website Save Point "Showreel" beta launch

[Nate North]

You can try out a section of the Save Point technology at home for free!

http://showreel.video/

This is up and running!

Here's a quick video showing exactly how easy this is to use. It's optimized for 720p and 1080p footage So just a note that it probably won't work with 4K in the beta test state.

I'd certainly appreciate a few people testing it and providing some feedback here on their experience with the web interface, But try not to go crazy since this thing costs me per job and I have to pay for it out of pocket until the beta test is over.

You drag your video files into the video box (Beta test maximum 300mb), You drag a single Music track into the audio box, Anything with a strong beat is good to see the synchronization really work, Then toggle whatever options you want and hit Assemble video. Typically within five or 10 minutes the Assemble video button will turn into a download button and you can click that to download your video. That's it, you're done, you now how a fully edited video.

 

[indietalk]

I Featured this post.

 

[Nate North]

I Featured this post.

Thanks I appreciate it. Being a web developer yourself you can probably understand the sheer scale of the nightmare that is deploying a functional live service website. This was really a lot of work. I don't know if this is automated or not, but it would be helpful if the edit button on the top post didn't get locked off for a while.

Quick update, I spent 12 hours yesterday fixing everything that was broken and the whole thing is streamlined and perfectly operational now. Every feature now works perfectly, not just the basics.

I'd love to see films from the community Using this. I've made it incredibly easy for anyone with some film clips to make a fun video. It's literally under one minute of work To toss in some shots and get a finished video back.

@Scoopicman @CelticRambler @sfoster @Vector_Monster @shofstetter27239 @JamesWEvans @Chris Tempel @MidnightRabbit @Feutus Lapdance @gdgross @BOBAH1

I'd love to see what some of you guys who have tons of shots archived could do with this. This particular end of the tech isn't for narrative projects but it's absolutely fantastic for dropping in a folder of old shots (Or new ones) And getting a finished video back in 10 minutes. One quick note is that this system, At least for the beta test or free demo, Geared towards already compressed footage. I tried tossing in one of my 4 year old folders when I was riffing on rendering different planet surfaces, And it immediately crashed because I had forgotten that those clips were six hundred megs per shot, lol. You could easily toss in 50 shots At 5MB a piece though. I'll raise the limit if too many people start having problems.

 

[CelticRambler]

I have taken note ... but will be otherwise occupied till at least some time next month to be able to go through any of my archives, let alone argue with my Win10 computer as to whether or not it has internet access for uploading anything of use.

 

[Nate North]

When it comes to scope creep I think I may literally be the worst person in the world. Sigh. I remember in the 2010 ERA I was working at a company and I wrote this guy an email titled "While We're At It", I was just thinking about new features and options we could add to the platform's entertainment rollout. The same email went back and forth for maybe 6 months and ended up with something like 75 replies.

So I am now 150 hours of work into this 20 hour quick spinoff project website. If you check the link at the top again you can see that it's now about eight times as large and growing daily. Unfortunately I had a really good idea today, And it's definitely going to add another 100 hours to this thing. Every back end service is growing in size and expense, But simultaneously I think I'm moving towards something that would be a lot more valuable to a larger number of people.

 

[CelticRambler]

When it comes to scope creep I think I may literally be the worst person in the world.

I'll fight you for that title !

Picked up an offcut of fabric in a charity shop last month and thought "that'll do for a quick low-budget proof-of-concept" sewing project. It should have been literally cut once, stitch twice, cut once more, stitch twice more, done. Four weeks later ...

Well, actually four weeks later it's finished, the buttons alone cost three times the price of the fabric, and the concept has not been proven because it turned into something else entirely.

But I did get to wear it for two days straight last weekend, and even had someone ask me if I was a fashion designer.

 

[sfoster]

Hey Nate - I have some clips that would work well for this, actually.
When I first started research as a director I made a massive folder of all the best Fight Scenes, Jumps/Falls, and Chase Scenes for Foot, Motorcycle, and Car.

Anyone have a request for a specific song and movie-clip category, I'll upload the combo.

 

[Nate North]

I've fixed and broken and fixed, then broken again, the whole site about 8 times this week, it's currently broken, so give me a sec, I just wanted to revamp and expand the whole thing a lot, and it, errr, broke the whole system when I added an integrated library and stock system, and a lot of other things. I'm working on it maybe 12 hours a day 7 days a week though, as usual, so it will be patched up and running again very soon. It was running just fine 20 hours ago, but I installed email verification and security certificates and visa support and now I can't even log in until everything gets successfully rewired. I'll post again here as soon as I can get it up and running again. It's 90% functional right now, But because I've connected it to banking services It can't be active until the entire chain is 100 percent secure. It will be much easier to test after this next update's finished though, With literally thousands of built-in clips available on the site, Hundreds of curated music tracks, etc. The whole thing was built for people to be able to speedrun assembly of reels for different uses like voice over documentary backgrounds gaming videos music videos stuff like that, So the intent is for everyone to bring their own footage from home, But I'm thinking I can probably serve a wider audience and make a lot more money if I just expand this into an artificially intelligent shutterstock.

For me the most fun part is always throwing in a brand new batch of footage I just filmed or made in some way, But I can also totally see the value of just aggregating 2000 clips of every new major game release and having it available on tap, $5 Worth of site credits and your entire new Elden Ring 2 review Video is ready for voice over in 10 minutes, That kind of thing.

 

[indietalk]

Anyone have a request for a specific song

I would suggest something from one of our great composer members.

 

[indietalk]

Escape Chase by David Fesliyan - Royalty Free Music Download

Track 'Escape Chase' - Intense chase music for action sequences such as car or police chases Dark, Epic, Panic, Suspenseful, Action, Chase Scene, Sports

www.fesliyanstudios.com

Cloak And Dagger by David Robson - Royalty Free Music Download

Track 'Cloak And Dagger' - This track embodies a sense of darkness and excitement. The track begins with a feeling of stealth that erupts into a frenzied conflict that ends in victory. Epic, Motivating And Inspiring, Action, Cinematic Film, Movie Trailer

www.fesliyanstudios.com

 

[Nate North]

OK the site is back up and mostly working, Now with a gigantic built in stock footage library, A page that keeps track of all your projects once you're logged in and lets you watch all the videos you've ever made on the site, etc. Rather than try to personally manage the beta testing which is an out of pocket expense for me , I just built a standard login system that gives anybody one free generation under three minutes per day. I've still got a minor timeout bug somewhere in the multi server chain that's killing off projects with more than 30 or 40 clips, But for basic stuff it works and you can try out a minor video for free right now again. I'm at maybe 98% on this thing right now so it's almost ready to go, After core functionality is all working , I'll build in some digital coupon type stuff to make it easy for people with promo codes to come in and generate a lot more freely. Anyway anyone who signs up to try it out doesn't have to worry about any spam email or anything like that, I just never bothered to build the mechanisms for it So it doesn't exist in my system yet. 6 months from now maybe I'll have it mail out a coupon to registered users once a month or something like that.

I'll post another update whenever I get it to 100 percent which should only be a few days at the most. At that point you won't even need your own music or clips To try it out and you can just go spin the wheel for free and see what happens. I plan to quit work on this in about 15 days and return to core engine development, So by that time it'll really be full blown With 10,000 or so Prefab stock clips built into the subscription, Optimized rendering time, etc.

 

[sfoster]

Escape Chase by David Fesliyan - Royalty Free Music Download

Track 'Escape Chase' - Intense chase music for action sequences such as car or police chases Dark, Epic, Panic, Suspenseful, Action, Chase Scene, Sports

www.fesliyanstudios.com

 

[Nate North]

This is a good test, because it's finding some issues in the system. It looks like maybe you've got a number of mixed formats or aspect ratios, and a lot of it is working but quite a few are stretching out or frozen. Can you tell me about the file formats used here? I'd like to make the system as robust as possible, in terms of handling random footage formats. It should already normalize most modern codecs, but there's quite a few out there, and I haven't tried them all. It's Mp4 native, but should handle most normal stuff.

I'm also seeing a title glitch here, where it's based the title text on a clip ratio that's getting misinterpreted. That never happens for me, but then I'm always feeding it exactly what it expects. Anyway, that's why you beta test stuff before releasing it.

I can probably fix all this stuff at once by simply installing an even broader codec pack, and moving the title process base resolution analysis to after the normalization pass.

Anyway thanks for testing it. I got a migraine today, so I probably won't be able to get much done until tomorrow, but I'll hardcode some guest passes into the system so you and anyone testing it can generate as much as you want, and use the now built in stock libraries. It's already got about 3000 built in stock clips, and I'm throwing in hundreds of audio tracks as soon as I have time to curate them.

Seems like in clip audio is working for some clips, not for others, and desynced for others.

 

[sfoster]

This is a good test, because it's finding some issues in the system. It looks like maybe you've got a number of mixed formats or aspect ratios, and a lot of it is working but quite a few are stretching out or frozen. Can you tell me about the file formats used here? I'd like to make the system as robust as possible, in terms of handling random footage formats. It should already normalize most modern codecs, but there's quite a few out there, and I haven't tried them all. It's Mp4 native, but should handle most normal stuff.

I'm also seeing a title glitch here, where it's based the title text on a clip ratio that's getting misinterpreted. That never happens for me, but then I'm always feeding it exactly what it expects. Anyway, that's why you beta test stuff before releasing it.

I can probably fix all this stuff at once by simply installing an even broader codec pack, and moving the title process base resolution analysis to after the normalization pass.

Anyway thanks for testing it. I got a migraine today, so I probably won't be able to get much done until tomorrow, but I'll hardcode some guest passes into the system so you and anyone testing it can generate as much as you want, and use the now built in stock libraries. It's already got about 3000 built in stock clips, and I'm throwing in hundreds of audio tracks as soon as I have time to curate them.

Seems like in clip audio is working for some clips, not for others, and desynced for others.

Here are the 7 files that I used, you can feed them back into the system as a unit test while you work on the problem.

NateChases.zip

drive.google.com

The files were generated from DVDs.
Next time I'll try it with fighting clips, I think it'll be more fun since action scenes have so more variety than chases.

 

[Nate North]

Ok, thanks, I'll run some tests with these. It looked from the reel like the Jackie chan clips were the ones getting stretched out. That likely means that it's just that one format causing the majority of issues. Often in code issues cascade, so I wouldn't be too surprised if just taking that one out fixes most of the issues.

It's literally only going to take me 10 seconds to find out, so

Couple things. The actual SP pipeline has tons of controls, but the web version is minimalistic. One control I'll need to add onto the web surface is toggle clip audio. This video would actually be reasonably cool if it didn't mix the audio randomly, a lot of key clashes with 7 different soundtracks playing at once. The Text is still wrong, but it's just oversized from assuming that clips are a minimum of 720p. Safe enough for my own libraries, but this shows that it's immediately a problem for random end users.

 

[sfoster]

Ok, thanks, I'll run some tests with these. It looked from the reel like the Jackie chan clips were the ones getting stretched out. That likely means that it's just that one format causing the majority of issues. Often in code issues cascade, so I wouldn't be too surprised if just taking that one out fixes most of the issues.

It's literally only going to take me 10 seconds to find out, so

Couple things. The actual SP pipeline has tons of controls, but the web version is minimalistic. One control I'll need to add onto the web surface is toggle clip audio. This video would actually be reasonably cool if it didn't mix the audio randomly, a lot of key clashes with 7 different soundtracks playing at once. The Text is still wrong, but it's just oversized from assuming that clips are a minimum of 720p. Safe enough for my own libraries, but this shows that it's immediately a problem for random end users.

This is way cooler than the one I generated. Nice update ideas too!
I hesitate to contribute to scope creep... but I imagine some people would want to hard-code the opening and/or closing video clip.

 

[Nate North]

This is way cooler than the one I generated. Nice update ideas too!
I hesitate to contribute to scope creep... but I imagine some people would want to hard-code the opening and/or closing video clip.

It can actually already do that, but I'm hesitant to add 6-8 more controls. My basic design for this public version is, If it's harder to use than a sink, I designed it wrong.

 

[Nate North]

 

[sfoster]

Tried to do some action clips, it had a problem with an american movie this time! Killer elite.

NateFights.zip

drive.google.com

Also had problems with Chocolate but that was another foreign film that snuck past me.

 

[Nate North]

Tried to do some action clips, it had a problem with an american movie this time! Killer elite.

NateFights.zip

drive.google.com

Also had problems with Chocolate but that was another foreign film that snuck past me.

I certainly appreciate the help and I realized while I was working tonight that I had forgotten to reply to this. The reason is that I'm fixing it and it's taking a minute. These problems that you're having are legitimate issues that need to be procedurally fixed permanently for all users. So obviously I'm just doing that and it's taking a second. I've looked at all of your input footage and the corresponding outputs and if I'm not mistaken this all comes down to finding the true resolution of any input video (The resolution without letterboxing or pillar boxing) (The Jackie Chan movie had both for some reason along with some weird offset I've never seen before) I'm building in a new detection algorithm during the normalization stage that finds the REAL Resolution of the actual video regardless of circumstance, And then adding an AI upscaling algorithm that brings all incoming footage even with mixed types, to the same project base resolution. It was sort of doing that before but the engine didn't have any way of dealing with stuff like 480p, Or videos with baked in letterbox or pillar box.

While I'm already taking the time to resolve that issue, I'll make two other changes as well. One will be optional output upscaling, So you can make a drop down selection on the site to have it output 4K From a 720 P source etc. The other will be detection and processing of vertical aspect videos, Allowing the system to work on portrait style videos common amongst cell phone users Tiktok Instagram and Youtube shorts users.

Anyway I'm not ignoring your comment and I appreciate you helping out with the beta testing.