Category: strobee

Video has a lot of legacy components that need re-examining. Video used to be a hardware things, with tape and discs. Now it’s software; we all watch video on computers, but many of the old conventions are still with us. Even worse, the web was built for text (hTtp), and has bought it’s own conventions with it.

While trying to build a video platform, Strobee came up against many of these conventions, some of them helpful, others a hindrance. I’ve been collecting a list of them here:

• Why is every video the same every time, when our Facebook page is different every time we return to it? One of Strobee’s design challenges has been allowing this, as well as allowing visitors to revisit and link to videos they’ve seen before.
• Why do we always have to scroll down to see more video on Instagram or Vine? We are used to our web-browsers working as electronic-book-reading-machines. To accommodate this, the current web-video idiom is magical moving pictures on each page of the video book. Video is video, and should be fullscreen. The interface should be built around this ideal. 
• Square videos are a fad, the world is starting to get over them. Our monitors, cinema, phones, and cameras seems to have settled on 16:9.
• Why does every video player need a play and pause button? They are legacy interfaces left over from hardware devices with actual buttons. There is no cost or side effect of not pausing a video. GIFs are a great example showing that we don’t need these controls any more.
• Long form video is a different media than social video. It has different conventions, constraints, and ways of viewing. My parents make appointments with TV – they’ve got to get home on time to watch 60 minutes of Inspector Morse at 9pm. To justify this kind of effort, video has to be 10s of minutes long, and once you’ve gone to all that effort, and watched something for 10 minutes, you’re trapped into to staying and watch the other 50 minutes. 
• Strobee attempts to bridge the gap between long form and short form (micro-video) video – our video can be viewed in small sections, but also keeps playing endlessly, letting people who want to watch for 10s of minutes.
• Video navigation is a hard problem. It was very simple with cable TV: just pick a channel. Today we have many more variables possible (user, video clips, position in those clips, order of those clips, etc…). We experimented a bit, and just now Strobee has a fine-grain history (the clip gallery) along the bottom of the screen, and a course-grain explorer (the story navigator) up the right hand side of the screen. 
• We should share video effortlessly and without thinking – in the same way we Instagram or tweet. We shouldn’t be worried that the video isn’t interesting to others or that the quality is lower than what we see on TV. We want to share our experiences using video with the click of a single button. Strobee is built to encourage this casual sharing. Clips are short, but what they lack in quality, they make up for that by both variety, and the interface’s ability to skip and explore.
• As with photos, some video clips are one-offs, but sometimes sequences of them tell a bigger story. Albums of photos can be more interesting than individual clips. When you look a photo album, you have to do the mental work to reconstruct the event – there’s no reason this shouldn’t work in video; there’s no reason, given the right format, why this shouldn’t be the case for video. Generating a perfect narrative (as we see in cinema), requires exact planning to capture every event – a totally different philosophy to the photo album.
• Unwatched video is a massive opportunity! Today, some of us have lots of video, in the future all of us will have lots of video. People with action-cameras (GoPros), are notorious for recording footage they never watch or share. They return from holiday with full memory cards, few have the patience to watch it all, fewer share any, and fewer still take the time to create a video that others would actually want to watch. It should be easy to share bulk footage like this, Strobee makes it a little easier, but there’s a long way to go…

Video has a lot of legacy components that need re-examining. Video used to be a hardware things, with tape and discs. Now it’s software; we all watch video on computers, but many of the old conventions are still with us. Even worse, the web was built for text (hTtp), and has bought it’s own conventions with it.

While trying to build a video platform, Strobee came up against many of these conventions, some of them helpful, others a hindrance. I’ve been collecting a list of them here:

• Why is every video the same every time, when our Facebook page is different every time we return to it? One of Strobee’s design challenges has been allowing this, as well as allowing visitors to revisit and link to videos they’ve seen before.
• Why do we always have to scroll down to see more video on Instagram or Vine? We are used to our web-browsers working as electronic-book-reading-machines. To accommodate this, the current web-video idiom is magical moving pictures on each page of the video book. Video is video, and should be fullscreen. The interface should be built around this ideal. 
• Square videos are a fad, the world is starting to get over them. Our monitors, cinema, phones, and cameras seems to have settled on 16:9.
• Why does every video player need a play and pause button? They are legacy interfaces left over from hardware devices with actual buttons. There is no cost or side effect of not pausing a video. GIFs are a great example showing that we don’t need these controls any more.
• Long form video is a different media than social video. It has different conventions, constraints, and ways of viewing. My parents make appointments with TV – they’ve got to get home on time to watch 60 minutes of Inspector Morse at 9pm. To justify this kind of effort, video has to be 10s of minutes long, and once you’ve gone to all that effort, and watched something for 10 minutes, you’re trapped into to staying and watch the other 50 minutes. 
• Strobee attempts to bridge the gap between long form and short form (micro-video) video – our video can be viewed in small sections, but also keeps playing endlessly, letting people who want to watch for 10s of minutes.
• Video navigation is a hard problem. It was very simple with cable TV: just pick a channel. Today we have many more variables possible (user, video clips, position in those clips, order of those clips, etc…). We experimented a bit, and just now Strobee has a fine-grain history (the clip gallery) along the bottom of the screen, and a course-grain explorer (the story navigator) up the right hand side of the screen. 
• We should share video effortlessly and without thinking – in the same way we Instagram or tweet. We shouldn’t be worried that the video isn’t interesting to others or that the quality is lower than what we see on TV. We want to share our experiences using video with the click of a single button. Strobee is built to encourage this casual sharing. Clips are short, but what they lack in quality, they make up for that by both variety, and the interface’s ability to skip and explore.
• As with photos, some video clips are one-offs, but sometimes sequences of them tell a bigger story. Albums of photos can be more interesting than individual clips. When you look a photo album, you have to do the mental work to reconstruct the event – there’s no reason this shouldn’t work in video; there’s no reason, given the right format, why this shouldn’t be the case for video. Generating a perfect narrative (as we see in cinema), requires exact planning to capture every event – a totally different philosophy to the photo album.
• Unwatched video is a massive opportunity! Today, some of us have lots of video, in the future all of us will have lots of video. People with action-cameras (GoPros), are notorious for recording footage they never watch or share. They return from holiday with full memory cards, few have the patience to watch it all, fewer share any, and fewer still take the time to create a video that others would actually want to watch. It should be easy to share bulk footage like this, Strobee makes it a little easier, but there’s a long way to go…

 
This has been a long road, starting with a GCSE (a high school qualification) in Media Studies many years ago. I spent a very happy few days with a bunch of friends creating a trailer for “Starship Troopers”. We discovered that by far the most exciting approach (for 15 year olds without any video editing experience), was to find all the short clips of people shooting guns (it was quite a violent film), and put them together. We could get away with this in-class as we’d just been taught about a technique called “montage”. We got a good grade for the project, but moved onto other things. (Apologies for video/sound quality, it was recovered from VHS tapes).

More recently, and due to a lot of travelling and cycling, I bought an early action-camera. Compared to a SLR camera or smartphone, these are great because they’re robust and easy to use. After a trip to Thailand I was left with loads (32Gb) of footage that was mostly wobbly, with noisy audio, and generally a bit shit, so I tried editing it down into something people would want to watch (here’s an old blog post). I tried a few attempts at “professional” editing by carefully constructing a narrative, but I came to the conclusion that there wasn’t enough footage to build one. Plus, there was no chance to go back and shoot more. In the end I found that taking many short clips was a very robust and fast way of manually editing a movie from bad footage.

The greatest observation that came out of this process was that selecting the short clip to use wasn’t very hard. As long as there was sufficient variety, and the clips kept moving, people wanted to watch more. Much more than if I tried to show them a wobbly 40 minute clip of me trying to feed peanuts to an elephant. What I thought was interesting video, wasn’t interesting at all to other people – they just wanted to see all the different things I did on my holiday.

When I found myself with some free time, I decided to automate the process – so Strobee was started as a bit of a startup. This started off as a desktop software project, but it became clear that the project belonged on the web. 

• given up because the editor was hard to use (have you seen the edits people choose with Vine?…), or
• given up because the editor couldn’t import your footage, or
• given up because the editor kept crashing, or
• spent 10x the length of your final video, getting the clips lined up just right, or
• had the result be entirely unwatchable to people who don’t know your friend, Fred.

I went to Thailand, and being a geek, took 3 cameras and came back with way too much mediocre footage, ~30Gb, or 3 hours or so. Trying to edit it all to anything my friends would actually want to watch (or, fantastically, recommend someone else watch), would have taken a long time, and was probably beyond my skill level and hardware. My solution was to pick 0.5 second long section clips from each video. I was really quite pleased with the result:

This is actually a quite interesting 4 minute video, as far as holiday videos go. Possibly about 3 minutes too long, but pretty succinct.

The thing that really struck me was that the process of selecting the clip from the (sometimes quite long) clip was almost trivial, to the point where an algorithm could make pretty good guesses.

• the first 0.5 seconds of a clip is a good default
• ignore lots of frames of video that are the same (when I leave the lens cap on).
• when not-much moves, and then something moves, that’s what’s interesting
• however, if the view wobbles for 1-2 seconds at the start before going steady, that’s me positioning the camera and you want the bit after.
• changes in volume can be interesting.
• blurry things generally aren’t interesting

So now we imagine a world in which everyone is uploading bees, from their phones, shiny new pairs of Google glasses (or do you wear a google glass?), cameras, etc… We pretty quickly come to the conclusion that strobees can, and should, be assembled on the fly from a large database. That is we could steam a strobee (endless video stream) to user based on:

• users (user channels)
• your current location (a stream that changes as you drive down the street!)
• a particular location
• most recent in time
• a certain hashtag (#bobs_wedding, #election2015)
• popularity (how do we judge popularity – votes? interaction with a stobee?)
• colours (show me videos that are mostly red)