Friday, June 27, 2008

Two Pieces of Eye Candy

They’re not videos; they’re art.

Links to a pair of lovely (for lack of a better term) “music videos” crossed my desk this week that I thought would be nice to share as you go into your weekend.

If you’re looking for something invigorating, then first view Tyger by Guilherme Marcondes. It contains a brilliant combination of physical animation (the tiger itself) along with 3D, a flat cartoon look, and glowing graphical elements. I had to view it twice: the first time, I was delighting in the sheer craft involved; the second time I got the story. I thought it was a particularly bold move to include the puppet handlers in the action, as it further broke down the walls of expectation; Trish would have liked to have seen a 3D tiger so that the surprise of seeing the handlers wouldn’t take away from enjoying the story. Guilherme has previously created videos for MTV, Microsoft, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and Animal Planet; click here to read an interview with him by Computer Arts magazine.

To calm down after the excitement of watching a tiger stalk a city, you might want to next view the soothing abstract video drift by Richard Lainhart. Some of you may know Richard for the period he and Brian Maffitt (of Total Training) hosted the New York After Effects user group, but he is equally well known in the electronic music universe. This movie combines Richard’s After Effects skills with a soundtrack improvised on a lap steel guitar, processed the Kyma sound design workstation.

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Monday, June 23, 2008

Mainstream Media’s new correspondent: YouTube

YouTube as the new AP Wire Service. Except nobody gets paid.

I’m still working out how I feel about this, so feel free to chime in with your own comments.

This past weekend, drag racer Scott Kalitta died in an accident while qualifying for the NHRA SuperNationals. The event was televised by ESPN.

I first learned about the tragedy while browsing the web site for the Los Angeles Times newspaper. In the initial version of the story, they didn’t have photos, but they did have a video of the accident.

It turns out that the video was an embedded clip from YouTube.

The interesting implication of this is that a news gathering source no longer needs to have staff on site, trade the story with a partner, or buy it from another news service; they can just link to a free service someone else has created.

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Friday, June 20, 2008

AFI Digital Content Lab Sessions

A couple of interactive TV sessions at upcoming conferences.

We occasionally post mention of what’s happening at the American Film Institute’s Digital Content Lab (AFI DCL for short), as it’s perhaps the best incubator around right now for interactive television. Here’s a couple of sessions they have coming up that are part of other conferences (the first with a registration discount):

MediaXchange
June 25-27, Los Angeles, CA

Exhibition Session June 26: New Technologies Impacting Drama Creation
Professionals from around the globe congregate in Los Angeles to address new models for scripted drama and for an exciting insight into the fast-evolving future of a more global TV drama industry. AFI Discount Resistration Code: EDU814 (3-day) or AFIEDU814 (1-day).

LA TV Festival Digital Day
July 30-August 1, 2008, Hollywood, CA

DCL Session, July 30: Steal These Ideas
Join project participants and mentors as they share lessons learned in the Digital Content Lab. The innovations and ideas developed in the lab are for the benefit of the entire television community, so come, learn and steal an idea or two!

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Tuesday, June 17, 2008

At Last - Someone Who Gets Web Advertising

The latest online Mac/PC ad uses the web page as a medium, not a display space.

Hurry: go to CNN’s home page, look for the Mac/PC ad on the right, and click on “Click to play with sound.” Then keep your eye on the ad to the right, as well as the banner ad that goes along the top of the page. The two ads are coordinated, with the characters in the ad on the right commentating on the animated banner ad above them.

I constantly rail about how clients just slap an ad intended for one medium into another, very different medium without modification. This is a case of an adaptation of a television ad that really takes advantage of a different medium: a web page. Kudos to the creatives who thought that up (whether you’re an Apple fan or not).

Just like multiscreen video projections are a real fun project for motion graphics designers, maybe multi-panel web ad or graphic design will prove to be a new outlet for us as well. You don’t get to do it too often, but when you do, take advantage of the space!

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Saturday, June 14, 2008

A Retro View of the Future

We unearth a time capsule and see how predictions for digital television have panned out so far.

Back in the early 90s, I wrote a column on interactive media for Audio/Video Interiors magazine. It was an odd fit; I was writing highly technical, philosophical think pieces, while the magazine was aimed at the most blatant forms of consumerism and instant gratification – but the editor gave me free rein, and it was a fun romp.

I’ve had reason to go clean out my archives recently, and it’s been quite a laugh to read the predictions of what the “future” of television and video would supposedly look like. To give you an idea of the landscape at the time, DVDs were just being developed, HD was but a promise, and the main way of gathering information was to attend lots of conferences and trade shows – for example, it was considered odd that I also had started to use chat rooms on sites such as The Well as part of my research.

One set of predictions I wrote about were made by noted futurist Nicolas Negroponte (co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, founder of the One Laptop Per Child project, and author of Being Digital) on the implications of television going digital. Let’s have some fun and see how many came true:

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Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Compression Artifacts & Pulldown

A question about a ghost leads to discourses on 3:2 pulldown and the QuickTime codec dialog.

This started as a quick post about how to gain finer control over the compression settings in the QuickTime dialog. But before we can get there, we first need to talk talk about how 3:2 pulldown works. (Trust me; it all ties together; it was also a good little mystery.)

I recently gave a training session at a local studio, and at the end they were invited to trot out their Barney Stumpers (questions about why something went wrong, how something works, etc.). For one stumper, a user had some footage with 3:2 pulldown, and after pulldown was removed, he noticed that an after-image of the previous frame appeared in the next frame after an edit. Why?

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Friday, June 06, 2008

Who Will Rule The New Internet?

“Take what man makes and use it, but do not worship it, for it shall pass.”

For those who contemplate issues such as the title of this post, Josh Quittner wrote an excellent article for Time on this subject. (It’s rather long, so be ready to carve out a small chunk of time before heading over to read it.) He doesn’t preach, nor pick winners and losers; he notes at the end “I’m rooting for everyone in this war.” Instead, he gives thoughtful, in-depth coverage of what Facebook, Google, and Apple’s iPhone are up to, along with a bit of a history lesson and comments from top-shelf thinkers such as Marc Andreessen. Find a few minutes this weekend and give it a read.

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Wednesday, June 04, 2008

A Distorted View of the World

A case study of why it’s crucial to plan just how you’re going to move between 16:9 and 4:3 worlds.

One of my vices is auto racing; I love to watch it. Which, of course, means that Speed TV (formerly Speedvision) is a requisite part of my satellite or cable TV package. Speed is owned by Fox Sports; you’d think there’d be some budget available, and some standards enforced. But every now and then, they put on a program that makes me wonder just who they’re hiring to do their production. (See my previous blog post Staggering Mistakes for another shining example.)

One recent program - a preview of a Formula 1 event - had me stumped for days trying to figure out just how in the world they managed to mess up the image that much (the result of which is simulated here). Here’s what I think they did:

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