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

[Vincent Pinon]

Hi Volker & List,

Sorry for the late reply...
The idea you are presenting here is indeed exciting!
The choice of Kdenlive for collaborative editing seems well justified, with 
proxy editing feature and versionable text file format.
That would promote Kdenlive and KDE software to a much wider audience!

I have limited knowledge about server side needs & solutions.
Maybe Dan or Steve you have know-how to promote?
The help I can provide here would be limited to rendering/transcoding stuff, 
project archive layout, quick client adaptations if needed for testing...

On the client side, I think most of the work is to get Win&Mac ports work 
again (quite a piece of work), further improve reliability, to answer 
expectations of many Wikimedia contributors I guess...
I was planning this on my spare time, so without committing on any timeframe 
:-/
This new offer to fund activities on Kdenlive tickles again hesitations to take 
a part time for that purpose, but I have to check if it really is feasible 
(family life, job constraints etc); end of year is coming so fast...

Once we will be fully part of KDE, we will also be able to mentor SoC 
students, maybe one or more subjects could be related to this collaboration?

To discuss more directly, maybe we can arrange a voice or video conference (I 
never tried but there should be a way to get it work)?

If there are other volunteers to get involved, please step out ;-)

Best regards,

Vincent.

Le jeudi 25 septembre 2014, 12:37:10 Volker Grassmuck a écrit :
> 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.