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. Videos of 30-90 seconds are captured and
shared without editing.
The market opportunity is to sell a dedicated video editing tablet to everyone in the world who is currently buying a camcorder costing $500 or more (Sony's dedicated consumer camcorders range in price from about $400 to $1200).
Why can't Johnny edit video? First, let's ask why we would expect a
consumer to be able to edit video. Being a video editor with current
software and hardware is a well-paid job. It isn't ordinarily possible
for an average consumer to do something that pays a high salary and
requires months of training and years of experience.
Consumers start off with the problem that their home computer may not be capable of editing high-definition video. Their operating system may not have the right codecs installed to display what is coming out of the camera. They might have configured their computer with insufficient memory or a slow hard drive. They might have an older computer with a slow processor. They might have anti-virus or other software installed that slows performance and makes response time unpredictable.
Suppose that they have a brand-new very powerful computer on which no additional software has ever been installed. Notably with Windows 7, the videos from the camcorder show up in the file system explorer as "00017.m2ts", with no thumbnail or any other cue as to what might be in the video. The consumer can install Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas, or Apple's Final Cut (Macintosh-only) and at least get a look at the videos, but these applications launch with five sub-windows and present a daunting user interface, perhaps the most complex of any desktop application sold to consumers.
Let's consider the consumer's opportunities for failure with Premiere, for example. In creating a new project, the consumer is asked to create a "sequence". Before loading in any video from the camera, the consumer is asked which of approximately 200 "presets" is appropriate. The consequences of picking the wrong preset are dire, with the video potentially being distorted with horizontal or vertical squeezing. In the case of a typical Sony flash-based camcorder, for example, the consumer is supposed to know to click "AVCHD". That's not too hard because "AVCHD" is printed on the side of the camcorder. Once AVCHD is selected, Premiere offers a choice of 1080i, 1080p, and 720p. The camcorder's labels offer no clue as to which of these might be appropriate. Suppose that a phone call to Sony reveals that 1080i is the right format. The consumer then gets subchoices such as "AVCHD 1080i25 (50i) Anamorphic" or "AVCHD 1080i30(60i)". Good luck to Johnny once he gets past these menus into the timeline.
What about ostensibly simpler applications such as Apple's iMovie? The author and his cousin, a professional animator who has worked for decades at Disney and Pixar, tried to remove a sound track of random noises that somehow the program had added to a project. After several hours, we gave up and started over, throwing out the days of work that had been invested in editing the original video.
The FlipShare program distributed on the Flip camera is probably the most successful interface for consumers. People with no training are able to trim original footage and combine the trimmed segments into a final product, though the experience is a little cumbersome and the software cannot be used with files from higher quality camcorders.
How to improve the user experience of video editing? Let's start by
throwing out the computer. The last thing any American needs is to
spend more time sitting in front of his or her computer. If a family
video has been captured, it should be editable while sitting on a sofa
with the family members appearing in the video. How is that possible?
We'll use a touchscreen tablet.
The consumer plugs the camcorder into the tablet, typically with a USB cable, and the tablet automatically starts playing the clips as they are transferred. A consumer has the following touch-screen controls:
You build the tablet using dedicated hardware that runs no other
applications. That way you can be sure of a consistent user
experience. The logical way to start is with Google's free and open
source Android
operating system and a standard Android-based tablet from a
Taiwanese company such as ASUS. To this you would have the hardware
vendor add a powerful GPU chip from a standard graphics card. You'd
build the software on top of existing free and open source video
editing applications (list).
To ensure fast and consistent response time, the tablet would have no hard drive, just flash memory. The tablet need not have more flash memory than the typical 32 GB of a camcorder. For maximum performance, it would be best to exclude a battery and have the tablet run only when connected to AC or DC power. Video editing is the most computationally challenging task that a consumer would want to perform at home and therefore it does not make sense to hobble the machine with a slow clock rate in order to make it run on batteries. Also, it might be possible to charge up some camcorders from the tablet via USB.
The tablet has a WiFi transceiver that is used for four purposes: (1) automatically downloading software updates, e.g., codecs to support new camcorder designs, (2) uploading raw footage to a home server or desktop computer with shared directory for archiving, (3) uploading edited videos to a home server and/or online services such as YouTube, and (4) supporting a basic Web browser on the tablet that can be used for captioning, renaming files, and fact-checking.
[A natural question to ask is "Why isn't this an iPad application". Current (2010) iPads offer inadequate CPU (1 GHz single core) and memory (256 MB) and also lack a USB port. The iPad is optimized for low power consumption to achieve long battery life and it runs very simple applications. A tablet built for video editing that can rely on a power plug would have exactly opposite design constraints.]
If sold as a desktop application, the new program will inevitably appear in a feature-by-feature comparison with Adobe Premiere and Sony Vegas (e.g., Wikipedia; different versions of Vegas). How well is the software going to sell when a consumer sees that for $99 from Adobe or Sony he gets 200 features whereas this new product has only five features?
Finally, as noted above, why would a consumer want to spend more time at his or her desktop? Home video creation is a leisure activity. Home video editing should also be a couch-based leisure activity.
[Perhaps after a few years of delighting customers with the tablet experience, the product could be repurposed for sale as an add-on to Windows 8.]
All of the required software components are free and open source. A four or five-person development team should be able to put together a first version of the software within six months, mostly building a touch-screen interface to existing video editing code. Figure a maximum of $250,000 in initial software development costs, even if done in Europe or the U.S.
Hardware development up-front costs depend heavily on how much engineering work the tablet manufacturer is willing to do in exchange for volume sales after the product is launched. Figure that a team of four engineers will need to be paid by someone for about three months. Most of the job will be specifying the processor and GPU and ensuring that the packaging achieves adequate cooling. Budget $500,000 for hardware engineering costs and plastic mold development (assuming that the design cannot run within a standard Android tablet case).
Marketing costs for an effective consumer electronics product launch are high, typically starting at $10 million. This is one reason U.S. venture capital firms traditionally have shied away from this area, leaving the market to well-financed Asian companies, however bad their user experience ideas might be. As a video editing tablet is probably not exciting enough to achieve effective viral marketing, it is probably best to assume that the all-in cost of engineering and launching this product is about $20 million.
Reduced competition is one of the advantages of pursuing an idea that
everyone else thinks is bad. Nonetheless, there are some logical
competitors. Sony, for example, produces video editing software and
tablets. They have an existing customer relationship with a plurality
of camcorder owners. Why wouldn't Sony build this? For one thing, they
are selling $680 copies of their Sony Vegas Pro package. Why
cannibalize that highly profitable business? Similarly Adobe sells
Premiere Pro for $799 and Apple sells Final Cut for $999 plus a
desktop computer and monitor for $3500+.
The closest existing system to what is described here is the iPhone version of iMovie, which can be used effectively (example), but is not capable of handling the much higher quality streams from a standard HD camcorder.
How can we build this in the "cloud"? Process would look like the following: User connects camcorder to tablet. Tablet is used to transfer video from the camcorder to our hosted service where they use the ipad to edit the video. Thus eliminating the need for the storage on the "tablet" device.While I hate to come to a problem without a solution, I will need some time to think about the following: A)What is the "secret sauce" to patent in the application? Is it the "touch screen" component that allows people to use their index finger to drag and drop their scenes?
B)A "compression" component for the transfer of the data needs to be added. I.E. Riverbed component to send the data to our hosted service in order to speed the delivery of the data. Not sure how to take the current appliance device of a Riverbed and condense it to software only.
Those are my current thoughts, but I am sure I can think of more later.
JJD - Intrigured...
-- JJ Donovan, November 6, 2010
An alternative approach would be similar to that taken by animoto.com: 1) user uploads the raw video, 2) software produces the video in the cloud (possibly with user hints such as ratings), 3) user downloads or shares finished video.This approach would be more efficient. The customer would only pay for the processing power that she actually uses (computing resources in the cloud are rented, not bought).
Also, with the animoto approach, the developer works directly on the real problem: producing a finished video that will evoke pleasant memories when the customer views it with her family or passes around to her friends. The tablet approach assumes that the customer really wants to be a video editing technician.
-- Daniel Patru, November 7, 2010
Why would animoto remove the need for editing and input from the user? Personally, I tried animoto several times and was consistently disappointed with the default rendering. The idea is good but the implementation is weak. Compared with a tablet or other personal device, uploads and downloads to a cloud based service are slow. Imagine one hour of HD video, or 12 GB... To order to prevent animoto from slapping their branding on my personal videos, I'd need the $249/yr Pro package, which would be more expensive than a tablet over two years.
-- David Wihl, November 10, 2010
Yes - I agree with much of what was said - but from the standpoint of a software developer! Those with an Android tablet may like to try Cloud-based tablet video editing with my Company's software:https://market.android.com/details?id=net.forscene.KestrelTest&feature=search_result
PS We started off as "tablet only", but 85% of our sales were for smartphones, which we added later. The point is that these 85% didn't pay for the tablet upgrade.
Most consumers already carry around a camera in their phone, many are "HD". The mass market may be editing on a phone, with possibly web access on a desktop for the hard bits.
I think there are millions who would use only trivial editing - but a different audience of a relative few who spend thousands on cameras (and lenses if you go the DSLR route), where a good product proves its worth in the time saved during editing.
-- Stephen Streater, March 25, 2011
Have you thought to revisit this concept in the aftermath of the iPad 2 and the iMovie application? I know it's running on an iPad, which seems to be anathema to you, but the iPad 2 seems to be designed with the idea of being able to edit video on it (what with the dual cores, extra memory and whatnot). With the camera connection kit (yes, it's 40 dollars, but it works), you can connect most video cameras to it via SD card or USB port. I know it's not perfect, and that iMovie can't read all file formats, but it seems to be the best current solution, and at a minimum of $540 (plus tax), or a maximum of $740 (ignoring 3G), it's under your mythical $1000 price point.
-- Joseph Scharfenberg, May 9, 2011
Joseph: the iPad 2 is definitely not anathema to me; in fact I am thinking of getting one so that I can walk around the house and Skype with relatives. I don't think iMovie on the iPad 2 solves the problem that I set forth at the beginning, i.e., convenient editing of high quality video from a real video camera. A Google search does not indicate that anyone was able to work with AVCHD files on the iPad (in fact it seems that a lot of people with iMacs and other standard Macintosh computers had trouble with AVCHD as well).
-- Philip Greenspun, May 9, 2011
A very interesting article for me to read, especially since I am actually looking for exactly what is being described here, a tablet or device which is easily portable for video editing on-the-go.However I disagree with the conclusion to produce a dedicated tablet just for video editing, since the iPad took off tablet computers have become increasingly popular as media consumption devices, however I believe people are beginning to want more out of their tablet devices, and so want to expand the uses that their tablet has, two of the most obvious being photo and video editing. With regards to video editing both Apple and Android have taken steps towards supporting this, however my main criticism of their implementations are that the apps are tailered just for videos taken from the camera of the tablet, and I think this is very limited since most people dont want to use a 10" tablet as a camera!
My vision would be to create an application where you were able to plug an SD or USB from a dedicated video camera into the tablet to transfer and edit the videos from that camera, the app would be developed for Honeycomb which has a minium spec requirement set by Google so there are no issues with wrrying about an under-specced device trying to run the app, that way people would not have to spend extra on "another" tablet, simply use the one they already have. The only issue with this proposal however is that it is the hardware that currently holds back this vision, the current Tegra 2, although it is pushed for its power and ability to play 720p video, is actually surprisingly underpowered when playing back HD videos unless they have been specifically encoded to run well on the cpu, until the CPU's can effectivly playback all video codecs then my dream of a video editing app looks to be out of the queston :-( (Heres hoping Tegra 3 or Tegra 4 sort this out!)
-- Thomas Carter, May 23, 2011