VideoEdit

VideoEdit
Designing to my SoC 2008 application, the design isn't ready yet. Faga 00:44, 22 March 2008 (EDT)

Idea

The main idea of this activity is to provide simple operations with videos. It is not intended to be complex, the easier the better. This should let a young child cut and paste parts of a video, record his voice over a video, put text as a subtitle or as a note and many other annotation operations. So the idea is not to only provide the simple operations which every video editor have - like copy, cut, add effects (not intended to the first version) - but to provide annotation (or comments). After the first release, this application can so start to explore collaboration - children seeing annotations by other children and annotating over it.

Note: This activity design doesn't focus in capture of video/image/sound like Record activity. This activity is intended to provide Edit power to videos, and could be extended to audio too, and does not only capture from camera / microphone, it permits from any source. A possible integration will be really nice in the future, but extending Record activity to this activity could turn Record activity too complex - anyway, this could be studied.

Designed Operations

Here it is listed some operations that VideoEdit could have (feel free to add anything desired):

• Cut/Copy/Paste: these basic operations are expected to have in the first version. They are essential to any video editing.
• Audio mix/extract/replace: working with audio extract, mix and replace to let user to change the audio of a video, mix with another and record with microphone a new audio.
• Convert videos: if this activity has a nice library with many codecs, an operation to simple convert videos op will be nice. Storing a big mpeg video in some other video format lesser than mpeg.
• Add texts,parallel videos and pictures: This part starts with a complex type of operation, annotating texts and merging videos and pictures. When this operation completes, a small animation maker is done, as user can do some presentations and using the power of technologies like SMIL.

Difficulties

Here are some possible difficulties that this project can have:

• Memory to store editable version - XO has a short memory. So, how could we store the editable version of video? One possible solution is to use SMIL and convert all media used in the OUTPUT wish-format (like only ogg/theora+vorbis), and this also support annotation.

• Plugins to work with videos - outputing only ogg/Theora hasn't much problem, but opening only this type of video can restrict activity a lot. For an example, user can get a video in mpeg1/2/4, xvid, flv formats. Without this support can be frustrating to a child to edit videos - even play them, as until this moment there isn't a specific video player activity.

• Rendering video - How can I render videos? With gstreamer? Is gstreamer fully workable in XO?