Comment by CinematicStudio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CinematicStudio | Hacker News Reader

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CinematicStudio

> Hardware keeps getting faster and software still keeps becoming slower.

I do know what you mean :D

> For export, avoiding reencoding where possible is a must in my opinion, e.g., for extracting clips from a video (even if frame boundaries are inexact).

At this time, this is not as easy as I'd like. I can't use ffmpeg, because my app in commercial. So at this time I do reencoding -- these are implementation details I simply can't avoid.

However, this happens on GPU, and it's really really fast. Especially on a decent graphic card.

> Also, I would like it to be super easy to keep the existing frame rate, quality, encoding, etc. Most software I see today ask for fresh export settings and not let easily figure the current ones (I guess assuming each video clip imported may have differences on these parameters).

This is doable (basically, guessing the best arguments by looking at all imported videos).

> It would be so much better, for some tasks, to treat videos like usual documents - open, edit, save (to the same location), as opposed to import, edit, export.

This is an interesting idea. Do you mean, have a special extension, and when you open it do your editing + auto save + at close, you've already saved the video project?

I understand the limitations mentioned for reencoding, which are perhaps likewise applicable to other software vendors also. It does limit usage though, in my opinion. It may be fast with GPUs, but the difference on my high end machine is still of an order of magnitude if reencoding is avoided.

>> This is an interesting idea. Do you mean, have a special extension, and when you open it do your editing + auto save + at close, you've already saved the video project?

Typical video software has it like a build process. So there are these project files maintaining the list of all resources, edits performed, settings, etc. Editing a Word document needs none of it. For many casual edits, it would be great to just open a video file, make edits (e.g., rotate the video, remove some segments, increase brightness, etc.) and click save (which overwrites the original file), and all done. There's no "project", no auto-save, etc.

> I understand the limitations mentioned for reencoding, which are perhaps likewise applicable to other software vendors also. It does limit usage though, in my opinion. It may be fast with GPUs, but the difference on my high end machine is still of an order of magnitude if reencoding is avoided.

Interesting, I'm actually curious of some numbers. This probably makes sense for insanely simple editing, but very likely if you do any edit, you'll always need to reencode (since you do some processing).

> Typical video software has it like a build process. So there are these project files maintaining the list of all resources, edits performed, settings, etc. Editing a Word document needs none of it. For many casual edits, it would be great to just open a video file, make edits (e.g., rotate the video, remove some segments, increase brightness, etc.) and click save (which overwrites the original file), and all done. There's no "project", no auto-save, etc.

Interesting, I do understand the allegory, but I'm not sure this is such a good idea. Just imagine this - you put some text on top of your video. In 5 minutes you want to move the text a bit lower. Bam, you wouldn't be able to do that.

>> This probably makes sense for insanely simple editing

Yes.

An example would be extracting or eliminating segments from a video recording.

>> Just imagine this - you put some text on top of your video. In 5 minutes you want to move the text a bit lower.

Sure. It's understood that once rasterized, further edits are nearly impossible.

However, it's not that a similar thing is unseen elsewhere. If I delete some text from a document, save, and close the application, and in 5 minutes, I want to get it back ...

If the user wants to keep the original, they just use "Save as ..."

The added complexity of 'project' based workflows is not worth for all edits.

> However, it's not that a similar thing is unseen elsewhere. If I delete some text from a document, save, and close the application, and in 5 minutes, I want to get it back ... If the user wants to keep the original, they just use "Save as ..."

That would put the responsibility on the user to remember all that. If I decide to do something like that, I'll need to save the original myself, and allow the user to go back to it.

But yeah, now I get the appeal of having something like this. I've added it to my todo list -- if enough people want this, I can certainly implement it (it would disrupt quite a bit of my internal workflow, since I view "videos" as constant, and optimize them as such. so I would need to find a workaround for editing in place, but it's certainly doable).

For some strange reason, I can't hit "Reply" on your other comment, so I replied here:

> In my view, there is scope for innovation here by making it easier over how most software applications do this.

Agreed!

> Here's an example of a very different workflow: https://www.descript.com/video-editing

Yeah, that is kinda' very very cool :D

I know they used to be audio only a few months back. Apparently they moved into video as well. Interesting, I will certainly take another look at them.

Sounds good.

In my view, there is scope for innovation here by making it easier over how most software applications do this.

Here's an example of a very different workflow:

https://www.descript.com/video-editing

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