
Launch HN: Tella (YC S20) – Collaborative video editing in the browser - 9ranty
Tella (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tella.tv&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tella.tv&#x2F;</a>) is a collaborative online video editor for screen and camera recordings. We&#x27;re making video creation accessible to people who have no prior editing experience.<p>Sharing screen and camera recordings is a rapidly growing way for people to communicate at work, especially in technology where the subject matter is often on screens (new features, code, designs). But while people are creating more video for work, it&#x27;s usually for the convenience of the creator and not the viewer. One-take screen recordings can be long, boring, and difficult to watch. We&#x27;re trying to change this by letting people produce and edit their recordings so that it&#x27;s a better experience for viewers.<p>Michiel and I used to work at a large remote company and this was where we saw the potential of edited video content in the workplace. One of the biggest challenges was keeping business teams up-to-date with product teams. The most effective solution was product teams sharing videos about their work over Slack, which the rest of the organisation watched in their own time. Product teams made videos about new projects, progress updates, launches, user research, and so on.<p>The most interesting aspect of the approach was that the videos weren&#x27;t just screen recordings, they were edited and often well-produced videos. The better the production, the better the engagement was. Teams approached the production of these videos in the same way as preparing a slide deck for a presentation.<p>We loved the format and saw its potential, especially in a remote workplace, but it had some problems. Video editing is time consuming, and working on a video with a teammate takes even longer. Video editing also has a high barrier to entry. Purchasing Screenflow or Final Cut (or other long-format editors) and then learning how to use it prohibits people from trying video as a form of sharing information.<p>So we set out to build a video editor that focuses on screen and camera recording (where most of the subject matter comes from at work), allows for collaboration (many people work in teams and expect the tools they use to support this), and makes editing straightforward (putting together a video should be as simple as putting together a slide deck).<p>Our implementation takes a different approach to most editors. We wanted something that was fast, lightweight, and could run in a web browser—appealing to people completely new to video editing. We also wanted to support real-time collaboration. Instead of transcoding all content to a video format, we created our own video player that controls the timing and display of HTML elements. Let&#x27;s say your video consists of a couple recordings, some text, and some images. Tella plots these different bits of content on a timeline and then plays them back in sequence on a webpage.<p>The benefit of this is that we can use anything that you can do with HTML, CSS and JS to create a video. We&#x27;re not bound to ffmpeg or other transcoders to generate our video for us. We take the document the user created and display that in the same way to the viewer (no converting step in between). This means we can stay lightweight and let you update the video whenever you like. There are no “snapshots” stored and the link always shows the source of truth.<p>The challenge with this is keeping all the content in sync. Using our earlier example: the first recording should play after the text and then the second recording exactly after the first ends. A more complex scenario would be where two videos need to play back at the same time: a screen recording and a camera recording—these need to start and stop at the same moments. This is called “Media Synchronization”, or MediaSync for short (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.springer.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;book&#x2F;9783319658391" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.springer.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;book&#x2F;9783319658391</a>). At the moment browsers don’t have a lot of stable APIs that can help us, but they are in the works! One notable example is the Timing Object (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webtiming.github.io&#x2F;timingobject&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webtiming.github.io&#x2F;timingobject&#x2F;</a>) which outlines how you can sync multiple media elements to the same clock. Right now Tella mostly works by manually syncing all video elements on actions like “play” or “seek”. Eventually we want to implement more of the techniques outlined in MediaSync, like slightly changing the speed of out of sync videos to let them catch up.<p>So far, people have been using Tella to create product demos, team updates, company announcements, sales pitches, investor pitches, and tutorial videos, as well as making video content for blogs and newsletters.<p>We&#x27;d love to hear what you think and answer any questions you might have. Thanks!
======
cmehdy
This looks really nice, and I do think it fits an increasing need in a field
where typically only major universities or brilliant individuals (putting in a
ton of time) on youtube usually find a place.

I have a couple questions for you:

\- It looks like one can record a screen or a video and make "static" slides,
but do you have plans to have an in-browser annotating tool ? Something where
one can annotate the slides along with their recording, and edit/cut/redo
parts of that whenever they make a mistake (I'm thinking of videos like
eigeinchris[0] where slides are annotated as he speaks - being able to edit
mistakes is something youtube just doesn't really offer so far and that would
have benefited him)

\- What about exports? Can a teacher export a set of static slides from that
presentation into a format they can later distribute/share? Can they generate
a video from the whole presentation which can also be shared as a file and
uploaded elsewhere (vimeo, youtube, etc)?

\- And just out of curiosity (and if it's not asking for too much), what's the
tech stack you use for testing purposes? I've got experience with that sort of
thing and I can imagine a bunch of interesting issues you must be running
into!

Lastly: good luck with this product and all the best!

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/user/eigenchris/videos?view=0&sort=d...](https://www.youtube.com/user/eigenchris/videos?view=0&sort=dd&shelf_id=1)

~~~
9ranty
\- We don't have this. But we have been thinking about a more dedicated
recording "mode". However, because we're in the browser we have some limits on
what you could annotate. Inside of Tella would probably be fine, but outside
of Tella would be tricky (e.g. you're recording another window).

\- We support exporting to mp4. So you'll get version of the video that you
can distribute (beyond just sharing the link to Tella). We don't have plans on
a slides-only export though.

\- We use ReasonML, Mux (for video), and Roomservice.dev (for the real-time
component).

Thanks for the kind words!

~~~
mleonard
Just curious about how you technically do the export to MP4. Can you share any
details? Do you play it back in real time and record it, or do you have a way
of exporting it quicker than real time?? What technical approach do you use if
you don't mind me asking? Thanks!

~~~
happylinks
Quickly summarized we use puppeteer headfull with docker to do a recording of
the video. So you’re right, it’s playing it back, not faster than real time. I
might write more about the specifics in the future. It’s mostly open source
code, you can start here:
[https://github.com/Ventricule/html2screen](https://github.com/Ventricule/html2screen)

~~~
mleonard
Thanks for the reply. I was wondering if you were using the headfull chrome
approach! I for one would definitely love to read some more specifics on this
in the future when you have time! (And if there's anything you can open source
please do!). I did a quick side project proof of concept of automating
recording a webpage with video and other elements a few months ago. It's a
shame there's not a way of just using headless chrome but my research let me
to the headfull docker approach, so I'm happy to hear I landed on the same
approach you did! Did you discover any novel tricks beyond what's been written
about/open sourced already? What was the trickiest part for you?

~~~
happylinks
No worries! Html2screen was a very good start, I modified it to support audio
recording and got it to a pretty good state in a couple of days. After that
the hard thing was just to run it automated on AWS. I used AWS Batch and Step
Functions for that. When it’s a bit more stable I’ll definitely write about it
and might open source it later. If you want to discuss more, feel free to
email me at michiel@tella.tv

------
john-tells-all
I'm producing lots of screencasts, and this service is perfect for me and my
team!

Our workflow is:

\- I record "A roll" of me doing things with terminals

\- I record audio at the same time

\- We edit to shrink the overall runtime, focusing on the audio, eliminating
restatements and flubs.

\- I record "B roll" of hand-drawn diagrams, illustrating certain points, and
again record audio.

\- We shrink the B roll, generally cutting the audio down to as small as
possible then adjusting the video to fit.

\- Splice A+B, add header (title card, spicy theme music) and footer, upload
to interwebs, dance a jig.

To be honest it's ... a lot! I want to have a simpler and more direct way for
my ideas to be published, so my friends and others can use the ideas to make
everyone's lives better. Our current workflow isn't the best. A service like
Tella might take a chunk of our drudgery away, which would be great!

~~~
9ranty
It sounds like Tella could help with at least some of that already. We
definitely don't have everything you'd find in a desktop editor yet, but it's
the plan to have more!

------
orliesaurus
Signed up! Will use this 100% for sure for my YouTube channel, called Landing
Page feedback on the tube - because I need a more robust way to highlight
things and this looks like it has the editing capabilities i need without the
overhead

------
filleokus
Looks awesome! Nowadays real time collaboration and single source of truth has
become the singel most important feature when I'm looking for some tool to
use. E.g I prefer Google Slides over Keynote whenever working with someone
else (even though I love Keynote for solo stuff). I think this have huge
potential!

One thing I never thought I would ask: What about an ≈Electron desktop app? As
you've written in some replies here, there are inherent limitations on what JS
running in the browser can do. I think there are a lot of potential in stuff
like only recording part of the screen (a specific window), or "upsampling"
webpages for recording by rendering them at higher DPI in your custom browser
view etc

~~~
happylinks
Thanks for the compliment! We agree that tools like Google Slides, Figma, etc
have definitely set the standard for having a "single source of truth".
Currently we like being in the browser because everybody can use it, but
indeed that has some limitations in terms of recording. Eventually we'll
definitely have a native app (maybe Electron) for improved recording, but
right now with a 2 person team we're trying to keep it lean :)

------
andygcook
After seeing the success of Figma, Miro, and other real-time collaboration
tools, I was wondering how long it would before an enterprising team developed
the same experience for video editing. A simple-but-powerful enough video
editor is a need I've regularly experienced over the years at my startup.
Adding on collaboration workflows and cloud-native files (instead of storing
actual file versions in Dropbox) makes this even more interesting. Will check
it out. Good luck with the launch and the rest of YC!

~~~
andygcook
Quick follow up: Do you have any details on plans for pricing or a terms of
service I can read?

~~~
9ranty
Not yet, I'm afraid... we'll be free while we're in beta (which could easily
be a couple more months). From there we'll keep a free tier, and introduce
paid individual plans and a team plan.

~~~
gingerlime
I personally find lack of pricing a big barrier of entry for products I'm even
willing to evaluate. Even if there's a good chance they'll be free for my use
case.

I definitely understand how hard pricing is, but I think you'd be much better
off taking a stab at something than leaving it completely empty.

The most fair/honest strategy in my opinion is to set some pricing in there,
and grandfathering people at this price point. It gives you plenty of room to
change pricing later without upsetting your early adopters (who can also be
your best marketing channel).

Just my 2 cents as a co-founder of a company that introduced paid plans pretty
much from day one.

------
xrd
Subtle typo: "compliment" should be "complement."

Exciting project! With so many companies thrust into remote only, the
potential for sharing information via video is huge. I always say, if a
picture is worth a thousand words, video is worth a million. (But, you have to
consider that 1M words then is a processing problem for the viewers.)

The promise you wrote up really speaks to me. But the demo video doesn't look
like much beyond a web based PPT tool. I'm struggling to see why I would use
that over a generic tool like Google Docs.

When I was at a large fortune 500 company I saw others struggling to
understand deep technical discussions without the video. I built an internal
video sharing tool and would hound people to record their presentations so I
could host them. It wasn't YouTube scale but thousands of people watched these
videos, especially less technical team members that probably wouldn't have
been invited to those meetings or wouldn't have felt safe to ask questions in
those meetings. It was a big success in my opinion as a way to share tribal
knowledge.

Good luck, very exciting space, especially because of Covid-19.

~~~
9ranty
Ugh, good catch on the typo. Fixed.

"But the demo video doesn't look like much beyond a web based PPT tool. I'm
struggling to see why I would use that over a generic tool like Google Docs."

Appreciate this observation. For people who've not done much video editing
before we want Tella to feel as familiar as possible (e.g. editing a slide
deck). Equally, we'd eventually like people who do know their way around a
video editor to feel like they can create what they want in Tella.

~~~
xrd
Yes, and I definitely got that from your write up. It's a huge opportunity.

I'm not sure how easily you can add the things I'm excited about into a demo
video, namely the idea that you can post process video in a browser. The
things you describe, synchronization, etc are really time sinks even when you
know what you are doing and have the right tools. If you capture 10% of the
functionality and make it automated and simple, you'll have a winner. Maybe
you already have this, I haven't played with it, sorry if I'm ignorant about
the true offering!

~~~
9ranty
Yeah the demo doesn't illustrate the MediaSync aspect very well. But if you
give the product a go you ought to get a sense of what we described in the
implementation part of the write-up.

------
sidcool
Questions:

1\. What's the tech stack you used?

2\. What was the biggest technical challenge you faced? (No need to mention
the solution)

3\. What new features are in pipeline?

4\. Who do you see as your competitors?

~~~
9ranty
1\. ReasonML, ReasonReact, Mux, roomservice.dev.

2\. Exporting our web "video" to .mp4, and keeping media in sync.

3\. Better timeline & canvas editing features (plus some organisation
features, for people with lots of videos)

4\. Loom, mmhmm (at least for the non-live aspect), and slide decks.

~~~
rememberlenny
Roomservice is incredible for adding multiplayer mode to any app. Very cool to
see you using them.

~~~
Johnyma22
Etherpad maintainer here, thanks for pointing Room Service at me. Gonna give
them a go :)

------
arkits
I recently was wrestling with MediaSync on my side project to make a direct
link generator for reddit videos. For those who don't know, reddit videos
([https://v.redd.it/8ac6uk4bbxg51](https://v.redd.it/8ac6uk4bbxg51)) play in
reddit's custom video player. After some digging, it turns out that reddit
hosts the audio and video streams separately and syncs them together on the
client side. I eventually was able to implement media sync (though it doesn't
cover all cases), and have tremendous respect for those trying to solve the
same problem.

Here is a demo of my media sync implementation -
[https://vreddit.vercel.app/?vid=8ac6uk4bbxg51&q=2](https://vreddit.vercel.app/?vid=8ac6uk4bbxg51&q=2)

~~~
happylinks
Ohhh I didn’t know that! Your project looks cool! I saw you used popcorn.js,
that’s definitely a good way to go. It’s an interesting problem to solve for
sure :)

------
laktek
Hey Michiel & Grant, congrats on the launch! This looks amazing (you guys have
iterated pretty fast since I checked out the alpha)

How you guys found your first couple of beta customers? Also, curious how was
your experience doing YC remotely (I guess you are still in Netherlands,
right?)

~~~
happylinks
Hey Lakshan! Thanks a lot :) The first beta customers were people in our
network from old companies we worked at, we have 2 sales teams which tried us
really early on who we knew and also a big remote company tried us because we
knew some people there. Besides that we’ve had some YC companies try us, and
after that the ProductHunt launch was the first moment we got a lot of new
users.

YC for me has been great! We can’t really compare it to “in person” YC but we
got a lot of value out of it, they seem to have adapted quite well to the
remote world and in some ways I think it’s more practical than before; no 2
hour drive to mountain view for an office hour with a partner. Since we worked
at InVision for 2 years we are used to the remote meetings so for us this was
kind of a normal way to work I guess. I would definitely recommend YC to
people wanting to start their own startup, the amount of information you get
in 3 months is crazy.

------
jessmartin
Since you guys are digging into the MediaSync work, you should look into
Croquet ([https://www.croquet.io](https://www.croquet.io)). It's a novel
synchronization framework for ensuring connected clients stay perfectly in
sync and that it scales up appropriately.

I think it might make sense for the "multiplayer" aspects of what you're
trying to build.

Check out the demos:
[https://www.croquet.io/demos](https://www.croquet.io/demos) . They have demos
of synchronizing video playback, text editing, object manipulation, etc.

~~~
happylinks
Hey! Thanks for that info, I think I saw some cool demo's of croquet before
but will digg into it more. Right now we use roomservice.dev for our real-time
video updates which has been great.

------
oskarahl
Well done! I like how you handle multiple scenes, it's easier this way vs e.g.
how clipchamp does it.

I'm the creator of Glitterly -
[https://glitterly.app/](https://glitterly.app/) a similar video editor but
more focused on pure feature videos with zooming and transitions. Initially
for exporting videos I tried a similar approach but with canvas. By recording
the canvas with captureStream and exporting the video, but I wasn't able to
get a satisfactory non-laggy output.

What upcoming new features are on your roadmap for Tella?

~~~
9ranty
What approach did you settle with for your exports?

The next main thing will be improvements to the timeline. We want editing on
Tella's timeline to feel much more approachable than "traditional" timelines.

~~~
oskarahl
Interesting, ended up using FFmpeg. It's heavy to run and it takes time to
write all the code for overlaying elements on top of each other and drawing
text etc - but the quality is great.

~~~
hellofunk
Are you running FFmpeg in the browser?! Like with the web assembly? If so
that’s pretty amazing.

------
kirillzubovsky
My first impression after watching your preview is "Powerpoint which can take
in screencast and live video." Not entirely if this is what it does, but is
the closest thin in my mind.

The major difference from just recording via a tool like Loom or Soapbox is
that video sits on top of Slides, and can be played back every time one moves
up/down the slides.

Basically, unlike a typical screencast, this one has chapters, so you can give
a presentation without physically being in the room. Interesting.

------
santiagobasulto
This looks great! We're building a platform for programmers to create their
own programming courses using different tools (like quizzes, programming
assignments, jupyter notebooks) and it'd be great if we could integrate with
something like this to simplify the process for them.

Do you see education as part of your market? If you think that could be of
interest, my email is santiago.basulto at gmail.

~~~
9ranty
We'd love to help educators more, and we've had a few make mini-lessons and
tutorials already. I'll send you an email.

~~~
santiagobasulto
Great, thanks!

------
james_impliu
We've started filming vlogs and have found this problem painful. Specifically,
the person filming isn't the person editing, and we have a separate designer -
all based in different physical locations. Since video files are so big and
slow to upload, it tends to be a once a day thing, versus being able to
iterate more quickly. It just feels dated! Going to try this out :)

------
buzzwordninja
Small UX bug report: when I click Sign Up in the top right corner on the home
page I get to a form which isn't the signup form, it's the login form.

So I enter a new email/pw and it doesn't work. Only then I notice there's
another link to click to sign up.

~~~
happylinks
Thanks for reporting that! Fixed it :)

------
hichkaker
We've been using Tella for product demos. A huge upgrade from hacking together
QuickTime recordings!

------
wtracy
Since I'm on mobile and can't test it right now: Do you support export to
other platforms/formats? Is there an easy way to get the finished video onto,
say, YouTube?

~~~
happylinks
We released Exporting in Beta last week. This will export to mp4 and send you
an email with the link. Still early but results are looking pretty good if I
may say so :) In the future we might add a direct integration with YouTube if
enough people request it.

------
jonahbenton
Cool- was looking for exactly this a few months back for my teen daughter who
needed to work on a video preso with her friends, and found nothing. Q- do you
work on Chromebooks?

~~~
9ranty
Awesome. Tella should be fine on Chromebooks, but we have an issue with the
performance of recording in the past. If anything comes up drop us a line on
livechat.

~~~
wtracy
If it's worth anything, my impression is that the CPU (and probably GPU)
performance of chromebooks varies widely between models. It seems to be
particularly dramatic when comparing ARM models against Intel and AMD models.

I don't doubt that low-end CPUs could cause dropped frames during video
recording.

If I had to offer any advice, it would be to test as many models as you can
and then decide which ones to officially support.

~~~
happylinks
Yeah we have had reports from one other user that his Chromebook sometimes has
issues recording both webcam and screen at the same time. I definitely intent
to test as many devices as possible and put up a more official page about
that.

------
sarfata
Do you support GoPro videos (h265)? I have played around on the same concept
but the lack of .mov support (iPhone) and mp4+h265 (gopro) is kind of a bummer
for Chrome users.

~~~
happylinks
Hey! Right now we don't allow upload of mov files yet, but we will add that
soon. Our infrastructure supports it but we can't immediately show a preview
(have to wait for it to be converted). Will probably have that within a week.
Mp4 files are definitely supported though, let me know if that works for you!

~~~
saddlerustle
That doesn't really make sense, these days mov files are exactly the same as
mp4 files - the same ISO/IEC 14496-12 container.

~~~
happylinks
Ah I may have spoken too soon then :) We use mux.com for our converting, and
they should support (almost) all video files. We currently preview the file
while it's uploading. So like I mentioned before, some file formats won't do
that initial preview. We will improve this soon so all video files will work
equally.

------
jdamon96
Cool product and nice landing page - clean and to the point.

Heads up: the format in which you've included links results in broken links
when clicked

~~~
happylinks
Thanks! We just fixed the links, let me know if it doesn't work :)

------
triyambakam
What are you using to synchronize state across users? Operational
transformation, conflict free replicated data types?

~~~
happylinks
We use roomservice.dev which indeed uses JSON CRDT types.

~~~
triyambakam
Oh very cool, thanks!

------
ingend88
Can this be used for courses ? Or is there a reason why it should not be used
for building training courses ?

~~~
9ranty
We've seen people make tutorials and how-tos already, so you should be able to
put together a course.

------
bealuga
how long can a video be without crashing? I think one of the biggest risks
towards something like this is spending two hours maybe recording a video only
to have it fail halfway through with no data saved

~~~
happylinks
We have had users make very long recordings with Tella that worked just fine,
however we do recommend working in smaller parts. We have a feature called
scenes where you can structure your story/video into parts and also record
into parts. All of the recording works on the client, so it also depends on
your device sometimes; if you have a slow device it can sometimes have issues
recording. So to recap, yes there are exceptions where long recordings cause
trouble, but overall we’ve seen good results!

------
krmmalik
Great idea. Do you have an example of a video produced by your app?

~~~
happylinks
Thanks! Here's a couple of examples with Tella's embedded:

[https://www.tella.tv/tella-for-product-and-
design](https://www.tella.tv/tella-for-product-and-design)

[https://www.tella.tv/tella-for-sales](https://www.tella.tv/tella-for-sales)

[https://www.tella.tv/tella-for-blogs-and-
newsletters](https://www.tella.tv/tella-for-blogs-and-newsletters)

------
anthonysarkis
cool starting screenshare does infinite loop of current screen suggest a 3
second delay / visual countdown or something

~~~
happylinks
Ah yes, this can be a bit confusing. We show you a preview of the screen you
are recording, which if it’s the same screen you’re on will cause the looping
effect. You can just switch to a different tab and do your video, come back
and stop the recording. The 3 second countdown is there to prepare you for the
recording starting. We will try to make this less confusing though!

------
pryelluw
What's the pricing?

~~~
9ranty
Tella is free during beta (which will likely be for a few more months). We'll
introduce paid individual and team plans after that (and keep a free tier).
However, we don't have figures on the pricing we can share yet.

