5 posts tagged “video”
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 National Association of Broadcasters convention is an annual pilgrimage for me. I go not so much because it is in Las Vegas, but in spite of the fact that it is in Vegas. I like the process of peeking over the horizon at the new technology, not just because of the excitement of invention, but because of the job security that comes with reducing the chance you will be blindsided by something new. Knowledge is power, and all that.
So here are my thougths from Las Vegas in video form. There is a large file if you are on a fat pipe (high speed connection) and here is a smaller version. I have to post two discrete files because of the limitations of the blogging software..
CNET reported this week tht the the US Justice department wants to keep track of who creates and uploads both video and photo content to the web. And I quote, "The Bush administration has accelerated its Internet surveillance push by proposing that Web sites must keep records of who uploads photographs or videos in case police determine the content is illegal and choose to investigate."
Am I the only one outraged here? This wouldn't be the slow ebbing away of our freedom of speech, but a full frontal assault. The chilling effect on the new voices that are emerging on the net would be tragic . I can't believe they are serious. OK, I can believe they are serious, but I have to hope enough voices will be raised in opposition.
What is a blog? Really, who cares? While I can understand from an academic standpoint the need to quantify particular genres for accurate apples-to-apples comparisons, really, what is a blog? Part of what I love about the internet is the cornucopia of crap called a blog. Blogging has become a catchall for the personal flotsam of our lives. But I think there is a difference between how we use the web as content providers and content consumers.
From the beginning of my experience as a content provider on the web I have journaled predominantly using photos. From my initial crude homepage, to my various current personas on the web, photo sharing has been an integral part of the dialogue. Perhaps because of ease, perhaps because of the way I see the world, writing about the nuts and bolts of the day is less compelling for me than capturing the moment with a camera. And while I have used this presentational format for sharing my point of view with a personal webpage, I also enjoy sharing with a community at large with a site like Flickr. But the tone of the community dialogue is important to me. When sharing media on a site like Youtube I am put off by the clutter and chaos of the community. I have become a recent convert to Vimeo and I find that the supportive nature of members is not only inclusive, but is an interesting environment for developing thoughtful discourse on personal media. This is knowledge I can then fold back here, in my more traditional blog space. The lines are blurring, and with the ability to marry my written, photographic and video efforts into one central site, I am finding that my need for a personal media portal is fading away. Blogs have become the tool I was trying to create on my own for the past 10 years.
Personal blogging always strikes me as a record of the exceptional rather than the mundane. For a large percentage of authors creating personal blogs, you write because of an exceptional event or feeling, and once it is past your posting frequency diminishes. How does this skew the content of a blog, and is that part of the reason so much of the content is ignored? Are we oversaturated with the angst and disappointment of everyday life?
As a content consumer I read the news… blogs are a part of that flow. I use links to news stories from sources I admire and respect. I love it when someone “pre-surfs” the web and directs me to a discovery on the web. I certainly maintained my own personal “hot links” page in the mid 90s, long since abandoned before the change of millennium. Having constant RSS feeds push content to me is invaluable, and really these authors become my “friends”, even though we have never met.
To quote Clay Shirky, blogging removes all barriers to publishing, so “you have high quality competition that costs nothing.” Then there is this blog. Low quality competition that costs minutes out of your life. Minutes that you will never recover. You do the math. I can’t believe this blog will ever be considered the farm team of any publisher. Shirky’s main point is on target, this is for my circle of friends, my virtual cocktail party. And it is for me. I can’t imagine who else would care.
Do you remember the wonder you felt the first time you saw computer mediated communication? I won’t say e-mail because my introduction started with messages that would pop up on my terminal as I was coding on an IBM360 in the late 70’s. You would be checking a sub-routine (if x<y then….) and suddenly “MA197TOM: Hungry? How about pizza?” would appear in the middle of your code. It was simultaneously frustrating and marvelous. We would go through reams of paper in a windowless engineering lab, popping inane and meaningless sentences back and forth just because we could. The environs may have been dank, but the wonder of sending these messages from across the room, across campus or across the country never failed to create a sense of awe.
This September will mark my 30th anniversary sending messages that are at times mercurial, inane, sublime, and occasionally, factual. Joseph Walther’s perspective on CMC reinforced perspectives I have held about the stages of engagement. I have always been fascinated about the natural dance of intimacy that takes place both professionally and personally when we write. I love the power to edit, revise and present an image of myself that I wish existed in face-to-face communication. The ease and convenience of asynchronous communication means I can respond when I am good and ready. And the time stamp gives insight on the responder’s sense of urgency to our communication. Did it come back in minutes? Hours? Days? Never? It often tells me more than someone nodding in agreement over a conference table, the “We should do this again” after drinks, or looking at their watch during a hallway conversation. Yes the process of accreting this information takes more time, but often the connection is more heartfelt with insights that would be missed or not offered in a conversation. Having the power to review the thread gives me flow and context to the conversation, a feature I wish I could call on in F2F conversations. Walther’s perspective that, “Time is frozen and conversation is disentrained when partners ‘meet’ independent of one another,” only gives me permission to answer my e-mail as I sit in bed at one in the morning (I only hope my wife doesn’t read this.)
The theories behind his analysis makes sense to me, even if the technology described is painfully dated. I wonder if there is a different syntax and paradigm to using Instant Messaging and text messaging? With IM, you have the immediacy of e-mail, but often without reflection or editing. I have found that much of the personal communication that I have traditionally accomplished with e-mail (“can you pick up milk on the way home?) has migrated to IM. As Jenny Preece points out in Online Communities, this communication tends to be brief, casual and very personal. This trusted circle of contacts is appreciably narrower than my e-mail community. Perhaps 10 people that I share some form a intimacy (family, close co-workers, peers) are on my list, where 250 are in my address book. And while chats have traditionally involved contemporality and simultaneity, the improved toolset of IM augments this experience with file sharing, collaboration and links. These are all functions that had previously been the domain of e-mail for me.
What I lose in IM is an elegant way to file and reference back to past conversations. Culling back through conversations can be cumbersome and does not have the elegance that my folder structure has in Outlook. Ducheneaut and Bellotti described my e-mail organization to a T, complete with filters and a very deep folder hierarchy. For me this is critical as I have mail coming to me from a variety of communities and responsibilities. Organizing by sender, task, project allows me to focus on the work at hand, and prioritize how I spend my time.
I personally love e-mail. The wonder I felt 30 years ago has not gone away. As video e-mail begins to penetrate the marketplace I doubt I will feel the burning desire to embrace it with the passion I have for writing. Even if I play a video message at 2x speed I still won’t be able to skim it as fast as I can the 200+ messages I dig through every day. I visualize video connections to be more like chat. Unedited, unscripted blather where the sender takes too long to make a point, with all the joy of voice mail.
I think I will stick with writing for now. I know how difficult it is to make good TV.
