novacut-community team mailing list archive

[Jason Gerard DeRose <jderose@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

AJ,

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 2:52 PM, AJ Ashton <aj.ashton@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I've been following Novacut development with great interest and it
> seems that DMedia could be an excellent solution not just for video
> but for other types of media as well.

Absolutely!  Actually, that's been the plan from the very beginning.

At its core, dmedia just deals with files generically, with out any
concept of file "type".  So all the really important behaviors
(maintaining durability, on-demand transfer, etc) are already
available to any kind of file.

However, as you guessed, the place where a file's type does come into
play is metadata extraction and thumbnail generation.

> I'm thinking about two specific use cases that I work with a lot -
> digital photography (raw files), and geospatial raster data (eg
> satellite/aerial imagery & digital elevation data). Like video, these
> are the kinds of files that take up a lot of disk space and that
> professionals would want to ensure multiple known good copies of
> across physical locations. They are also the kinds of files that
> benefit from a local metadata/thumbnail cache whether or not the full
> file is locally stored.

RAW photography is actually the use-case that first got me day
dreaming about something like dmedia.

Storing photos in dmedia also is a high priority for Novacut as photos
are important in storyboarding workflow.

> I realize that HD video is the current project focus, and I know from
> experience the success that can come from focusing early development
> on a single narrow use case. So I'm not suggesting a change in
> priorities at all, just curious if thought has been given to this sort
> of thing and what any long-term ideas/intentions for a more generic
> media library might be.

Well, I appreciate your sensitivity to the fact that we need to keep a
narrow focus, but luckily, this doesn't take us off track!

I have given quite a bit of thought to how to make dmedia useful to a
lot of different apps and use cases.  I think the biggest thing is
planning in the right sort of schema-extensibility.  Next month one of
my goals is to really document the schema design and put out a request
for comment,  to start getting more feedback from people interested in
using dmedia in other domains.

> For digital photography the workflow might be very similar to video,
> however for geospatial data the import process and the metadata would
> likely need a bit of a different approach. Is a pluggable system
> allowing for different types of data and different metadata
> requirements something you could see for DMedia down the line?

Yeah, the plan has always been plugable metadata extraction.
Technically, there is a *very* crude plugin mechanism already in
place, but it's probably not suitable for plugins to be registered
from outside of dmedia.

A metadata extractor wouldn't have to integrate with dmedia very
closely either.  You could import a file into dmedia, and then the
plugin could extract metadata after the fact and just update the
file's CouchDB document.

> Anyway, fantastic work so far. Thanks.

Thanks for taking an interest!  By the way, I just got nice
documentation up for the new stand-alone dmedia filestore.  I'm
seeking more feedback on the dmedia hashing protocol before declaring
it final, so if you're interested:

http://docs.novacut.com/filestore/index.html

> AJ Ashton

Cheers!  Also, thanks for chiming in on the mailing list! I say there
should me more of that :^)

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