[HN Gopher] Show HN: Welder - Record high-quality remote interviews
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Show HN: Welder - Record high-quality remote interviews
Author : JohanCutych
Score : 78 points
Date : 2021-01-22 09:11 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.getwelder.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.getwelder.com)
| raviisoccupied wrote:
| I use Riverside nearly weekly for my podcast, designbyus. I do
| like it, but I think the biggest opportunity for solutions in
| space is to reduce 'jank', and make the recording process as
| transparent as possible.
|
| We once recorded an interview in Riverside and had mistakenly
| added the guest as a 'Producer', and not as a 'guest', meaning it
| did not record one stream of the audio. Anything the UI can do to
| essentially scream in my face 'this is recording, and everything
| is ok' is what will build trust in products like these.
| JohanCutych wrote:
| Thanks for this valuable point of view! This is exactly our
| focus right now. The next two weeks we are doing a sprint
| called "Improving reliability by UX" where we are going to do
| exactly what you said.
| [deleted]
| jcims wrote:
| Look into the remote deposition market. If you add timecoded
| transcription support you could have an entry into it.
| Marciplan wrote:
| Gratz on the launch! Riverside was talked about earlier on HN and
| they seem to do the same thing. How do you differ? :)
| JohanCutych wrote:
| Good question! We are quite similar. The main difference is, I
| believe in the attitude. We focus a lot on the ease-of-use and
| reliability and not so much on adding robust features that are
| requested by B2Bs like podcasting studios or media.
|
| I also believe we are heading in different directions as we
| want to shift from being just a tool that does HQ recording
| remotely to start-to-end solution to help startups and product
| teams produce purposeful content with ease.
|
| We believe there is a lot of space for an improvement for
| businesses in term of showing who is behind the product,
| building empathy and educating their customers. The process of
| putting out meaningful content and building brand love is
| cumbersome right now and takes a lot of energy.
| [deleted]
| RyanShook wrote:
| Why should someone switch from Zoom/Teams/FaceTime to Welder?
|
| What niche is Welder trying to serve?
| JohanCutych wrote:
| Content creators in general and right now podcasters,
| videocasters, media, podcasting studio and others who want to
| pre-record content and distribute later in best quality
| possible.
|
| We found out that the quality of content is not only nicer to
| watch or listen to, but it actually makes the content easier to
| consume and digest.
| JohanCutych wrote:
| Hey! We finally decided to show Welder to HN.
|
| We built Welder for ourselves as we are a small product team that
| was forced to go remote and wanted to produce content.
|
| We used Zoom, but the quality was.. Well, S*t.
|
| It's a super easy way to record full quality recordings remotely
| as each participant is doing local recording which is
| progressively uploaded to our servers so as soon as the call
| ends, it's ready for editing.
|
| We've validated the product in 2 weeks by doing LP and running YT
| ads. Built MVP in 1 month and found out no one used it as we did
| a mistake by not validating if Electron app is ok for people to
| download.
|
| Lessons learned, Welder is now browsers based. We decided to stay
| bootstrap and right now we are trying to find a pivot from a tool
| that "Allows you to record an interview in HQ remotely" to a tool
| for a team like us to produce meaningful content with ease from
| start to end.
|
| I would love to hear your feedback either about the tool or about
| your content creation process. As we are doing extensive research
| on the topic of how startups and product teams produce content.
|
| P.S. We have now quite a lot of experience with running online
| video service in production for some time, so if you have any
| questions regarding this topic, let us know we will be more than
| happy to answer.
| nonane wrote:
| Congrats on the release and the excellent product! I work on a
| Remote Desktop app and one of my customers used Remote Desktop
| + your tool to collaborate live with his partner.
|
| Would you be able to talk a little more about your Webrtc
| stack? Do you use SFUs in your stack?
|
| Thanks.
| SiNTEx wrote:
| Thank you! We use Twilio for our WebRTC infrastructure with
| VP8 simulcast setup so we do use SFU but only through Twilio.
| We were considering how to get rid of Twilio and quite
| extensively researching what would it mean to run our own
| WebRTC infra as Twilio costs are pretty high (sometimes up to
| 1/4 of our revenue). But operating multiple servers around
| the word to act as SFUs or creating them on demand in e.g.
| GCP and paying the cloud tax in form of extremely expensive
| egress costs doesn't seem to be the right solution either.
| Other service providers have very similar pricing, that's why
| we will stay with Twilio for now.
| nonane wrote:
| Thank you for the info! Incase it helps, we've been running
| our own WebRTC infrastructure (TURN servers only at the
| moment) for the last 5 years. It's globally distributed,
| fault tolerant and allows us to mitigate the high costs.
| We're doing 10s of TB of traffic at a fraction of the cost.
| Would be happy to discuss our infra incase it helps.
| SiNTEx wrote:
| That would be super helpful to us. Can you please hit me
| at marek@getwelder.com? We could schedule a call or just
| text chat about it if that's ok for you.
| schattschneider wrote:
| It confuses me that you used a video with that much high-
| pitched background noise in the audio to showcase your tool -
| in the end, both version seem a bit low-quality because of the
| noisy audio.
| JohanCutych wrote:
| It's true! This was done with an early prototype of the
| Welder so the quality is not the best. We should've reshot it
| already, but we love the vibe of it, haha.
| [deleted]
| vladojsem wrote:
| congrats for the launch! how did you manage to increase the
| quality of the recording?
| Ryner001 wrote:
| It's actually quite simple. In a addition to a web call we
| record a separate high quality tracks for both audio and
| video locally.
|
| The challenge was doing all of this in browser since the APIs
| are not really consistent + there are a lot of weird bugs and
| issues with both MediaRecorder API and IndexedDB.
|
| We spend quite a bit of time setting up logging for client
| app. Since most of these weird issues are very hard to
| reproduce. (For example Chrome randomly purging binary blobs
| after storing them in IndexedDB)
| elwell wrote:
| Congrats on the release! This was one of the 'app ideas'
| hanging around in my notes that I hadn't gotten around to
| prototyping.
| orblivion wrote:
| > ...each participant is doing local recording which is
| progressively uploaded to our servers so as soon as the call
| ends...
|
| I was wondering where this product was, and/or why some of the
| podcasts I listen to don't use something like this.
|
| This works on a browser, though? What if the guest forgets that
| they still need to upload the tail end of their data and closes
| their browser?
|
| (I'm not a podcaster so this is just curiosity)
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _I was wondering where this product was, and /or why some
| of the podcasts I listen to don't use something like this._
|
| These are called "multi-enders", and lots of podcasts do
| them. There are many[1] tools for this which are focused
| specifically on podcasters.
|
| Additionally, it's straightforward to do it manually as well.
| (Tip: Have participants on all ends do a "1-2-3 <CLAP>" to
| make it easy to align the audio during production. Do this at
| the beginning and end to account for digital clock drift.)
|
| [1] Cast: https://tryca.st/ [2] Cleanfeed:
| https://cleanfeed.net/ [3] Ringr: https://www.ringr.com/ [4]
| Zencastr: https://zencastr.com/
| orblivion wrote:
| Then I'll just say I'm surprised more shows don't do it.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Me too!
| SeanBoocock wrote:
| Most of the higher production value podcasts I listen to with
| remote hosts/guests do this, albeit manually (ie record
| locally with something like Audacity, sync on a click/clap,
| recorded live call as a backup). This feels like a nice
| improvement to streamline an otherwise cumbersome process.
| JohanCutych wrote:
| haha we are asking the same question!
|
| We have an uploader system. So if they quit too soon, you can
| always send them a link so they can finish the uploading.
| orblivion wrote:
| Where does the video save? I guess I didn't know a browser
| could just record video and save it somewhere.
| Ryner001 wrote:
| Video is saved as a binary blob in some kind of storage.
| In our case that would be IndexedDB. But since the data
| is uploaded in parallel with the call there is only few
| hundred MB used at any give moment.
|
| Generally browsers will let you store a few GB of data
| (depending on the user free space) if your really wanted
| to but it's not recommended since they can delete it any
| time.
| SiNTEx wrote:
| We store unuploaded chunks of the video in IndexDB in a
| browser. Btw if plan to do something similar beware of
| the fact that storing a lot of blob references in IndexDB
| can cause some wired issues in Chrome a some blobs can
| get corrupted. Our workaround is to store it as byte
| arrays.
| greypowerOz wrote:
| may i ask if using phone as camera and/or audio support will
| come to linux users at some point?
|
| i didn't see on the site how audio was handled, probably just
| my reading skills :)
| JohanCutych wrote:
| Audio is recorded in HQ too, thanks for the feedback, seems
| like it's not clear enough.
|
| About the phone on linux - it will work if there is any
| solution out there that allows you to use your phone as a
| webcam on linux, Welder will pick that up.
|
| https://medium.com/@freeyourdesktopblog/need-a-webcam-in-
| ubu... this might be handy
| jsuccar wrote:
| Disclamer: I'm a cofounder but I want to challenge my buddy and
| CEO @johandCutych .
|
| @Johan, can you tell us about how see Welder in the content
| creation life cycle ? And also for media ?
| natch wrote:
| I think in your product descriptions you should consider
| "conversations" as a more generic, friendly, and open ended
| alternative to the word "interviews." Many of these podcasts are
| presenting the experience as a conversation, not an interview,
| even if the traditional old fashioned word for what they are
| doing is interview.
|
| It would also remove the negative reactions (my own included)
| arising from confusion where people worry that your product might
| be intended for job interviews.
| JohanCutych wrote:
| Thank you, this is a feedback we get a lot here. Definitely
| something we will update!
| tmhrtly wrote:
| Agreed - I definitely thought this was for job interviews and
| was really confused why they needed uber-high quality video
| recordings of me!
| jack_riminton wrote:
| Nice one! Does it record HQ participant audio too? I might've
| missed that bit
| JohanCutych wrote:
| It does, both audio and video in HQ locally.
| purplecats wrote:
| i'd pass if I knew a company was gonna record me and retain it
| for their free use indefinitely.
| iso1210 wrote:
| We built an (internal) product back in March, based around vmix
| and webrtc, for doing interviews for braoadcast purposes.
|
| Guest(s) get a link, interviewer gets a link, producer can
| watch the whole thing and provide comms to the right people at
| the right time, combined and ISO feed recorded separately and
| dropped into package, fairly reliable although occasionally get
| issues with some guests being unable to click "Allow camera" or
| whatever in chrome.
|
| Wouldn't have even considered using it for interviews, but I
| guess that's because our minds tend to work on a "see problem,
| build solution" rather than "build solution, expand market"
| ev1 wrote:
| I really really hope this means like podcast interviews, if
| it's a job interview it would be the worst thing imaginable.
| JohanCutych wrote:
| yep, it's for content purposes. Podcasts, videocasts etc... I
| wouldn't participate in a job interview with demand like this
| haha.
| kleiba wrote:
| So, that's another take-away lesson then: how can you make
| this point clearer to your audience? I, too, thought you
| were targeting job interviews - if it's a common
| misunderstanding, it might really hurt you.
| lukevp wrote:
| Agreed, thought you meant job interviews and immediately
| associated negativity with your brand until reading
| comments.
| gingerlime wrote:
| Yeah my first reaction reading the title was job
| interviews, but then the site made it clearer. Maybe worth
| updating it to say "podcast interviews" or "webcast" (not
| sure if it's a thing)? EDIT: videocast!
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