Freesound Forums

hey guys.
i was wondering where there was a video equivalent of freesound where users upload random video files etc. to share with the community?
anybody know of any sites?
if not maybe i should consider thinking about starting up a site like that, would be mighty cool!

loving freesound project!

cheers, louis.

That would be something...could be amazing! If there's some way to maintain a decent picture quality/file size ratio, I'd happily contribute.

yeah you'd definently need to be able to post high quailty video, otherwise most of it would be useless but of course you'd need to have something like a file size or play length limit.
i'm very much considering starting something like that. would anybody be interested in something like this?

I know this is more like YouTube for HD, but http://www.zudeo.com/ might get some ideas flowing.

Maybe

www.archive.org

But I don't know how responsible users are for saying something is in public domain when it really isn't.

bump, would anybody be interested... in regards to being interested in starting something like this?

I'm not sure I see how this would work. You don't layer and mix video in the same way as you do sound. In general a video production has material from one source on the screen at any one time. Of course the whole program is compiled from many such sources, but it isn't as if you can make a typical video from a collection of 30 second clips. That would be incredibly postmodern - probably beyond most viewer's capacity to deal with.

Then there's the bandwidth problem, and that if PAL/NTSC resolutions and widescreen/HDTV etc etc.

Maybe you could start as a youtube group to test the water, where people could get a preview idea of clips browsing the group, and request the full size version from the authors if they found a clip they could use.

I just don't see how a movie of an uncontrolled myriad of actors, scenery, camera technique etc could result in something that would be watchable. Perhaps that's a limitation of my imagination...

i think this kind of thing would be aimed towards VJ's like myself...
i understand what you're saying but yeah it would be more aimed towards expanding video collections for VJ's

Actually, most of what I do professionally involves compositing different images from different sources. Really, it's very similar to the way you layer and mix sound (it takes a lot longer). I'm always looking for different shots of water, clouds, fabric in the wind etc. These shots are used all the time in so many different ways, most of the time you never actually see any water or clouds. Either the movement is tracked and applied to some other object or the image is used as a displacement map. There are companies that sell high quality stock footage for high prices, it would be great to have a noncommercial source for noncommercial projects.

Net connections are getting faster, eventually video will stream seamlessly, this is a good idea for the next 5-10 years.

And imagine a 'Dare' competition - everyone go shoot a shot of bugs, or feet dancing, or tongues. Or make an original video image using only amoebas, mountains, and monsoon rain. If the philosophy of the site was similar to Freesound's, the winners wouldn't necessarily be the people with the best video gear. It'd be about imagination.

Yes! That would be so awesome. Thanos, you bring up some great possibilites. A creative-commons licensed stock footage pool would be a good place to start, and perhaps video remixes could be incorporated ccmixter style.

For now there is the open source movies section of archive.org... you can post CC-licensed videos there with ccpublisher, they don't have to be public domain.

But now I'm imagining something halfway between ccMixter and youtube, with downloads of various video resolutions... oh wow. *Drools*

i would think maybe it would be where people can put stock video where they can layer it behind their whatever, or have homemade special effects plug-ins or footage

bump, would anybody be interested... in regards to being interested in starting something like this?

Seems like the biggest initial barrier would be hosting the stuff. Perhaps Archive.org would be willing to donate space and bandwidth?

If its free, it doesnt need to be very fast at first.

One server could do it - 100mbps ... that would be 32 TB of video up and 32 down initially. A good coder with a focus on p2p could make something work. Think torrents...

Otherwise one should make a deal with Joost

A video equivalent of Freesound would be a very cool idea. But the issue of file size is really big. PAL video runs at 25 frames per second, and each frame of uncompressed video is like 1.4MB. The arithmetic gets real impressive real quick.

The thing is, video compression seriously affects what can be done with the footage. It isn't at all easy to colour-correct mini-DV or HDV, for example. The video information just isn't there. The compression is 5 to 1, I think? You end up with lots of noise, often big squares of noise. And, you know, maybe you'll like the noise for a while and think it works, but then it just starts getting blech. Colour-correcting MPEG-4 is a nightmare. That's fine if you're doing something super-experimental and abstract, but not so fine if you want to do anything else. Also, when that image goes through the tubes for broadcast, either by antenna or cable or any video signal amplifier, any nasty bits in the image get enhanced and stand out more than you would think. It's a real drag to see something that looked pretty clean on your monitor appear dirty and jaggy on somebody else's.

So as far as precise effects go, the size issue isn't gonna go away. However, if the users are small-format video editors or VJs (in other words, the end result is not for broadcast) it probably isn't so important to have great quality material as long as the digital interventions are either mild or they completely f**k the image. Anything in-between looks crappy.

The stuff I have on video.g**gle.com was mostly shot with mini-DV, and often I used a filter afterwards to make it look even older and crappier. (Which totally suits the turbo-crappy quality of g**gle!) So there is quite a lot you can do with noisy material - but you know, not everything needs to be that way. It's better to start with decent quality footage and go down if you want to. And that means big files.

CC uses this - maybe the best option right now... http://revver.com/