Show HN: Cloud-based GIF editor to augment any video
gifs.com
gifs.com
We started with the premise of democratizing video editing by making an iMovie-lite in the cloud. Our goal is to empower people around the world to express themselves. We still have a lot of ideas in the works to make finding, creating and augmenting short-form media frictionless but launching our new editor is the back-bone of that dream.
You may remember us from gifyoutube.com where anyone could add gif in front of youtube and we would let you trim the video and add captions. Now you can simply replace youtube.com with gifs.com or put gifs.com/edit/ in front of any video or GIF to open it up in the new editor with even more editing capabilities.
Everyone knows a picture is worth a thousand words, so does that mean a GIF must be worth n pictures where n is frames in the GIF? After checking out /r/reactiongifs/ and /r/wastedgifs I now believe so.
p.s. can't wait to try out what you've built when I get to my desktop.
What I meant by democratizing was opening up a capability to many more people than previously available due to needing expensive software or the knowledge and skills to use OSS.
Here is wikipedia's definition:
> Democratization of technology refers to the process by which access to technology rapidly continues to become more accessible to more people.
Your buzzwords, and the rest of this industry's buzzwords, are basically meaningless mumbo jumbo to all those people you are trying to sign up around the world. Equally guilty, I've used the word "container" in a thousand sentences if I've used it in one. I've also used the crap out of your service, but bailed to one of the other ones because of video quality. That's the reality of GIFy playthings.
Users should dictate what software is created for them, including and up to how it benefits from their use. If an application requires hurting a long time user to be more "successful", then it should rethink how it presents itself to the users during the marketing growth phase. I'd rather pay cryptocurrency transactions to a GIF API aggregator that does auto-bids on quality and compression times for services like this. That way, I'd get to pick what TYPE of service I wanted and the services themselves would optimize on feature quality instead of founder and VC equity.
Our goal is not to be a high quality image transcoding business, if that's what you are after there are many great options. Our first task was to create a tool that anyone (like our parents) could use to edit short clips of video and easily share it with their friends. However I can sympathize with the feeling of wanting higher quality media and we have several performance increases and smart mechanisms to serve the right quality to different clients that will allow us to increase the quality of our media for everyone, no auctions necessary.
The youtube integration and cropping is really cool as well. It took less than a minute to try it out. I can imagine this getting some heavy usage which begs the question, how do you support the costs behind this?
The video processing cpu time isn't free and the end result is an image hosting site which traditionally are impossible to monetize. What's the secret sauce for sustainability?
Okay but that's capital, not revenue.
> We've built out a team (we're hiring! rory@gifs.com), and the team has done a lot of work to ensure that gifs/webms/mp4s are transcoded insanely fast.
A great dev team can arguably keep costs down with efficient systems but that's still not revenue. Also, dev teams cost money too so that's more expense.
> We've had over 4,5000,000 gifs made, and over billions of .gifs delivered, which has started to run up some cost
Okay sounds like some traction but I read that as about $11.5K/month of bandwidth spending[1] (just bandwidth, not counting transcoding costs).
> ...which leads us to sustainability: we look at the gifs player almost like the youtube embedded player, but for, well, short media. Maybe one day ever gif/webm will be in the gifs player. As we continue to build tools for empowering people to augment videos, we hope to see more people make cool short clips within our ecosystem.
So where's the revenue? Embedded player licensing? Intermingling ads? Changing the overlay icons for Brazzers to link straight there?
I love VC fueled fun as much as the next guy, but I'm genuinely curious what the end game is. Ride it out and hope the user base becomes worthy of an acquisition before the money burns?
[1]: 1 Billion Images x 100 KB/Image x $.12/GB[2]
[2]: Based on the IP I'm guessing they're running on GCE with rack rates for bandwidth at $.12/GB. Probably over estimating though.
What we are truly passionate about is exposing the general public to a new means of expression through short form media. What we are seeing is publishers writing articles that are just lists of looping GIFs, sports fans browsing /r/nba and watching the 3 dunks and a block instead of the 3 hour game, etc... so we built our embeddable GIFs player that allows viewers to share, turn on sound, view source, and much more. It also has the benefit of using mp4 or webm format over the actual gif file which is not a good choice when compared to those modern formats. This has led to a lot of publishers using our product and the tremendous growth of people viewing media in our embedded player. Now we want to expand another segment of our user-base, the creator (who we see as the next-generation of publishers) by making a easy-to-use video editor in the cloud.
To finally answer your question, how could we generate revenue, we could show highly targeted ads during prime-time slots. Imagine the NBA finals game, people making GIFS and sharing them with captions. Nike wants to promote some new product and they use our ad platform to expose a viral campaign / advertisement on all of our media. That's just one idea but there are many other potential avenues for monetization that we are considering as well.
tl;dr we're not aiming to be an image hosting company
Q: How come when I visit gifs.com I see a brazzers logo in the bottom right corner...?
Thanks for pointing this out though, the team had a good chuckle and it reinforced the need for a manual or better system to elect gifs that show up on the homepage.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/29/irans-blo...
Democratization /= fueling the televisization of the Web
The only thing we're trying to fuel is the ability of the common person to express themselves through short video. If you think that is a bad then we'll have to agree to disagree.
E.g. I only want the first 3 seconds of a video to be turned into a gif.
{
"source": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhyANGHDDH8",
"trim": {
"start": 145,
"end": 148
}
}
I'm getting an error that the duration that youtube sends me back is higher than your read out duration:
{ errors: { message: 'end(8s) > currentDuration(7.383s)' } }
As a quick hack since the youtube video duration is 7.383s, and you want to trim to the end just omit the end property.
Found one usability issue: when starting a crop and without clicking 'check' or [x] also place a sticker or caption, the sticker or caption shows an interactivity outline but only the crop is active.
We've chosen to prioritize speed over quality for the initial launch so at this time but are working on transcoding to various sizes and qualities to return based on the client's device size and internet speed in the player or when someone wants to share a super high quality (and file size) GIF.
I'm trying to create a 10-second gif starting at 71:16 of https://gifs.com/watch?v=LW6hPl6zx5Q.
I get "Your Gif could not be created at this time.". I hope you're able to fix it, gifs.com looks fantastic. If/when it works, I'll use it a lot!
I filed an issue to report the correct error message and log this as an event so we could see how many times it's happening.
Sorry about that and I hope you find some other AoE videos to gif!