Apologies in advance for a bit of a techy post here, but I’d be really interested to see if anyone with experience of ‘version control’ has any thoughts on this one.
A few months back at Harper Adams, several staff from e-Learning, Web and IT took part in a number of hands-on workshops, led by ‘version control’ expert Joe Collins.
Version control systems can be a great way for techy software developers to work collaboratively on pieces of complex code. Firstly, they enable developers to archive previous ‘version histories’ of their work, therefore allowing them to rollback to former versions should they make irreversible errors in their projects. Secondly, they allow users to ‘track’ the changes made between different versions of code, which is great for collaborative projects, particularly as different contributors can annotate their changes for their fellow developers to see what has been edited.
During our recent workshops, we all managed to get to grips with using the tool ‘Subversion’ – an open-source version control system, which can be used through Subversion clients such as TortoiseSVN. It’s an interface that I had some experience of using during the UMF Project, but usually only for the occasional small piece of work.
So the question is, with many of the learning objects at Harper Adams being video-based, is there any way that version control systems such as ‘Subversion’ could be applied to video projects? This could potentially allow editors such as myself to rollback to previous versions of our cuts, and work collaboratively with other editors while tracking changes. Joe Collins had never encountered version-control being used under such circumstances, so I felt a blog post might help to draw some interest from anyone who might have any experience in this field!
Video projects tend to be massive in size, particularly when using HD footage, so it’s completely unrealistic to commit an entire project to a Subversion repository. However, as most projects tend to be held together by a single application file which simply references the video footage, it might be possible to use this within a version-control environment. Such a file would tend to be specific to the video editing software being used, such as Adobe Premiere (.prproj), which might only be a couple of hundred meg in size.
I have tried putting such a file through Subversion, and it is indeed possible to ‘compare’ the version histories of a .prproj file if you commit an updated version, although you can only see evidence of this through trawling through the reams of back-end code that make up the file (similar to the kind of nonsense you get if you open an image file in Notepad!). It’s unfortunately completely incomprehensible and would never be usable by anyone with a human brain.
So, this leaves me with a few perplexing questions:
- Is there any way that version control could be applied to video project, perhaps through somehow ‘converting’ these text-based ramblings to something that is actually meaningful?
- If not, does version control simply become another means of ‘backing-up’ application files (rather than being able to track changes)?
- What other interesting methods do other video editors use to backup their video projects, beyond simply copying and pasting files to another drive?
I suspect my attempts to apply version control to such situations could turn out to be completely futile, but it would be great to hear from anyone out there who might have some answers!
James Roscoe's EdTech Blog 