PAD.MA Launch - Sanjay Bhangar
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Just wanted to introduce Sanjay Bhangar who will do a short presentation on essentially what is left in terms of the practical conditions of how do you contribute material physically, what do you do to contribute material, how do you actually make the first levels of annotation.
It's a fairly short presentation which should give you a sense of some development that's occurring outside the website framework. It allows you to, I'll let Sanjay fill in the details.
Sanjay Bhangar is, sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, and right after this is a kind of quest, like an open question and answer session. So we would encourage you to, if you have thoughts already, if you could write them down, give them to, would they give in some questions to you, or it's small enough to be open.
Yeah? Okay. All right. This is a short 10-minute presentation, and then we'll have questions.
Hi. So I was, just give me a second here.
So I'm hoping to be answering the question that I hope is on the top of everyone's mind, which is, how can I start contributing footage? So, kind of the way we've been doing it so far has been kind of ad hoc.
And I know for a lot of people who've been doing it, my heart kind of goes out to you. It's been often a very painful process, looking at video, transcribing it, annotating it.
These girls have been sitting for hours, hours on end, kind of doing this work. And so I've been, I've been working on a software application that I'm not going to be able to show you if this, if this stupid connector doesn't work, that's going to try and make this process easier.
Um, and it's still a work in progress and is open to suggestion and is, um, um, it's something that runs in a web browser. Um, so hopefully it works on every machine. Um, wait, I've had to do this before.
My, I'm, I'm using a white screen and this thing is not white screen, so let's just make it fit. Yeah. Yep. Um, okay, so it, it doesn't look as fancy as the website because it's, it's trying to be as, as clean as possible.
Um, I'm just going to, run through it really quickly and then, uh, and then take questions, but the process is pretty simple. You browse, you pick a video, um, on your computer. Um, let's, let's pick this one that I have lying around that I was supposed to annotate and haven't yet.
Um, the video starts playing. Um, we would have had sound, but I mean, of course, there's sound when you're playing it. Uh, whatever you want, you mark an out point. You press O, you mark an out point.
Um, you give it a transcription, you give it a description. This is a sign in Bangalore. Um, you give it some keywords, police, sign, Jesus. Um, no, it does. It's, it's a quote from the Bible or something.
Um, you say done when you're done with the clip. Again, there's keyboard shortcuts for all of this. Once, if you're work, if you're using it heavily, you'd appreciate it. Um, you press done. Press done.
You go to the next clip. You press space again. It starts playing. Um, you watch it. You mark the out point. You put in your description. You can put in, I mean, you can be watching it and typing, typing, typing, transcribing.
You press escape. It pauses. Um, you can surf ahead and back in the video kind of using keyboard shortcuts. Um, I mean, if you want to kind of just do things kind of quickly, you just mark in point.
mark out point and you say, oh, you just want to mark the location and say this is Shivaji Nagar Bangalore. There's no transcription here. I just wanted to mention the location. You say done. Now, for some reason, the video has disappeared, but I click here and press space and hopefully it comes back.
Um, this is kind of the simple process. Once, um, uh, description for the event, a title, the contributor, the date it was shot by the person who's logged it. Um, you said done adding event metadata when you're done, you can always, you save to file.
It saves it as an XML file. Um, it's a kind of really easy format, um, that works with the website that can go straight into the website and you could potentially do other things with it because it's a very clean, very simple format.
If anyone's interested, I can show the file, but it doesn't look very pretty on a presentation screen, so I won't right now. Um, and, uh, yeah, and then, okay, click OK to save changes. I just saved, so I say cancel.
Um, and this is what it looks, you can also go in and this is something I've done earlier and you can load straight the XML file, um, and go, I mean, go edit it, stuff like that. So then all the clips that you've marked out show in, um, you can just surf to each clip and kind of edit stuff, uh, make sure everything is correct, save to file.
Um, it's a work in progress. There's a few features, um, that are really important and are soon to be added. Uh, right now the video size is not resizable and sometimes if you're looking at footage that's really detailed, that gets painful.
Um, that should soon be implemented. Um, there's, there's other, there's other features that no doubt people have in their minds and, uh, hopefully we can resolve them, but that's kind of to give you an idea.
So basically the process would be, you take your video, you open it up, you annotate it kind of however densely or non-densely you want. Um, then you can either encode the video yourself using, um, using, using an application that, uh, Jan, um, actually wrote who's, um, who's the best, uh, backend we could possibly have and is actually the reason, uh, any of this has happened.
Um, so you can, it's a very simple program. It works on Windows, it works on Mac, it works on Linux. Um, to encode the videos into the org format which we are using, open format that's guaranteed to be playable for years.
Um, and, um, if you send us the org file and the XML file, within a couple of days you should see the footage up on the archive. Um, and, um, oh yeah, um, so basically this, uh, this is kind of a file I did, so I've basically spent some time, uh, wait, I'll want to get out of the metadata view.
Um, so I've basically spent some time annotating each of these scenes, right? You see the time codes there and you see transcription, description, keywords, et cetera, that are put in, um, for those time codes.
Um, right, so then I sent the file to Padma and if we search for copyright this, uh, we get an internal error and so then we go back and, uh, we search for it without the exclamation mark and that is something that Jan will have resolved within 15 minutes once he gets a keyboard.
Um, Um, but, I mean, such is also the nature of, of, of things we've been fighting against the past couple of months. I take out this ugly thing right here, but this is how the film shows up, um, on the archive and, um, and, um, yeah, I mean, kind of hope to make this process as, as easy and enjoyable to do because it's, um, it can be really painful, it can also be really enjoyable.
It's something I found out while doing the annotation for this as well. It was a point where it's painful, but when it's really easy to use, it's a really wonderful process as well. Looking at footage that you've either shot or kind of has been lying in your cupboard for the past 10 years and you dredge it up and you add text to it, it can, it can be a fascinating process and, uh, I hope, uh, I hope the client, uh, gets some work, gets people using it and, uh, becomes something that's useful.
Um, and, um, should we go straight to, and then the browser crashes, um, um, so, the, yeah, you can, um, download the client from, um, if you go to wiki.pad.ma is, uh, where we generally, um, host, um, information downloads, uh, related to Padma.
There'll also be a link, uh, from the Padma page. Um, I haven't had the time in the past couple of weeks to work on it, so it's probably another week before I consider it stable.
Um, and then, um, then I'll be happy to hand out. There's still some problems, uh, in terms of when you're dealing with a lot of different file formats. It works really well for raw AVI files. Um, and, uh, anything else, it potentially works.
Uh, but then you have to be aware of the possible bugs. Um, seeking doesn't work so well. If you abuse the seek bar, the application will crash. Um, things like this, but they're all things that can be worked around and will be worked around.
And, uh, I mean, if we work out solutions, if someone has footage that's, uh, in strange formats, it's, uh, generally not a problem. Lawrence, uh, gave us, uh, footage in the worst of formats possible.
And it exists on the archive. Um, it was painful, it was a bunch of work, but, uh, it exists on the archive. And we learn, and then the next process gets simpler and simpler every time we have to do it.
Um, FAQs? Um, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So question and answer session.
Um, sure. I don't know. My, my machine is in unstable mode. Two, two nights ago it completely died. So excuse, uh, excuse, like, uh, it should be okay. It should be okay.
It, I abuse my machine too much sometimes. Um, yeah.
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