Chiat/Day: 0 – People: 1
Category: confessions of a pixel pusher
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.
Just added ten more Terrabytes to the Xsan. When republishing the volume via afp on a OS X 10.4 server box I had to:
sharing -a /path/to/volume
serveradmin stop afp
serveradmin start afp
Things that are not obvious in this:
The path in the sharing command can not end in a slash. But the shell WILL add it if you let it finish it.
The stop / start is needed. sharing -l will show the new volume but clients can not mount it.
Another neat trick that I learned today is that you have to slice an Xraid into 2 LUNs in order to overcome an internal 2 Terrabyte limit of the Storenext *cough* Apple Xsan software. That alone gave us an unexpected 2.7TB boost.
a nice spot from W+K London for Honda.
As a flash player movie. The usual sad story:
I think the concept is brilliant.
It got implemented alright, although not appropiately: I am not sure about that the frozen car in the middle for instance).
Imagine for a few seconds what Frank Budgen would have done with this spot.
I like that they did a 120 again. Of course by now it’s the trend:
cog, hate, bravia: they all use the new format at least in the time dimension.
Aside-1: Nobody really used the freedom of aspect ratio yet. It always takes years for people to understand and use change.
Aside-2: I hope that they get it and make decent cinema commercials out of these overlong web edits. All of them would work great. Did the Bravia have a cinema media buy?
Then they have ‘viral’ intentions. And that’s usually when things fall down. Sony thought they needed to put things into a zip file for Bravia. Lame. W+K has an IP address and a flash player for the movie. YouTube and google also use this player.
It is a shame that Apple messed up and was unable to put quicktime in this place. Now we have to live with the wrong flat color and weird resizing artefacts. And with the fact that its’ tricky to download.
Google video:
I thought they would not get it all. It gets slowly better. Of course nobody will ever buy any contentfrom them. I think that Apple and Google are in for a surprise: there is no 2 dollar clip market.
Maybe G&A think that if you can make billions with ringtones that you might be able to monetize something a bit more meaningful like clips. I am not an expert on the ringtones thing, but isn’t it that it’s somewhat tricky to get free ringtones? The default costs money. Clips are different. There is ample free content.
Which is where google video starts to become better. I like that you can copy paste links:
THAT is something that W+K should have done for their “Viral”.
It’s easy and it respects the laws and dynamics of the internet.
Maybe next time. Or in five years. Ideas take time.
update:
there is a quicktime / mpeg4 Version that looks so much better.
update2:
There is also an iTunes video cast Version with a 3 part “making of”. Maybe that campaign has more depth than was initially visible from that one link I found everywhere.
update3:
it work’s
digg, del.icio.us the whole nine yards. I am sure boingboing will follow. They are late these days.
In theory this might be a good idea. What comes from it we will see.
In this recent ars technica article the author writes that cinema commercials grossed 315 Million US in 2003. Which would make it the 3rd biggest movie of that year. Right between Finding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean. Sounds big, of course. But when you sum up the ten biggest movies then you get close to 2 Billion. It’s fair to say that movie theatres ruin everybodies experience for less a fraction of their income.
Let me say that I made good money with cinema commericals: Software that I wrote for a “Solitaire” Film Recorder provided plenty of content for the european cinema market in the nineties. Mostly commmericals. A cinema commercial can actually a decent piece of entertainment. It’s just that most of them are not. The worst is always when a quick edited TV commercial gets pushed into the cinema. Mostly out of media buy consideration: “Let’s get that cinema demographic”. This afterthought shows: The content is not meant to be seen on the ‘big screen’ and that causes troubles that will ruin everybodies experience. You can not sell things when the whole presentation looks like junk.
The overall ‘junkification’ of the cinema experience will cost the more and more viewers. Which is a shame.
A decent cinema can provide amazing images and sound. I still prefer to see a movie in a decent Theatre.
Just that they are hard to find these days.
Yesterday I had to move a site that I wrote from LA to Paris. From redhat to debian. Overall not a bad experience. Debian is different but seems neither worse nor better than Redhat or Suse from what I can tell. apt-get is your friend. Why they felt that apache is a better name than httpd beats me.
Complex things go well and simple ones have surprises:
Changing the timezone back from Paris to LA I first ran tzselect.
That gave me the correct value. But then I had read on the web to change /etc/default/rcS. Which does not make sense to me: UTC is UTC is UTC. That’s what it’s there for. I then found /etc/timezone. I thought that would be it. Rebooted and, well, ssh
hash has changed. Interesting side effect. But still we were on the wrong time. Then I found that /etc/localtime was still (soft) linked to /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Paris. After changing this to /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Los_Angeles the date command gave me thee ‘right’ time. But apache/php still reported mod times of files in the old style. A second reboot fixed also that.