Show HN: Entire concerts algorithmically "reconstructed" from YouTube videos

Wow. Many thoughts arose:<p>- 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?<p>- 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.<p>- I'd be really interested to know how automated this is, and how much human curation is required to get it right.<p>- 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. :)

Really cool stuff!<p>A little suggestion.<p>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.<p>Very good job lads!<p>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!

Cool idea, but I was sad that it wasn't finally an implementation of an idea I've had for a long time. My idea is to actually use video and audio information from distinct sources to create a single video/audio stream that is of better quality and/or completeness than any of the constituent parts. Essentially, my idea would do to video what Photosynth does for photos.<p><a href="http://photosynth.net/" rel="nofollow">http://photosynth.net/</a>

Reminds me of "Awesome, I Fuckin' Shot that", a Beastie Boys concert filmed by 50 audience volunteers and edited together:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awesome;_I_Fuckin_Shot_That" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awesome;_I_Fuckin_Shot_That</a>!

Very cool, just a slight niggle about the 'lightroom' colour scheme (dark area surrounding the video) which I see being poorly implemented time and time again: it doesn't really work when you have elements of bright white on the page, because they just end up looking even brighter next to the dark parts. The glaring white strips are distracting while watching the video, moreso than even an all white background.<p>TL;DR: lose the strips of white from the video viewing page.

I had been thinking about something like this, but in the context of recreating riot crime scenes. After the last riot in Toronto the police received over 1M stills and thousands of hours of relatively low quality cell phone video. The main task for them is to connect different shots of individual offenders over time to build a) a coherent story demonstrating premeditation, b) an unbeatable description and connect it to some identifying info that might not necessarily be present at the exact time of the offense.

Site seems to be struggling under load.<p>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.

Sweet execution. Finally a use for all those dickheads who hold up their phones in the middle of a <i>live</i> performance.

Honestly one of the coolest things i've seen in a while. If they can get around the legality of it, im sure they'll be snatched up quickly.

Pretty cool. Looks like they are a 500 startups project, formerly Veokami. Guess they used some of their funding to buy a better name! <a href="http://www.startupsmart.com.au/growth/veokami-among-500-startups-latest-intake/201110174213.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.startupsmart.com.au/growth/veokami-among-500-star...</a>

Sorry guys, probably should have sured up servers for HN load - my bad =\ On Caltrain, brb...

This is awesome. My only suggestion is to allow the user to switch angles without changing the audio track. Since these are concerts, the audio track is going to be one of the most important things. Often times one video will have significantly better audio than the other ones. It'd be nice to be able to choose that one to stay constant. Alternately, it'd be awesome if there were a way for the bands themselves to upload the recorded concert audio.<p>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.

This. Is. So. Cool. Wow. I tried several concerts, several angles, and everything works pretty smoothly. Any critiques I might have are quite minor.

This is really cool.<p>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.<p>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!<p>Overall, great job and I look forward to seeing how you guys progress with this idea!

I love it. Any chance you would expand to more general "news" applications? The audio wouldn't be as good for syncing against, but I've always wanted an interface like this for watching protest videos.

Very impressive. Very cool. I assume this will eventually extend beyond concerts to all kinds of other live events (sports, plays, etc). This is going to be big.<p>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.<p>Best of Luck. We'll all be rooting for you guys.

Pretty cool. One thing... after switching camera angles from the first camera I can switch between all other camera except I can never get back to camera 1.

This perfect circle gig is a good sample:<p><a href="http://switchcam.com/event/a-perfect-circle-lollapalooza-2011/" rel="nofollow">http://switchcam.com/event/a-perfect-circle-lollapalooza-201...</a><p>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

Seems to work. That is incredibly cool/terrifying.

Nice. However - the timeline should be default. I was pretty meh'd until I found it, works great.<p>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)

So if you can do this with concerts, presumably you can do it with any collection of video shot in the same place, if there's enough audio in common.<p>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.

Pretty cool indeed. A question though: how much of a need is there for a service like this? Beyond the more mainstream artists and festivals, most of the artists whose shows I've seen have typically had more respectful audience members who didnt put recording with their cellphones ahead of enjoying the show.

This is really awesome. I hope you don't have any issues with copyright though. Best of luck with the project!

Absolutely amazing, great job. I just got chills from watching the National and feeling like I was back there.

First thing I thought of was the Nine Inch Nails fan project "This One Is On Us". It works. Very cool and I wish you all the best.<p><a href="http://www.thisoneisonus.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.thisoneisonus.org</a><p><a href="http://www.ninwiki.com/This_One_Is_On_Us" rel="nofollow">http://www.ninwiki.com/This_One_Is_On_Us</a>

Does anyone believe that this is done algorithmically? All the examples I checked seemed to be really poorly sync-ed, &#38; as a DSP engineer I don't believe this task to be incredibly difficult...<p>would also be cooler to have a seating chart to click around to make sense of perspectives

This is one of the coolest things I have seen. While there are some little bits of feedback, I can admit that I spent the last 30 minutes watchings concerts, amazed at how great this felt.<p>MPAA: More of this, less of SOPA. If you give us great ways to get content, we will pay for it.

Absolutely one of the better ideas I've seen lately! An original idea with a lot of wiggle room for future growth.<p>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).

Great concept and like how you can change views! Been following them since they were veokami.

Maybe it's just me, but the site rick-rolled me on each concert I tried to check out.

Cool concept, fairly good execution.<p>I think I would advise not to just focus on concerts, but potentially other mass events, e.g. sporting events.<p>I guess you're using the audio stream to do some form of sync / time stamp though, so that may limit potential uses.

Is music a requirement? I'm trying to add Henry Rollins' spoken word at Coachella from April 18 2009, but your YouTube search always seems to fail. I can see the videos on YouTube just fine if I search for myself.

I had the idea to do this (albeit, manually) a while ago, syncing the audio from Justice's "A Cross The Universe" with Youtube video of the concert it came from. Really cool to see it done, though!

Watching Ocean's 11 last night it occurred to me that other contexts in which intelligent multi-camera stitching might be profitable are casino security and retail loss prevention.

this is awesome. seriously. maybe you could package the technology in a way that lets other platforms use this without youtube. i am reminded of the original Color app.

Maybe a next step could be a video app which had some kind of time code embedded in the resulting video - for much easier syncing.

Great work, hope you can handle the traffic that is coming your way. I would be surprised if you didn't get bought by Google.

Mind blowing. I don't know that I'd ever really use it, but this is super cool and really well done!

Looks a lot like Hadza <a href="http://hadza.com/" rel="nofollow">http://hadza.com/</a> (ex Wesync)

I want. Love the idea. Site is down so I can't tell if it works. But plus 1 for the idea alone.

My out loud comment when I tried it was "Holy shit this is genius if it works".

Great stuff. This is like Photosynth for videos! Remember Photosynth?

Ummm... am I missing something? Every video I click on is a rickroll.

Cool idea but when I tried "Arcade Fire - Austin City Limits" 2011 <a href="http://switchcam.com/event/arcade-fire-austin-city-limits-2011/" rel="nofollow">http://switchcam.com/event/arcade-fire-austin-city-limits-20...</a> it was far from correct.

to me, it looks amazing<p>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?

Too bad some artists apparently take down concert videos.

Excellent work!<p>It says a lot that the music industry didn't invent this.

Very cool. What about other applications? News reports?

great idea. do you have any solution to all of the shaky and unsteady video?

Amazing, thanks!!

wow. super cool

very cool. worked swell.

This is awesome for two reasons: 1) it's just plain cool and 2) it finally gives a reason to tolerate annoying people who hold up their cell phone cameras during concerts.

This is freakin awesome! Keep it up! How big is your company?