Novacut: Collaborative Video Editing With Big Ambitions

novacut

It’s coming down to the wire today for Novacut, a new open source project that aims to produce a collaborative video editor for users of HDSLR cameras. Novacut has been running a Kickstarter campaign to raise $25,000 in funding since late August. Today is the last day to contribute, and Novacut is still some $17,000 shy of its original goal.

I talked to the project’s co-creators Tara Oldfield and Jason Gerard DeRose today, and the married couple remains optimistic, despite being aware of the challenges ahead. “Right now it’s just all talk, so I can understand people being skeptical,” DeRose told me via Skype.

Novacut wants to offer video creators a cloud-enabled solution to collaboratively edit video, the most important element being meta-data that documents each and every change and can be shared in real time with other collaborators. DeRose compared the editing process to Google Docs: If you make a change on your local machine, it will also show up on copies of the film material processed elsewhere. The whole process is cloud-enabled, so users will be able to offload some of the video rendering to cloud services.

What about broadband upload speeds, the constant bottle-neck for many HD video producers? DeRose said that Novacut will support proxy resolutions to take the pain of exchanging media files. Users will be able to send lower-resolution video to their collaborators, and then have their edits applied to the HD master file on their local machine.

Another interesting angle of the Novacut project is their love for HDSLRs. Oldfield is a still photographer herself, and she’s excited about the possibilities this technology offers her to branch out into film making. “HDSLRs have opened up the entertainment game,” she said, adding that anyone with $5000 in cash can now buy equipment suitable for shooting movies or TV shows.

Novacut users won’t have to use video shot with SLRs, but the software wants to specifically empower those that do. Novacut will use the meta-data provided by SLRs, DeRose told me, which will make up for the fact that most HDSLR’s don’t support time-codes, making it easier to sync multiple video sources or video and external audio.

Of course, there is a good chance that Novacut won’t actually reach its funding goal, in which case none of the current Kickstarter contributors will have to pay anything. DeRose told me that they’re definitely committed to moving forward, even without the $25,000. He admitted that his team didn’t do as good of a job as it should have to explain Novacut, and said that they underestimated the community building aspect of it. They also got some helpful feedback during their Kickstarter campaign, and have now added an OS X version to their timeline.

Speaking of which: Novacut hopes to release a first version of its media library in about a month, and follow-up with monthly releases after that. The project will integrate a lot of existing open source multimedia processing software, and DeRose said he wants to have a version that is “enough to do TV shows” in five to six months.

Check out a video presentation of the project below:

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