If you know how to do this – I’m 100% game to help… Just not sure how much help I can be. This is waaaay beyond my coding skills, but I’m happy to pimp the results of your coding skills, help wrangle people, assets, etc.

I’ve been working with Adobe as a beta tester for some of the new metadata features they’ve got coming in CS5 which seem like they’d help – immensely – once you’ve got everything logged and transcribed. I haven’t seen this work yet, but I’m optimistic and hope that this would close the loop eventually (like in your example of simultaneous translation). I’m mainly a FinalCut user, but the metadata functionality is enough to woo me out of my comfort zone – esp. since my doc is a cuts-only affair.

What are your thoughts on this? What would it take to get started? How do you make your SQL database talk to YouTube?

Best,

David

I too had this idea and recently did a Google search to see who else was thinking like me.

I most definitely think that a “free service” like youtube could be used for storing the video. These could be marked as “Private” or “friends” only and embedded on your site (depending on your distribution model).

I would try to use a seperate site running some form of SQL for tracking Video with metadata. Use a link to the youtube videos. You could make metadata, tag cloud, etc. visible to users so that they could “drag + drop” things they feel are related and keeping a standard naming/description. It would be extremely easy to pull this data later as a user comment would have the video ID number and sql string data to parse and compare with others of the same video ID and translate to whatever format you want for whatever program. You could even make a system to mark groups of video, so you could combine the smaller clips and using info during the batch video splitting process recombine with timecode/tape info. The uploading process is where the problem will probably occur. Research into the youtube(or other video sites) API would give immediate information if this is possible. Original CPU time for Compression of files for upload would be enormous.

Another thought would be allowing “translations” to be preformed at the same time. Many people speak a second language, why not leverage this knowledge as well. Instant market increase. We could share our knowledge and story with even more people, without being limited by the financial marketability of the piece or long grant applications we never finished

A great opportunity would be to promote something like this at SXSW Interactive, lots of eager people there. I currently have a 1 TB full of Documentary footage that I haven’t made progress on because no logging was done at capture, I let the tape run while I did other work.

Let me know your thoughts. My email should be listed for you with this post. Sometime in March I would LOVE to start some coding to make this possible for myself and others. Let’s collaborate.

We need more documentaries in this world. We are a great machine, capable of many glorious things. Let us get to work.