The Ideal Video Creation Platform
Wish #2: Intuitive Video Authoring User Interface

Of course, the ideal video creation platform needs to be easy to use and powerful!

>> Drag & Drop Timeline

EditDroid Timeline from the documentary “The EditDroid, Rise and Fall”

I’m trying to keep from getting bogged down in the feature/function minutia that has driven the development roadmaps of every major non-linear editing tool for the past decade or so. Let’s just start by saying that, of course, the video editing tool needs to employ the typical timeline-based user interface where multiple video clips, audio tracks, effects, and transitions can be dragged, dropped, and synchronized to assemble the final video. Pioneered by Lucasfilms’ EditDroid in the late 1980s, the timeline UI has withstood the test of time because of its high level of intuitiveness.

Now let’s move on to “big picture” stuff…

>> Integrated, Aggregated Stock Video Search

Many videos leverage “stock” video clips from media libraries. And if you haven’t been paying close attention, you might not have noticed the renaissance of top-quality royalty-free and rights-managed clips available for a very reasonable price via providers like Getty, Thought Equity (now T3 Media), Pond5, etc.

Stock search should be integrated into the authoring tool, with the following capabilities:

• Aggregated stock video search: A single search dialog box should return results from all leading providers. This would be a huge productivity advantage over the current reality, where you have to go on a scavenger hunt to each individual content provider’s site to do the same search over and over again!
• Streaming, frame-accurate, and watermark-free: The reality now is that, if you want reliable frame-accuracy from the video clips you select, you need to download and pay for the hi-res versions in advance, review them, and discard the ones you don’t want to use. It is a horribly inefficient process. The right way to do it is that the low-res frame-accurate representations of the video clips should be available for you to use right from the cloud-based video authoring tool. Drag them into your timeline to create a low-res rough-cut draft of your video. Then once the video is approved you push a button, and the low-res versions are automatically swapped out for hi-res production-ready versions.
• Pay for stock only when approved and ready for distribution: The same push-button process outlined above would ensure that clips are paid for as soon as the button is pushed to swap the low-res for the hi-res versions. That way, you pay for only what you use, and only when it is approved, and not for footage that winds up on the virtual cutting room floor.

>> Digital Asset Management

Stock video is only part of the solution. Video producers have digital assets of all types from many different sources: custom shot video, logos, transitions & effects, audio tracks, etc. The ideal video authoring platform needs a simple but powerful way to store it all, organize it, and make it easily accessible on your workspace for your projects.

>> Review & Approval Collaboration and Workflow Management

Even if you don’t have a “client” in the advertising agency sense of the word, just about every video project has a review and revision process where team members need to provide feedback and specify changes. A cloud-based video creation tool could enable this type of collaboration:

• From within the video creation tool, send an email with a link to the latest draft of the video.
• The reviewer follows the link, views the video, clicks the timeline and enters text comments to describe changes to what she is seeing on the screen (“synch the video with the crescendo of the soundtrack here”, “add a transition effect here”, etc.).
• Or schedule a webcam virtual meeting to review the video draft with the reviewers as if you are all sitting around the same conference table. Have a live, virtual feedback session.
• Approvals and feedback rounds are tracked and time-stamped.

>> Compatibility With Leading Video Editing Applications

I came down pretty hard on leading desktop video editing applications in “Wish #1” for avoiding cloud computing. But rest assured I am not foolish enough to think they can be easily replaced. Creating videos is a labor of love, and creative professionals love the tools they use. A winning strategy is to strive for compatibility with Apple Final Cut Pro and other market leaders.

By providing compatibility with desktop solutions today, this cloud-based video creation tool can find a place in the creative professional’s toolbox and add value in the margins.  Trust, me, the margins are wide, as I will continue to enumerate!  It can be used as a rapid prototyping solution, or as an OVP, or as a collaboration tool, or as a stock video search aggregator, or as a business development marketplace. And tomorrow, perhaps it will earn greater prominence.