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'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're trying to change this by letting people produce and edit their recordings so that it's a better experience for viewers.
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.
The most interesting aspect of the approach was that the videos weren'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.
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.
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).
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'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.
The benefit of this is that we can use anything that you can do with HTML, CSS and JS to create a video. We'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.
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 (https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319658391). 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 (https://webtiming.github.io/timingobject/) 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.
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.
We'd love to hear what you think and answer any questions you might have. Thanks!
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...
- 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!
I’ve always been curious how companies like your monitor their business metrics?
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!
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
I'm the creator of Glitterly - 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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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!
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?
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.
Just curious.
I've used TypeScript a lot in the past as well, and I'm not against it at all. You can do a lot of the things you can do with Reason in TypeScript. But I do have the feeling Reason makes me a lot faster than when I worked with TypeScript.
Here is a demo of my media sync implementation - https://vreddit.vercel.app/?vid=8ac6uk4bbxg51&q=2
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?)
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.
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 . They have demos of synchronizing video playback, text editing, object manipulation, etc.
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.
Do you see education as part of your market? If you think that could be of interest, my email is santiago.basulto at gmail.
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.
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.
Heads up: the format in which you've included links results in broken links when clicked
https://www.tella.tv/tella-for-product-and-design
https://www.tella.tv/tella-for-sales
https://www.tella.tv/tella-for-blogs-and-newsletters