The NapierTV Production Blog

Not sure how many of you know, but we used to go under the name Napier Subculture Society, when we were filming in our first few years. Back then we would almost religiously use open source software for video editing, and we'd also be sure to export in open source formats in addition to the other formats we provided. Ben, our Executive Producer (and regular writer to this blog) is quite an advocate of open source, and that's carried across to the rest of our team. As an advance warning, this features techy content - beware!

We believe it's important that computing, and more specifically video editing, should be available and open to everyone. 20 years ago, video was the exclusive realm of the content distributors - they decided what we watched, and whilst you could film your own video, there was no way to get it out there, so to speak.
Fast forward to the last 5 years, and the market has changed immensely. With the launch of youtube and other internet video sites, there's now an easy way to share your work with the rest of the world, and you don't need to go through a middleman to get your content across. You don't even have to worry about whether your viewers will have the right software to watch your video, as these sites mostly take care of that for you.
Even in terms of equipment, for a relatively small financial outlay it's possible to film, as we do, in full High Definition (we film in 1080, higher resolution than most TV sets show), whereas before you'd have to put away money for quite some time to be able to afford even the most basic of models. Video has truly come to the masses.

So what does this have to do with open source you ask? Well it's all about the accessibility of video editing. Rather than have to pay for a full video editing suite, and then being locked into that for the rest of your career, we like the idea of being able to use a free one that works in open formats, that anyone can use or build upon. As Napier Subculture we edited almost exclusively using open software (Kino & Open Movie Editor), only using proprietary software when we had to, basically.

Currently with NapierTV, we're editing using Apple's Final Cut Suite, and Adobe Premiere under Windows. We've had to move to using these simply because the open source community options simply don't seem to be up to scratch (yet) for editing HD footage. Stressing the word "seem" there - if you're using open software to edit HD footage, please let us know. We'd genuinely like to be proven wrong here!

Similarly, with open formats we've had to have another look at them. We used to upload a full resolution copy of everything in Ogg Theora format. Not only was it good to be able to provide an open source format, but it offered us an archive of our episodes, for when we inevitably lost the original DV files. Currently though, exporting full 1080 footage to Ogg Theora to upload just isn't viable. We're still committed to supporting open formats though, so we're going to offer them at some point - albeit maybe at a lower resolution like 720p or 576.

It's important to try and support these we feel - though we can't offer funds to them, we can try and make open formats a little more prolific. After all, the more accessible video editing is to people, the better. We don't want to be the only guys doing this!

Peace out.
-Chris
NapierTV President