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Most of us work a regular job to pay the bills but typically have a few side projects going on as well. Usually, they're fun. Rarely, if ever, do they translate into serious, buy-a-beach-house-and-a-new-Corvette money.
As you know, the past couple of years I've started getting into video production. There are three major players for software. Apple, with Final Cut Pro (FCP), Avid, with Media Composer (MC) and Adobe, with Premiere Pro (PP), not to mention After Effects, etc. All are pro level products. None are inexpensive. But these are your choices.
With FCP X, Apple alienated its pro user base by revamping the product to be more consumer oriented. There was a major uproar over this. Adobe recently ended perpetual licensing and switched to pure subscription, with an unusual twist. Unlike MSDN, if you stop paying at the end of the year, you can no longer use the software. You have to pay them monthly for the rest of your life, or you lose your software.
Avid's MC is twice the price of PP (and I've heard even buggier, which stretches the imagination given how unstable PP is). They're the only company that hasn't actively screwed their customer base, but Avid is a company who's not doing so well. I would be nervous (and have a big dent in my bank account) if I converted to them.
If you want to produce professional grade video for movies, TV, or even the web, these are your choices. All of them are bad. I got screwed by Adobe to the point that I might have even considered buying a Mac but for the FCP X debacle. Avid isn't terribly appealing, but if I want to move into the future (and own my software license), they're all that's left.
Hence my question. It's very rare that a window opens up in the software world where there's an actual business opportunity with a proven ability to make money that isn't locked up by major players. At the moment, there's a huge opportunity for software to serve the pro video market, and nobody's filling it. We're talking buy-a-dozen-beach-houses-and-a-herd-of-new-Corvettes money here.
This isn't an easy project. To support all the audio and video formats, offer support for existing third party plugins, implement both video editing and motion graphics (AE) programs, etc. is a lot of work. There's also the reality that upon release, many will pirate your work instead of paying you for it. However, Apple, Adobe and Avid have made a ton of money even with the cracked versions floating around.
This isn't a program you could write overnight, but there's a huge market out there. Furthermore, if you build something good, we'll not only happily give you our money and tell our friends about you, we'll likely erect a statue in your honor while we're doing it. This market desperately needs a new solution at this price point.
Could I write this myself? Absolutely. However, I have two new books on the street, speaking gigs to promote, a new show band I'm putting together and a couple of other longstanding weekly commitments. I simply don't have the bandwidth.
And so, as a video guy who has access to an extremely powerful collection of pro software developers, I ask - is anyone interested in going after this pile of money, and helping the video guys out in the process?
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Am I (like any other developer) interested in making a pile of money? Hell yes.
Is what you are talking about, being able to compete with the likes of Adobe or pro-grade video software, within the reach of the lone developer. I highly doubt it.
So where does that leave somebody wanting to take on this venture? Start a company, hire developers, and get coding. I'm guessing the first release would be 2 years off, and in this time the company is burning cash without income. They have to buy standards, they have to buy codec licenses, they have to pay overhead, etc. The only chance here is an angel investor or somebody with deep pockets and a lot of patience. Video editing software isn't like a new CRM, its a lot more complicated.
Then, even after 2 years of hard development, you release a "no-name" product to the world. You're price point will have to be low enough to capture interest while at the same time not pricing so low that you're seen as "cheap". This puts your ROI years off while still having to start immediately on Version 2.
I just don't see this kind of thing making anybody piles of money for somebody who doesn't have a name behind it...
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I spent 8 months writing a media projection app for a company in MediaCityUK
Doing video rendering well (with associated transforms, filtering, etc) is **hard**.
So that's probably the reason why there are so few players, and their products are expensive and slightly buggy.
Or, maybe I'm just not that good. :p
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I would be up for it but I can't work with anyone in a Show Band, sorry.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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I hate to be the pessimist (no, actually I don't mind), but I don't think a one-man team could pull it off. Oh they could probably make video editing software, but it would take too long. So long that the entire video editing landscape will have changed by then, making the product obsolete at launch.
Or they could cut corners and not take so long, but then the result will be a low-quality turd.
By the way, if anyone's going to do this, I'll be available to do asm optimizations. For free, unless it takes too much time.
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How much money do you have to finance this endeavor? (this is no small task if you build it from the ground up...)
You forgot to factor in all the licensing costs you will have to pay for the use of various formats also. Licensing costs for this type of product are a major factor in this.
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Christopher Duncan wrote: Could I write this myself? Absolutely.
Not.
"What Turing gave us for the first time (and without Turing you just couldn't do any of this) is he gave us a way of thinking about and taking seriously and thinking in a disciplined way about phenomena that have, as I like to say, trillions of moving parts.
Until the late 20th century, nobody knew how to take seriously a machine with a trillion moving parts. It's just mind-boggling." Daniel C. Dennett
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Christopher Duncan wrote: Why aren't you writing pro video editing software?
'Cos all the pr0n I watch is already nicely edited.
Move along there, nothing to see here.
(Friday afternoon syndrome)
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There are some alternatives...
LightWorks is a major player with pro editors. A few motion pictures have been done on it and it continues to pick up penetration each year. It isn't poised to knock off any of the ones you mentioned but then again Google didn't start out with 100% market share either.
The regular version (which is fairly capable and will teach you the basics) is free while there is a pro version that will set you back a massive $60 USD/yr.
LightWorks uses a different paradigm than the standard timeline-based editors and it definitely takes some getting used to. However, I think it is a good setup and once I learned it I think it has some advantages in the way the workflow is setup. I suggest giving it a look if you are tired of getting screwed by the big 3.
As for my rant...
As a developer, I think we sometimes walk around feeling like we are holding the hammer and every problem is a nail. In our limited exposure to any market, we think that there is a glaring gap that hasn't yet been filled or a major business opportunity that we can quickly write a script for and head for the sand. But any serious business venture starts out with lots and lots of research to understand the need, the opportunity, and to validate our ideas and assumptions before we even start a line of code. I'm not suggesting what you propose can't be done... quite the opposite. But I'm not sure that an enthusiastic posting on a coding site is the best start to a massive software project. (Unless you are looking for people to shoot you down...  )
Many, many great software projects start with someone that sees a need and writes something that fills a void. I certainly think what you propose is possible and I hope you really can get something going, get some momentum, and release something useful and timely. But having been involved with some of this startup kind of stuff for a few years, I suggest making sure you know everything there is to know about the NLE segment... who the players are, what the advantages and disadvantages are of each, and get an idea of what your solution will do and what it will offer.
I also suggest starting SMALL and getting something out the door quick and into people's hands. Yes... they may blast it as useless for their needs but they will provide useful feedback. Your best ideas will come from your users who approach the problem without preconceived notions about what your software should or shouldn't do. Maybe write something that will let you import clips, set trim points, and render an output. Ensure you get over that minimum level of functionality before you take on the big boys.
Good luck!
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Jason Gleim wrote: But any serious business venture starts out with lots and lots of research to understand the need, the opportunity, and to validate our ideas and assumptions before we even start a line of code.
But many non-serious ones don't do that. And some succeed.
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Yes... that's true. But the post isn't about a hobby project. The OP is proposing a commercial product to go up against a number of established players. So while I appreciate the input, your comment really has no bearing on the discussion at hand.
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Jason Gleim wrote: The OP is proposing a commercial product to go up against a number of established players.
And my comment applies to that.
Jason Gleim wrote: your comment really has no bearing on the discussion at hand.
In your opinion.
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If it's just editing and not effects, I've found Sony's product to be reasonable.
The reason nobody breaks in is that everybody wants to use a standard format. Film makers develop their preference and stick to it for their career.
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You can't make me, you can't make me. 
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Has anyone seen this this?
c+=, feminist programing language,created to smash the toxic Patriarchy that is inherent in and that permeates all current computer programming languages.
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Quote: No constants or persistence. Rigidity is masculine; the feminine is fluid. I.e., fluid mechanics is hard for men 'because it deals with "feminine" fluids in contrast to "masculine" rigid mechanics'.
Pretty sure that's not the definition of "fluid mechanics"...
Yet another joke language, funny though
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Well, it's still better than COBOL...
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Certainly C is a much more fluid language than COBOL. Besides, it's not the developers who are rigid, it's the computers.
I must with all due respect to Grace Hopper et al that COBOL is the only feminine language. Now I have to be chauvinistic and say: "Just look at how verbose it is!"
Come to think of it, I think wives are less fluid than husbands -- husbands tend to want to leave dirty laundry wherever it lands, but wives insist on putting it in the hamper.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: husbands tend to want to leave dirty laundry wherever it lands, but wives insist on putting it in the hamper
Other way round here: but guess who gets to do the washing? 
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+5
no, never!
it´s oh so amusing cool
i haven´t yet looked into the code right now, but i´ll give the inherpreter a try definitely!
apart from that, the devil in me (or the angel  ) thinks it may be sort of counterproductive to think, a language is feministic/patriarchic...
why is there always the Need for stereotyped thinking when it comes to men´s and women´s (programming) Habits...
i´m so bored with that...
there are good guys and bad Girls and vice versa...
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Now that's funny!!
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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even if nobody would believe it but i chuckled by reading this
(Anti)FeministSoftwareFoundation wrote:
plz::raise_awareness of_the_following "I don't feel like it, try again later\n";
post_on_tumblr trigger("RAPE\n");
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similar to:
Quote: •Instead of Booleans we now have Boolean+, or bool+ for short, which has three states: true, false, and maybe. The number of states may go up as intersectionality of the moment calls for such a need.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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I would be curious to see how it will meet the numeric challenge of the following requirement.
"After birth, a program rolls for a 40% chance of executing literally as the code is written, 40% of being "psychoanalytically incompatible", and 40% of executing by a metaphorical epistemology the order of the functions found in main()."
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