Make - Don't Consume

Who would have thought that Susan Boyle would represent so many possibilities for metaphor and example. The YouTube video that I linked to previously is dead - taken down by the poster. Well that's my impression of YouTube. It's quick and easy, but not to be counted on over time. It's unreliable as a reference or repository and for all of it's pretense at being able to show HD, most of it is technically inferior. 

So now the remaining Susan Boyle videos that I can find are not up to my standard. They either don't show all of the footage (you miss the full story - I hate that) or they have bad audio (why post a music video with sucky audio?) or it's the wrong format (16:9 images squished down to 4:3 - again why do that?). 

I saw someone on CNN last night commenting on the remarkable number of hits her video has generated - about 50 million (I had this at 500 million at first, then I doubted that number after a while and changed it, but the one that I'm linking to now already has over 50 million - so who knows?) That's a lot, but it's even a little more amazing because it all seems so ad hoc and kludged together. That must be an aggregated number combining all of the versions of her performance.

So what's the point to all of this. I guess this is just more of a reflection on the way YouTube has penetrated our world. It's an easy way to show ourselves work, but it's also too off the cuff, unreliable, and arbitrary. If we need to post a video to show to each other we need to control that ourselves, not rely on a middleman to do the heavy lifting, because later, it's just not there. Don't be a consumer, be a maker - own and control your work.

gunther

The Story Turns

After discovering the "official" Britain's Got Talent web site and viewing the second episode I find myself mad about Simon's behavior. Who would have thought – certainly not me – that I actually have an option about this, let alone that I'm upset about it. The second show features some young man, lad I guess they'd call him, singing as if he were a Michael Jackson sound-a-like. Simon stops the music and has the kid select a different song, because he thinks it's not going well or he's not singing a sellable song. I don't think that's ever happened before – has it? The kid's OK, but only OK. He's not that great, but Simon looks like he sees  a record deal in the future – hum.

Now I find that I'm actually rooting for Susan Boyle over this little kid. She's earned a chance, she's paid her dues. The kid is just a kid. Next year is fine for him – don't push it. Simon, don't be greedy. What am I saying?

Later....

Well the Wikipedia article about Miss Boyle is informative, perhaps psychologically therapeutic, and alludes to a record deal with Simon after all. It better happen. There's a page about the show too and I see I don't really know how the show works after all. i've never seen the American version at all. I'm not sure I've even heard of it.

Wow, I'm an "official" Susan Boyle fan and I didn't even know it. Yes, I've heard "Cry Me A River" that she does. It's pretty good. She infuses emotion into her singing and that was ten years ago. It's that disconnect between her voice and her look, but the more I hear her sing the more I like it. Just let her be herself. Isn't that what we all should wish for ourselves and others.

Maybe this is the new internationalism. We're sucked into the new world order by pulling for dowdy Scottish singers – of substance. In the end I hope Susan Boyle gets to sing for the Queen. I guess I'll be watching somewhere on May 23 for the next round. Who knew?

This is the real power of the internet. It's either personal, a strikingly good imitation of real, or it simply reads that way. Maybe we should all be afraid instead, because it's emotionally deeper than we thought. When it works, it really works. At least be wary – and always use a microphone. God save the Queen.

gunther

The Power Is In The Microphone and The Story

I've been watching the Susan Boyle video from the TV show "Britain's Got Talent". It's a fantastic seven minute roller-coaster ride than ends well. (New Link Here)  YouTube makes it easy to see this kind of thing, after the fact, so people link back and forth to it, though there are a lot of really bad versions out there, too truncated (you need to see the whole thing), bad audio, wrong aspect ratio. In fact the "official BGT" site on YouTube has the worst version of the performance – brutally edited down until it looses all of the tension. After watching a squished SD version, I finally found a full 16:9 version that looks and sounds good too. I was surprised by how choked up I was the first few times I watched it – it's quite emotional.

A few days later on BoingBoing I found this "Playing For Change" video that's a great music event, but doesn't have the full emotional impact of the other. The common thread is the power of a microphone, getting a great recording, and what mixing audio skillfully can produce.

On Wednesday I saw Hampshire student Will Bangs' Division III presentation. It was held in the Red Barn, a large rustic structure. He sat at a small table with a desk lamp, audio mixer, and microphone and just talked to the audience while he showed videos he and high school students he worked with had made projected onto a very small movie screen placed next to him. It was terriffic, but the microphone made all of the difference. If he had just sat there and talked to us – a crowd of over 50 people – it would have been a weak presentation. It was simple, but intimate because of the presentational power of amplification. Audio amplification is a lot like film lighting. It separates the subject from the background and draws our eye to what is meant to be seen or in this case heard. It was a lot like a "This American Life" show on stage. There were stories he just told as radio - voice only, then there were stories that were shown on the video projector and then he moved back and forth – each form playing off of the other.

The music video "Playing for Change" is a tour deforce of audio recording and mixing. It's subtle and builds and weaves instruments and voices as it progresses in complexity. It's one of the most restrained audio mixes I've heard. Think of all the audio they didn't use. The video part documents the making of it as much as showing the musicians and locations. You come to understand what's going on as it unfolds making it more enjoyable because of your growing understanding.

Susan Boyle, however, has a story behind it that adds more punch to the unfolding of events. It is a great recording and you can see fully how a microphone changes the sound of a voice from ordinary to extraordinary, but it's the context of the events that builds tension, surprise, irony, pleasure and hope. The performance by itself would be good, but not as uniquely memorable. However, what we are seeing is also heavily edited with the wisdom of hindsight and the power of a soundtrack that continues even after she's done singing. What we see has been arranged to bring out as much emotion as possible. It works. I wish all of my stories were as well told, succinct, and carried as much impact and warmth. Britain is a better place because it got to see Susan Boyle sing and I'm certainly looking forward to hearing more of her voice.

gunther

Showing the Work

Class assignments are sometimes fun, sometimes hard, and sometimes late. Too often we watch students work franticly in the labs only hours before a class eager to finish a project then finally, depressingly, they realize it's going to be another hour to burn a DVD of it all – too late. Compression takes time. Yes, we do have real-time DVD burners, but you don't get a menu with it and they're sometimes hard to duplicate.

There's a slight disconnect between finishing a project and outputting it in a viewable format. In our wonderful world of widening formats where you end up isn't always obvious. As I've said several times, in the old days – last year – we were almost always going to end up with a tape as the finial destination, but that's not necessarily true today. If you've been working in HDV you might not be able to hand an HDV tape to a faculty member and expect them to watch that at home. You need to make a more universal and easily viewable product. Is that a video DVD, a data DVD with a QuickTime movie on it, a flash drive with a QuickTime movie, or even a CD with a QuickTime movie on it, or upload it to YouTube and watch over the internets. The answer is yes, pick one, pick all.

OK smarty, which one do I do first and what's the fastest and best looking. Enter the Turbos. In the Advanced Media Lab we have ElGato Turbo.264 USB sticks inside all of the computers. They're small hardware accelerated compression devices that output H.264 QuickTime movies. If you're still in Final Cut Pro you can export your movie by going to File> Export> QuickTime Conversion and finding the settings with Turbo listed next to the name. Then press the Options button to change any of the settings. I like the iPod High settings, but you do have to actually try them to see not just the quality of the image, but the resulting file size. You'll be surprised by how small your movie can end up and still look great in the process. If you want to view your work in a large window use the Apple TV settings. 

If you've already exported a QuickTime movie or have a reference movie you can open the Turbo.264 application from the dock and drop your movie onto the window.  It has a nice interface that shows how fast it's encoding and how long it will take to finish. The only constraint is that the ones in the lab are only for SD projects. I have a loaner one in my office that you can borrow that does HD, but it only runs on Intel machines so you have to work in the Inter-Media Lab: B-5, for that.

So while I always say USB is too slow for video, it's pretty terrific for these little hardware sticks. Give it a try.  You can also batch process your movie and select the best format after all of them have been exported. In the opposite direction it's also a good way to sweep all of your work from the year onto a single disk for your semester or div II portfolio and don't forget to send a copy home to show mom. She'll love it.

Maybe she's shooting in HDV also, wait, it's better than that. She gave you the camcorder you're using and she bought a new one. Your mom's shooting in full HD and you're stuck in dinky HDV. And you thought you were so hot with this new stuff. Man, your mom's got it all down tight. She's savvy enough to buy the sharpest gear and have fun with it at whatever level she wants. If we want to beat your mom we all need to get faster, quicker and deeper than we ever thought possible, because we're up-against some stiff competition – your mom's shooting HD. It's "the new modern world".

gunther

Digital Realities

It's been a hard week. On Monday we had a string of technical problems all day: hard drive failures, freezes, network hangs, etc. I remember when a Hampshire grad stopped by one time and talked with us about his experiences working on a technical help desk for a famous video editing software company. He said he would get the same software problems on the same day all across the country. I believe that. There are days that seem like we're trapped in an eddy of swirling malfunctions and "general errors". It's built into the systems – clocks within clocks and they all lock up at the same time. Well it sure feels like that.

Part of the solution is to keep people calm, try to give a reasonable explanation, restore functionality as quickly as possible, make suggestions for going forward, and give emotional support as you leave. Then you walk down the hall shaking you head wondering what the heck's going on. That's the easy part.

Then there's the hard part. A conversation that starts, "My drive is making a funny sound could you take a quick look at it?" It's a friendly division III woman with a 1TB drive that she accidently knocked over on it's side while it was running. We power it up and immediately I know it's the "click of death" sound. The drive is fried. Power down. We take the drive apart to see if it's really the drive or the problem is with the case. There's little chance, but we want to know for sure. Pop it in a Mac Pro tower, power it up, bang, it's the same thing. Quick, pull the plug, power down. It's dead.

At this point there are no easy words of encouragement, there's only silence. A student comes in to ask a question, sees us all standing in silent dread and quickly leaves. My whole division III project is on that drive she says and starts to cry. I don't have a backup, everything is on that one drive. So there we all are one minute we're working in the happy and productive world of digital media, the next we're stuck in the hell of a ephemeral universe that's capricious and uncaring, full of trip wires and spiked pits. You can almost hear the recriminations going through her head. Why didn't I....

I  offer the suggestion that her committee might already have enough faith in her project to get a pass out of what she currently has, but she cuts me off quickly, "I don't care about graduating, I only care about my film." Wow, that's just the attitude we want – normally. Bruner quickly steps in and suggests the possibility of sending the drive out to have the files reclaimed and mentions a company. He pulls up their web page and calls them on the phone to get a price quote.  It's between $900 and $3,000. It's expensive and uncertain, but maybe it's the only option. I package the drive in bubble wrap, find a small box and we both watch her walk up the stairs obviously shaken.

We give lip-service to the needs of backing up your work, but when it comes to actually doing that we all fail, but it's that quiet failing that remains unnoticed until failing turns into fatality and then we're drawn up short and surprised by the enormity of the situation. As hard drive sizes increase we become smugly satisfied with using them and fail to notice that now more and more of our work is at risk. Quite like our national economy, isn't it. The Black Swan is real and the demise of digital data is as likely today as it will be in the statistical future, but all of us need to get realistic about the realities of digital perils and make them a daily factor, not a perceived distant possibility.

UPDATE:

No, the data recovery did not work. It's all gone. The good news is she's made a terrific comeback on her own. I saw the second part of the three part film and it was really great – interesting animation, done cleverly yet seemingly simple, with an interesting story behind it. All of us who've seen it love it. A job well done and a display of resilience, intelligence, and skill.

gunther

The Liebling Center Continues

I stopped in to look at the construction of the new Liebling Center addition to the film & photo building last week. As always the rooms keep changing. First I think they're too small, then they seem to feel larger, then a few days later they shrink again. It's amazing how your perceptions can change with the additions of sheetrock, paint, ceiling tiles, and lights. Think what it's going to be with stuff and people in it. Well, that's the problem – I can't.

Over the weekend my daughter received an invitation to this years alumni reunion/commencement/building opening (that's the new austerity – bundling events together, good thing there isn't a funeral happening too). She lives in San Francisco now, so I opened the invitation and discovered that Ken Burns is on a panel of distinguished alumnus and is doing the ribbon cutting of the new building on Saturday the 16th. That's just six weeks from now. Glad I know what's going on now. Wow, there's a little pressure to get stuff set up and at least look like it works. My daughter's not going to be there, but I'm an alumn too and I'll go.

My daughter and I talk about two times a week, three if I'm lucky, well two if I'm lucky. She's really calling to talk with her mother not me, but we have a good time. I'm really her step-father, but I like to claim her as my daughter since she's turned out so well. She told me once that she and I had the most in common of all of us in the family. I took that as an extreme compliment and a deep insight. We do. She studied photography and writing and is now in grad school for psychology. Psychology was one of my majors in college, along with photography, but my writing has come late and it's tardiness is noticeable. My daughter, on the other hand, is the best writer I've ever read and it's my only disappointment that she doesn't pursue it, but it's not my choice, it's hers.

So, just as it's often hard to see what rooms will turn into from discussions and drawings, it's hard to know how people will develop and what pathways are the ones to follow and the ones to avoid. You just have to let things unfold and make suggestions and hope all the changes are for the best. Cheap psychology tells us it's not the destination that's the goal, it's the journey and having fun along the way. I wonder what expensive psychology would tell us.

gunther

Wait, Stop the Clock

I started this blog back in January with the modest intent of evaluating software, which I think is best done simply by using it. Is Blogger better and easier than Wordpress or what? I've been making web pages for a long time now; starting with something I can't even remember the name of back in the 1990s (PageMill), then Dreamweaver, then our content management system, then we changed to Red-dot, then I gave up because it was such a horrible experience, then I started up with iWeb – which I actually like a lot and feel quite productive with (we can talk about that some time), then I felt guilty that we didn't have cool enough web pages and thought maybe a blog would be easier - whew! 

Suddenly, a lot of time has gone by and I've come full circle again. I've given Red-Dot another try. It's not as horrible as I remembered, but it's stiff and not much fun and doesn't seem to actually like to work with images, just those poor little slices of pictures that pass for photos. It must have been designed by word oriented people not image oriented thinkers. It's also a very formal and managed process. You write something then some one else has to "approve" it, then it gets posted, then you get to see it. My writing style, such that it is, is all about revision (I am, at heart, a video editor or as Bruner always interjects, no, you're a designer – I guess that's what friends are for, to tell you who you really are), but I like to see it posted, then read it, then revise it. For me, the form – how it ends up looking – is a real part of the work, not only the words. My sense of media is a merging of content with the shape of that content; design and meaning flowing together, one informing the other. It's not that easy to do with a CMS approach and it must not be that much fun either for those that have to do the approvals over and over. So much for the sense of live and immediate on the web. But blogging somehow has escaped that formalist approval process and even the administrators now have blogs made outside of our content management system. So it must be OK.

Anyway, that's not my point. The point is that a lot of time has passed. The semester has a speed and necessity all of its own. I get engrossed in something – the day, the week, student projects, helping, working, life – finally pause, look up and it's two months later. Guess I've been in the groove all that time. Isn't that what they call "the flow". Suddenly while working vast amounts of time have elapsed and you didn't even notice because you were having such a good time. Well, I was.

Now, when I've come back to this blog it turns out I've forgotten all the passwords and have had to struggle for a few days to think them back up. Freud would have been proud, I've recovered my memories or at least the quirky password I used and I'll try and get back into the swing of it all again. Though my viewpoint now feels slightly discontinuous. This must be what it's like to come out of a coma and join your family back in the world again – how would I know, huh.

gunther