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Show HN: From Markdown to Video

videopuppet.com

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31–40 of 77 posts

Re: Show HN: From Markdown to Video

#31

Post by aquark »

This looks cool. Something I have looked for on and off without create success would be a fully scriptable NLE

Something like this that would support simple fades, transitions, and maybe animation. The kind of stuff you can do fairly easily in a video editor, but with lots of fiddly clicks and zooming in and out of timelines.

I'd like to have a script that let me specify when different source media start, when to apply effects, etc. All written as a basic text file.

Anything obvious out there I've missed?

Re: Show HN: From Markdown to Video

#32

Post by adzicg »

aquark wrote: post #31

This looks cool. Something I have looked for on and off without create success would be a fully scriptable NLE Something like this that would support simple fades, transitions, and maybe animation. The kind of stuff you can do fairly easily in a video editor, but with lots of fiddly clicks and zooming in and out of timelines. I'd like to have a script that let me specify when different source media start, when to app…

simple transitions are already supported, and I plan to add a lot more transitions soon.

you can set transitions globally in the document header, or on individual scenes. for example, just add

    (transition: crossfade 0.2)
for a 0.2sec cross-fade transition between scenes

video segments (different source media start) are also supported. You can do something like:

    (video:
      file: stopwatch.mp4
      segment: 00:02 - 00:04)
Check out video and transition sections here for more info: https://videopuppet.com/docs/format/

Re: Show HN: From Markdown to Video

#35

Post by hobofan »

gregmac wrote: post #19

From a technology point of view, this is really cool. From the view of someone that occasionally watches videos on YouTube, I am trying to figure out a nice way to say... I hate it. Or more specifically, I hate that it generates the voice, and basically enables video content spam. What we don't need more of is cheap, easy to automatically generate videos that are basically spam and/or clickbait, trying to get views.…

> The problem with auto-generated voices in videos like this is as a viewer I can't distinguish between work that someone put deliberate production time into, and something churned out by a content farm.

If machine voiced vs human voiced is the only discernible difference in the end, this seems like a non-argument.

As someone that is building a tool in the roughly same space (machine voiced video generation), I can just say that the use-cases go far beyond "content-farm". It also enables a lot of useful content like e.g. internal training videos, or paired with browser automation, you can have narrated always up-to-date video manuals of your product. In the education space, it enables a more iterative way to produce material where you previously couldn't afford to tweak parts of a video, as you would have to narrate it again.

And I also don't think that it will amplify the existence of such videos significantly. There are already Youtube channels that already do just that, and people don't seem to mind. E.g. there is a channel that uploads "car news" content, which basically just has a narration on top of a series of pictures of a car, and the amount of views and the rating on those videos is pretty good. In the end its just a few fact bulletins stretched into an overly long video using the same old worn out phrases (just like regular "car news"), and I don't see why a human would need to waste their time to voice that.

Re: Show HN: From Markdown to Video

#36

Post by j45 »

DagAgren wrote: post #25

I'm not sure I see why you would want to base this on Markdown. Markdown is designed for a very specific niche, and this falls far outside that niche. It seems it would make a lot more sense to just design the language from scratch, rather than try to bend Markdown to do something it was not at all meant for. For instance, why would you WANT to have an example like this: ![](london.jpg) Welcome to London --- ![](berl…

Markdown is like writing an approachable recipe.

Readable but has some intelligence and decoration that is not distracting. See it enough and the syntax will become invisible over time like using punctuation.

Re: Show HN: From Markdown to Video

#37

Post by g_langenderfer »

gregmac wrote: post #19

From a technology point of view, this is really cool. From the view of someone that occasionally watches videos on YouTube, I am trying to figure out a nice way to say... I hate it. Or more specifically, I hate that it generates the voice, and basically enables video content spam. What we don't need more of is cheap, easy to automatically generate videos that are basically spam and/or clickbait, trying to get views.…

this is where views/rating help out.

Re: Show HN: From Markdown to Video

#38

Post by edoceo »

adzicg wrote: post #30
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally disagree, and I have the exact opposite reaction. Markdown is something tons of people know already. I literally just glanced over the article and felt I could generate a "narrated PowerPoint", which seems like the main purpose of this, extremely quickly. Why would I want to learn a completely new language because there are some trivially minor syntax oddities with using Markdown? The perfect is the enemy o…

btw, for narrated powerpoint, you can actually use Video Puppet directly with Powerpoint files - just put narration into speaker notes. Here's more info on that: https://videopuppet.com/docs/powerpoint/

Wow, ace feature right here. Sales team about to fall in love with you.

Re: Show HN: From Markdown to Video

#40

Post by fudged71 »

I'm trying to imagine all the useful things you could do with code generated videos.

I'm imagining a daily routine of airplaying the video to your TV with an annotated dashboard of quantified self metrics, weather forecast, plotted local Covid-19 cases, health advisories, etc.

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