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Ask HN: Beta test my video editor for OSX

12 points by jawngee ↗ HN
This is my entry into the Mac App Store. Am looking for people to run it through it's paces:

http://bit.ly/bXjVB3

It's called Shave and is something I wrote for myself to fill in a void that seems to be missing from OS X: a simple video editing tool that lets me quickly trim and cut/copy/paste video together. It's most similar to Quicktime 7 Pro, but goes a couple of steps further.

Would love some feedback.

Here's a video overview:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150334724145161&saved (Might not work for everyone).

Thanks!

Edit: This requires OSX 10.6+

21 comments

[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 65.9 ms ] thread
thepumpkin1979
- I want to try it but don't have any videos to edit, you know when I can get one so I edit it with your software? Or may be you can look for videos in supported formats in my local machine... that would be a cool feature.

- I click on the 'Open' button but it does nothing, you should disable it if there is nothing selected on the list.

- The list should have a title to know what the list is about. (does it list projects or recently open videos?)

- You can rename the "Open other..." by "Open file", I don't know if that button creates a new project or allow me select a video file.

- Put a email address and a URL (blog, website) anything that the user can use to reach you or get more info about your software, this should probably be shown inside the "About" dialog and the startup screeen. Don't forget the license, if is not opensource then use a Copyright statement.

jawngee
Thanks! Good points.

If you don't have any videos, you might try a screen recording tool just to get something going. I envision one of the intended uses for Shave is editing together screencasts. That's what I use it for at work now.

Thanks for checking it out!

there
second the comment about the open dialog. it's confusing the first time you run it.

when closing the inspector window via its 'X' icon, it tries to close the video. i just want to close the inspector window.

when uploading a video to flickr, it asks for the details of the video before authenticating. when choosing facebook, it tries to authenticate first. when choosing youtube, it goes to the preferences (and does not automatically put me in the youtube pane). i think these should all do the same thing in the same order.

clicking down on the 'beginning of video' button but then mousing off of it and letting go of the mouse button leaves the control highlighted.

doing 'ping pong' and then clicking 'loop' while it's still running makes it loop in reverse. not sure if that's intended.

jawngee
How about a first run "Welcome to Shave ..." kind of dialog?

I can confirm that the inspector window is a bug.

Thanks, will make the authentication flows behave similar.

That's a bug with looping.

Thanks for the feedback!

ephesus
I will definitely be using this to split avis. I had been using a program called "explicit" up until now. Is there a readme somewhere? "Trim" and "Extract" seem to do nothing.
jawngee
Trim and Extract work when you have an in point or out point set. Move the playback head to where you want to start and hit I to set the in point. Move it to where you want to end and press O. You can quickly navigate to the in and out by pressing Ctrl+I and Ctrl+O.

Once the in/out is set, extract will "lift" the selection to a new document, cutting it out of the old (basically cut, new document paste). Trim will trim the current document to the selection.

jawngee
I'm working on the help file now.
timc3
Looks good, and seem to work well. Is there some way to set it so that the time bar display sticks in place? I prefer to use the keyboard and so it keeps disappearing.

Have you based it on Quicktime? It seems quite frame accurate..

jawngee
Yeah that's been annoying me too. I'll make it an option in the view menu.

Yes it's based on Quicktime. It uses QTMovie for most of the high level stuff, but I did have to dip down to the old school procedural QuickTime API for some stuff. Which sucks because those API's are only available in 32-bit apps.

For frame accuracy, that's the low level API stuff. QuickTime, in general, is frame adverse though, so it's sort of hack-ish to make it work.

aaronblohowiak
might run into trademark issues with "shave and a haircut", which is a little unrelated but akso in the digital film space.
fragmede
I'm not logging into facebook just to watch your video, sorry.
dgreensp
Skin and blood... are you Dexter?
Terretta
How do I contact you by email?
wazoox
I found the "open/open other" dialog non obvious. That, and it doesn't open most of the video files in my mac, most of them are ogv, mp4 or mkv, which doesn't help. I'd rather see an "Import" button than "Open other".
jawngee
MP4 is a no-brainer. I purposely limited this beta to .mov and .avi.

MKV and OGV files are another matter all together. MKV files are weird and not suitable for editing at all, even with Perian. Same goes for WMV via Flip4Mac. OGV, I've never even tried, but will add that to the list.

Thanks for the feedback!

wazoox
The .mp4 are files downloaded from ted.com mostly; I also have m4v files I encoded myself with Handbrake. Just for info...
thomasswift
yep this is awesome, you'll have me as customer for sure, as this is something I have wanted for a while because quicktime's trim is ok, but I like being precise with my cuts.

So I am giving you my full permission to email me when you come out with this for real. +1

The things I really liked, In point - I, out point - O, trim, extract split, skip and step = pure awesomeness.

bugs?

1) Clicking on the in moves the white ball scrubber to the end of the timeline.

* would be cool if I could set in and out by click on them where the playhead is, I and O works great, this could be a nice complement.

Few nitpicks from how I see things

1) I think you should add a preference for the playbar thing to show always. when I'm in this sort of program, the editing is more important to me then see the top and bottom part of the video.

2) Inside of encoders pref tab, maybe include why i would want to use this, and where I could possibly download this if I wanted to use this. I'm sure your not including it because of the licensing mess, but as a simple user I wouldn't know what this is all about.

3) the open other thing people mention earlier, threw me for loop as well

4) i haven't tried any of the sharing options, because I already have methods to get everything where it needs to be, so if you dropped these it wouldn't matter to me, but very cool for including them, I'll try them out at some point.

All in all very cool, please keep me in the loop with your developments, contact is in my profile.

jawngee
Thanks for the great feedback!

Will definitely keep you in the loop.

I think I'm going to yank the FFMPEG encoding for now as there isn't an easy binary install for users, but it definitely will be in the V2.

Thanks again!