During the last week a small group of people have been working with Deptford.tv at Deckspace, Greenwhich on setting up a system for collaborative video. Building on the proposals by the Echo chamber project to connect Final Cut Pro’s output XML to Drupal, thought has been spent on creating a system involving the XML output of Cinelerra, based on this first draft -see below- made by Adnan. The aim is to produce at the end of next week a flowchart that maps the process, and from which possible optimisations of the system can be derived before the next Deptford.tv workshop will take place in october. The database of Deptford.tv is excellent case study material for trying to set up such a system.

The above sketch shows a connection from the Deptford database to a version of the Bitnik Copyfight broadcasting system, indicated by the blue cloud on the right, and described on the site of Bitnik. A possibility for the future, but not the center of this workshop.

Lisa Haskel installed a SVN versioning system, which can be used by editors to exchange cinelerra output xml files. Meaning off course that all editors will have to work with Cinelerra, which I find excellent and exciting news. One way of permitting editors to opt working with Final Cut Pro could be to write a script that translates between the two software’s differently formatted project XML’s. SVN adds a particular potential to the project: Forking, making versions of the same project accessible and editable opens new avenues for a symphonic collaborative video project.