Labs/Ubiquity/Usability/Usability Testing/Sync
Tagging video is a major PITA. Syncing iMovie (for clip reels), Viddler, podcast (chaptering), the spreadsheet, and various tables in MediaWiki redoing the same tedious work 4+ time every time a change is made.
One solution is to upload everything to a MetaVid wiki. That way all comments are made where the video can be edited as well. However, running a video hosting service isn't exactly cheap or easy.
To automate the process of sycning the tag data I spec'd out two options.
- A simple desktop application that converts the tag data files which are then used to manually update the various data sources.
- A GAE app that automatically syncs the various sources, versioning problems makes this solution harder -but not impossible.
I want to proceed in such a way that if the server version dies an early death or a MetaVid wiki or other such video editing wiki appears we will start by creating the scripts that actually convert the data. That way we can use the command line to run scripts and resuse them in GAE or in a desktop application.
First off is getting a script that will convert the weird iMove Data plist format (bottom of the page) into a CVS or XML file.
Once in XML it should be easy to convert it into a podcast XML file, which can then be manually be combined with Chaptertool or, if you are feeling awesome, combine it with the m4a movie file on it's own.
After that, the next most important step is pushing that data onto Viddler via their API.
And finally we need a script to create a CVS spreadsheet. It is then manually added to a special Google Docs spreadsheet which analyzes the numbers from all the tests. This also provides an easy interface for changing tags across all movies/sheets at once (i.e. merging similar tags like "wiki:confusing" and "confused by wiki").