An early concept poster
An early concept poster
In 2005 I co-founded Cuts.com. A combination desktop application and web site, Cuts let you legally edit and view edited versions of commercial, protected DVDs and share your changes with other Cuts users.
A "cut" is a description of the changes (edits) that are to be made in real-time by the DVD player software; at its most basic, the cut player acted as an automated remote control, doing what you might do to skip around a movie - if you could be so accurate. You could make your own cut of a movie, you could download a variety of cuts.
We raised seed capital, hired a CEO and employees, moved the company to Silicon Valley, and launched at DEMO/Fall 2006.
Around the time of our launch in 2006, iTunes began selling video downloads, Amazon Unbox announced, Google purchased YouTube, and it seemed like the world was going to move online. Though I didn't believe it, yet, we made a huge course change, and unable to raise additional funds, in early 2007 we sold to RiffTrax.. basically for a song.
While after all this time I still like to think Cuts could have thrived if only .. and if only ... I'm honestly not sure at this point. Looking back at the time in which Cuts was launched, it was really looking like streaming video or at least downloads would win and the death of DVD was imminent. But two years later I still watch DVDs far more than anything else. NetFlix is thriving, and people who watch YouTube really don't care that much about video quality. I'm happy to buy a medium quality movie on iTunes, watch movies on my laptop with NetFlix streaming video, watch DVDs or Blu-Ray for the highest quality in my home theater. All these flash video editors that were popping up in 2006? Gone. Nobody cares - really.
Even my phone can edit video today; it lets you trim the bad parts and upload to YouTube. Just about everyone's computer can edit video now, and people seem to be satisfied with downloading the flv from YouTube, transcoding and editing it to their satisfaction in iMovie or whatever, and uploading it again. After all, the creative freedom with this method seems to outweigh any generational loss you get from re-re-re-encoding. And it's not exactly rocket science either.
As for DVDs, we again face the creative freedom issue. It doesn't take long to rip a DVD; most enthusiasts these days have giant hard drives full of ripped DVDs; the Mac has had the ability to play a DVD image or VIDEO_TS folder for years. For real enthusiasts, ripping and re-cutting is just plain boring; why not re-enact your favorite scenes with your friends? (on YouTube, see the in one minute or how it should have ended memes). Or, of course, selling mp3 files of you and your buddies making funny comments while watching popular films. Everything else is pedestrian.
I first conceived the cuts concept in a slightly different context (see below), but realized it could work for video when I kept having to skip the scary scene at the beginning of Finding Nemo for my young daughter.
We built Cuts with this basic scenario in mind - the automated remote control, where upon reaching a specified time code, the DVD player would skip ahead to another arbitrary time code. We envisioned that when you insert your DVD, Cuts would show you a list of cuts available on the website, or stored locally on your computer. So you could always and easily pick one you'd want, or make your own and share them with others.
I realized somewhat early that this could lead to a cut proliferation, and how to pick one, and can you trust it? In my original scenario, what happens when the child is older, but not quite ready for the whole film? Do you make a new cut, expanding the existing one, or go find a new one online? Sounds like a bit of a mess. We never had to address that issue, but it was never solved. I expected to see zillions of cuts for popular films, some only slightly different than others, many indistinguishable. How to manage this? Ratings? "community?" Groups?
I did solve this problem in a general way, but only after Cuts was sold. The Cuts way is basically to attach events to time codes; and when the player encounters the time code, the event(s) are triggered - such as skipping to another time code or track, displaying a note, playing a sound, switching audio streams. But my new solution to this fundamental Cuts problem is an entirely new approach.
from an old blog post of mine, dated May 30, 2007. I never wrote the other two parts mentioned, but I will summarize them next.
part one: the seed
part two: what happened
part three: what's next
Cuts.com began as a tiny startup in Philadelphia whose product was to give you more control over your commercial video DVDs when played through your computer. You could cut out scenes or portions of video, insert audio, overlay your own video, add text and links to other things. Doing that is called making a cut, as in the phrase "the director's cut". Your cuts would contain no video - we don't rip or extract video from the dvd - a cut is simply instructions to the software dvd player: what to skip, what to play. Like an automated remote control, telling the computer when you get to here, jump to there. So you need to have the physical DVD. And cuts.com would let you share cuts with others.
Why would you want to do that? Well, I wanted to put Lord of the Rings in book order, and make a LotR cut safely viewable by my six year-old (to whom I was reading the books). I wanted to cut out the scary barracuda opening scene from Finding Nemo. I wanted to see just the flashbacks from a certain character in Lost, or cut them out entirely. I wanted a legal (or at least dvd-res) version of the Phantom Edit. A hitlist of my favorite scenes. I thought perhaps it could have a status light: green for good, yellow for boring, and I could respond to boring with Skip it! or scrub 2/4/8x through it! Many people, I discovered, also wanted to "sanitize" movies for religious or other reasons. The no-violence version, or inversely, the all-violence version.
While we were accused of enabling censorship as well as destroying artists' rights, I always thought of us as celebrating movies. I, along with other fans, love my movies and want to analyze and watch and rewatch them many different ways. I have to say being able to cut out the minor bits that I don't like only increases my enjoyment of it. I'd love to see all the references and items in my movies marked up with descriptions and links. And in my capacity as a fan, I'd like to be able, at any given moment in a movie, pull up the script for that part, or in the case of a movie like LotR, pull up a map that shows where each character is at this point in the film.
It turned out to be a fairly difficult concept for some people. But once you get it, you can easily imagine all kinds of interesting things you could do next. Once you understand the kinds of control you can have over digital media, it's easy to see how much DRM sucks. But at Cuts we weren't trying to break DRM or promote illegal activities. We just loved movies, but things like force-fed commercials and previews at the beginning seriously detract from the experience. You begin to think about ripping the disc just to get rid of crap like that, and you marvel at how stupid and self-defeating DRM is in this case, and how piracy on the individual level can be completely unrelated to stealing or evil motives. You feel crushed by the industry that you really want to love.
More about the real why in part three.
In 1997 or 1998, at the time I first learned about mp3 audio, I was trying to adjust my monitor for color matching to fix a logo (iirc). I'd read about a device which would suction cup to the monitor to sense the color that was output so as to adjust the monitor to match the actual to the expected output. And since I was thinking about digital audio, I thought - why not do this output measuring thing for audio? Surely musicians working in the studio environment can't be happy with everyone hearing a substandard version of their hard work. Why not have your playback device listens to the output so that it can then make adjustments to get it to as close an approximation to the expected output as possible? I guess you'd have an "artist mode" button to engage output control.
But if you're doing that, then it's only a short leap to see that this matching algorithm is really a small program that could just as easily be in the hands of the artist, using the audio in the file/ on the disc as the source media. Then, soon, we have something more like a program and less like a flat audio file. Like multitrack audio. Like an audio production environment. The mixing can move from the studio to your player. It could adjust or enhance the vocals, or even have alternate vocal tracks, or various instrument tracks. It could do looping, thereby saving space, or use small samples controlled by a program. This sort of thing has most recently been seen when the band NIN released one of their songs in Garageband format, giving anyone access to the source tracks of the mix. Way, way cool. Now if only my iPod supported Garageband format, then we'd really be making progress. This would also be the platform for generative music, which I will discuss as related to video in part three.
So what is this really about? It's the player becoming ever more complex. It's about the media becoming more flexible so that the player can adjust, adapt, even generate the output. Am I the only one who has wanted the music to beat in time with the windshield wipers or turn signal (or the other way around)? No? Or let me say that at the very least, I'd like, when wearing headphones, not to exclude the sound around me, but to mix it in: I want to crank my headphones, but then I also want to hear sounds around me. (I have kids and want to listen for them, you know) I'd also like to be able to write music that incorporates the ambient sound of the listener.
Thinking about audio leads to thinking about video. And around that time I also got my first DVD player. DVD already supported some interesting, albeit limited and slightly damaged-on-purpose features like camera angle and alternate audio tracks. Cuts would let you take advantage of all that in a way the standard dvd players never could, but this story isn't there yet. [ Actually, as an aside, let me mention my favorite silly alternate audio trick with a DVD because I haven't figured out where else to put it yet. I found that the Shrek dvd, as for many others, had a Spanish as well as French audio track. I could arbitrarily switch between them, so I made a cut that had different characters speaking different languages by marking the dialog boundaries in my cut and having it switch audio tracks. So Shrek speaks French, Donkey speaks Spanish. Of course it messed up when dialog crosses, and different languages have different cadence and phrasing, but still - I would have to rip the movie three times and do three tracks of timeline editing to accomplish the same thing. ]
When I watch video I spend much more time with the remote in hand attempting to control my experience of it than I do when listening to music. Generally, beyond volume and equalizer adjustments, creating a playlist is about the extent of personalizing one's music experience. Although iTunes lets you choose a custom start and end point for individual songs, it is probably used very infrequently. (I use it when adding to a playlist a song that comes from continuous set, like a live album or a movie soundtrack)
So the player becomes more complicated. You get to do more things with more flexible media. And there I am banging on the remote control to always skip those parts that annoy me. (I'm very particular sometimes). The DVD player is software. Why can't I just... automate this remote control business? I've got iMovie, I've got Final Cut Pro and I edit video of my kids. DVD is digital video. Why not meet in the middle if I can't, by law, rip mix and burn (to quote Apple marketing) video.
And then my daughter was afraid of that one part in Finding Nemo where the barracuda attacks in the beginning. I found out that almost all my friends were skipping that part, also.
Thus, Cuts.
(October 2009)
Rough sketch of part 2, notes, summary, or at least some commentary.
As written above:
As of October 2009, at rifftrax.com/cuts you can see the remnants of Cuts. And it has nothing to do with DVDs.
This is because, in the middle of development and while trying to raise money - things seemed to be shifting to online video. The iTunes store had recently begun selling video downloads. And Google bought YouTube. Were DVDs dead? Would HD take over on the high quality end, with the low end dominated by downloads?
Well, back at the beginning, I'd been thinking about the cuts idea for some time. Lucinda, then transitioning to be the CEO of Commerce 360 (now ClickEquations) thought the time might be right. She approached Sunny, one of the co-founders of half.com, who was working on a number of concepts at First Round Capital, and he was intrigued. He did some prototyping, database design. We talked about the three of us co-founding a company as it began to seem real and possible.
This was in 2005, and I had been a stay-at-home dad since 2000. Now I had a two year-old and a five year-old. I had to decide whether I could commit, because honestly, at this point, I did not want to outsource raising the young kids; that's why I left work in the first place. I decided to do it in a limited capacity: I wouldn't be doing day-to-day programming work, but I'd be the visionary, do some high level design, writing, work on some key problems, and contribute whatever I could. I decided not to be involved in the management or operational aspects of the company.
Well we started, won seed money from First Round. We hired a web developer and as the company decided to focus on Windows, we hired a Windows developer. I decided to take the Mac version upon myself, in addition to working on the file format as well as the problem of DVD identification. We hired Evan Krauss from Yahoo as CEO, and opened an office in Silicon Valley, hiring a product guy. The original Cuts crowd remained in Philadelphia; Evan, our product guys and other developers were in the new Silicon Valley office.
Lots of work later, we launched at DEMOfall 2006. (meaning: this was our big public announcement) See Evan in the launch video at DEMO.
That was the high point. We had announced, but we still hadn't actually launched. You could not download the cuts player from the web site and use it. None of us could; we had classic software integration problems. Evan was pushing for more features while we still were struggling to communicate the basic concepts to people. I was pushing to launch with the absolute minimum feature set possible, and then add and improve things along the way. We had a multitude of Windows troubles, trying to get DVD playing to be consistent and reasonable on various hardware.
October 2006: I was worried about our viability in an email to our product manager:
But YouTube videos won out for our CEO. He proceeded to develop a flash video editor that let you trim, add sounds and comments to YouTube videos. The thinking was, well, we'd return to DVDs after we were able to raise additional capital.
I basically dropped out at this point, as it was clear that there was nothing for me to do. I had no interest in creating a dynamic editing system for YouTube videos.
Cuts finally launched, for real, with the flash video editor in February 2007. Regarding that TechCrunch article, I wrote to Lucinda: The first comment is exactly how I feel, to be honest.... which was: (from Emma, coincidentally)
As a professional video editor these ’services’ make me want to hit someone with a shovel. Basically you take a piece of dodgy video, from YouTube or Google, and make it even more dodgy with some lame Flash tool. I imagine $20million in venture capital from Gullible Investor Inc. is right around the corner.
I mean, seriously. YouTube is full of re-edited and re-encoded video, and not a lot of people there seem to care much about the quality. You just download some video, dump it into iMovie, and upload again. The great thing about it is that it takes no time and you get to do anything, and your re-edited video appears in YouTube itself, available to be searched, instead of hidden away on some other site.
That was basically it. Potential deal after deal fell through, and in the end rifftrax was it, for almost nothing.
Early alpha showing timecodes and the cutlist
Another alpha, showing the cut files I have on my computer for the DVD
early beta showing early timeline
yet another one
This diagram illustrates the problem of DVD / movie identification. Here we have a few movies on many different DVDs. some overlapping. The question for cuts was does a cut file apply to a specific DVD or to the movie itself? Or more specifically, does a cut apply to the media object (dvd/file), the product (eg as identified by an ISBN #), or the concept (eg "Toy Story") ? Though we never answered this fully, I believe we had to allow the user to specify which; some should be specific to the media or the product, others are simply more general. Also: here is early work on finding a disc identifier. Lacking a general method, we needed a big database. (I kept thinking there must be something obvious we're missing)
Example of a cut file. This one hilights the drugs and violence in the move Pulp Fiction.
See it rendered via XSL
This file was created by the editing facility within the cuts player.
At one point toward the end I did significant work trying to figure out how to apply the cuts concept to protected iTunes movies, and the answer turned out to be interesting. The main problem was that there was no facility for developers to play protected iTunes video in their own apps. However, QuickTime supported SMIL - the multimedia markup language - for quite some time. Using SMIL you can specify time codes the way we needed it, and it turns out that an SMIL file can reference DRM iTunes content as long as you play it within the QuickTime player. So the way to make a cuts player that works with iTunes content is to create and send SMIL files to the QuickTime player, probably using apple events, etc.
Note: It would appear that as of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard that this no longer applies. According to Getting Started with Audio & Video at the OS X Dev Center, it is possible to play protected content purchased through iTunes in your app though I haven't tested it, nor do I know if SMIL is supported - at least, it is not in the new QuickTime player.
The following SMIL examples were created by hand for testing and demo purposes.
Here's an example; this one plays the first 30 seconds of each episode of the second season of LOST. It specifies a single sequence (seq) of video clips, specifying the start and end time codes. Simple.
Obviously, when you leave DVDs behind, you potentially have more control over the content. Here's an example that repeats the above but playing four simultaneously. This one defines four regions. There is one sequence, but the objects in sequence are to be played in parallel (par) in the specified regions.