Open Bible Stories in *your* language, today

In a previous post we introduced the Open Bible Stories project. The vision of this project is to see 30 stories of the Bible in every language, in text, audio and mobile phone-optimized video.

If you haven't seen it yet, the video for "The Compassionate Father" illustrates what we are aiming for:

To achieve the goal of getting this video (and 29 others like it) in every language of the world, we are using three things:

1. Content that is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License to remove all legal obstacles.
2. A worldwide, distributed, self-selecting team of volunteers that believe in the vision and want to help make it happen (aka "crowdsourcing").
3. A unique technological approach to creation of the videos that is extremely low-cost, easy to do and efficient.

The rest of this article will sketch out how the third point in this list works.

The video component

Each story of the Open Bible Stories project is comprised of text (recorded as audio) and illustrations from the set released by Sweet Publishing under CC-BY-SA. Each of the stories have about 10-15 "segments", comprised of one illustration and the corresponding text/audio for that illustration. For example, see the "Text & Images" tab of this story.

In order to create the video, the team at Clarion Creative slices up the illustrations, puts the various parts on different virtual layers with simulated "depth of field". Each of these "segments" of the story is rendered as a stand-alone 720p30 HD video clip that is 20 seconds in length. Then each 20 second master clip is re-rendered in "fast-motion" at half-second increments, from 5-19.5 seconds, resulting in a total of 31 HD video clips of the same segment at different speeds.

The audio component

In order to create a translated version of a video, a speaker of the target language needs to translate each "segment" of the video. Once translated, the segment is recorded into the target language as an MP3 (44.1kHz, 128kbps, if possible) for ease of transfer via slow Internet connections.

Each recorded audio clip is given a file name like this:

obs-AAA-BB-CC.mp3

where

• "AAA" is the ISO-639-3 (3-letter, Ethnologue) language code for the language, and
• "BB" is the number of the story in the Open Bible Stories (e.g. "The Compassionate Father" is story #23 in the 30 Open Bible Stories)
• "CC" is the segment number in the story, e.g. "01", "02", etc.

So, for example, obs-xog-23-05.mp3 would be the 5th segment of the 23rd story ("The Compassionate Father") in the Lusoga (xog) language.

The render process

By using these file-naming conventions and procedures, we will be able to programmatically dub the story into the target language by selecting a pre-rendered video clip for each segment of the story, using a "render process" script on the server. The length of the video clip to use for each segment is determined from the length of the translated audio clip for that segment of the selected story.

After the render process has selected the closest video clip length based on the length of the corresponding audio file for each segment of the story in the target language, the render process will concatenate the video clips and the audio clips in the correct order and mux them together into an HD video in the target language. From that master copy, 4-6 down-sampled videos will be automatically rendered as well, in lower resolutions and with mobile-optimized codecs for use on mobile phones.

Ready to get started?

Would you like to get the Open Bible Stories videos translated in your language? You can get started whenever you want. Follow the steps above and contact us if you have any questions. Let us know how we can help.

Also, if you have any ideas for how to improve the video translation & creation process, please leave a comment below or talk to us on Facebook. This strategy is continually improving from user feedback and field tests, so let us know what you think!

One final comment: none of the technology that we are using here is necessarily "new" - we are using existing technology and assembling the component parts and processes in different ways. We could really use some programming help! We are working in PHP at the moment, with the goal of making the whole process available via the web (especially the mobile web), as well as on stand-alone hard drives with local webservers, etc. If you know of anyone who could help on any aspect of this open-source project, let us know! We plan to have the code on GitHub shortly.