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Show HN: Editly – Declarative command-line video editing
- timpattinson 6y agoWelcome to the era of the fully automated youtube channel. Reddit scraper -> voice synthesizer -> Programmatic video editing tool -> youtube API For extra credit add some kind of ML tool to identify "stories" in comments Trash content, but a lot of people seem to watch it [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QIh3GSgPPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QIh3GSgPPk
- mikepurvis 6y agoYour comment also reminds me a lot of the James Bridle piece from a few years ago about creepy, semi-automated YouTube content targeting kids: "Other channels do away with the human actors to create infinite reconfigurable versions of the same videos over and over again. What is occurring here is clearly automated. Stock animations, audio tracks, and lists of keywords being assembled in their thousands to produce an endless stream of videos. The above channel, Videogyan 3D Rhymes — Nursery Rhymes & Baby Songs, posts several videos a week, in increasingly byzantine combinations of keywords." https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...
- neap24 6y agoI already view the “meme” phenomenon the same way: a creepy, possibly semi-automatically generated image based on random keywords.
- lou1306 6y agoAlso, some of these videos are pretty disturbing or inappropriate for their intended audience. This phenomenon has been dubbed the "Elsagate" on Reddit.
- jjice 6y agoI was talking to a friend about these about a week ago and it hit me how easy it would be to fully automate one of those channels. I started looking into scraping and automatic screenshots with selenium. After a little bit, it didn't feel right and I did a bit of thinking. I decided that (for me at least) it's not cool to use other people's experiences to profit off of in such a way. I really like the idea of completely automated workflows, but if it's going to be taking advantage of people's personal experiences, I don't think it's the way to go.
- wpietri 6y agoI'm with you on this. But if we think of this process as akin to a funnel, I really wonder about the people making it all the way to the bottom. It suggests a lot of stuff is getting created by people who just blow right past the ethical considerations.
- hckr_news 6y agoVery strange indeed. I think I started seeing videos with content from AskReddit on YouTube last year with several thousands of views. My first thought was well why don’t these viewers just go on Reddit and read it there instead.
- JoeQuery 6y agoI prefer audio over text, so text to speech is my preferred medium if a high quality voice is used, such as the ones from Google. No TTS browser extension I have tried has a good ux. Article Reader and Evie on android are okay.
- sergiomattei 6y agoI read Reddit often and I honestly do enjoy those TTS compilations. They're low effort, sure. But it's a different format and allows me to do other things while hearing creepy stories or whatnot.
- hiccuphippo 6y agoI look forward to someone building Narrated Hacker News.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bufferoverflow 6y agoIt's mostly because YT actually pushes this garbage, while demonetizing or banning real people with tons of subscribers.
- time0ut 6y agoStartup idea: auto twitch highlight to youtube aggregator as a service. Put in your channel, upload your intro, outro, and paid testimonial for raid: shadow whatever, profit.
- Andrex 6y agoUntil now couldn't the "Programmatic video editing tool" step be replaced with ffmpeg via CL?
- jandrese 6y agoI remember an old Maya demo where it would lipsync a face mesh with an audio track. The technology is there to have a fully automated news mascot read you the stories.
- blululu 6y agoLast I checked ByteDance (TikTok) bills itself as an AI company. This may have just been a pitch to woo investors, but this sort of thing would naturally fall into an AI business' revenue model.
- amelius 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_farm
- 01100011 6y agoNot just Reddit. The other day I googled a fish my brother was interested in for his aquarium. There was a YT vid composed of a text-to-speech of a popular aquarium site's page on the fish, along with scrolling images from a Google image search on the fish variety. It's been going on for a few years, but seems to have gotten worse lately.
- adtac 6y agoAnd then post that video back to reddit. And then scrape youtube comments in videos posted on /r/videos and pass them as your own comment on the corresponding reddit posts. Free karma.
- areactnativedev 6y agoLooks great, from looking at the use cases and examples. What scares me is the requirement to have ffmpeg and ffprobe installed and available of course. Had a painful experience installing ffmpeg on Jessie Light on a rpi in the past. If you know a good and easy way, or have a link to such a way, to install these on Mac / Windows / Ubuntu I think adding it to your readme could help you gain traction outside of people who already have some of the capacities needed to do such edits. Edit: precised that I'm not looking for a way to install ffmpeg, I was just suggesting that pointing to a way in the README would be an improvement IMHO.
- sirius87 6y agoI use static builds from [0] for my Rockchip RK3368. You have to be okay with trusting those builds though. [0] https://johnvansickle.com/ffmpeg/ https://johnvansickle.com/ffmpeg/
- ISL 6y agoapt install ffmpeg?
- areactnativedev 6y agoYep, maybe that's all one would have to add in the readme for Linux guys
- btbuildem 6y agotbh, what turned me off is having to have Node.js installed
- mifino 6y agoI might add the ffmpeg-static npm package, then no need for system ffmpeg. But that package does not work on raspberry pi, so yeah.. Downloading and installing static ffmpeg builds from ffmpeg.org is pretty easy these days
- gnomesteel 6y agoCool, but why? What’s a use case for this?
- JoeQuery 6y agoUse your imagination. Edit: For a group of people that have critical thinking skills it's discouraging to see the same trite questions asked over and over again. The author of the project does not have to sell a use case. Use your imagination to create one. George Boole did not pitch the transistor.
- asicsp 6y agothey have a section [1] explaining their reasoning Create a slideshow from a set of pictures with text overlay Create a fast paced trailer or promo video Create a tutorial video with help text Simply convert a video to a GIF Resize video to any size or framerate and with automatic letterbox/crop (e.g. if you need to upload a video somewhere but the site complains Video must be 1337x1000 30fps) [1] https://github.com/mifi/editly#use-cases https://github.com/mifi/editly#use-cases
- nerdponx 6y agoOr you're like me, and you just enjoy text-based file formats that you can version control.
- otoburb 6y ago>>Simply convert a video to a GIF I wonder if animated GIFs will ever be replaced. Nothing beats the convenience of dropping in a GIF to express memes because embedded video clips still don't have that same easy workflow.
- adwi 6y agoFrom the headline I was hoping someone finally built a system that transcribes interview footage and lets you edit the video by editing the text.
- fredmonroe 6y agoThat’s a great idea! Hope someone build it
- serverQuestion 6y agodidn't Adobe demo something like this?
- jtvjan 6y agoYes, Adobe Voco. They demoed[1] it once and then they never talked about it again. [1]: https://youtu.be/I3l4XLZ59iw https://youtu.be/I3l4XLZ59iw
- amelius 6y ago> lets you edit the video by editing the text What would happen if you insert a word into the text?
- ragebol 6y agoThe voice is cloned by a GAN and new audio is generated, of course!
- didgeoridoo 6y agoThis is pretty much exactly what Descript.com does with its “overdub” feature. You can even choose the emotion and intonation of the generated audio. It works freakishly well.
- G2H 6y agodescript.com does this I believe
- chpmrc 6y agohttps://github.com/mifi/editly/blob/master/sources/glFrameSource.js#L5 https://github.com/mifi/editly/blob/master/sources/glFrameSo... thank you for your honesty!
- mingabunga 6y agoThere was something similar posted a few weeks ago called video puppet, but it had more features.
- detaro 6y agoDifferent features. And is a service, not standalone software.
- als0 6y agoGreat project. I had to do some command line video editing a while ago and it was a fiddly and frustrating process. Keep going!
- ArlenBales 6y agoGreat.. now we can have more videos like the one this parodies: https://youtu.be/Jrl9LQesl7U https://youtu.be/Jrl9LQesl7U
- gitgud 6y agoThat's painfully accurate...
- jacobush 6y agoIs this only for creating gifs? I was hoping it could create regular videos.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- xhkkffbf 6y agoHas anyone hacked together some Pandoc glue? It would be nice to just point it at some pandoc files. (Granted there will be a need for a few extra details with imagery.)
- hnarn 6y agoJudging by the comments here I guess I'm the only one that feels extremely awkward about this being written in Javascript. I don't mind wrappers but is this essentially just an ffmpeg wrapper in JS?
- buzzerbetrayed 6y agoIs your problem with it the fact that it is a wrapper, or that it's javascript? If you don't like that it's a wrapper, what is wrong with adding a wrapper that adds new functionality? If you don't like that it's Javascript, how would another language somehow make this better? Especially with the sheer number of people that are already comfortable using Javascript.
- NetOpWibby 6y agoYeah it sounds like the typical JS-is-bad circlejerk.
- contingencies 6y agoYes, but the HN audience skews toward kids using javascript to 'engineer' 'scalable' 'technology' without learning unix. The comments currently include a tangent to the ease of installing ffmpeg on a Raspberry Pi (wrong target hardware for this sort of application, simplified user experience as focus), apparent mentions of online services, ideas for mass psychological manipulation through algorithm assembly, hand-wavey characterizations of Youtube monetization algorithms, and almost no tangible discussion of limitations, ethics, etc.
- mifino 6y agoYou should try to learn JS - it's really awesome. Asynchronous, incredibly stable, battle tested by billions of users every day, it has one of the best open source module ecosystems in the world, and it runs everywhere.
- SrslyJosh 6y ago> it has one of the best open source module ecosystems in the world, Left-pad, is-promise.
- umvi 6y agoIs there a way to mute specific windows of clips? I see you can do `cutFrom` and `cutTo` but say I just want to mute that section, not remove the entire section
- mifino 6y agoIf by mute you mean cut away, then that's not implemented yet. You can achieve an inverse cutting by adding the same clip twice though, with cutFrom and cutTo.
- saaaam 6y agoThis looks great! Two alternatives if you are interested in doing similar things in python are moviepy (https://zulko.github.io/moviepy/ https://zulko.github.io/moviepy/) and vidpy (which I am working on, and still has many issues: https://antiboredom.github.io/vidpy/ https://antiboredom.github.io/vidpy/)
- ArtWomb 6y agoHTML5 / WebGL integration makes this an essential tool for me. My target is a "pure" animation pipeline for ThreeJS scenes dumped to WebM files. Thanks for building ;)
- vanderZwan 6y agoSomewhat related: I recently realized that in theory I should be able to easily use ffmpeg with Termux to cut and concatenate clips I shoot on my phone without recompression, since they're all guaranteed to have the same settings (as long as all inputs are landscape or portrait). However, typing out the file path for a list of files would be a complete pain on the phone. Does anyone know of a way to select a list of files on Android and send that list as input to a script in Termux? That would open up quite a bit of automation possibilities
- contingencies 6y agoPut them in a given directory. When the phone is connected, use that as input to a script. Alternatively, use metadata such as date or location.
- vanderZwan 6y agoSounds like a viable workaround if the automation app route doesn't work out for me, thanks!
- detaro 6y agoYou should be able to do that with the Tasker or Automate apps.
- vanderZwan 6y agoWill give that a try, thanks!
- atum47 6y agoWell, I came here to congratulate for the good job, but everyone seems to be talking about creating automatic videos for youtube. Well, that's the thing with this kind of stuff, it goes both ways. Can be used for good or bad. But congratulations anyways. Good job.
- jonas21 6y agoHmmm. I thought ffmpeg was already pretty good for declarative command-line video editing.
- zzo38computer 6y agoReading the documentation for FFmpeg, it seems like FFmpeg can also be used to concatenate and overlay video and edit the audio, and supports captions and subtitles and many other functions too. It would seem that Editly supports the use of JSON5, and the use of JavaScript and HTML for custom graphics/animations (although I don't see a lot of the stuff that FFmpeg does in the documentation for Editly), but what I want is the ability to use PostScript for custom graphics and animations, rather than JavaScript. Although external graphics/animations are also helpful, but I think FFmpeg already does that anyways (and it also supports APNG, too, which is better than animated GIF, I think). However, neither FFmpeg nor Editly support farbfeld, as far as I can see.
- kimown 6y agoCan I use other glsl transition from shadertoy?
- mertnesvat 6y agoLooks nice it gave me a good side project idea which is merging my family randomly cut small pieces with the music I liked. And combine with beats if possible. Thanks for sharing.