Shred Video (YC S15) Turns Hours of Video into a Montage in Seconds | Hacker News Reader

Shred Video (YC S15) Turns Hours of Video into a Montage in Seconds

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66 pointskevin40 comments

I wrote a semi-detailed review from my first try today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9924721

Overall it's not perfect but I like it and it got the job done. I'm also pretty confident that with time, they'll be able to make this a pretty solid product. I bought it.

tl;dr is that I got this very meh video with no effort:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/gnarhub/hank/whatcom+falls+-+bad.mp...

And this pretty solid edit with some tweaking:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/gnarhub/hank/whatcom+falls.mp4

thanks for the detailed review - you're tweaked video was really good! gainers were sick. for readers, this will be a pretty common reaction w/ first time use: the first version will not be that great, but with a few tweaks can make it a lot better.

any thoughts on what we could do to make the videos better post-tweaking?

How does it compare to uploading the videos to Google Photos and using auto-awesome?

Hi everyone! I'm one of Shred Video's founders. We endeavored to make Shred Video after suffering too many hours trying to edit surf trip footage into movies that were any good. We hope to make editing GoPro and adventure travel footage fun and painless, so we can all spend less time editing and more time living. Happy to answer any questions about Shred Video, or just talk shop about movie-making!

Hey! First things first: awesome idea! I'm not sure how successful you guys can be in the long term but IMHO this is something that has been lacking for the target customers (me!). So:

1. The app UI and UX are terrible, just terrible; find someone who knows these to work on the app with you please. It feels "cheap". Also, the app icon on Launchpad.

2. I can make the app crash on OSX 10.9.4 whenever I want, all I have to do is to drop a few random .mov from my iPhone 4S in there and boom! Or even some random .jpg, boom again. Seems some basic QA was missed before the last release. If you're confident about the app stability we could then talk about sharing my files with you to reproduce it.

3. That "buy movie" button triggered a WTF in my mind. Those are my stuff, my movies! Maybe make it more specific, I don't know, like "buy this edited movie" or something like that.

4. Tried some shred videos and they all looked nice with the soundtrack I selected, but every time I dropped some pictures togethers with the other movies the final cut always had duplicated pictures showing up all the time. Like boringly all the time. Maybe tune this down for pictures?

5. Why would I pay that much for the edited movie if I a) can't edit it anymore once it's finished (unless I redo the whole thing and buy it AGAIN) and b) I won't probably be allowed to upload it to YouTube without being flagged? Maybe if the edited videos kept part of the original audio tracks it would help with this? No idea, just wondering if it's worth the money given this legal issue...

Usually I'm the guy my friends ask for help to edit their Go Kart races or whatever or any GoPro movies or vacations stuff because I took the time to learn how to use GoPro's software and Apple's, but although I'd just love to leave them behind to use Shred I'm still not convinced of the price versus benefits here...

Congrats again and keep up the good work, I'll keep trying the next releases, specially after my vacations at the Kilimanjaro next month :-)

thanks for the feedback!

1. haha yes Kevin OP working with us on this. we've spent a lot more time on the backend tech than the front-end.

2. yes would love if you'd send the bad files! mike@shredvideo.com super helpful thx

3. yeah we could have more clear messaging here. we wanted to align our interests with the user's (as in: you only pay once we help you make a movie you feel is worth paying for), will continue to work this.

4. sounds like we need to make the app smarter when just a few pics are added. we first optimized for the case where user has lots of footage/photos.

5. this the reason for the unlimited SKU - save as many movies as you want! on content, we've found more and more artists are choosing to pre-roll an add when users upload their content, instead of blocking them outright.

thx again for the feedback! would love to hear more of your ideas for how we can make the app better, send any ideas or feature requests right to me mike@shredvideo.com thanks!

This is pretty awesome looking. I have hours and hours of gopro footage, and no edited video to show for it. Target demographic here.

great outericky! get at me mike@shredvideo.com I'd love your feedback!

I wish I had similar problems, surfer problems.

Nice video though. It's really clear to me what your product is supposed to do.

Whereas editing in Final Cut or Adobe Premiere can take even experienced editors a few hours, Shred Video can cut these videos down in a matter of seconds.

You really need to be careful with journalists saying things like this. If Shred ends up with the same result (or even just a similar result) as an experienced editor then it's truly amazing and it will revolutionise amateur video. If it doesn't then comparisons like this one will leave a lot of users disappointed with the product when they try it, and disappointed early users are incredibly toxic to getting traction.

Thanks onion2k, great point it's importance to not go too far with the hype. There are certainly a ton of things users can do in pro softwares that Shred Video doesn't (yet!) deliver. We've found most GoPro/equivalent users don't want to go to the trouble or pay the cost (Final Cut Pro is $299 in the Mac store) of these pro softwares, Shred Video is a great solution for them.

I like the concept of short remixes made from the music (the music processing is impressively fast), but I noticed some glitches, sometimes the beat detection was not perfectly accurate and so the junctions were not beat-matching. Also, the music sync is not as good as I expected: I made a few trials with different bunches of videos and music tracks, and for the majority of them the beat drop at the start of the chorus was missed. The rhythm of the video cuts was interesting, though.

thanks for trying it out!

mind sharing which songs had trouble staying on beat? will help us improve our beat tracker.

yeah catching that beat drop is super critical, mind sharing which songs it missed on? super helpful thx!

Reminds me of Vix

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7496430

Someone needs to get this type of NLE done right. I like the simplicity of Shred although it needs some stability improvement - it crashes when I change clip length in the detail editor.

More than happy to help test future versions.

thanks nivals!

send the crash details to mike@shredvideo.com? we'll try write a fix for you asap!

A part of me feels like this would work extremely well as a kind of Vine or Instagram for people with GoPros doing cool shit. Yep, social media features and content hosting might be a bit out of scope but it would really close the loop on the whole "videos I've made that no one will ever see" problem.

One of the reasons I never bought a GoPro for skiing was I felt like the footage would just sit on my hard drive. If this proves useful I would consider getting a camera a lot more. Would be interesting if this gets picked up by GoPro soon.

this is the very motivation that caused us to build Shred Video! "I paid $400 for this camera, and the footage sits dormant" is a super common experience with these cameras, one we felt personally.

Does the iTunes licence permit using songs from your player in a video montage that is then shown to others/uploaded on Youtube?

I would have thought any music you have purchased is only for your personal use and derivative work is not allowed?

the same licensing rules apply if you edited the song yourself to a movie in final cut/imovie/premiere and then posted to youtube. we've found that most times youtube detects content in a video, they'll pre-roll an ad to make sure the artist gets paid.

So it is legal?

On YouTube it's "legal" because they have agreements with movie and music industries so they revenue from those ads go to them, not you. Even then, in some countries (Germany?) they flag it anyway and you won't even have the ads option, hence those quotes around legal.

Definitely not, which is why people should only be using Creative Commons licensed music in their video creations.[0]

[0]https://creativecommons.org/legalmusicforvideos

It doesn't. I know this since I was working on a startup using 30 second clips from itunes and consulted with multiple music lawyers who told me it was a grey enough area that I would get sued. I've advised for other music startups and they face similar challenges with music (one just hit 1mm downloads and got hit from Apple -> RIAA about the content).

Its incredibly frustrating when interesting applications like Shred pop up and the music folks make it difficult. Hopefully they can get some licenses and not have to sell their kidneys to do it.

This talk from Dalton is dated but still pretty relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTOlrN5-UGU

yeah it's hard for a giant industry like music to adapt to all the changes digital, internet, and now streaming in so short a time. I feel the music industry just wants the distribution it had w/ records: buy something you can share w/ your friends, but not distribute to the whole world at once.

I think Shred Video perfect aligns with the music industry's objectives here. Shred Video is not designed to help professional videog's make movies that will be seen by millions, it's designed to make movies folks like you and me can share with our friends. In this way Shred Video is a service that will encourage more music purchases, a win for the artists.

If you happen to make a movie in Shred Video that gets a million views (rooting for you!), YouTube has ways of making sure the artist maintains their rights to their content and/or gets paid. This stuff will evolve, but there's definitely a way to get the artist paid and the users able to make art with the music they love.

There's nothing in the iTunes license that gives you permission to do this. The terms vary depending on who has the publishing rights for the music. If you upload it to YouTube, then one of these things will happen, depending on YouTube's agreement with the publisher:

1. Nothing

2. You get a copyright notification from YouTube and they will show ads on your video, with the revenue going to the music publisher

3. You get a copyright violation notification from YouTube and your audio will be removed from your video.

It could have an effect on your account as well if you are a YouTube partner - where part of the agreement is that you only post content that you created or own the rights.

I have a different notion of what shred means when applied to a video, and it's not pretty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYc4DT18EJg

haha yeah....found out about this YouTube fad after we bought the domain. alas.

Hmm. Really needs a way to save and resume editing a "shred" I was in the middle of selecting some different portions of a bunch of videos and accidentally quit. Seems like an app with potential though.

we're working on a recovery feature, so if you liked the previous shred better than a new one you can go back to it. we can probably use that to salvage the last shred in the event of the crash. thanks for the suggestion!

Hey guys, realistically speaking, what are the chances of a linux port ?. Also if you could tell us anything about how it works under the hood (segment classification ?) that would be pretty cool.

hey there! proooobably not a linux port right away, we want to get the UX fully dialed before we port to other platforms.

sure! want to know more about our video analysis, or the way we remix music? the short on each: video analysis is looking for changes in speed and smoothness of the video. music tries to find a seamless path through the song where the transitions fit each other, so you get a shorter version of the song that still sounds like the original song (i.e. has intro/verse/chorus/outro).

Google Photos does the same automagically when I film multiple short videos and take many photos the same day

Awesome! Is there a plan to process footage if the user does not want to add music?

hi datamart not at the moment. for the kinds of movies Shred Video creates music is too critical to forego.

i just purchased it.

was a bit disappointed that it downsampled my 4k videos to 720p. was there some sort of preference setting that i overlooked?

great observation, we don't have a setting for that yet. we do the downsampling for speed in UX, makes sense to add a toggle to give user that preference. thanks for the suggestion!

Shred dat dope films tight, bro?

https://xkcd.com/37/

haha too awesome.

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