would also be cooler to have a seating chart to click around to make sense of perspectives
MPAA: More of this, less of SOPA. If you give us great ways to get content, we will pay for it.
I think it could be pretty cool if users had the ability to reference a higher quality audio source (when available - something on Archive.org or uploaded mp3s).
If you're inclined (I completely understand if not) can you tell us the error that the console in Chrome or Firebug gives you?
VKLog is not defined http://switchcam.com/assets/js/utils/facebook.js?ver=2011112... Line 81
VKLog.dlog("checkSessionStatus()");
It does seem to work with Adblock disabled, so I'd guess a subscription is blocking something essential.
I think I would advise not to just focus on concerts, but potentially other mass events, e.g. sporting events.
I guess you're using the audio stream to do some form of sync / time stamp though, so that may limit potential uses.
some techie questions, how does it work? how do you get to know which videos are actually part of a specific event? how do you match the video with the actual song?
It says a lot that the music industry didn't invent this.
- Is this more, less, or equivalently legal (copyright-wise) to just posting the youtube videos on youtube in the first place? It seems like the act of compositing them in this way would be significant, but maybe not?
- The normalisation of audio could use some work. SwitchCam seems to do something (the youtube volume on each clip was different for me), but it didn't quite work.
- I'd be really interested to know how automated this is, and how much human curation is required to get it right.
- Presumably, the next step is stitching the multiple videos together to make 3d models, allowing you to pan to places between the various camera operators. :)
- I'm no lawyer, but the advice we've received is that we're good on the legal side.
- You're on the money re: audio. It's miles better than it was 1 month ago, but we're still not 100% yet.
- There is a human curation step (~5% of the process), but that is mostly for removing really crappy videos. Searching/Synching/Sequencing is automatic.
- I dunno about next step(!), but i agree the idea is super interesting :)
This may be more legally grey than just piping through audio since you are actually producing a derivative work (even if it is mechanically produced), but the net effect would be awesome. You'd end up with better audio than any one person could record, and the more angles you get the higher quality you can make the audio.
Definitely a great idea and very well done for the first cut. You just need some Wilco on there.
Actually, I'd be tempted to make the process 100% automated, and open it up to the general public as soon as possible.
This has the potential to go extremely viral, and occasional "bad" videos could work in favour of this, by introducing an element of humour into the proceedings.
I can't see how this is possibly "fair use" - it's the complete work of music and the visual design of the set, choreography and show that is being reproduced in full in a commercial way. Unless the uploaders bought a license with their ticket to reproduce and distribute online and allow derivative works of those reproductions ...
Would be fascinated to read the letter from your IP lawyer justifying this?
A little suggestion.
The first video I picked had only one camera angle for the first two tracks of the concert. So it was an effort for me to understand how it works. I would suggest you have a prominent link to a 'model video' that has multiple camera angles so new visitors can easily see it in action.
Very good job lads!
Of course, I presume the bigger play is for switchcam to be the default app that people use to record at concerts and other events. Smart!
It combines a few high-resolution still images with a low-res video to improve the video quality:
Static scene: http://vimeo.com/1513129 Dynamic: http://vimeo.com/2937785
(Looks a bit old (3 years) so I don't know if it's still in development)
TL;DR: lose the strips of white from the video viewing page.
I am excited about the concept - was thinking about this very idea while watching Coachella streaming live this year and then seeing all the cams people were uploading.
Thankfully this isn't too much of a problem at heavy metal gigs. No-one wants to take their smartphone to the moshpit :D
Incidentally, Switchcam.com was only a little more than $1k, which was definitely worth it.
I realize that often times getting the recorded audio for a concert can be a finicky matter, but maybe you could partner with one of the many music festivals that are cropping up to make it happen.
I went to add a concert with time/date but landed up getting lot of videos that didn't meet the criteria. The concert was part of Osheaga (a festival in Montreal) but the listing shows up as Parc Jean-Drapeau, where the festival is held. I think including the ability to indicate what event it was part of might narrow down your search a bit.
Since most of the 300 videos found were unrelated, I decided to go through manually and select only those which were relevant. By default, all 300 videos are checked with no easy way of unchecking them. Your average user isn't going to be able to just use a jQuery one-liner like I did, so this is something else you should consider!
Overall, great job and I look forward to seeing how you guys progress with this idea!
What's also interesting is how much the effect of SOPA will have on such an awesome service like this. So disappointing to think about how the copyright holders would rather shut you down then come up with a great way to enhance the service and share revenue with you.
Best of Luck. We'll all be rooting for you guys.
http://switchcam.com/event/a-perfect-circle-lollapalooza-201...
Some of these concerts may have bootleg audio available, often recorded by audiophiles with decent equipment. It'd be amazing if supported syncing that up so you'd get great audio with multi-camera video
Now it would be nice with an underlying concert-track or / per song mp3. I don't like the crappy cellphonesound. I guess the syncing will be hard though, with the videos lag not very constant (most often, seems to work good now but I have a nice broadband connection)
That makes me think that all kinds of crowd video (protests, speeches, etc) should be stitchable, which seems like it would open larger (and potentially morally ambiguous) markets.
Another example: owning a DVD does not mean you can then stream the DVD over Justin.tv.
The thing about rights is that infringement must be claimed by the rightsholder for any action to be taken. Once a rightsholder claims infringement then the content/stream/video must be shut down or removed, and if the site or person continues to infringe, THEN action can be taken.
This is one of the good things about the DMCA and the reason YouTube, Soundcloud and even justin.tv can continue to operate. It is also exactly what the much maligned SOPA bill is trying to change - for the worse.
btw, you should sign a petition against that bill on votizen or similar.
They climbin in yo' windows, snatching your youtubes up.
In other words, no, there's pretty much no way they'd buy any attempt to game the system so transparently. That's why you need a lawyer.
The only bootleg audio that usually sounds decent are soundboard recordings, and when you find audience tapes spliced in with them the difference is immediately noticable.
What is the problem exactly?
This is largely irrelevant to the question of infringement and puts the onus on the owner to spot those infringing. Just because there's a ready way in which you can complain doesn't mean that the unlawful activity is somehow made lawful.
Note I'm making no comment here wrt the soundness or morality of said law.
I think the best you could do is use the video to determine where someone was standing, and try to reconstruct some of the stereo information based on multiple recorders.
I think this is technically not quite true. If two cell phones right next to each other are both sampling at 15kHz, in the best case you could combine their samples to get an equivalent sampling of 30 kHz. (Best case meaning phone 1 samples exactly half way between phone 2's samples.)
In practice, however, you would have to account for positioning and the fact that the phones' samples aren't perfectly offset from one another. It would require an amazing engineering feat to overcome this challenge, but I think it's within the realm of physically possible.
If the microphones, ADCs etc on both phones are incapable of capturing frequencies of above e.g. 15Khz below a certain range, combining those signals definitely won't bring you any closer to the original signal. You may be able to cancel out a fair bit of noise given enough processing but you won't get back what hasn't been originally captured by either device.
That's before you get into phase problems from trying to combine two signals. A likely outcome is that the amplitude of some signals are increased whilst some are decreased due to phasing issues.
/fuzzily remembered music tech degree. May be too fuzzy though!
Chances are that there is a low pass filter in front of the phone's ADC, blocking signals above the Nyquist limit from reaching the sampler. Assuming brick wall filters (ie perfect cutoff), combining the signals will reduce variance (noise) but not give any information on frequencies above the cutoff frequency of the filter.
Brick wall filters don't exist though. What you might see is a miniscule amount of signal in the filter's stop band. Combining the signal from many many phones might reduce the variable enough to give useful information for frequencies a tiny bit above the cutoff frequency.
A cool project would be to gather the audio from every networked microphone in an area (mobile phones, laptops, ...) and use beam-forming techniques to reconstruct the sound pressure field as a function of position. My guess is that the system would be sensitive enough that it could do amazing things like capture conversations though walls or from long distances.
The problem eventually comes down to the fact that "better" is subjective. We're in the murky realm of art here. Should your algorithm keep that fret noise or the squeaking of a vocalist's intake of breath? Are they "noise," or are they part of the performance?
>I know nothing about audio processing
Not wishing to be rude, but this much is very evident. Recording engineers position their microphones with millimetre precision in order to combat phase issues, and that is in an ideal studio scenario. Doing what you suggest is basically impossible.
Maybe I'm overstating it, you could probably do something and it'd be a nice bit of research, but you wouldn't get useful results in the way that you're imagining.
Actually, that much I know, because I've done some amateur home recording. I know that, for example, when you mic a snare drum with two microphones that are pointed at each other, you have to put a phase inverter on one microphone. I also know my way around the basic processors for audio production (compressor, limiter, EQ, etc.).
What I don't know much about is the undoubtedly more advanced techniques which may or may not exist that could realize the idea I'm talking about. The best idea I can come up with is, if you had one audio source that captured the dynamics of a concert (perhaps from a phone that was far away from the house speakers), and another audio source that captured a clearer yet "smashed" sound (perhaps from a phone closer to the house speakers), perhaps you could apply a compressor to the second source that was keyed on the dynamics of the first. Again, I might be full of crap here.
Typically what it seems you're talking about for audio here is similar to a matrix mix in the amateur/live audio world. People have been (manually) mixing soundboard audio with audience-recorded audio to improve the audio quality of recorded shows for some years now.
The thing is, sound doesn't travel all that fast when you consider the wavelengths of vocal-range soundwaves. Those spikes are not going to arrive at the same time on the different phones.
As ever with DSP, phase problems will be the ruin of you.
Or do you mean that different frequencies will travel at different speeds, enough to make (e.g.) high and low frequencies arrive at different times? Whoa, apparently it does (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_sound#Effect_of_freque...) but seems to be a small effect.
Also, how do you calculate your offset? Consider that it is constantly changing.
Isn't downvoting for removing bad content, not trying to silence someone you don't agree with?
Thoughts/comments?
(edit - post is no longer showing as greyed out/downvoted - but still, any comments?)
The more challenging problem is the distortion from the phones being overloaded, crowd noise, built in limiters, different sample rates and compression. It is true that phase relationships from a single sound captured by multple sources can be very problematic.
However, the further the mics are away from the source the less this a problem at least with "phaseyness." This annoying artifact is a type of comb filtering , and it's based on the fact that two mics close to a sound source can be thought of really capturing the "same" sound at slightly different times. If the mics are far apart, the sound is no longer the same: it's picking up reflections from a myriad of sources, the phase relationships within the frequency spectrum have been smeared and shifted by traveling through air. This negates a lot of phase problems. The more likely problem is cancellation in the low frequencies which can be ameliorated with time alignment.