Doc Searls interviews Jah Shaka, the eponymous originator of Jahshaka, the first open source realtime editing and effects system.
I first heard about Jahshaka from Marc Canter, the opera singer, entrepreneur and former cab driver who is best known as the driving force behind Macromind, known today as Macromedia. In the last few years Marc has become, like his friend Mitch Kapor, committed to a variety of new open source projects, as well as fresh commercial pursuits. Marc told me the Jahshaka project was the product of the also-named Jah Shaka, and would bring the power of $200,000 editing software to The Rest of Us. When I contacted Jah Shaka about his project last fall, he told me it wasn't quite ready for the spotlight that coverage by Linux Journal would bring.
But now Jah is ready. Here's a quick summary of Jahshaka <http://www.jahshaka.com/>:
Here's my interview with him. (Most of the links, by the way, are his.)
- Doc Searls
DS: Mostly I'd like to know how things are going. The last time we exchanged emails (in October, when I was in Ocho Rios with Linus and other Linux Lunatics on a Geek Cruise, touring the neighborhood), you said it was still a little early. Now some folks at LJ are starting to take notice and wondering what's up. Time to catch up. Maybe some background will help, too.
JS: I grew up in Kingston, in the heart of the ghetto, for over 20 years. I worked for my dad in a place called Concrete Jungle which Bob Marley sung about. I moved to Ocho Rios to escape the violence and lived there for 5 years and loved it. I ran a family-owned campground and scuba shop in a town called Priory. That's where I really got into coding as I had lots of free time. I cant wait to go back, now that I can get a DSL line down there! Plus it's a zero-stress lifestyle.
I have always loved production and was actively involved in a group in Jamaica in which I played the keyboards. It was a reggae/hard rock crossover group called "Y Mas Gan" which means "let Jah be Praised", and it was an amazing experience. We did some tracks with Michael Rose (from Black Uhuru) and Bunny Ruggs (from Third World).
I was hustling electronics on the side to pay for this and got a Sony vr1000 and started shooting music videos. I got into some crazy places in the hood and shot some amazing footage. We were working on launching a site called telechronic.com – chronic television in which guys in the ghetto would shoot footage and we would edit it and post it on the web – but it never got off the ground, seems there was too much risk involved…
I left the audio/visual world and got into programming when I saw how crooked the record-label's were and found out what it would take to get us a deal. Just couldn't deal with that system, its all wrong. Once I have the time and things have changed I plan to get back into production, and I hope the JahNetwork will help encourage some of that change.
DS: And how did you get from music to Jahshaka?
JS: Then I moved to Miami, and got schooled in media by my mentor, the GodFather Chris Blackwell. Chris taught me that 'Content is King' and if anyone knows what this means, Chris produced both Bob Marley and U2. It was really Chris's influence on me that lead to the start of the first line of Jahshaka code. He's an amazing person, and if you meet him you'd realize why he single-handedly created two of the largest and most influential groups in the world. He's all about the artist and the creativity -- not the money.
Chris hooked me up with Les Garland, the mind behind MTV, VH1 and the Box. Les taught me about broadcasting and the power of indie content. MTV was the first network that you couldn't pay to get your music on if they didn't want it. I also met my lovely wife and Queen in Miami. She's the creativity behind the Jahshaka website.
I met Shawn Fanning at a party at Chris's house and we hit it off. Shawn has helped me to figure out the network side of things and that contributed to laying down the architecture for JahNetwork. When it's finished, JahNetwork will be a content and project sharing system for Indie content creators.
I went out to California for the first time to meet up with Shawn right when Napster was tanking, to discuss some new ideas he had. While I was there I hooked up with Marc Canter, mastermind behind Macromedia and the godfather of multimedia. Marc has had a great influence on the future of Jahshaka. If there's anyone out there who knows where software is coming from and where it going, its Marc.
DS: Yes. In fact, we heard about Jahshaka through Marc.
JS: So after all these good hookups I figured if Jahshaka is going to take the leap then I'm going to have to take the leap as well. So I moved out to Cali, which I couldn't have done without the enourmous amount of assistance I have gotten from another friend of mine, Alex Hern. He's giving the Jahshaka team the assistance we need to get Jahshaka out there into the hands of the people that its being built for. So maximum respect to him.
DS: And now Jahshaka is getting some notice.
JS: It's great news about the interest in Jahshaka. The project has been moving ahead at its own pace, and it is starting to shape up into something exceptional. When I released Jahshaka initially it was more of like a digital survey -- most of the functionality was disabled in order to find out what people really wanted. We'd kind've leave it up to their imagination.
The strategy worked out better than I thought it would, since what it had was real-time compositing, something that was only available at that time on $200,000+ systems -- so it was revolutionary and we got tons of feedback. Now we are getting close to a final release and there are lots of great features n the latest beta that will really start to refine themselves as we move ahead and work towards coming out with a killer app.
DS: What itch, as the hackers say, were you trying to scratch here?
JS: There is always motivation for a higher cause in everything that we do -- spiritually, mentally and physically -- whether we know it or not. My motivation was to free the digital artists from the tyranny of the big companies that hold them back. These guys keep the real tools out of our hands by charging ridiculous prices for them, backed by brand-name loyalty brainwashing. Can you imagine paying $200 grand for a paintbrush and an easel? I set out to create a free and open-sourced brand in the hopes of changing that.
DS: At first I thought you were the performing artist also named Jahshaka, or the sound system by the same name.
JS: He's a English man with Jamaican roots (and actually my favorite group and #1 sound system in the world second to StoneLove ).
DS: Do you see the Jahshaka Project as competition for existing commercial products? Or as something that complements them? Or both?
JS: : I would say Jahshaka is its own thing. I don't really care much what 'existing commercial products' are doing. And as long as I can get the power of the open-source community behind Jahshaka it wont matter much either. They are commercial for a reason, and that's because they are sold out. I mean, in any one company making digital content creation tools I am sure the programmers are the ones who are the lowest paid... which is very ironic since they are the real creators of the tools. And then the people that fine-tune the tools, the artists, have to pay to play. So no wonder you don't see any great new features anymore.
DS: What were the reasons behind your technical choices early on? What can we expect in the next few releases?
JS: When I started writing the code it was all on Linux. I used Qt for the libraries since Qt was exclusively C++ and the Gtk libraries were just for C. Object oriented programming rocks, and that was the driving force there. (I'm also the administor/editor for AvaiLinux.com, by the way. It's a resource for high availability Linux.) The great upside to Qt is the power it gives you when it comes to creating an interface, and its native OpenGL support. The cross-platform support also opens up a lot of doors, and the guys at trolltech are real cool!
The 3.0 release of Jahshaka which we are working towards getting out by the end of the year is going to be amazing. You’re talking full powered, hardware accelerated studio-in-a-box that will run on any hardware and any OS (of course its written on linux so the best features will always be there first) . The main thing that’s working right now is the effects and compositing, which is the core of the app, but once the editing and asset management parts are filled out, and the collaboration tools are ready, its going to be very impressive. Cool features like a skinnable interface, coupled with AI so it can adjust to your needs, are going to separate it from whats out there today.
Things start to get real exciting when you think about 3d-tv coming out in the next few years and when you look at what people can do with pixel-shaders. Nvidia has a great roadmap in which they describe the evolution of 3d hardware and show the point where film and 3d intersect. For me the Internet is like a portal into a different universe -- and 3d technology is going to start to give it some substance.
DS: I see NVidia promoted on your site. Are you tied to Nvidia, or is your technology independent of hardware?
JS: We aren’t tied to anything right now, but the NVidia cards rock and we do all development on NVidia. They also send us cards to use, and in a market that doubles in power every few months its important to develop on the fastest cards (I’d like to thank Jeff Herbst for hooking us up)
Apple (and other companies) are doing their real-time effects using the processor — but they are doing them with low-res proxys (low quality). I think if they were to harness the power of the 3d GPU’s that are now standard on almost every pc, they would find a lot more power than they would ever need. If you also take the gaming industry into consideration, and its effect on hardware evolution, it becomes obvious that the GPU is the way to go. We decided to go with hardware acceleration from the start.
We are using standard OpenGL calls so any GL card will work, although once OpenML support is added certain features will only work on systems with OpenML drivers. We are currently working with RealVision on this. Once we move up to OpenGL 2.0 we will be able to take advantage of pixel-shaders for some really cool effects. NVidia cards also accelerate the OpenEXR format, which we are in the process of adding support for, it will allow people to do hardware-accelerated film work. Very cool!
DS: What social and market effects are you looking for? If it's to put everybody is in a position to produce anything, which would be very cool.
JS: That’s the idea, open up some new doors for producers by eliminating the existing barrier-for-entry that’s out there. Combined with the JahNetwork, not only will people be able to create dynamic and immersive content in a new way but they will also be able to collaborate and share their ideas. This is a great thing for Indie filmmakers and we hope to give them new and better ways to get their ideas out there so they can take their projects to the big screen.
With Jahshaka we not only want to liberate digital artists; but we are also hoping to force a necessary step of evolution in the DCC arena. Currently, developers are caught up in a price and feature war and aren't coming out with anything that's really different or new. If you look at any of the top editing or effects packages that are out there today they all have the same features. They are too busy competing with each other and trying to find different ways to package old features they forgot what got them all started in the first place: innovation.