Randa’s Neighborhood

The feed aggregator is now up and running. For how long I am uncertain. I am having a difficult time getting FeedRaider to send me a confirmation email, and I fear they will crash the site after 48 hours. What do you expect for free? You can find the list of blogs here.

http://feedraider.com/page/252505/COM597C-Summer-2009-Class-Feeds

Just in case the feed breaks, I have posted a list of enrolled students linked to their blogs on the class website. You can check there for easy navigation to the blogs. 

OK, here we go. This is the central meeting site for the 2009 class. This site will have the schedule, grades and resource information. The class blog site is our content repository. I will start it off with a few optional articles to read. The first is more in the pop culture realm than academic, but I found it an interesting analysis of how changing the way we deliver the media changes the message. The medium is the message, and all that. This is a Vanity Fair article (albeit dated) from two years ago on the politics of YouTube. I won't claim to agree or disagree; only that it is a perspective worth noting.

Also, I will need your e-mail addresses and blog urls sent to me so I can get the list coordinated. Please get it done by midnight, Sunday June 28.

If in your academic travels you bump into something we might want to review please pass it on to me or post it in your blog. I think we learn more from each other than we do from the book. Besides, it is critical that we stay current on the shifting technology of web delivered media.

The Syllabus is posted as a word document in the file section, if you need it.

This is where I will post articles, links and resources that I bump into that I feel might be helpful to you. Additionally, I will use the class hash-tag on Twitter to let you know I've found something. None of these resources are required reading unless I clearly say so. They are just things I think you will enjoy or find enlightening. The first two are two survey presentations by the Edison Research Group.  They were specifically created for radio executives but the information is very pertinent to the discussions in our class. The first is titled "The Infinite Dial" and is the research I have referenced in tonight's class. The second is I a nice report on podcasting. As if you don't have enough to read, I have provided two additional files for you. One is a great (and insanely dense) "bible" that will give you clear insights and definitions on the technology of video and television. Consider yourself warned, this is a major gear-head paper and most will find it rather arcane. But there are always a few folks in class who are seeking a deeper technical knowledge on the topic and I will continue to do my best to provide that information. This paper is published by the Quantel Corporation and can be downloaded from their site. I have parked it here to make it a little easier to find. I was doing some research on Brightcove (you will hear more about them as we explore syndicated video distribution models) and I came across this article in PC Magazine (not exactly the last bastion of academic rigor, but hey, you take the information where you find it.) This article is a nice quick review of a few of the exploding video distribution sites on the web.

Blog by midnight Wednesday, July 1

There are two "articles" I offer for your review. Please choose one and write how this concept of Socail Media could impact storytelling on the web.

This first is lecture by Clay Shirky at this years' TED conference.
http://mashable.com/2009/06/16/twitter-facebook-history/

The second is a little news article about Microsoft abandoning the Soapbox platform. "The what?" you may ask. If you have any thoughts on how video is provided on the web, here is a starting point for you.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10265858-56.html

Finally, once I get your blog urls I will throw everything into a feed aggregator like this. Unfortunately, FeedRaider has chosen this moment in time to shut down the system so I am uncertain what the URL will be. I will let you know once I fugure something out.

Voices available to storytelling…

Narrative (voice)

Natural Sound

Music

Visual

Storytelling is about managing coincidence

Psychology of camera angle Triumph of the Will

Height

Psychology of framing

Impact of focal length

Shooting a Simple Sequence

Quarter raw footage

Quarter Cut

UW Hallway

Match action

Aline, Preston, Kyra and the Key

Camera angle

Star Ferry

Media Flow Blog

Rule of Thirds

Stairway to Heaven

Just when you thought HD cameras couldn’t get any smaller, Pure Digital, maker of the mega-popular Flip camcorders, is rolling out the the MinoHD. This is essentially the Flip Mino shooting 720p HD video.  The Wall Street Journal’s Katie Boehret tested this insanely small profile camera and had generally high praise for this potential game-changer in the consumer HD camera market.  You can see some of her test footage below.

This is not a camera that can be easily dismissed. The New York Times reported that the fastest growing company in Silicon Valley over the past few years was not Facebook, VMWare, or all-mighty Google. According to Deloitte, the professional services firm, it was none other than  Pure Digital Technologies, maker of, you guessed it, the Flip video camera.

The appeal of the Flip has never been incredible optics or a robust feature set… no it is all about simplicity. When my daughter started shooting with flash-based cameras (she was 8) I marveled at the novelty. The rock-bottom price of these cameras put them in the range of an impulse buy at the electronics store. One of the potential challenges that Pure Digital may face is the price for this new camera. It jumps to $230 and puts it out of impulse range and more directly in competition with consumer cameras that have such novel options as an optical zoom, image stabilization and external mic jack.

But this is all about simplicity and you can be certain this camera is simple to operate.

Its internal 4GB of will hold up to an hour of video. I am not personally a big fan of the 720p format. It is a frame size that straddles the line between standard definition (480i) and HD (1080i). Both Sony and Cannon have adopted 1080 as the HD format for their cameras, while JVC and Panasonic have chosen 720. (Can you say VHS v. Betamax?)  

Most new HD Televisions will handle either format quite nicely. The choice to work in 720 for the Flip Mino is logical. 1080 files are significantly larger and to get smooth recordings would require the ability to write a lot a data very quickly to the memory chip. Not only are you pushing fewer pixels around with the smaller 720 format, you are also pushing fewer 1’s and 0’s. You can record and retrieve files faster. Mixing your Mino footage with content from your Canon or Sony HD camera could be problematic as you will be mixing formats and most current edit packages don’t handle this problem very smoothly.

The new camera also will utilize new FlipShare software. This on-board software platform allows a user to plug the camcorder’s flip-out USB arm into any computer for easy drag-and-drop video organizing, editing and sharing. This has not always been true with past iterations of the software. Particularly when wrestling with a sometimes balky DivX codec.

FlipShare’s use of drag-and-drop video organizing resembles the way that Apple iTunes songs can be dragged into playlists. Users can manage their files, rename and copy through the intuitive interface. They have made following the usual paths of distribution quite easy (save to the computer, play full screen, share via e-mail, upload to YouTube, AOL or MySpace, or create a movie.) On the Mac side, it’s fully compatible with Apple’s video applications, including iMovie and iDVD.

While not quite perfect, and I usually hate to buy the first generation of any technology, I have a feeling I know which camera will be under the tree this Christmas.

With the rollout of the new MacBook comes the inevitable news that Firewire is dying. The machine is loaded with oodles of new features and many old favorites wrapped in a signature aluminum case. The drag coefficient for this new case must be significantly lower than the old plastic one, and that will be quite handy if I ever leave it on the roof of my car.

The development of this new machine does not herald any new or startling development in the Mac ecosystem, save one. There is no firewire port on the MacBook. And there is no way to add one. You can swap hard drives like you currently swap external drives, and the new track pad reflects the usability of the iPhone and Touch.

But losing the firewire port is a signal that consumers are not going to transfer their video tapes to their machines. No editing, no DVD, no looking back at your old movies when you make that video designed to embarrass your daughter on Prom night. (“Dad! You will NOT show me naked in the tub when I was 18 months old! You will NOT show me tap dancing at the talent show!”)

It is a sure sign that consumers are no longer buying tape-based cameras. Any trip to Circuit City will tell you that. Just try and find a tape-based camera on display. There might be one HDV… two DV. The rest are flash-based or hard drive.

That is fine going forward, but what about our legacy content? What do we do with that? And when the hard drive on our new camera gets full what do we do with the media? I hate tracking and searching file-based content. It is the definition of needle in the haystack. More likely, what happens when that hard drive fails?

I am still struggling with a closet full of legacy content; shelves full of magnetic tape slowly trying to reach a state of stasis. I have Hi8, DV, DVCam, Betamax, VHS, Beta, BetaCam, DigiBeta, DVCPro, D5 and HDCam waiting to get called back into action.

Apple’s decision just reaffirms what I have know all along. Those formats are not coming back into action. In 10 years you will have a very hard time finding a deck that will even play these formats. My kid’s birthdays, my family’s holidays, the business trips and vacations will all be inaccessible.

Truth be told, if you don’t edit your content right after you shoot it, odds are you will never get around to it. The industry knows most of this footage gets shot, viewed once and then forgotten.

Perhaps I need to send a thank-you to Steve Jobs for the wake-up call. This new computer tells me I had better start thinking about how I am going to get my stacks of tape transferred to something I can use. And I need to kiss my firewire dependence goodbye.

The line between still and video cameras continues to blur. True, that’s a painful pun, but there is no denying this trend is most evident in top-of-the-line still cameras. If we could look at the names on the waiting list for the Canon 5D Mark II professional S.L.R. I would wager most of them would belong to filmmakers, not still photographers.

This is because the high definition footage from the Canon is mind blowing. It is full motion, 30 frame-per-second, 1080p footage captured on an image sensor the size of a 35mm negative, instead of the video camera’s fingernail sized CCD. Not only is the capture system vastly superior with the S.L.R., but the glass in the lens means the image in the $2,700 camera rivals that of a $100,000 HD camera used for features. Using Canon’s interchangeable lenses means the filmmaker is no longer limited to a zoom lens full of compromises permanently mounted to the camera. You now have a prime lens system with out Redrock. And you have a digital cinema solution without the hype of Red and their proprietary file format hassles.  You have a filmmakers Nirvana. You also have a very long waiting list.

There have even been a few rumors of late that Red pulled their plans to release Scarlet because the 5DM2 chopped the legs out from under it. Honestly, that would not surprise me.

Sure there are compromises. There is no audio to speak of so you are back to double system sound. But heck, I could figure that out using an iPhone or a DVcam.

The Web was buzzing a couple of weeks ago when photographer Vincent LaForet spent a weekend making a short, wordless movie using an early Canon 5D Mark II. He hired a couple of models, grabbed a crew, rented a helicopter, pulled together $5,000, and made an absolutely astonishing-looking piece of video. It was hard to find the thing online—Vincent didn’t want to host it on his own site because of the massive bandwidth required to serve it. (Here’s his writeup, and here’s the “making of” video.)

Finally, David Pogue of the New York Times writes that, “the original video has finally found a place online, and you should have a look.” I could not agree more, you should have a look. And as Pogue writes,  “Just keep telling yourself: ‘It was shot with a still camera. It was shot with a still camera….’”

You can see the film here.

While driving, what's your biggest pet peeve?
Submitted by Alexandra

I hate it when I'm at a green light with oncoming traffic, trying to turn left and the cars behind me impatiently honk. Maybe they would risk their lives to turn in front of fast moving vehicles, but I want to live a few more years.

Granted, I don't visit Vox much anymore, so perhaps I should just close down my account, but I'm not ready to do that yet. This morning I received three private messages -- all spam and leading to a URLs that ended in .nu I didn't click on the links - who knows what I would have found at the end. Here's a screenshot of one of them.

2008-08-09_0926

Anyone else getting private messages that are spam?

Also -- has Vox always had the dating advertisements with scantily clad women? I don't remember those. I don't like those.