Video editing language

Question

Hi folks,

My next project will be all about language tools, parsing and such. Because of that reason I've decided to write a simple language which can be used for video editing. So instead of those desktop applications (Sony vegas, Adobe Premiere, ..) it's basically a language where you define the effects and all and it will generate a video for you.

Since I've got no experience in this kind of business I need some help. The goal of the project is to create a simple language which is able to do some basic things (such as text fading in, etc). I am looking for articles/projects/blogs/whatever related with this which could help me writing this language. (Note that I don't need articles about language parsing since I'm pretty familar with that, just the video editing part).

Thanks,

William v. Doorn

Answer 1

The best starting point can be installing trial version of the common video editing softwares and see what they offer.

Answer 2

I'm having trouble understanding the purpose of writing such code.

If you are intending on creating a tool that a user can use to edit a video by supplying a set of commands, how is forcing the user to write text better than the GUI video editors that are available? Its going to have a pretty low usability in this situation.

If you are looking for a way to automate some kind of editing process, some video editors like VirtualDub already contain tools for batching and plugins to allow them to be automated.

Are you actually looking to make a tool that will be used by someone to edit video or is this for your own intellectual curiosity?

Answer 3

When it comes to writing video editing software, I always see ffmpeg mentioned.

From the site:

FFmpeg is a complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. It includes libavcodec - the leading audio/video codec library.

Answer 4

I if understand right your goal, you should take a look at Avisynth. I use it -and like it. It's for Windows only, but conceptually it seems to have what you are going after: a script language for non-linear video editing.