Chiat/Day: 0 – People: 1
Category: communication
Now that it’s over it might be worth looking at FireWire again. I think there are lessons to be learned if something as smart and nice as FireWire looses against a mix of ‘ok’ replacements.
FireWire is a standard to connect things. Together with DV tape it was supposed to change everything. And interestingly enough it did not. Computers and Video were not exactly an easy match in the early 90s. TVs, recorders, transmissions: it all was analog. Digital processing was simply not fast enough to keep up with 25 or 30 images per second. Machines that could keep up with this onslaught of bits were expensive and complex. So was the connection of the video equipment: You had cables for audio, two of them if stereo, control and one to three for video. And the computer had to do the analog to digital conversion on the way in, and vice versa on the way out.
miniDV and FireWire did change all that. One cable between your camcorder and computer and you are done. Best of all: the data traveled in its native format between tape and computer. No conversion introduced a generation loss. The visual quality of the DV format is amazing, compared to any other consumer format that existed before.
When these solutions entered the market I was convinced that they would change everything. After all it was now amazingly inexpensive to create content of technically good quality. I think that Apple shared some of my enthusiasm: They promoted FireWire but also asked for a 1$ license fee per device. They invested allot into applications that would allow for easy video editing. I think every Mac runs iMovie, and with FireWire you really only need a cable and a camera to start. It is amazingly easy. Yet nobody really does it. People that edit video today probably would have cut super 8 film with a razor blade in the seventies.
Devices get sold. Of course. But there is very little output from this equipment. There are so badly named ‘vlogs’. But just a few thousand, and only few have original content.
There will be a sequel to Clerks. The story goes that Kevin Smith was buying filmstock by loaning money on his credit card. Back in 1994 that’s what you needed to do when you wanted to make a movie. Now you go and pick up a tape for 8 dollars and that’s all you need.
Has it let to an onslaught of new and fresh ideas? When Arri made a small handheld 16 millimeter camera in the 50s it spawned the nouvelle Vague. But what did DV do? Where is the contribution of FireWire? Just because everybody can edit does not mean that everybody can edit.
When FireWire was making things easy I had high hopes in the youth. I thought that there would be a revolution in visual content. That one day I would turn on the TV and would be surprised. I think it was two or three moves ago that I did not bother wiring up the TV set anymore. Finally I sold it, after I dragged it around from place to place.
The FireWire on the latest “MacBook Pro” is half as fast as on the previous PowerBooks. iPods started out with FireWire connections but are USB2 now. The self made porn market has transitioned from Polaroid over Video to phone cams.
Firewire is a thing of the past. People don’t really want to edit video it seems. For years video editing has been amazingly simple on Mac’s, and weird and cumbersome on Windows. But its market share seemed unfazed. The iPod and the constant Windows, malware malaise did what FireWire/Video could never accomplish.
I would have bet money on the opposite. Glad I did not.
It has been a bad year for the US movie box office.
Now everybody jumps to conclusions. Me too. Of course the theatre owners point to everything but themselves. I think they share much of the responsibility for their demise.
People stop going to the movies, and theatre owners blame the bad Hollywood product for it. Maybe they should buy some diversity instead. Maybe -gulp- they should take some risk? Only few theatres have more character than a chain restaurant. Most of them are generic as it comes. And then they show dismal ads.
Cinema also lost the arms race in quality: For the average consumer the picture at home can look as good as it does in the cinema. And this is mostly pre HD DVD we are talking about. The audio at home already is as much 5.1 as it can be in a cinema. Plus that the volume will be always right, and there is no talking person next to you. Or if there should be then that is your own choice, and there is always the pause button.
During the 50s TV took away the cinemas monopoly of showing moving images. Colored movies got a boost from this, but Hollywood and the theatres went one step further: They changed their own format to widescreen. This was costly for production and theatres. But seperated the movi experience from the pale 4 by 3 Black and white TV set. Content adopted to what worked well in cinema. Some Movie genres surrendered to “I Love Lucy” and the likes,
new ones like the Cinemascope Western thrived.
Nothing like this happens right now. The movie theatres have the same whinning tone that we heard from the recording industry for years. They seem equally unable to adopt. Media habbits are changing. Games, DVDs, Internet are booming.
Just like the recording industry the Theatres blame piracy for their demise. Which is the classical looser argument. It’s not going anywhere. It does not help to search your audience for camcorders.
Theatres would have a chance though: They could make movie going an experience. Something that is fun and cool. With bad projection, bad seats and dirty theatres you will loose against any big screen TV. If movie theatres don’t make the show an event again, then they will go away. With the advent of color TVs in the early 70s many cinemas in Europe started showing porn in their struggle. I don’t think that this strategy would help US theatres right now.
If (young) people would start dressing up to go out and to the movies then theatres would have a market that nobody could take away from them. People want to celebrate an evening. Current multiplex generic mall type popcorn outlets are not the right offering for this.
I think “Narrenfreiheit” is one of my most favorite german words.
Business Week writes about MySpace and the likes. The article is better than the usual hype-treadmill-word-boilups that you can read when people from traditional media try to get a handle on yet another internet base phenomen. They write that 15 to 18 year olds spend six and a half hours a day with any form of visual media on CRT/LCD sccreens: the big 3 TV, games and internet. When I was that age, we spend that much time having sex. Probably only on three or four of the 1424 days that you have between fifteen and eighteen. The rest of time we tried to get there. I have never looked at mySpace but I suspect that the basic motivations in the lifes of teenagers have not changed that much. They are so basic that they are not worth mentioning I guess. Or, maybe, times really have changed?
Well Murdoch payed almost half a billion dollars for MySpace. Better than twenty bugs on friendster. Which one of the things I liked about this article: It does not only cite events that supports one underlying current. Friendster tanked. They still mention it, even though this would not fit into the rosy ‘social networking’ boom picture that they paint otherwise.
p&g allegdedly started a social network around a scent or spray. No, really. They spent some money on that. The really sad part about that is, that those responsible probably still occupy their corner office, despite the fact that they burned millions on a project that was as viable as, well, hm. I really tried to come up with something that would be as stupid. Couldn’t find anything.
Don’t tell George, but you can create masses of people in the computer. Pretty easy:
Massive is a software that will generate crowds for you.
Of those commecial I really only like the this PSA . Otherwise it appears as if digital crowd duplication is this years ‘frozen moment’. A visual effect that is nice at first, but if not backed up with content or meaning it becomes a yawning experience as long as it serves a replacement for an original idea.
In a supportive role it certainly can save some money by replacin lots of people.
The Carlton ad is alright as well. Carmina Burana. Like in the late eighties. But that one I have seen too often. It’s made it’s rounds.
The Aids PSA reminded me of another PSA. That one did not use Massive.
Cingular is one of these phone companies. They have a website. Allegdly you can do certain thing on this site.
Well, I just tried it, and it is broken. Never mind the cluttered design or the appauling animations. And
that html code that rushes over the page. It claims it can not find my phone number. It accepts a login, but
then can not find the records. Trying Safari instead of Firefox is says now that my account has been locked.
That’s all fine. But why did they waste their money on a website in the first place if they can’t make it work.
Can’t wait for skype to clean up with those telcos: I will not shed a single tear after any of them. Mindless stupid companies. They need to go away. Oh, and they will. They had it coming.
Ars Technica took notice that Nokia is stop selling their phone/game combination ‘N-Gage’.
Cellphones and gaming both have enjoyed huge growth rates since Nokia introduced the device in 2003.
Somehow Frankenstein concepts don’t seem to work.
Consumers today encounter from 3,500 to 5,000 marketing messages per day, vs. 500 to 2,000 in the 1970s, says J. Walker Smith, president of consumer and marketing watcher Yankelovich.
from USA today
the duke of count says:
assuming you are awake for 16 hours that means you get a new
marketing message every eleven seconds.
Nice!