Great post Manuel, and I wholeheartedly agree, including the final
recommendation. I, instead, voted for full MP4 support on the RfC to draw
the center of gravity towards accepting MP4, but I would be happy even with
a partial solution.
Some points:
1. The video project in English Wikipedia is:
[[Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wiki_Makes_Video]] We certainly welcome more than
just English Wikipedians there! We've had several university classes use
this, and I think a pretty good set of example videos and guidelines
including many videos shot by journalism and media studies students:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wiki_Makes_Video
2. I talked recently with the Mozilla Popcorn folks, and they seem to have
the best OSS, online video editing system today with Popcorn Maker. You can
actually paste in URLs of Commons video and start splicing them together.
Just make sure to use an Ogg/WebM friendly browser. I encourage you to try
it out.
https://popcorn.webmaker.org/
They said they would be thrilled if Popcorn became part of the editing
solution for Wikimedia. One problem is that they right now only manage an
EDL of edits, so embedding an edited video together requires an online
Javascript environment -- there is no provision for re-compressing and
outputting the video to a standalone Ogg or WebM file. But this is OSS so
adding this functionality should be possible with the right resources.
3. Perhaps we should do several sessions at Wikimedia in succession,
including a workshop on how to shoot and make video? I teach video shooting
and editing to students each year, so this would be quite an easy thing for
me to pitch in on.
-Andrew
On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 6:54 AM, Manuel Schneider <
manuel.schneider(a)wikimedia.ch> wrote:
Hi Fabrice,
interesting question!
I'd like to remind of a discussion we had at last year's Wikimania in
Hong Kong concerning tools for the video community.
Yet we do not really have a video community but scattered small groups
or individuals doing some work. I try to coordinate this in the
german-speaking world and we do this via Wikipedia, then there are
people in the Czech Republic doing videos on national parks, Andrew did
some great stuff in the US, there is a british initiative as well. We
all face similar challenges. One things - which is off-topic here - is
that I have in mind to connect these groups to an internationl video
community, maybe by having a WikiVideo (or whatever the name might be)
project.
But back to the RfC: One of the challenges is that we need a solution for
* storing the raw video material allowing people to re-use, re-edit
etc., also most volunteers don't have the storage capacity to store all
their raw material
* collaborative editing - hard to do technically and it mostly implies
that raw material is being shared - hard for people that can meet each
other as these files are big, fast storage is needed etc. and it is even
harder for people working online
* upload of high-quality, finished video projects is a pain. They mostly
have more than 1 GB, you need to have another server to upload and share
it, make a bug report, find a server admin who downloads and imports it
etc.
My idea which we talked about briefly at Wikimania was a server where
people could upload there raw material, it gets transcoded into smaller
"proxy clips" everyone can easily download, edit and then upload the EDL
(edit decision list = video editing project file, which just holds the
operations). The server would then use the EDL on the raw material
stored there and render the final video. The upload process can then be
automated between this server and Commons.
The reason this idea was dismissed is the core of this RfC: patent
trolling etc. on H.264 codecs etc. which we would need to allow as raw
material.
So my take on this topic is a compromise:
* allow MP4 / H.264 as a source codec
* deliver everything in WebM / Ogg Theora (or other free codecs)
Especially with WebM I see no reason why people really need H.264. Ogg
Theora is somewhat exotic but WebM isn't.
And once we have solved the legal problem around this RfC nothing is
stoping us to implement the video editing server, right?
/Manuel
--
Wikimedia CH - Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens
Lausanne, +41 (21) 34066-22 -
www.wikimedia.ch
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>