Forum:Video editing

Forums → Ten Forward → Video editing (reply • watch)

Wikia has a demo of Kaltura's collaborative video editing tool here. Kaltura's MediaWiki extension allows you to collaboratively create and edit videos, music, images, and animations directly on the wiki.

Please try it out and let us know what you think of it. We are very open to bug reports and suggested improvements and I will make sure any comments get passed on to Kaltura. See the help page for more details on how to use this.

If you can think of some cool uses for this tool on your wiki, please let us know. This will also help in the development since we need to know how people are most likely to use collaborative video.

I feel this has a lot of potential to enrich the content of many different wikis, so please give it some time and see how you could use it.

Angela (talk) 19:47, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for all the feedback so far. One of the main issues seemed to be that there wasn't much in the way of help. There is now a video tutorial and some help pages on wikieducator. There are also some Halo 3 and Star Wars examples to show how this can be used in an article. If you have any feedback, questions, or bug reports, please add those here, or send them to me by email. Angela (talk) 03:35, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Now that I've seen these videos in action on MA/en, I have a couple of serious misgivings about this tool. I can see some benefits to its use, but there are a few major worries I have. Specifically as follows:

1. Credit issues. There seems to be no easy way to get from an article with the video in it to the actual page for the video (ie, like Images).
2. Tied to that, hitting "credits" shows the user who added stuff to the video. Not the actual credits for the video.
3. Tied to that, it makes it very difficult to properly note the license of each item in said video.
4. Unrelated, they go into an "Kaltura" namespace? Wouldn't "Video" make more sense, so as to make them more like the way images work? As it stands, they work counter to everything else we use on MA/en.
5. I personally cannot edit them using Firefox on OS X. I get a blank page when I hit the "edit this video" link.
6. Do the names of the videos have to be as useful as "Video 1234567"? Maybe it's just the examples uploaded by the Kaltura people to date, but with images, we can give them vaguely descriptive names. Are we unable to do the same with videos? If not, looking at the list of videos in the Kaltura: namespace with their non-descriptive names makes it pretty tough to figure out what you're looking for.

That's it at an immediate first... and that's after only trying to play for a few minutes. -- Sulfur 12:55, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

My main concern is that of copyright issues. I am worried that if we start to put video on MA, CBS/Paramount may not be too happy. Images I don't think they have too much of a problem with (else we would have been shut down before now), but video would probably be a big no-no, fair use wise. -- Michael Warren | Talk 13:03, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Written before seeing DH's addition, so some duplicate content.

I agree on all of the above points - and, regarding functionality, would like to add that it would make much more sense to add videos to a page using a wikilink like [[Video:Title_Of_Video]] than using the *ML syntax that is provided with each video.

More important, though, I think we need to talk about the usefulness of collaborative video editing on Memory Alpha. Our topic here is a specific subset ("canon") of something that someone has a copyright on (the Star Trek franchise) - and I feel that most of the potential videos to be uploaded here will either be copyright violations or "not canon". I can't think of either a page that desperately needs a collaboratively edited video, or content that would be free to use in such case. To avoid much administrative overhead to remove unwanted content, it might be best to deactivate this functionality here completely. The few cases that need a video (if any) could still use the youtube plugin. -- Cid Highwind 13:07, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Thank you everyone

For this discussion. I'm Aiden and as a Star Wars fan and a member of the Kaltura team, will be here to answer any questions you might have about this new tool. From what I read, there are several main points being discussed right now:

1. Copyright. Copyright is indeed a key issue when dealing with video. Displaying very short pieces of video, for purposes of critique, education, explanation etc is permissible. As long as we abide by that we should be ok. Furthermore: Apparently, some of this community members have pointed out, this tool is very useful in combining ,and gathering many images that are currently scattered around the articles, in which case, we are back to the domain of images.
2. Hitting credits does show the users who contributed to the video. If you are not the creator of the clip or photo you uploaded, you can add a simple text slide at the end with credits.
3. Titles - We have found a solution to this issue, and it should be implemented shortly. However, it doesn't seem to be critical, as when you see the video as a part of an article, it has a proper and descriptive title. Furthermore, collaborative video search will be further enhanced in the near future.
4. Technical Problems While the code for this extension is already stable, we are still looking to perfect it, and Thank you Sulfur for the note on the problem with the Mac OS system - Our tech guy has contacted you.

I hope this discussion continues, and look forward to seeing the video-wikis you create using this new feature. AidenS 11:50, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Well, images are typically "scattered around" the article because each one has a specific relation to the bit of text it accompanies, not because we just like to have them around in a random fashion - I doubt that merging them to a video will make the article better in most cases.

However, for that to be useful at all, the resulting videos would need to be able to "blend in" with the existing formatting - that means, no additional border/UI, resizeable to thumbnail size, preferably no need to press a play button, usage via wikicode instead of XML-like syntax. -- Cid Highwind 14:07, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

As I just found out:

• Deleting the local video description page doesn't delete the video itself. This is bad, because we most probably want to delete a video for a reason, be it porn spam or "just" a copyright violation.
• All Wikia wikis using the Kaltura extension can display ALL uploaded videos. For example, you can just go to a video description page here, grab the tag code and use it to display the same video on Uncyclopedia - without the video having a description page there, without changes to that video showing up in their recent changes (probably, haven't tried), and without anyone there being aware of the fact that the video was created here using a different license.

-- Cid Highwind 16:28, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

"Moratorium" - no videos in main namespace

There are still many questions open (see above) - do we want these videos at all; if we want them, do we want to pose any restrictions on their use; can any of the implementation details be fixed; etc.

For the moment, it would be nice if we could agree on not using videos in main namespace until the remaining questions are resolved. I think this is necessary because, among other things, included videos can't even be found easily, should we decide to drop that feature. -- Cid Highwind 15:39, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

It's amusing to see all these new users suddenly come out of the woodwork, just to post videos.

As for the future of the feature, I can see it as being useful if you wanted to effectively show scientific or special functions that can not be accurately depicted in a single image: like the Picard Maneuver (which is currently represented by 4 consecutive images), or an alien morphing, or a starship going to warp or firing phasers. I don't necessarily like the idea of it being useful just to show someone's personal favorite or most amusing scene or as a homage to their favorite character.

I'm a little hazy on this, but wasn't there a time when we had issues with posting animated .gif files for fear of copyright issues, or something? --Alan 21:35, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

I think there's something in the image use policy about animated graphics not being as accessible as single images - which still holds, and should be even more true for flash videos used to show previously "scattered" images. ;) -- Cid Highwind 21:44, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Example

We can already see a nice example. As Alan suggested, it's a technical video demonstrating the Warp Drive. AidenS 10:21, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

And another point - it's true you can copy the tag and paste it in uncyclopedia, or other wikia community that implemented the extension. But you can do the same thing with the text you have here in the articles. I believe that no one will actually do it without linking to the original source, unless he/she has hramful intentions (and in that case, will be banned by the community). AidenS 12:48, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

This is all nicely done, it has no place on Memory Alpha, in my opinion, however. We don't allow graphics /be it pictures or videos) that somebody has made, to illustrate how warp drive etc. works, only screencaps are acceptable. This video contains too much speculation. We'd only be able to use actual dialogue snippets with actual clips from the episode to showcase how things work. That approach would look strange as well, I guess, so I'd say we shouldn't include a video at all. Now, I do think there are cases were a video would work to illustrate things that cannot be properly shown on screencaps. Two examples: Photonic fleas are so small that they are hard to capture on a proper screencap. They are only really visible because of their movement (moving yellow dots of light), so in this case a small video from the episode, showing the moving fleas might be a good idea. Another example: B'Zal is a moving, visual phenomenon. We could include a video to show what it looks like. Before people start uploading more and more videos, we should really discuss how we want to implement those videos. I think, there are many "rules" we can carry over from screenshots. We shouldn't upload a collage videos with shots from different episodes. We don't need a video of Picard saying "Engage" twenty times. We also don't need videos that purely illustrate bloopers. Also, videos of people saying funny things (Merde...) are not necessary. Only when a video is the best way to illustrate an article, when screenshots don't work properly, or when the topic of the article is a visual, moving phenomenon by nature, we should add a video, IMHO. --Jörg 13:17, 2 March 2008 (UTC)