Not sure if this is the appropriate place to ask this …if not please feel free to point me to the appropriate place.
I am looking to develop a cloud based video editor. Users will be able to do basic video editing via computer, tablet or smart phone.
I think the first thing I need to know is whether Blender currently has the capability to do this. I am not a programmer myself so would be hiring coders. If I understand things correctly then some sort of Blender API to allow HTML based interaction with Blender operating on a remote server is required. Not being a programmer I haven’t been able to determine if this is available.
Having looked at the Python scripting capability of Blender it looks like it should be able handle the basics of the actual editing (which will be fairly simple).
Blender’s nuclear weapon is Python that has grown to the 3rd most popular language (according to TIOBE INDEX, used to be 10th around the time it was introduced in Blender ) and of course C sitting at 2nd place . So overall you are already have a deadly combo to do whatever you want. This is important because Python has a very strong presence on the web front and because how powerful Python is.
Blend4Web is an example of Blender taken to the server side (cloud does not exist technology wise, its just a fancy term) so there is nothing stopping you from implementing your video editor because python dominates , together with Javascript, the web dev world with C doing the heavy lifting as always. Of course making a front end can be a bit tricky.
Nowadays also there is the secondary option of running in browser via webassembly that can take something like Blender source and compile it for the web browser , it shows some good promise, performance wise. So overall technology wise you are pretty covered. Blender already has a video editor although not that powerful so you are covered on the backend as well.
So yeah I do not see any reason why you would not be able to do this.
Of course being able to do this is not equal to be able to do it fast or easy or both. So do not expect it to be a walk in the park.
Blender is also designed to run on the command line and do everything in the background so its server tools friendly as well.
The real problem here is not Blender , that already excels at such task, but web dev with its usual performance issues, lack of features, sandboxing and insane memory demands which have made it hard for web apps to be taken seriously by artists and semi-artists alike. I am not a believer on the success of so called “cloud apps”, after of more than decade of hype, Desktop still reigns supreme.
Hi Kilon,
Thanks so much for your thoughtful reply. It definitely answers a lot of my questions …and of course creates more .
I’m certainly not looking to try and replace desktop editing, really just trying to create something that will be able to do some simple edits and output short video sequences. It sounds like Blender has the capability to do what I need so I will continue looking into how I can accomplish this.
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