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DVD Format Changing Movie-making
rgmoore writes "The Los Angeles Times is running an interesting article on the impact of DVDs on the movie making process. They briefly mention the possibilities of end-users being able to re-edit the movie (with a veiled reference to The Phantom Edit) but focus more on the way that it's starting to influence directors and producers during the course of making the movie."
In case you're not familiar with it, you can read all about it here.
I'm gonna edit the Memento DVD so that it plays in correct chronological order and my idiot roommate can work out just what the fuck is going on!
ROOMMATE
(perplexed)
My head hurts! What just happened then??? Who's John G? What the?! Who the?!
ME
Here you go somewhere else and watch THIS version! Away with you!
:)
THis would help in editing the bad content of movies (cursing, nudity, etc.) and making some movies out there viewable for the whole family. I like this and hope to see this soon.
I've been thinking about and half-heartedly working on this idea for quite some time.
What I'm working on is taking an open-source DVD player (I picked Xine, but I'm questioning the wisdom of that decision) and hacking on-the-fly editing capabilities into it.
The basic idea is that for a given DVD, a person can go through the movie and carefully "mark it up", generating a file that annotates all of the portions of the video and audio tracks that are potentially offensive, tagging each one with descriptive information including the nature of the material, relevance to the plot, etc. Then, an individual can create a personalized "viewing stylesheet" that specifies how he or she would like kind of offensive material to be handled. Obviously, some default stylesheets could be provided as well. The markup and stylesheet languages will both be extensible, (so you can add the "Jar Jar tag"), and you should be able to edit pretty much anything that's marked up in any way you want. A buddy of mine wants to make himself a stylesheet that will show *only* the offensive parts ;-)
Then, of course, when you play a DVD on my hacked-up player, it would look up the markup file and use that and your personal viewing stylesheet to automatically edit the movie.
I think it would also be cool to provide another sort of editscript that allows more sequential editing, rather than a rule-based system, so that you could do more "artistic" edits, grabbing snippets of video and audio from various places and maybe mixing them with your own. That's not my major interest, though, mainly since such edits probably wouldn't be done 'on the fly' anyway.
The project has been languishing for a few months, though. The Xine support for playing DVDs is quite rough and doesn't seem to be improving quickly. The Xine developers had been talking about a 1.0 release in December, but it hasn't happened yet, AFAIK (haven't checked for a while). Actually it's the dvdnav plugin (which supports menus and such) that has been really lagging, and the regular DVD plugin doesn't support encrypted DVDs, which makes testing difficult, since I don't have any unencrypted DVDs.
What I have done is implemented various edits (masking blocks of the image, skipping short scenes [long skips are much harder; seeking doesn't work in dvdnav yet], muting the sound and substituting alternative snippets of audio, altering subtitles, etc.) to verify that it can be done easily. I have also found what I believe is the best way to insert the editing stuff architecturally; as part of a general filter plugin architecture. I've also begun to define the markup and stylesheet languages (both in XML).
I've mostly been waiting on Xine, though. Just recently I've gotten tired of that and I've started looking into some of the other options. Ogle, VLC and gstreamer are three I'm considering.
If anyone knows of other players I should look into, or has any interest in helping me with the code, drop me a line.
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