Matt Hanson talks about his project A Swarm of Angles and the general concepts behind collaboration in the digital era. I personally would love to see collaborative editing tools evolve to the point where you could upload raw footage and anyone could add to the meta data like it was a wiki. They could ad captions, comments, notes, languages, time code based tags etc… And in some cases it might be possible for meta data to be automatically added to your footage similar to the way everyzing.com uses computers to transcribe footage. The key in my mind is to have both automatic as well as organic transcribing and then use software to have the automatic transcription basically become time code anchor points to the human transcription.
In a system where raw footage is online rather then trapped on your computer anyone can be involved either as someone simply watching and rating raw footage or by actually selecting clips to add to a timeline they create and then post back online.
The missing link here is a URI for raw footage. URI stands for uniform resource identifier and they are very important to the what comes after web 2.0 which is the Semantic Web. A URI is basically a standardized home base that any other site or software can refer to when it needs that object. If you had that for raw footage then you’d have a place where software could refer to when it needed meta data information or needed to download a portion of the master in high res to compile a final edit.
And of course your final edit would already have all of it’s meta data that it needs thanks to the software being able to refer to the URI. You could choose to flatten or keep the meta data live if it was still a rough cut.
Brett Gaylor from Open Source Cinema and I have spoken about this concept and he says it would be a god sent for his open source collaborative editing film he’s working on called Basement Tapes. Susan Buice and Matt Hanson also had a quick talk about it after power to the pixel and he expressed a lot of interest and we’ll probably be working together in some capacity to continue to brainstorm how this all could work.
After the Power to the Pixel Conference at the drinks reception I also met Michela Ledwidge who has a project called ModFilms that is also exploring URI based video editing stuff and is interested in future development.
While we are all about opening up raw footage other filmmakers I’ve spoken to feel weird about having raw material available to the public. Thats why I think it would be smart for a system like this to allow passwords on custom RSS feeds that are generated for a particular user. That way if you aren’t that user, the RSS feed doesn’t work and you don’t get all of the dailies from the film in your Miro player.
The thing about video editing is you never have enough time with the footage and you never have enough tools to dig through it to find the gems. I hope a system like this can be built in time for our next film which will be very inspired by a Swarm of Angels because it will also be an online collaborative project that I’ll write more about in the future.
Formats available: MPEG-4 Video (.m4v)
Hi Arin, Thanks for the comments, and of course I picked this up through some RSS feeds I have to collect any online comments on A Swarm of Angels (even if you keep saying ‘Angles’
).
Some really pertinent comments here about the fact we’re now building a consensus/common knowledge about what we actually need for some new tools for collaborative filmmaking. I definitely believe it will benefit all of us to exchange information, and work together on making these things happen, so count me in on any discussion/work on this. It’s something I talked about with Liz Rosenthal again (PTP organizer) when we were travelling back on the train from Birmingham to London on Saturday. So it’s in all our minds…
Yes, the URI. Thanks for pointing out the name of this! That’s basically whats holding all this up – its the same as when you go to online your film – you need to be able to recapture your lowrez stuff from the source tapes – but when you export to quicktime, all your timecode starts over again at zero…
Brilliant Arin, and Matt, the meta data discussion we had has been nagging away at a synapse buried in the dark recess somewhere. An old friend of mine made a short film many years ago, about a person who started vomiting up barcodes..shot in sequence, on a vhs camera…..it was way ahead it its time. The problem is going to be rights, or open source material, as Creative Commons only works if both parties agree the deal or price or usage etc. In the making of the film or piece, how do you reward those that participate in an open source manner, appropriately, should there be sufficient revenue after costs?
PS: can u change my website to http://www.dv8.co.za, not .uk……
To Matt
A frame accurate cloud-based collaborative video editor has been available since 2004.
Just Google for FORscene.
Initially it worked in browsers (Mac, PC, Linux…) but nowadays it works on Android tablets too.
Regards, Mark Kilby.