Tell HN: I've got an idea for an (easy?) improvement on video conference apps

1 points by slazaro ↗ HN
(I won't develop it myself because it's not an app itself, it's an improvement on current apps.)

There's plenty of shows nowadays (regular TV but also on YouTube) that use video conference apps because they can't meet guests because of the social distancing, or they don't have guests but the hosts can't gather together. They straight up record what comes out from the app, and just use that as the video they publish, which looks and sounds awful.

I don't know how original my idea is, but here it is:

All the client apps would record their raw video+audio to disk while the live conference goes as usual, and when it's over, all clients automatically send their unedited video to the host (whoever that is), so they can edit a better looking version without audio/video artifacts, dropped frames or stutters, with better quality, better editing choices, etc. It could even be automatically edited the same way as was shown live, but with the raw sources and therefore better quality, and without the need for manually post-producing or editing. This feature being seamless is important for adoption.

This seems relatively easy to add to current video conferencing apps, and it would definitely improve on the visual quality of shows nowadays.

Of course, it can be argued that shows WANT the lo-fi experience of conferencing because it makes celebrities seem more down to earth, like they're going through the same issues as you during the pandemic, etc. Even if this is true, the feature I propose would be useful after the social distancing, because skype calls were also used before, in pre-recorded shows, with the same quality issues that could be easily avoided in this way.

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