Video WeVideo Helps You Edit Your Videos Online (Video) 48
Tim: Your company WeVideo is doing something I wouldn’t have thought possible a few years ago, which is you are editing video on the web. Can you explain how that could work?
Jostein: Exactly. So the interesting thing you are completely right - this wasn’t possible a few years ago because the bandwidth wasn’t there, and also the cloud computing wasn’t mature as a technology. But now with the latest web technologies and so on, we have been able to build a very powerful video editing platform which is in the cloud - it is easier to use, and it is even faster and more powerful than many of the desktop counterparts.
So to give you a quick demo here: Just like if you have done any video editing before you are used to seeing the content of what you want to edit, you have a preview window, and down here we have a storyboard. This is a simple editor we are showing right here. So it means that anybody who maybe have never done a video before, they can very quickly get started with this. You see here a sequence of some video clips. I can rearrange them.
I can even shorten them, just like changing where the start and the finish is of the video, and so on. It is also very easy to add on audio to this, if you want to add music, we have a music library with more than 400 songs, so you go and select which music you want for this, and this is now attached to the video. Then you set play and then you can actually have a look at the video that you have been putting together.
We also have what we call themes. And this is great for beginners who have never done video before. Because you don’t need to worry about color corrections, about transitions and effects. So to some extent, we are doing for video exactly the same Instagram did for photos.
So here, if you want to have a like film noir, or a vintage film, you are just going to say which theme you want to have. And you just hit play and you’ll see automatically that it will transform the look and feel of the video to look like a vintage video. And the same with the music. The music is now also fitting with the style of the video.
Then when you finish the project you just go and give it a title: ‘We Are at Google IO’. And then you can publish it, you can select which resolution you want to publish it in; we support both DVD quality, high definition all the way to 1080p high definition or full HD as some people call it. And you can export out to the WeVideo platform, YouTube, Vimeo, and also save down to Dropbox and Google Drive.
Tim: Now speaking of Dropbox and Google Drive, video takes a lot of space. How do you deal with the transfer of files, and the storage of files?
Jostein: Yes. So that’s the beautiful part of it. That is if you first have stored your videos up in the cloud already, like for instance Dropbox they have a feature to automatically take all of your photos and videos from your cameras and push it up to the cloud. If it is already there, you don’t need to transfer them again.
You will see here, we a direct connection between WeVideo and your cloud storage, Google Drive, Instagram, Flickr, Facebook, Dropbox, Picasa and Box. And so you can retrieve it cloud to cloud. And that happens in a matter of seconds. So you don’t need to spend a lot of time waiting for it to upload. And it is the same when you are exporting out, and saving out to YouTube, Vimeo, Dropbox and Google Drive.
It is so much faster, you could publish from our service which is set on Amazon Cloud, than it would be to publish from your own computer. So this is a simple UI, but then what’s interesting is that as you become more advanced, if you want more advanced features, we have two other user interfaces - so we have what we call as simple timeline interface and an advanced timeline interface.
And when you switch to the advanced timeline you get unlimited layers of video, and unlimited layers of audio, and then you can start to create very sophisticated video projects. So let’s say, I want to go and grab another video, I want to put it on another layer, on top of the other, I can even change the transparency, so it will blend the two videos together, I can go and change the size of the video, and I can move where the video is on the screen –this video was actually a little bit dark, a bit difficult to see.
But you will see now, when they start playing you will see the videos are blending into each other. And it is all rendered in real time. So there is no waiting time that you normally would experience on a desktop video editor.
Tim: Now in storing all these files elsewhere, either Dropbox or another online storage system, what does the user actually manipulate? That is, the files are big, but you don’t want to send that over network all the time?
Jostein: No. Exactly. So the secret of the performance of our system, and the reason why it works so well even on a Chromebook even on a $250 Chromebook is that the [fonts] you are working with here, is in a preview format. It is low resolution proxy files. So that means the high definition files stay up in the cloud, while it only takes 2 percent of the original size on to your computer. So it means that you can have very good performance in your editing on the tablet, on the $250 Chromebook, or even on your mobile phone.
Tim: What does it cost to use the server?
Jostein: So it is starting from free; we have a freemium service for free; you get 5 gigabits of storage, you get 15 minutes of video, and 480p DVD quality resolution. If you want to upgrade to high definition, longer videos and so on, it starts at $5 a month.
Tim: Now this is a Flash application?
Jostein: This one is Flash, but what we are now showing here at Google IO is the new generation of our software which is all going to run in open standards HTML5 and WebGL. We are just in the middle of that development project right now but we are just showcasing here, you will see that we have a touchscreen interface, it is very easy to use, and you can move things around just as I showed you before, but all of this is actually in HTML5 so it runs across many different devices, more than we had before in Flash.
Tim: One other question. What sort of output format can you export once you are finished and you are happy with the video? Can you export to a number of different kinds of final output?
Jostein: You can. So our system is taking almost any format in, but specifically, what happens is that when you say you want to publish it, we are publishing out to the YouTube, Vimeo, Dropbox and Google Drive, you are typically using H264.
Tim: Anything else people should know about this?
Jostein: It is available. Go and start using it. And it is across mobile phones, Chromebooks, Macs, PC and it is good to get started and having fun with it.
Tim: Perfect.
Jostein: Thank you.
Come on, try harder (Score:1)
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I'd like to know why in the hell I'd want to upload a video I'd shot to edit it? My laptop is as powerful as a twenty year old mainframe and has plenty of juice to edit videos. Why would I want to spend the time waiting to upload, then edit, then have to wait for it to download it all over again just to see it?
This is, IMO, fucking retarded. Give or sell me software to do it! Jesus, you kids and your stupid cloud... we overthrew you bastards back in the eighties when we traded mainframes for PCs.
-mcgrew (wi
Cloud storage quota (Score:2)
like for instance Dropbox they have a feature to automatically take all of your photos and videos from your cameras and push it up to the cloud.
I imagine that raw video footage is big enough that people will run out of the 2 GB that Dropbox provides without charge fairly quickly. More than that requires paying a recurring fee to Dropbox. What's the crossover point? How long does one have to use Dropbox before buying a copy of proprietary video editing software becomes cheaper?
Its a false choice (Score:4, Interesting)
Why would you ever need to BUY anything? I have at least 3 or 4 decent video editors that are free I can install in 5 minutes that for the level of stuff you can do with an online suite are perfectly fine. The 'article' (aka slashvertisment) is putting up a false dichotomy between pay software and a free webapp when nobody in their right mind that doesn't have at least pretensions to serious video editing has PAID for their software in a while now.
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Can you give us names/links to the "at least 3 or 4 decent video editors that are free...
You can get "Lightworks"
http://www.lwks.com/ [lwks.com]
Completely free (no watermark) - and used on films like "Pulp Fiction," "Hugo," "King's Speech," "Jerry Maguire," etc.
A favorite of Thelma Schoonmaker.
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What platform(s) are these free solutions available for?
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Well, I KNOW there's perfectly good software available on Linux. I am pretty sure some of those things also exist on Windows, do they not?
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Not that we don't believe you, but what pieces of software (on any platform) are you referring to?
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Lightworks has some happy customers. (Windows, Linux). It is free-ish, but there is a cost associated with the use of some codecs.
iMovie (Mac) and Windows Movie Maker are also available.
These should fill the need for "casual video production", or the "want to try editing a video or two but have no idea if you're going to be good enough that it will be worth spending money on video editing software" scenario. Given that the free version of WeVideo drops a watermark on any exports, someone who just wants to
Why is this here? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who reads Slashdot but can't install a video editor?
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Do you trust them to keep their flash player updates as well?
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WeVideo is awesome for my students. They have short video compositions, and this gives them an intro to visual literacy and composing without having to go through my IT department, which is - understandably? - nervous about installing new programs.
This is a perfect bridge for education where we don't have the resources we need to introduce our students to all the programs they should should at least use once or twice.
Flash player? (Score:3)
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And it isn't really running in the browser anyway. It's running in the Flash player. One can embed the Flash player on a website, but it's by no means required and the application running inside the Flash player doesn't really have any interaction with the browser at all.
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HTML5 video is quite stable and drastically more performant.
Performant [ahdictionary.com] is not a word.
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It's like they came here just for some abuse. I really hope the read these comments. Let's see...
- It's an advertisement, but annoying even a subscriber with AdBlock enabled it got through
- It doesn't work without Flash, a technology universally reviled by all Slashdot posters
- People are listing all the free desktop alternatives, along with reasons why they are better
- It uses The Cloud, another universally hated technology.
- The transcript is full of errors.
- You don't even own the resulting video, the st
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No, I don't.
Fuck you, Roblimo.
Skeptical fungus is very skeptical indeed... (Score:5, Interesting)
Unless their capabilities are god's gift to amateur video editing or something, I don't get it. The pricing [wevideo.com] is (while probably necessarily so, to handle the bandwidth and compute) dangerously close to basic video-editing shovelware that doesn't require you to twiddle your thumbs while the source video gets uploaded, or put up with a 720p(extra per-export fee for 1080!) resolution cap. And the storage and export-length limits should be fairly easy to hit unless you are really just looking for something that is the video equivalent of the 'crop' tool.
Mac users, of course, have something out of the box that is dangerously likely to be competitive(and even more recent WMM, while a bit of a joke, is at least unhindered by bandwidth constraints and nickle-and-dime pricing).
Heck, if it simply must be 'cloud', let's see your 60-second elevator speech about why this [youtube.com] isn't the sound of Google curb-stomping your company and spitting on its corpse. Surely you have one, right?
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The prices are nuts. For private use I'd get a "student version" of Pinnacle Studio 16.0 Ultimate. It comes with green screen accessories and can do anything I would ever need from a video editor.
Ohhh and it will not expire in a year where $99.99 will only get you one year of WeVideo service.
this thing is terrible (Score:3)
Re:this thing is terrible (Score:5, Informative)
It gets better: Apparently, there is a 500MB [desk.com] upload limit, so if you want to trim the fat on a long take(only one of the ridiculously common use cases for a basic video editing tool, and the one most likely to save 'my-insufferably-drawn-out-shakycam-footage-of-some-tourist-bullshit-you've-all-seen-shot-by-professionals-a-dozen-times.m4v'), you are SOL...
Also... encouraging... is the little tidbit on their 'business' [wevideo.com] page. Down near the bottom, "Usage rights". Apparently, kids, what you can do with the video you create is determined by what tier of video editor you purchased. Welcome to the glorious future!
Bandwidth vs. Bitrate (Score:1)
The CEO claims problems with bandwidth have been overcome. I disagree.
Most broadband connections today still have severely limited upload speeds. Sure, they may be slightly faster. But since 1080p video has become a commodity, the amount of data per frame (bitrate) for amateur video has increased quite dramatically, compared to a few years ago when 480p was still common. So any increase in upload speed is negated by higher video resolutions.
I think this will only work when symmetrical fiber connections beco
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Yeah, I'm not sure where he's getting that. I shot a short 2 weekends ago. Six and a half minutes of finished product, cut from over 30gb of footage. That would take... god knows how long to upload from my Roadrunner connection. Not to mention blow my "storage limit" with them. I applaud them for their initial efforts, but I'll continue editing and manipulating video on my local drive (or a very fast local network) for the time being. However, who knows, this will surely change in the future and they'
More Cloud Crap (Score:4, Interesting)
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Thanks, Rob. But I use Linux. (Score:2)
Which has plenty of video editing options -- some of them even quite good, and some of them even quite easy. (Note the two don't always overlap.)
P.S. If you think my subject is sarcastic... well, yes.
Never even got the look at the features (Score:1)
Their only purchasing option is in the form of a monthly subscription, which seems like it misses most of their potential market.
For a monthly subscription pricing structure to make sense, the customer would need to be producing multiple videos per month, and as other posters have already mentioned, in that case most would install some more capable local video editing software that doesn't require uploading raw footage to a cloud system.
It seems like most of their target users would be people like me, w
Seriously, such a blatant advertisement? (Score:3)
Why? I don't get it. Yes, slashvertisements have always existed, but at least they've always been of the form "here is a neat thing I found." This is one very, *very* small step removed from just posting actual ad videos. Cut it out.
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No, I don't complain when movie stars start giving interviews about their movies. I do complain when news channels talk about them as if they were actual news, rather than interviews about movies. More relevantly to this, though, I would get annoyed if the newspaper posted an article that started with "this movie is the greatest movie ever! Everyone should go see it!", and it wasn't in the reviews section.
This is retarded (Score:2)
This does not look like product placement. (Score:1)
At all.
Yo Dawg, we hear you like videos. (Score:2)
So here's a video on the Internet of WeVideo editing videos you upload to the Internet, so you can edit your videos and upload your upload.
I've actually been thinking about this (Score:2)