[Kdenlive-devel] development of a video editing server based on Kdenlive

[Volker Grassmuck]

Dear Kdenlive-devels,

we love Kdenlive. A lot. And we want to commission the development of a video editing server based on it that will help alleviate the stunning lack of video in Wikipedia. And the first people who come to mind for asking whether they are interested in the project are those who brought us Kdenlive in the first place: you.

We are the project Videos for Wikipedia Articles (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VWA), which was initiated at the Centre for Digital Cultures of Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany, is supported by Wikimedia Germany and funded by the German Ministry for Education and Science.

Please find below the introduction to the specifications of the service we would like to have developed. We're very curious what you think. We hope you like the idea as much as people at Wikimedia and at the Internet Archive which will provide its infrastructure for development and will host the final service.

And we hope to find one or a group from your midst to commission the work to. Caveat: the VWA project has to close its books by the end of the year. Little time and comparably little money but big chance of establishing Kdenlive as the standard video editor in the Wikipedia universe

I could post the full specs here on the list, maybe as .odt. Or you could contact me offlist <vgrass at vgrass.de> if this request is considered off-topic. Please advise how to proceed.

We find the idea of building a three-way cooperation between the Internet Archive, Wikipdia and Kdenlive really exciting. I hope you share the feeling.

Thank you for Kdenlive!

Best,
Volker


The Video Editing Server
Distributed video production has to struggle with a number of bottlenecks:

	• Wikimedia Commons permits uploading of video files only in the patent-free formats WebM / VP8/VP9 and Ogg/Theora.

	• Once produced and published on Wikimedia Commons, videos can not be edited further or re-used by other users because those do not have access to either raw footage or project files.

	• Distributed volunteer video teams can hardly work together, because the large data volume from common consumer cameras recording in HD and soon 4K make exchanging files difficult.

	• Also in editing video, common consumer PCs available to volunteer producers quickly reach their limits due to large data volumes.

	• Raw footage can currently only be archived de-centrally by the volunteer producers themselves who continuously have to expand storage capacity or delete material.

	• The upload to Wikimedia Commons with regular browsers is limited to 100 MB (1 GB with chunked upload) which is too little for most videos.

A Video Editing Server based on the free, non-linear editing software Kdenlive will solve or alleviate these problems:

	• Raw footage will be archived on the Editing Server.

	• Producers get smaller proxy clips from the Editing Server that are fast to download and easy to edit on standard consumer PCs.

	• After editing, producers upload their video project files to the Server which are then available for other producers.

	• From the video project files and the archived raw footage, the Server renders the final video and cross-site uploads it directly to Wikimedia Commons. Thus the producers avoid the computationally intensive rendering as well as the cumbersome process of uploading large files to Wikimedia Commons.