VIX: A New Kind of Video Editor | Hacker News Reader

VIX: A New Kind of Video Editor

interfacelab.com

67 pointsjawngee27 comments

This is a clever solution to this problem, and there are instances where this could be helpful.

However, if you happen to be attached to FCP, and have basic rhythm, you can perform a more controlled version of this process in either FCP7 or FCPX using MultiClip/Multicam Editing.

http://youtu.be/kmFmyXWaQHM?t=3m27s

Using keyboard commands, in real time you can cut between up to 16 different video clips. I basically play my keyboard like a drumset, and the result is video that is synced to the audio, and allows more artistic choice over the content selection.

This is a cool idea, but I must admit, I find the example video basically unwatchable, with the way it cuts back and forth so much. They might take longer, but I would expect “a moderately skilled person in the use of Final Cut or Adobe Premiere” to create a dramatically better final output.

I thought the pacing of the start of the video with the super slow titling and effects was enough to keep me from wanting to watch the rest of the video. Internet ADD, gotta get to the point quicker.

Having edited some documentary films, though, I could see this as a useful tool for a preliminary cut facilitator of some types of montage scenes...

Yup. You should change that.

thought so, too.

Watching on my Mac Mini, some of the Video cuts are late. Your mind is used to light being received in your eyes prior to sound hitting your ears. When cutting, you should emulate that by cutting the video slightly early.

Yeah, maybe bring the video just 1 frame earlier, before that drumbeat.

Not a replacement for final cut pro, but definitely handy for making quick music driven videos. Definitely will give it a try.

Definitely not intended to replace Final Cut Pro. Let me know how it goes!

"For a moderately skilled person in the use of Final Cut or Adobe Premiere, this might have taken anywhere from a day to three days. In VIX, it took about an hour"

I'm not sure where you got your definition of moderately skilled from, because the very first video I ever made in Final Cut (or maybe it was AE) was pretty similar to this (dubstep, cuts to music) and it took me about 3 hours to edit together. I would consider myself a total noob, I didn't know a single keyboard shortcut.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK--TtQtVk8

Considering the difference of work speed between a program where I know the hotkeys for everything and a program that I'm unfamiliar with I can't help but extrapolate that this sort of editing would take at most ~30m with a reasonably optimized workflow using existing software. Anyone care to disillusion me?

I've been editing video for 15+ years now, sometimes professionally, sometimes not. I mean Ridley Scott is not going to be hiring me to cut Prometheus 2 or anything like that but ... I have cut stuff that was in two AMA award shows, a cannibal corpse video that aired on MTV, a lot of previz for larger raves in the late 90's, a lot of the videos I do for experience retail installs now and a couple of years writing custom plug-ins (mostly for AE) for a post shop.

This is also my second video editor, the first one being Shave (http://www.maclife.com/article/reviews/shave_video_review) - which, unfortunately, got obsoleted with Mavericks (thanks Apple!).

Each of these videos I was cutting, which lead me to write VIX in the first place, are composed of anywhere from 25 to 60+ individual shots, sequenced into anywhere from 120-423 individual edits, depending on the effect we were going for. There is no way you are going to do that in 3 hours and end up with something near finished. You would be making, taking the average of 151 edits, 0.8 edits per minute for 180 minutes straight. The video you linked to had ~20 edits, discounting the time ramping/remapping you were doing. So I would expect that would take you 3 hours.

The video linked to in the blog post consists of 30 shots and 292 edits.

Now on the other end of the spectrum, this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs9ut-gbYUU consists of 8 or 9 edits. I started it in VIX, built the structure in about 5 minutes and then finished in FCP and AE. So the edit itself took maybe 10 minutes, but an additional day of post work because the camera man who shot it had no idea what he was doing (it was our first shoot, so I wasn't as hands on as I should have been and was far too trusting than I should have been). I mean motion tracking to stabilize footage, they shot it at 30fps, so I had to optical flow it down to slow mo and then paint out distortions from that in photoshop, etc. The color wash and light leaks isn't there for aesthetics, it's there to distract you from the crappy camera work. It was a major pita.

I posted the beta to /r/editors on Reddit last week I think and got a ton of feedback from the pro's that hang out there, plus got a lot of input from people I've worked with who do post professionally/commercially, so it wasn't entirely developed in a void. I don't think it's the panacea of video editors though, but it is is a pretty cool creative tool that supplants FCP or AE. You won't edit a movie with it, but a music video, club video, behind the scenes video, skateboarding video, one guy from reddit was using it for wedding videos even. For that type of work, and of course I am totally biased, I can't see myself starting it in FCP. Finishing in FCP? Yes, for sure. But not starting, VIX is too fast to get to a good rough point.

Also, it's free. :) Well exporting to AE and FCP might be in app purchases for $5-$10, I haven't decided yet. The magazine and the publishing platform are my main biz, but I thought people would find this useful and/or fun.

Do give it a spin though and let me know what you think!

Admire your chops for doing this. But what do you honestly want to do with it? From a professional POV, I think this may be a good tool for a mood reel. But, even still, client will usually still want precision with that.

I would never use this professionally for any of the descriptors you - aside from a wedding video. Your logic entirely negates storytelling - which is why people are saying the example you've posted is so unwatchable. I'm not hating here - just trying to give you a solid critique.

That leaves, in my mind, the casual user not really well versed in video literacy. I'm talking your mom'n'pops and road trip bros who have a bunch of Iphone/DSLR footage they want to throw down on a timeline.

As someone else said, I think there's a fair few apps out there like this. How is yours going to be different? I think the motion graphics is a nice add.

Do people not read the blog post, is what I'm wondering right about now because in it, I outline exactly what I want to do with it, what I use it for currently. It was born out of necessity, not because I wanted to slap some weird idea together and throw it out there th change the editing world.

If you are talking about Animoto and that other thing that was posted in here, Replay I think it's called, they're not even remotely similar. For one, VIX is real time, Animoto and Replay upload your videos to a server, do the edits on the server and you download the results. For seconds you have the exact same precision in editing that you do with any other NLE, you can't change anything with Animoto or that other thing except for picking a different theme.

Yes, you can let VIX automatically edit the video, but you can also change any edit down to the frame.

As I said before, you're not going to make a movie with this. You're not going to edit a TV show with this. But there are broad categories of other types of editing where VIX is perfectly suited.

So in summary, I made it because I needed it, I put it out there because I hoped others would find it useful. If they don't, it's no real skin off my back, but I know that's not the case. Will it make me a million dollars? No, not when I'm putting it out there for free. I make the millions with the magazine and publishing platform I built VIX to help me build.

As for the posted video being unwatchable, it's a matter of demographics and taste, I suppose. It's been tested with our target demo for Em Oi, Vietnamese women ages 18-24, and it tested pretty well against slower/less edits. It also "been blessed" by the people involved, including the photographer who shot it, who himself shoots for every top fashion mag here in Vietnam (http://bobbynguyen.vn). Could it be better? Of course it could!

I don't mean to sound defensive, I appreciate that you took the time to offer your advice, but I think you are under the false impression that I'm building a startup around VIX or something, when it's clear in the blog post what startup I'm actually trying to build. If you're interested in that:

https://vimeo.com/68565914 (demo of the magazine app) pw: finalaspektdemo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXlHFhbqzHU (building aspekt experiences)

Ahhh, very cool! If you want to sell about 10 times more though, make it capable of exporting to iMovie...

I’d be interested in how it’s built. What app frameworks did you use? Is it written in Objective C? Etc. Thanks!

Mostly Objective-C. Media via CoreVideo and AVFoundation. Document persistence through ModelKit (http://github.com/jawngee/ModelKit). UI mostly custom. Beat detection and BPM detection is C++.

Interestingly, everything but UI should compile and work on iOS without much modification. Doubt I will ever take it there, but you never know.

This is such a brilliant idea! It'd be also interesting to extract other features from videos such as colour profiles , face detection and movements of objects in the frame and camera movements. They don't need to be accurate but hints; then use the profile to control the mood of the video. An example may be,to start of with cool edits at the beginning then gradually progress to the warmer clips.

is the bpm / beat detection home grown code?

Yup.

There's an iPhone app, Replay, that does something similar: automatic music/video tagging to build a video "counterpoint". Of course it's more limited, as it's intended for general public, but the Epic theme is quite convincing. Disclaimer: I am CTO @ Stupeflix.

Whoa. I've had similar ideas on my own, and now it seems they weren't so unique after all. I'm founder of Wavesum which is focused on music analysis algorithms and their applications. Would be cool to compare our beat tracking algos. Lots of love and ramen was put into ours.

FYI, when I see VIX, I think of the volatility index. A quick google search shows this is overwhelmingly the case. A name change to something more distinct could help with exposure. Good luck!

And when I see VIX, I think the VMware VIX API: https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vix-api/

But, I don't think it actually matters. Finance vs. Virtualization vs. Video editing are all pretty separate areas of interest, and I imagine anyone in any of those areas would know what they're looking for.

The title made me think it was going to somehow be a vi-based editor (and that sounds like a good idea).

Try Avid, those folks are scary fast on the keyboard.

This stupid site can't even show plain text without JavaScript.

The important bit for the rest of us:

     Mac OS 10.9 or later

LMK when it runs on something open source.

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