the edits, I choose not to get any extra raw footage, music, or effects.

I start my editing suite and open the project file for long-intro. The editor informs me that some footage, music and effects layers are missing. I go ahead and watch the movie. There are some shots where the video is greyed out, and others where I get an indicator of missing music, but the editor never chokes.

In the last third of the movie I notice that there are some sloppy cuts during some dialog. Rather than doing the work totally myself, I switch to another branch and see that in "bryan-edit" this section of dialog is very well done. I take that bit of index and copy it over to my current branch.

After making sure it works, I commit my changes to the repository.

Amateur Cinematographer-

My buddy tells me about a hobby project he's involved with, and shows me about 20 minutes of footage on his iPod when we run into each other. I'm interested, but my internet connection isn't that great and it sounds like a hassle. He says he's got all 30 gigs of the raw footage on his laptop right now, so we go over to my place, copy it over to my pc, and he shows me some of the editing suite. I'm impressed.

After about a week of fooling with the edits I decide I want to get involved, so I head to the project wiki and find a page listing shots that are missing or need improvement. They want a location shot in Seattle, where I happen to live, so I grab my camera and head downtown. I get about 20 minutes of footage around Seattle.

Instead of uploading it myself, I call my friend, give him the footage, and he uploads it for me. Even before he finishes uploading it, I start adding my footage to some edits on my local machine. I like one of them and commit it. Since the footage hasn't hit the repository yet, the source control grabs a thumbnail from my footage, and everyone who views my edits sees the thumbnail until my friend finally gets it uploaded.

What do you think?

Is this an interesting idea? Is this a problem contributors have? Would this be useful? Is it prohibitively hard? Do you know of nondestructive video editors that could be used in this manner?

Could we put together an already existing tech stack that accomplishes this? Git, for sharing both edits and raw footage, some video editor that can export/import flat files?

Deserves some more thought.

Labels: business, collaborative, crowdsource, crowdsourced, hobbyist, idea, iron sky, project, video