Video Functionality Constructive Discussion :-)

Hi SI Team & Community

Apologies in advance I know this is going to be long and rambling and even if no one replies I can live with that. I am trying to nail my thoughts about video functionality in the SI universe… (Currently planned for ES 1.4.) I can imagine how deep the rabbit hole can go. Kind of ;-) But frankly can not nail the the depth and breath of the rabbit hole together!!! i.e. I have no idea how much SI could/should do and how much can be done with existing 3rd party products! I am also aware of the Apple Zen like strategy of rolling out a snow ball like product with the minimum amount of features. The features are few but essential and with time the other features get added if and when required. Hence the snowball. Needless to say it is essential to get a nice round solid ball rolling… I think that I will post a number of times as my thoughts crystallise…

Let me start here with the deceptively simple task of being able to find things!!!

I am a Mac for the simple reason I need the graphics programs that run on mac. Mac is for me nothing other than an expensive dongle and I have to live with that. End of story.

All is not rosy in the Mac world. For example the file management system has been a complete disaster for many years. My simple example is that I have a folder for “pictures” and one for “documents” Inside these folders I have “Blog Pictures” and “Blog Articles” i.e. “Blog Pictures” is in the “pictures” folder and yes “Blog Articles” is in the “documents” folder. Surprise, surprise I end up constantly switching between these folders which is a pain. I am currently on Mavericks and there were some new features introduced about a year ago… There is now a thing called tagging! Which means that I can have my cake and eat it. Things can be in multiple places!!!!!

From an article that I wrote:

Tags are really, cool. I can keep my pictures in my pictures folder and my texts in my text folder and, tag them. The text and pictures for the “First Article” get a tag, “First Article” and I can search for anything with the tag, “First Article.” If you want to get a feel for this the quickest way is to try playing with the labels in the side bar of the Mavericks finder. They are after all a very basic tagging system. The best thing about Tags, in Mavericks, is that I can search for them with Spotlight, just, as I would search for a file, i.e. by using the name of the tag! This little detail, alone could almost send me back to the standard OS X finder…

full article is here:
http://finalbug.net/blog/entry/367-not-all-finders-are-equal

I know virtual nothing about the PC finder system but I am willing to bet that it is at the very least better than the pre Standard Mavericks system!!! On a side note I have been on Pathfinder for years ;-)

http://cocoatech.com/pathfinder/

So that is basically my first thought with respect to the Video functionality in the SI Universe.

However it is implemented and by whomever it is really important that there is a big old box somewhere that allows me to do Boolean searches as illustrated in the video below. Imagine that I get to a point where my Site is really big and I want to be able to search 1,000s of videos for complex tasks etc… Needles to say part of this equation is that I can tag my videos as I embed/encode them… depending on how video functionality is implemented!!!



Yes I am Boolean mad. More later…

best

Paul