Treehouse Studio

Treehouse Studio is a large group project by the Physical Language Workshop.
It is a suite of online-accessible applications for drawing, painting, photography, sound-editing and video-editing. By virtue of being situated on the Net, communities of content creation can be formed around any subset of the tools. Each software tool is written to be extensible with a back-end engine for the on-demand compilation of new features. Content created in Treehouse Studio is meant to be used primarily for the OpenAtelier project. Impact areas for Treehouse Studio include distance education, online communities, digital entertainment, and creative knowledge management. Treehouse Studio will be publicly accessible in the summer of 2004.

My primary contribution to Treehouse Studio is the Movie application for video editing. Treehouse Movie lets users edit video clips that are stored in the central Treehouse Studio content database. Unlike desktop-based video editing tools, Treehouse Movie is built from ground up as a networked application. It consists of two parts: a client-side video editing interface and a server-based video rendering engine. The client-side part is a Java applet that runs within a standard web browser; graphic representations of video clips, thumbnail images and in / out points can be manipulated and modified by the user. The server-side part is a Java servlet that generates new video sequences and thumbnail images, as requested by the client-side editing interface.
Because all media is stored, managed and rendered on the server through minimal communication with the client, Treehouse Movie eases the burden of requirements on the end-user side (in terms of processing power, disk space, network bandwidth) that are typically associated with digital video editing.
Original video content can be uploaded into the Treehouse Studio database by using the media upload webpage or by emailing video clips (as attachments) to the Treehouse Studio system.
QuickTime is used as the underlying video technology for both client-side playback and server-side rendering.

In addition to Treehouse Movie, I am currently building a Treehouse Studio application for webcams. Details will follow shortly.

SeasonPaint is an old prototype of a Treehouse Studio application. Because it was written using a now-outdated codebase, it does not represent the current state of Treehouse Studio. However, I think it does give some sense of the scale and type of applications that are provided by Treehouse Studio.