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Show HN: Open-Source Video Editor Web App

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Re: Show HN: Open-Source Video Editor Web App

#51

Post by fauigerzigerk »

Sorry for responding to relatively unimportant usability details rather than to the core of what must be a tremendously difficult project. But as one purpose of this app is to showcase your work, perhaps my feedback isn't completely useless and certainly not meant to offend.

When I open the home page, I see almost nothing right out of the gate. There's no contrast at all. It's all tiny dark symbols on a vast black back background. After I let my eyes adjust for a bit, I see an empty timeline with absolutely no indication of how to load anything into it. I tried closing the timeline by clicking on the X in the upper right corner, but nothing happens.

Clicking on some faint squares in the upper right produces more nested panes. Contrary to the main pane they do have a menu (with labels, which is great). Clicking on the text menu produces uneditable example text in that pane. Hovering the mouse over the example text makes a plus icon appear. Clicking it creates a big red bar below the timeline in the original pane. I can change its size horizontally, but I can't find a way to enter any text.

I think someone who works with video editors a lot wouldn't be quite as confused by this user interface as I am. But a web app like this is probably aimed at casual users like me.

So my suggestions are:

a) More contrast! If you absolutely must do dark mode then you must also make everything on that black background big, fat and very bright, or people like me will think they just turned blind.

b) Better discoverability! All those tiny faint controls that appear only when the mouse is hovering over them are making it extremely hard for video editing newbies like me to understand what's going on.

c) Do some more testing. Besides not being able to enter any text, the plus icon in the text editor that normally produces those red bars stopped responding for me after a while. Refreshing the page brought it back to life.

I'm using Chrome on Mac with a not too great external monitor, which might make some of the contrast issues worse than it would appear to others.

Congrats to actually releasing something!

Re: Show HN: Open-Source Video Editor Web App

#52

Post by bjano »

wonger_ wrote: post #2

Nice, seems like a good learning project. Black screen on mobile was disappointing, but oh well. I've thought about video editing in the browser before. I understand there's a memory limit, something like 5GB iirc. Have you experienced that yet?

You don't need to keep the video files in memory, it's enough to have the javascript File object and then you can read the packets you need on the fly. This way the app's memory usage should be okay.

This is what I did in my similar project (vidmix.app) and seems to be what OP's project is doing, except that they also copy the file to indexedDB to keep it around after the browser tab is closed.

Re: Show HN: Open-Source Video Editor Web App

#53

Post by moffkalast »

zenkyu wrote: post #37
moffkalast wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could potentially use the indexedDB as a swap of sorts, iirc it's typically unlimited. It would probably be quite slow though.

I did tried that and yes it was slow, like it almost didnt make sense to use webcodecs api because there was too big of a bottleneck

Ah welp, was worth a shot.

Re: Show HN: Open-Source Video Editor Web App

#54

Post by zenkyu »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #51

Sorry for responding to relatively unimportant usability details rather than to the core of what must be a tremendously difficult project. But as one purpose of this app is to showcase your work, perhaps my feedback isn't completely useless and certainly not meant to offend. When I open the home page, I see almost nothing right out of the gate. There's no contrast at all. It's all tiny dark symbols on a vast black ba…

Appreciate the detailed feedback and yeah sorry for those issues, I kind of wanted to make it raw for now to leave to test just the core features so i tried perfecting that, I mean I could make it more beautiful and all but I dont have infinite time -- in the end im trying to get a job with it and work on it on the side because its open source so I know I wont get any money out of it at all, so I aimed to make core features not to bugged out and show it as it is, but still you feedback is very helpful, like best I've got so far, so im saving all you said and surely I will improve it the way you said

Re: Show HN: Open-Source Video Editor Web App

#55

Post by breck »

I struggled to use it but it seems like it has potential and I starred it. I love how you land us right into the editing experience. Maybe there's a way to add some kind of short fully featured demo video when a fresh visitor lands? I made an open source fully static web data science studio (https://ohayo.computer/) and it made a big difference to have some simple templates on a fresh session.

I hadn't thought of an open source web video editor, but now I definitely want one.

Are there other good open source web video editors out there? What about other good open source desktop video editors?

Nice choice of idea. Video editing is important. Looking forward to see this develop.

Re: Show HN: Open-Source Video Editor Web App

#56

Post by zenkyu »

breck wrote: post #55

I struggled to use it but it seems like it has potential and I starred it. I love how you land us right into the editing experience. Maybe there's a way to add some kind of short fully featured demo video when a fresh visitor lands? I made an open source fully static web data science studio ( https://ohayo.computer/ ) and it made a big difference to have some simple templates on a fresh session. I hadn't thought of a…

Thats what I wanted to do, to land right into the editor, test it quickly, and give some feedback, and yes I thought about making this demo video and I will probably make it, from what I was looking I didnt notice many open source video editors especially on web, if you want then join the discord: https://discord.com/invite/Nr8t9s5wSM

Re: Show HN: Open-Source Video Editor Web App

#57

Post by grodriguez100 »

zenkyu wrote: post #54
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #51

Sorry for responding to relatively unimportant usability details rather than to the core of what must be a tremendously difficult project. But as one purpose of this app is to showcase your work, perhaps my feedback isn't completely useless and certainly not meant to offend. When I open the home page, I see almost nothing right out of the gate. There's no contrast at all. It's all tiny dark symbols on a vast black ba…

Appreciate the detailed feedback and yeah sorry for those issues, I kind of wanted to make it raw for now to leave to test just the core features so i tried perfecting that, I mean I could make it more beautiful and all but I dont have infinite time -- in the end im trying to get a job with it and work on it on the side because its open source so I know I wont get any money out of it at all, so I aimed to make core f…

> I could make it more beautiful and all but I dont have infinite time -- in the end im trying to get a job with it

My two cents only, and this is meant to be constructive criticism. Precisely because you are trying to land a job with this I think you should try to polish as much as possible.

As an employer I’d probably get a better impression if someone shows me a less ambitious project, but one where attention to detail shines everywhere, rather than a more ambitious project that looks “half cooked”. The message I am looking for is “I can do things well, and I care” and for me that is more important than the size of the project.

Of course I am aware that this is completely subjective.

Re: Show HN: Open-Source Video Editor Web App

#58

Post by zenkyu »

grodriguez100 wrote: post #57
zenkyu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appreciate the detailed feedback and yeah sorry for those issues, I kind of wanted to make it raw for now to leave to test just the core features so i tried perfecting that, I mean I could make it more beautiful and all but I dont have infinite time -- in the end im trying to get a job with it and work on it on the side because its open source so I know I wont get any money out of it at all, so I aimed to make core f…

> I could make it more beautiful and all but I dont have infinite time -- in the end im trying to get a job with it My two cents only, and this is meant to be constructive criticism. Precisely because you are trying to land a job with this I think you should try to polish as much as possible. As an employer I’d probably get a better impression if someone shows me a less ambitious project, but one where attention to d…

yeah I know... I had attention but too much to core features but not exacly the ui, I knew ui is flawed, honestly I thought its not as bad as it seems to be, but those feedbacks opened my eyes and so maybe I will try managing to have some more time to polish it, I mean now after this much recognition on this post I really started reconsidering where I want to go with this project ...

Re: Show HN: Open-Source Video Editor Web App

#59

Post by joenot443 »

zenkyu wrote: post #54
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #51

Sorry for responding to relatively unimportant usability details rather than to the core of what must be a tremendously difficult project. But as one purpose of this app is to showcase your work, perhaps my feedback isn't completely useless and certainly not meant to offend. When I open the home page, I see almost nothing right out of the gate. There's no contrast at all. It's all tiny dark symbols on a vast black ba…

Appreciate the detailed feedback and yeah sorry for those issues, I kind of wanted to make it raw for now to leave to test just the core features so i tried perfecting that, I mean I could make it more beautiful and all but I dont have infinite time -- in the end im trying to get a job with it and work on it on the side because its open source so I know I wont get any money out of it at all, so I aimed to make core f…

In my experience, employers aren’t really impressed by “I made this project so you’d give me a job”, they’re impressed by living breathing projects with actual users which solve an actual problem.
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