Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrusi | Hacker News Reader

Does this require you to upload your video assets to their servers over the internet? That seems extremely impractical for 4k or 8k footage. Even with gigabit upload speeds a clip could take several times it's playback duration to transfer.

View on HN

OTOH, if it's targeting (at least in part) the tiktok crowd or busy people throwing together a video slideshow for a wedding, you might be dealing with a situation where most of the source video is already in datacenters already, whether FB, GPhotos, etc.

The Tiktok crowd also doesn't need 4k or 8k video. Automatically downscaling the source material before uploading will be an acceptable tradeoff for the vast majority of users.

I’m not sure how that would be a benefit without massive partnerships with the custodians of those assets.

For gphotos at least, could I not just put them in an album that's shareable by link and then paste that link into Runway for it to ingest from? There'd still be an "upload" stage, of course, but not involving someone's home internet.

I believe the comment you replied to is talking about peering agreements, or some other way of coming to terms with the potentially huge of traffic this could generate.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering

This does seem like a 'bring the mountain to Muhammad situation' Upload and download many GB of video every time you want to use it, rather than download the program once.

People who do a lot of video editing usually already have decent PCs on which to do it.

My guess is that they don't want to run this on the users computer (even though video editors have fairly beefy machines) because it would be easy to extract out the ML models and use them, destroying their business model.

Exactly. The cloud is DRM. It’s really the only DRM that works; don’t give the user the code at all.

There’s also the data play of making the user keep data there and pay rent forever to keep it accessible. You can download your videos but you lose edit history etc.

The models they are using are probably already public.

The ml parts can be accessed via API without requiring a full video upload maybe

More likely is that it's easier to monetize. Or both of course

I think hosting the software might also be a way to defuse the software patent minefield - by running the algorithms in a country which doesn't have software patents. This might (arguably) keep the embodiment of the invention in said jurisdiction. Or at least muddy the waters somewhat.

According to the pricing page, each video can only be 2mins long. So this appears to be geared towards social media video sharing and marketing.

Thanks for finding that — that does make sense then. Seems like the sort of thing that ought to be mentioned on the landing page though!

I think that is the case. They are applying ML to all the clips too, which is served-side. They also say final renders are server-side.

Once the clips are on their servers, editing is probably fine, as long as they're using some kind of edge compute for low latency. In fact that's great for people who don't want to buy a more powerful computer for video editing. But if that means you have to saturate your uplink for 24 hours before you even start editing then that's borderline unusable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com