Create SlideShow Videos on the Web, In the Cloud

Our web-based system works anywhere in the world that you happen to be, so long as you have a browser with Adobe Flash support and sufficient bandwidth. (And yes, creating and editing video online does tend to use a lot of bandwidth)

It allows collaboration among people working on a project, so one person can be uploading and transcoding video, while another works on the text-to-speech for the voiceover. Multiple videos can be developed in parallel. Clients can be given the tools, not just a finished product.

The new way

• Web-based editor that works in all modern browsers.
• Edit video on the run while on-site with a client, or in a cybercafe on vacation.
• Subscription model with minimal start-up costs and instant access.
• Regular upgrades and improvements are part of the service.
• Files stored in the Amazon cloud have 99.999999999% durability.
• If you need more processing power, it’s just one click away.

The old way

• Desktop software that runs on one computer for one person.
• If you’re not at your desk, you can’t edit. Others rarely have the same version.
• Up-front purchase of software, then large downloads and installation.
• Software upgrades and maintenance is your problem..
• Locally stored files are vulnerable to theft or accidental loss.
• Once you hit the limits of your hardware, what then?

Moviemasher Video Creator

Flash-based in-browser editor allows ‘mash-ups’ of images, audio,
and video with transitions and multiple layers of effects.

Create original video, manage your assets

• Import, Transcode, and Manage media files.
• Create a Video from image, audio, and video sources.
• Apply overlays, transitions, and special effects.
• Multiple layers of audio and effects.
• Render to any video format or resolution that FFMPEG supports.
• Text To Speech services available for computer/human-generated dialog.

Create multiple projects to organize all your media files. Our asset manager lets you edit, copy, and delete files at will. If you use a web-based email system (such as GMail) you will find our interface simple and familiar.

Our management software is designed for ‘mass’ operations, such as rendering dozens of videos at once, or turning bulk text into speech faster than a human could, to solve business and marketing needs.

Publish the way you want, not the forced way

• Run your own Video Render Farm.
• Set any options FFMPEG supports.
• Control your own job queues - no waiting for others
• Keep Terabytes of video online under your own control.
• Share using Amazon S3 filesystem, HTTP, even BitTorrent.
• Upload directly from Amazon Web Services to other video sites.

Never be limited by your own internet connection again. All your data is hosted and processed by Amazon Web Services, with nearly unlimited bandwidth and storage available.

Because our system is open an extensible, you can run bespoke software on additional servers to perform special operations on your files. Or modify the open-source rendering software and start customized servers.

Supported File Types

Manage your own Cloud, control your own workflow

• Manage your Amazon Web Services.
• Control your Server and Storage Costs.
• Run your own Windows and Linux VPS Servers. Start Web servers, Proxy servers, or third-party media software.
• Plug in other systems for infinite expansion. Modify your servers for ultimate control.
• What happens in the cloud can stay in the cloud.

The cloud can be a complex place. We give you tools to automate the hard parts.

Manage all your servers through our simple interface. See what all your machines are up to with a single glance. Set automatic shutdown times for idle servers to reduce costs.

Start up as many rendering servers as you need to handle your workload, and pay Amazon ‘wholesale’ rates for the horsepower.

What sets us apart from the Crowd in the Cloud:

There are many web-based video or movie creation systems around, but most of them run their own server cloud. (“render farm” in the old jargon) No battling for a place in the queue since it's your own.

We don’t do that. We give you the tools to run your own cloud. This has an enormous impact on our pricing model, and the capabilities and Cost Reductions you get. It makes no difference to any other customer, or ourselves, if someone wants to run 2,000 servers or none at all so we don’t have to factor those costs into our own to pass along to you.

• No price markup for your servers. You’re essentially getting them wholesale from Amazon, and can take advantage of their various deals and offers. We don’t add any extra AT ALL to your AWS costs.
• Run as many servers as you need, or your budget allows. If you have twenty videos you’re happy to wait for overnight, just start one cheap ‘Small’ server and let it work away. If you absolutely need them all done in the next ten minutes, run a dozen high-performance servers and smash your way through the work queue.
• Set your own video options. We don’t care if you want to do triple-pass high-definition hour-long videos using cutting-edge codecs. They’re your servers, and your queue. Whatever you want is what we want as well!
• There are no rendering limitations due to security. If you want to modify or extend your server farm  in interesting ways. SSH to your servers to install and run special software. Create your own Amazon Machine Images (AMI’s). Mix our software with existing Cloud systems for backing up your companies precious offline resources or extend our video system to match your working style locally out of the Cloud.
• What you render is what you get. We don’t add our logo to anything you produce or limit what use you put it to either commercially or privately. ALL videos that you produce are yours. You own full rights to any videos you produce and the only caveat to that is that you must own all the rights to any files, or properly attribute them to the artist(s), that you use to produce the final videos. Any disputes that arise will be between yourselves and any alledgedly wronged copyright owners and won’t involve us or our services as everything is run on your own servers at AWS and not ours.
• You are protected from the ramifications of other people’s actions. Their files and your files never mix. And our business is never exposed to unintended consequences such as cost blowouts, so we’ll be here for a long time to come.

The only downside to being able to provide you with all of this choice is that you must also have a commercial relationship (a paid account) with Amazon Web Services as well as with us, so you will get billed by two separate companies instead of just one. Ours will be an automatic subscription through PayPal and AWS will bill your attached credit card monthly as well, quite painless from our perspective.

Our extensive testing shows that if the software is used in the same manner as a casual desktop video editor, the variable costs are just a few dollars a month. An individual using the software ‘professionally’ (a “Medium” server running eight hours every business day) would get billed around $20 for a month’s use by Amazon. That provides the ability to render literally Hundreds of Videos a month for quite literally cents per video.

What "They" Do

• To prevent your renders costing more than they expect, other systems will limit the length, resolution, or encoding options of your videos.
• You will often see a flat per video rate of around $1-$2, or a ‘points’ system that limits use per month. ‘High Definition’ renders will cost even more and usually you have to buy a higher cost subscription.
• Pricing is set at average cost for average service that rewards abuse and punishes efficiency. And you pay a mark-up for services you could have obtained directly.
• Casual usage often includes their logo embedded in your output video.
• Security requirements usually prevent you from passing special options to their rendering servers, so only a fixed set of video formats are allowed.
• Since they host your content, leaving their service means your data is deleted, if they allow long-term storage at all.
• Under their TOS they somehow believe that they own the copyright to YOUR work and can limit your usage of your own work to non-commercial use.

What We Do

• Our system is given ‘API keys’ to your Amazon service to manage media files and rendering servers on your behalf. These keys can be revoked at any time, and all our usage is tracked and reported to you seperately by Amazon.
• We bill you a fixed monthly fee for using our service; on a low-cost unlimited use subscription model.
• Amazon will then bill you monthly for the rest, which constitutes the only “variable costs” of your video editing empire, (bandwidth, storage, and CPU power) however large or little that is.
• If you do leave us, you still have all your content stored with Amazon. If you rejoin us, it’s all instantly back with no need to upload again.

What about iPhones and iPads?

Alas, because of Apple’s campaign to keep Adobe Flash off these platforms, the video editor will not run. You can still use an iPhone to manage the account, assets, servers, and queues - even start renders... just not edit the actual video. Sorry about that. We are working towards a solution, but can’t promise anything yet.

Other tablets and platforms such as Android do run Flash applications, thanks to Google’s commitment to Adobe. In fact future browsers based on Chrome will support Flash even better, as Google embeds it directly into the browser code.

Cost Comparison

It can be difficult to compare costs when peoples’ potential usage differ so much: We will consider here three scenarios with different relative levels of storage, bandwidth, and CPU use. All costs are monthly, with 20 'working days' per month.

The Hobbyist

Spends an hour a day editing video uploaded from their own equipment, but tends to preview and then render each video many times over, with lots of special effects. About a dozen hours of video are stored online.

The Professional

Spends eight hours a day editing and rendering a constant stream of videos made from various sources. Pros generally create ‘clean cuts’ with few effects. They also maintain a reasonably large library of stock video footage, but don’t need to transfer very much of it each month except to select clients.

The Publisher

Large geographically diverse corporation mechanically adds leaders and trailers to batches of videos, but needs to simultaneously convert them to multiple output formats and serve them directly to the internet. Multiple COTR accounts are bought for staff with various roles, for security reasons to compartmentalize projects.

Scalability

The key concept here is "scalability", the ability to smoothly scale up from small to large (and then back again) without having "breaking points" which require you to change the way you work, or reorganize all your content into a new system.

Video is becoming more important to the way companies market themselves and communicate. A personal computer may be fine for producing a few videos a day, (assuming you have nothing else to do with it) but eventually your business will hit the wall of what your PC can render and your internet connection can upload.

What then? Miss opportunities? Buy more computers? Where do you put them? Who do you hire to maintain them? How much does all the software cost? And if your video production needs are variable (do you have an ‘off season’?) what do you do with all the idle computers? These are the problems that the cloud and our system solves.

The Hobbyist

2 videos a day, 20 days a month

The Professional

20 videos a day, 20 days a month

The Publisher

200 videos a day, 20 days a month

COTR Accounts

1 Account: $10

1 Account: $10

4 Accounts: $40

AWS Storage

(approx $0.10/gigabyte)

8 Gigabytes of storage:
$0.80

200 Gigabytes of storage:
$20.00

1 Terabyte of Storage:
$100

AWS Bandwidth

(approx $0.10/gigabyte)

8 Gigabytes of Bandwidth:
$0.80

20 Gigabytes of Bandwidth:
$2.00

500 Gigabytes of Bandwidth:
$50

AWS CPU

($0.08-$0.17/hr)

20 hours Small CPU:
$1.60

120 hours Medium CPU:
$20.40

360 hours Medium CPU:
$62

Equivalent cost per video:

40 Videos @ $13.20 = $0.33 each

400 Videos @ $52.40 = $0.13 each

4000 Videos @ $252 = $0.06 each

Rendering Options and Limits

Internally, FFMPEG is used to transcode video. It can handle nearly every codec ever invented, and there is a large community already familiar with how to tweak its settings to produce files compatible for nearly any player.

Many web-based transcoding services use FFMPEG ‘under the hood’ but they hide the full range of options (or only allow a limited preset list) because passing arbitrary user settings and parameters to their server pool is a security risk. Or because they need to control their ‘cost per minute’ for rendering video, and therefore can’t permit you to turn on time-wasting options (from their point of view) like multipass high-quality rendering.

We don’t care. They’re your servers, pass whatever options you like in the settings dialog. If you want to spend an hour rendering your movie at 2000x1200, go right ahead. If you want to put in so many experimental options it might make the server crash, it’s your choice. Doesn’t affect anyone else. The way it should be.

It’s easy to re-render a mash (or an entire batch) to a different encoding format. You can also create your own presets, once you discover the ‘magic formula’ that makes your videos encode perfectly for your specific needs.

Why is this important?

In an ideal world, you would generate one video file and it would play everywhere. But unfortunately there are a lot of different devices out there, a lot of incompatible video players, and new ones coming along every day.

Creating good quality video is, unfortunately, still as much art as science. Perhaps one day codecs will automatically get everything right on the first pass with just a few simple options, but not today. Carefully controlling codec settings still makes a big difference in final quality.

Even if you’re just uploading the video to another web service, they don’t all accept the same formats. Even streaming them directly to the web usually requires three versions. And there is always a careful balance between making your files look good, and making them use less disk space or render quickly.

Common formats we support:

WebM Streaming

HTML5 Compatible
VP8 video
Vorbis audio

iPod, iPhone

h264 video
320x240 at 30fps
48 Khz AAC-LC audio 160 kbps

Desktop Computer

MPEG-4 video
800x600 at 30fps
44 Khz MP3 audio 128 kbps

NTSC DVD

MPEG-2 video
720x480 at 29.97fps interlaced
48 Khz MP2 audio

Home Theatre

h264 video
1280x720 at 25fps
Aspect Ratio: 11:9
48 Khz AAC-LC audio 160 kbps