You have a school reunion after ages. It’s all about fun, frolic and lots of nostalgia. Photos are taken and amateur videos shot. Everyone promises the other that the photographs will be mailed the first thing after getting home. We all know what usually happens to such promises.
An initiative called Qlikstream offers to store these memories for posterity as a seamless professional video, where one image flows into the other, accompanied by music.
The initiative, started by friends Sridhar Viswanathan, Ashutosh Pujari and Uday Sinh Wala, aged between 48 and 50, had its origins when the three were on a diving trip in Egypt. “One of our friends had a new camera called a GoPro, a HD video camera that is inexpensive and easy to operate. However, editing is cumbersome for the uninitiated because there are numerous files. We wanted to do something that will make this task easier,” says Sridhar, director, Qlikstream.
Sridhar says the three of them have been editing videos for as a hobby for over 15 years, and they have looked at it seriously only now. Uday works out of Mumbai and is into film production, Ashutosh is a digital marketing professional and Sridhar is in the line of performance clothing. “For all of us, this is the future. We are all self-employed, so juggling time is not much of an issue. We do believe that this can be really big.”
“A holiday can have a hundred little clippings from a few seconds to a few minutes. Because all this data is unwieldy, few people are able to put it all together and relive the memory of a great break. What we do is edit all this into a five-to-six-minute video that can be easily shared,” he adds. They recently did videos of did the Tour of Nilgiris and the Aquaterra Challenge. It takes them about five days to deliver a finished product.
The team works with both video and photographs, as long as they are part of the story. And though they have started off with holiday and adventure footage, the team is in talks with NGOs and profile portals to partner with them.
The team has been receiving enquiries from editors in locations outside of Bangalore, their main base, asking if they can work for Qlikstream. Sridhar says they have a dedicated bank of editors. “Now that both bandwidth and HD is available and affordable for all, the time is right to take this idea forward,” he says.
The team feels that video is the medium of the future, since “almost anybody with a mobile phone, a DSLR or a GoPro has the ability to shoot wonderful HD-quality videos. And, they can capture any facet of life, from an adventure trip to a slice-of-live everyday moment”.
How does Qlikstream work?
• Clients send in video footage or photographs, through an online file transfer system.
• The team adds music (licensed or free) and edits using provided images.
• Qlikstream charges by the hour of raw footage. For instance, a basic video where they scour, edit and add music and a couple of supers (graphics, special effects) would cost around Rs. 8,000 for an hour of raw footage.
• The shortest video they have done is a 30-second promo for a cycling event; the longest is an eight-minute video of a triathlon in the mountains.
For details, visit >www.qlikstream.com
