http://www.vidipedia.org/Vidipedia_FAQ
Lots of stuff comes directly from Wikipedia, and quite a lot of the pages were just cut'n'pasted over and are in need of fixing ... but hmm, interesting.
I wonder if they'll do much toward making video editable. Imagine how far Wikipedia wouldn't have gotten if every edit was a PDF of a scan ...
- d.
On 7/19/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
http://www.vidipedia.org/Vidipedia_FAQ
Lots of stuff comes directly from Wikipedia, and quite a lot of the pages were just cut'n'pasted over and are in need of fixing ... but hmm, interesting.
I wonder if they'll do much toward making video editable. Imagine how far Wikipedia wouldn't have gotten if every edit was a PDF of a scan
Well .. images are about as editable as video could ever hope to be.. and we seldom see cooperative editing for raster images.
SVGs are much much better in this regard that we could expect video to become we only see a fairly limited amount of cooperative editing compared to text.
Interested people can see most of our own videos here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Video
Right now our upload size limits are a major limitation for us. As well as the lack of good user education... and the pure difficulty in producing professional quality videos which remains even when you have the right equipment. etc..
It seems like the site is focusing on cooperative submission and cooperative classification rather than cooperative editing... which is probably the right approach for video for the foreseeable future.
I expect to see an upswing in videos submitted as more people realize that there is a lot of opportunity to submit videos of simple things that have no video at all. Today still photography on Wikipedia can be a challenge because most of the easy and obviously things are already done well. Thats not yet true of video.
On 19/07/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
It seems like the site is focusing on cooperative submission and cooperative classification rather than cooperative editing... which is probably the right approach for video for the foreseeable future.
At the moment I'd be happy if they got their copy of MediaWiki working well enough for me to be able to save my user page without a MySQL error ...
I expect to see an upswing in videos submitted as more people realize that there is a lot of opportunity to submit videos of simple things that have no video at all. Today still photography on Wikipedia can be a challenge because most of the easy and obviously things are already done well. Thats not yet true of video.
A Flash video player that works in Gnash is within reach - the YouTube player now works in Gnash.
- d.
On 7/19/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
A Flash video player that works in Gnash is within reach - the YouTube player now works in Gnash.
And Gnash is clearly violating at least 7 patents in the process: Legal flash video is out of reach anywhere software patents are valid because the only formats that can work in flash 8 require heavily and indisputably patent encumbered formats.
In flash 9 it is, at least theoretically, possible to code support for unencumbered formats... but no one has done it yet.
It's also less relevant these days: The player we have today supports four different playback methods (Java, VLC plugin, Application/OGG plugin, and HTML 5 video tag), and at least one of these works for the overwhelming majority of *readers* (I know not nor care not about Wikipedia regulars, they can install their own players) who attempt to view video on our site.
With the huge victory of Ogg/Theora being made the baseline for HTML5 video (due to the need to have a basic unencumbered format universally available), we can expect the situation to improve far more in the next two cycles of browser development. (Opera beta already has HTML5 video tag support, and FireFox keeps toying with it but hasn't made a public commitment about when they'll ship).
Now that we have working playback for most readers, I think it's safe to say that our limiting factors are someplace else at this point.
Personally I don't enjoy doing videos much because it takes more work to get a less polished (and on our projects right now, appreciated) result.
For example, this cruddy video took many minutes to create while the still took seconds. The video is more informative but it just doesn't look well done. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Electronic_lock_yl88_operation.ogg
On 7/19/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/19/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
http://www.vidipedia.org/Vidipedia_FAQ
Lots of stuff comes directly from Wikipedia, and quite a lot of the pages were just cut'n'pasted over and are in need of fixing ... but hmm, interesting.
I wonder if they'll do much toward making video editable. Imagine how far Wikipedia wouldn't have gotten if every edit was a PDF of a scan
Well .. images are about as editable as video could ever hope to be.. and we seldom see cooperative editing for raster images.
Video is much more potentially editable than static images. Consider a 5 minute mini-documentary on [[Hurricane Katrina]], slide-show style, with narration taken straight from the text of the Wikipedia article and images taken from commons to match the narration. There is a *lot* of potential for cooperative editing there, basically as much or more than the text of a Wikipedia article.
The idea is probably ahead of its time, though, because AFAIK there aren't any free (even as in beer) software tools to make such video editing easy, let alone collaborative.
Anthony
On 7/20/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
Video is much more potentially editable than static images. Consider a 5 minute mini-documentary on [[Hurricane Katrina]], slide-show style, with narration taken straight from the text of the Wikipedia article and images taken from commons to match the narration. There is a *lot* of potential for cooperative editing there, basically as much or more than the text of a Wikipedia article.
The idea is probably ahead of its time, though, because AFAIK there aren't any free (even as in beer) software tools to make such video editing easy, let alone collaborative.
Anthony
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_editing_software#Open_software
Actually the main problem with you scenario would be trying to meet the different license requirements of the images.
On 7/20/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/20/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
Video is much more potentially editable than static images. Consider a 5 minute mini-documentary on [[Hurricane Katrina]], slide-show style, with narration taken straight from the text of the Wikipedia article and images taken from commons to match the narration. There is a *lot* of potential for cooperative editing there, basically as much or more than the text of a Wikipedia article.
The idea is probably ahead of its time, though, because AFAIK there aren't any free (even as in beer) software tools to make such video editing easy, let alone collaborative.
Anthony
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_editing_software#Open_software
"Non-linear video editing software" - not a single Windows program on the list. Haven't tried any of them. Are any of them "easy" besides the requirement to install linux?
(Looking again, Jahshaka is listed as cross-platform. I'll try downloading it and using it.)
Actually the main problem with you scenario would be trying to meet the different license requirements of the images.
Both the CC licenses and the GFDL allow aggregate works. If CC images are allowed in a GFDL encyclopedia, I see no reason they wouldn't be allowed in a GFDL documentary.
On 7/21/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
"Non-linear video editing software" - not a single Windows program on the list. Haven't tried any of them. Are any of them "easy" besides the requirement to install linux?
No idea I lost interest after they appeared for the most part not to support .ogg Theora
Both the CC licenses and the GFDL allow aggregate works. If CC images are allowed in a GFDL encyclopedia, I see no reason they wouldn't be allowed in a GFDL documentary.
CC has the "For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is a musical composition or sound recording, the synchronization of the Work in timed-relation with a moving image ("synching") will be considered a Derivative Work for the purpose of this License." section and going by statement by the FSF they would also likely view such a work as a derivaitive rather than an aggregate.
Other issues are keeping tract of what is licsensed under what and credit.
On 7/20/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/21/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
"Non-linear video editing software" - not a single Windows program on the list. Haven't tried any of them. Are any of them "easy" besides the requirement to install linux?
No idea I lost interest after they appeared for the most part not to support .ogg Theora
I downloaded and installed Jahshaka. Couldn't really get it working without crashing, but it doesn't look particularly good right now. OTOH, in the free beer space there were a few titles that piqued my interest.
Both the CC licenses and the GFDL allow aggregate works. If CC images are allowed in a GFDL encyclopedia, I see no reason they wouldn't be allowed in a GFDL documentary.
CC has the "For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is a musical composition or sound recording, the synchronization of the Work in timed-relation with a moving image ("synching") will be considered a Derivative Work for the purpose of this License." section and going by statement by the FSF they would also likely view such a work as a derivaitive rather than an aggregate.
Yuck. Ohwell. I guess it's GFDL images, CC-BY-SA text, or just do it anyway and hope no one sues (because, it'd be an incredibly dumb thing to sue over). The latter solution isn't an option for the WMF, of course. (Unless maybe the "no one is going to sue" could be disguised as "fair use"...)
Oh yeah, and also there's the hope that GSFDL may one day be CC-BY-SA compatible.
Other issues are keeping tract of what is licsensed under what and credit.
That's a relatively minor issue, I'd think. Just keep track of it and scroll it in the credits at the end of the video.
I wonder how hard it'd be to hack up a proof of concept using a spoken wikipedia article and some commons images, putting it together using either Avid Free DV or Windows Movie Maker. Under fair use, of course. :)
On 7/21/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
Yuck. Ohwell. I guess it's GFDL images, CC-BY-SA text, or just do it anyway and hope no one sues (because, it'd be an incredibly dumb thing to sue over). The latter solution isn't an option for the WMF, of course. (Unless maybe the "no one is going to sue" could be disguised as "fair use"...)
GFDL and PD. CC-BY maybe. Then the uses MIT ect..
Oh yeah, and also there's the hope that GSFDL may one day be CC-BY-SA compatible.
GSFDL has other issues to get over first (still has some invariant sections due to things like preserve copyright notices).
Other issues are keeping tract of what is licsensed under what and credit.
That's a relatively minor issue, I'd think. Just keep track of it and scroll it in the credits at the end of the video.
Only doable if you treat the thing as a single derivative. Please don't ask about documents entitled history.
I wonder how hard it'd be to hack up a proof of concept using a spoken wikipedia article and some commons images, putting it together using either Avid Free DV or Windows Movie Maker. Under fair use, of course. :)
Fairly trivial from a technical point of view. Assuming you know how to use the command line and download http://www.v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora/download.html. Otherwise I think SUPER is the only thing that does the relevant codec conversations and it has issues.
If you wanted to make it easy copyright wise you would use something PD image based or where you hold the copyright on the images.
Low quality version could probably be thrown together in an hour or less.
On 7/20/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
Video is much more potentially editable than static images. Consider a 5 minute mini-documentary on [[Hurricane Katrina]], slide-show style, with narration taken straight from the text of the Wikipedia article and images taken from commons to match the narration. There is a *lot* of potential for cooperative editing there, basically as much or more than the text of a Wikipedia article.
The ill-fated mediawiki video extension stuff demonstrated at Wikimania was eventually supposed to support wiki-based video editing by allowing you build cut-sheets on a wikipage.
So you'd build a tag which described a new video as a set of clips from other videos.
This would enable collaborative 'editing' of the type you describe, though it would need some interface bits to be user friendly.
I'll grant that it's editing and that it's very useful.. but it isn't and can never be the sort of rich editing that we see for text that I was talking about.
The idea is probably ahead of its time, though, because AFAIK there aren't any free (even as in beer) software tools to make such video editing easy, let alone collaborative.
There exist no tools, free or otherwise to do what you want. But building one to do collaborative cut sheets wouldn't be hard at all... most of the parts of building one already exist.
(Your right about the licensing stuff being a challenge.. but that should be no shocker, is an amazing pain for people making commercial movies and TV, whole books have been written on how to make a documentary without getting sued over random copyright problems. So it's not something that we'll have solved instantly either, even in the free content world.)
On 7/19/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I wonder if they'll do much toward making video editable. Imagine how far Wikipedia wouldn't have gotten if every edit was a PDF of a scan
Images and videos tend to come closer to starting out in a fully formed state. BTW I would argue that as long as the resolution of the video is high enough the GFDL isn't a massive problem for videos. You just stick the license on the end followed by standard credits.
On 7/19/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/19/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I wonder if they'll do much toward making video editable. Imagine how far Wikipedia wouldn't have gotten if every edit was a PDF of a scan
Images and videos tend to come closer to starting out in a fully formed state. BTW I would argue that as long as the resolution of the video is high enough the GFDL isn't a massive problem for videos. You just stick the license on the end followed by standard credits.
Or into the tags on the file which are provided for that purpose... (our popup web based video player will be displaying those tags soon).