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Trying Hulu Embed Again
I’m embedding a second Hulu clip because both Jeffrey Taylor in France and Phil Campbell in the UK informed me that they were getting this message when they tried to view the video I embedded in my previous post.
“Unfortunately this video is not available in your country or region. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Phil suggested it might have been because of some sort of rating on the previous video, so I embedded a clip from “30 Rock” that shouldn’t have similar issues.
Dude… Where’s My Twitter Link?
As I reported back on June 28, 2007, Twitter ‘ruined my life’ [link].
I realize _now_ that there’s something that I left out.
Today, Charles Hope twittered… Yes, “twittered”… There’s no such thing as a “tweet” or else the app would be named “tweeter”…. Anyway… Charles twittered that the “older” link was no longer at the bottom of our Twitter pages. I checked it out, and sure enough, there was no link allowing me to check back past my first page of the most recent posts. I figured that since they’re always doing tests and trying to improve how twitter works, it was a programming error and that it would be quickly replaced. Then, someone mentioned an issue with spam, and that the link was deliberately removed in response to it.
I still wasn’t concerned, because I know that I can type http://twitter.com/home?page=2 directly into my browser to get to the next-most-recent page of posts. No dice. Pages 2, 3, 4 and 5 all returned the exact same Page 1 entries….. MINUS the entries that had fallen off the edge of the flat Earth, because new people had twittered since I had last refreshed. :/
The link removal wouldn’t be a big deal to people following a handful of people, but when you’re following > 230 people, like I am, it’s a major ‘problem’ and jacks a critical amount of functionality that I get out of Twitter. Fortunately, out of the > 240 people following me on these social status-update sites like Twitter and Pownce (and Jaiku? … Haven’t heard from that app in AGES!), Veronica Belmont replied to my status update on Pownce [link], informing me not only that it was a temporary issue, but pointing me to the Twitter blog where Biz Stone had already addressed the issue earlier this morning. Fortunately, she replied on Pownce, because on Twitter, her post would have scrolled off the bottom of my “page 1″ and been (temporarily) lost forever, unless she had added an @BillCammack to it and it would have alighted in my “replies” section. So, thanks to Veronica, this is a different post than it would have been. :)
Photo Credit: Jared Klett
For me, one of the values of Twitter is that you don’t have to pay attention to it and it will save the status updates for you. I’ve gone back as far as 11 pages, which span several hours. That’s normally where you lose the “older” link. This means that when it’s crunch time, and I’m being my most effective and efficient, I can release Twitter from my mind entirely and only get back to it when I have processing cycles for it. Removing the “older” link from the first page means that I have to constantly remember Twitter to check it on the web site or I’d actually have to install a widget which would keep sending me the messages, non-stop, all day, consistently distracting me from what I’m trying to do. Neither option’s optimal.
It’s one of those things that you don’t miss until it’s gone. :) Taking the “older” link from the front page of Twitter turns it into the home page of Facebook. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to increase the number of pages of updates that you can see on Facebook’s home page. They’re not even in chronological order. If they were, you wouldn’t see that an entire stack of your friends just joined a new group… You’d see individual instances with other types of updates in between them. When I get to the bottom of Facebook’s ome page, I invariably wonder what happened BEFORE the edge of the flat Earth that the rest of the updates fell off of. Of course it’s a good ploy to make it so people go to Facebook more often specifically so they DON’T miss the revolving-door updates, but that doesn’t work for me personally, so removal of the “older” link on Twitter is nothing short of a disaster. :)
I just checked my page right now, and there are only 20 twitters on the front (read: ONLY) page. Amongst the > 230 people I’m following, the oldest post is a whopping 22 minutes old. :/ I’ve been writing this post for more than 20 minutes, so there’s an entire ‘generation’ of comments that I’ve entirely missed and will never ever see unless they fix their spam bot issues within the next 8 hours or so.
This isn’t the stock market, so it’s not mission-critical for me to know in real-time what my Twitter friends are doing, thinking or saying. However, I was glad to read in the Twitter blog that the “older” link is going to be reinstated ASAP. Part of my daily productivity is using down-time during rendering, uploading, etc to catch up with what’s been going on in the last couple of hours since I even THOUGHT about Twitter at all. 22 minutes worth of status updates from > 230 people isn’t even a drop in the bucket.
Good thing I checked twitter within 20 minutes of Charles’ post, or I would have been completely in the dark as far as WhereTF my “older” link went! :D
Bill Cammack • New York City • Freelance Video Editor • alum.mit.edu/www/billcammack
Recording Episode 01 of “The Lab”
WOWWWWW!!!
OK… So I just spent an hour recording my lines for my first episode of “The Lab”. I’m an editor, not an actor. I had the incorrect notion that what I was about to do was more like talking than acting. It was really something I’ve never experienced before……
That was an amazing trip. I wanted to blog it now, while I’m still feeling it.
There’s a journey that you take when you try to record something quasi-theatrical. I’m even more sensitive to it since I’m an editor. I’m more aware of what I can and can’t use.
What I mean by record is when YOU’RE the on-air talent. There’s so much to think about, but then you can’t actually afford to think about it because you have to deliver the lines… that is… IF you scripted your lines ahead of time, and preferably studied them. I did neither, since I’m not an actor. I had no idea it was going to be so hard to pull at least three directions together and then do the right thing with what you receive to deliver the goods. I have no idea whether I have a show or not. If I don’t, that’s fine. I’ve slated my release of episode 1 of “The Lab” for Friday. I still have tonight and all of tomorrow to do it over if I don’t have what I need.
The first thing I noticed was that I had to stop myself from wanting to deliver the lines in a stoic fashion, just to get them out. Then, I realized things would have been way better if I had scripted the lines and practiced them instead of trying to make stuff up on the fly. I had a couple of cues that I had figured out, but the problem was that by the time I was on the spot, doing the do… I had seen the scenes so many times that I wasn’t naturally affected anymore by watching them, and there was no natural launch into what I wanted to say about the section. I had to fake the launch and then make sure I wasn’t stiff delivering the actual lines that I had just decided upon and hadn’t practiced, ever. :/
The obvious question is why not pause the process until I made something up? :D The problem with that is that I needed to shoot the whole thing in one session so there was no chance of the camera moving from where it was. I decided to run the video from the monitors live instead of greenscreening them or matting out the screens and shrinking and distorting the video. I knew I was in it for the long haul as soon as I pressed the button, so I went for it and now I have whatever I have… if anything! :D
I can’t really feel the effects from the journey at this point, but I remember hearing the click that indicated that the camera had shut off and that there wasn’t anything more I could do about getting the show on tape. I remember this feeling of… ?relief? and a return to ?reality?… I’ll definitely be doing way more pre-production for my next episode, but this time, I was so glad to get the set done that I just had to try to make it happen. Actually, when I was completely ready, I wasn’t INTERESTED in filming the show right then. That was the first battle… actually getting myself to start in the first place. It was only after I was in the process that I realized how important a script is that you’ve practiced over and over.
There’s more to being on-air-talent than meets the eye… I mean if you’re going to do a decent job at it… and I’m not saying that *I* did a decent job! :D It’s that there are things you have to remember, and while you’re remembering them, you have to forget them so you can seem authentic or natural. You have to internalize them and then live with them and “act as if”. I guess this is why some actors *coughnicholascagecough* always seem to be portraying the exact same character. Their expression is the same in different movies, so you get the same effect when you watch the actor’s performance.
Another thing that’s tough is that you’re not talking to anybody! :D I mean, you know the audience is “inside” that little lens, but there’s really nobody there, so you have to pretend you’re talking to someone. Depending on the person or people that you imagine yourself talking to, you’re going to deliver differently. You’re going to sound different. You’re going to use different words. I’m sure my performance suffered from “identity crisis”, but I’ll just fix that in the edit. :D
Just about the only thing that I learned along the way that helped me was in order to get over the fact that I was no longer highly amused by the scenes, having seen them multiple times while I was selecting them, what I DID find amusing was how ‘lost’ I was and unable to recreate my surprise and interest in the shot. Fortunately… I found that realization so funny, that I ended up laughing at how ridiculous it was and realize that that was my out. Whenever I needed a laugh, I got a laugh off of the fact that I couldn’t laugh because the scene wasn’t funny to me anymore. :D WHAT LUCK! :D
So, yes… More scripting… More practicing (more like ANY practicing, since I didn’t practice at all, having no script, just some outline notes). I didn’t want to script it, but that’s because I didn’t know there were so many other things to worry about when you’re trying to make it happen from in front of the camera instead of behind it. About 1/3 of the way through, I decided to get over the fact that I was talking to a lens. :D It wasn’t so tough after that, but that was only one of several ‘issues’ that I was having.
I decided I was going to play some music to see if I wanted to use any of it to get me in or out of the piece. Unfortunately, the way the camera was set up, I had the choices of holding the guitar at a ridiculous angle to play it or play naturally, and the guitar wasn’t in the shot at all. Since I decided on using a single shot for the whole episode, I just had to miss out on the appearance of the guitar. I’ll have to see if anything can be done with that in post.
I was very glad when I heard the click indicating it was all over. It was a weight off, for sure. I learned A LOT about the process, and I’ll be ready for it next time. I’ll also be habituated to certain elements, so those won’t be issues for me. Depending on how it works, I might have to rethink my shooting style as well, or maybe shoot it twice.. once as a practice so I can see how everything works together and then a second time as the real deal. Another issue was that I was sitting in approximately the same place the whole time, so I said approximately the same thing again, closer to the camera…. that is, from what I could remember that I said, since I had no script! :/
Anyway… anyone preparing to do this for the first time, beware! hahahaha :D This is one of those situations where you have to learn by on-the-job training, because you’re not going to feel like this in any normal situation. Even having a normal conversation and having someone tape you isn’t the same as trying to deliver lines that you HOPE are going to connect scene A to scene B, while relating to the audience in an effective and preferably consistent manner. It doesn’t prepare you for talking to a lens and convincing yourself you’re talking to a person or people. It’s not as easy as it looks! :D
Actually, I started doing better (IMO) when I stopped caring if it was good or not. :)
Viacom Sues YouTube
NewTeeVee.com reports that Viacom sued YouTube and Google today over the display of copyrighted materials.
Of course, this makes sense with all the pirated material on YouTube….
Another NewTeeVee article may shed extra light on the situation, since Viacom has signed on to be a content partner with Joost. An amount of your value to a particular site as a content creator or producer is that people HAVE to go to that site to see your content. If people are ripping your videos to YouTube, your effectiveness is diluted, AND _your_group_ doesn’t get any credit for the hits or popularity of your own content. It all goes to the pirate, along with whomever subscribes to that channel in the hopes of finding even more of your content.
I’m still waiting to see what YouTube’s going to do about revenue-sharing with non-professional content creators. I’d like to see what their plan is to monetize the channels of the popular YT characters like Boh3m3 and TheHill88 and LisaNova an even the proven-to-be-scripted Lonelygirl15.
Hopefully, there’ll be money left over for people who are actually creative on YouTube after deals are made to pay off the lawsuits about the blatant and rampant piracy of previously-made, copyrighted content.
Bill Cammack • New York City • Freelance Video Editor • alum.mit.edu/www/billcammack
Digital Video Data Rate
First of all, I’d like to thank Lynne D. Johnson for the opportunity to blog as a Fast Company Expert.
There are many reasons a particular digital video might not run well, or at all, on your computer. You might not have enough processor speed. Your video card might not be able to handle the task. You may not have the necessary codec installed. If you can see and hear the video, but it doesn’t run smoothly, your best bet is to lower the data rate. It might seem that the answer lies in decreasing the frame size. A smaller video should run more smoothly than a larger video, right?
In most cases, digital video being presented on a computer or over the internet has been compressed. By definition, the video you are watching is “smaller” than the original video. It’s smaller in size (perhaps 320×240 when the original was 640×480), but it’s also smaller in file size, or the amount of space it takes up on your drive. The parameter that limits your frame size is independent of the parameter that limits your data rate. If you decrease the frame size without decreasing the data rate, you end up with a video with a smaller viewing size that takes up the exact same amount of space on your drive.
Data rate is measured in kbps (kilobits per second or thousands of bits per second). You can set a data rate limit when you compress a digital video. If you leave the frame size the same as the problematic compression attempt and decrease the data rate, you end up with a smaller file size as well as a video that demands less processing power.
Eventually, you’ll get the video down to a manageable data rate for your computer. Hopefully, the video still looks good. If it doesn’t (since there’s now much less data per second making up each frame), you have the choices of either decreasing your frame size or decreasing your frame rate to get the visual quality where you want it now that you’ve dealt with your performance issues.
Bill Cammack • New York City • Freelance Video Editor • alum.mit.edu/www/billcammack
re: Chris Brogan’s “Your Voice”
re: Chris Brogan’s “Your Voice”
I think there’s something more important / useful than learning voice. That would be learning to listen to yourself and discover your own voice.
Learn your own patterns, your own perceptions, your own priorities and values. The more aware you become of your own personal “voice”, the more efficient you’ll be in expressing yourself and the more you’ll enjoy what you’re doing, which makes it easier to write A LOT in a short amount of time.
Then again, it depends on what one is writing about… I can’t write about surfing, because I don’t surf. I’ve seen “Point Break” and other beach movies, and I’ve even watched a competition or two on television, but I have no personal experience with surfing, so A) it would take me a long time to write something about surfing, and B) whomever actually surfs would know that what I’m saying is completely inauthentic. If the goal is to write horror films or stories about people flying around on brooms, then, yeah… I think that needs to be learned! :D
Your (Chris’) particular voice may very well be ‘merely’ a series of writing tricks….. except it’s YOUR collection of tricks and you deploy them in your own particular fashion. The individuality is in the selection and use of the tools, not the tools themselves. The ‘value’ of your voice is found in the same place. Your perception is what separates you from the next writer. It’s all about how you perceive things and then how you express yourself to the reader. I see a table, you see a chair, someone else sees a collection of wood. Making others aware of a different way of seeing things is value right there.
Person vs Material is an interesting question. I think the first time, people in general read for material… After that, they read for the person… assuming it’s the same material. I think that if they disagree with or just plain wouldn’t like to believe what you have to say about things, they won’t return to read more, even if it’s on a topic they’re really interested in. OTOH, if you have an interesting take on people flying around on brooms, they might click on your new article about auto repair…..
I think that what makes someone’s ‘voice’ useful to someone else is relevance and competence. If you’re talking about issues that are interesting or important to that person and they respect what you have to say about it or how you see it, you’ve gained someone that sees you as an authority on that topic. If that person decides to check what you have to say on other topics, they may gain respect for your views in general and not just on that one topic that they clicked on from a search engine that one time.
Interestingly enough, IMO, it all comes down to individuality, and perhaps the luck of the draw… How much life experience is someone bringing to the table to be able to talk about certain issues? How much training did someone pursue to learn “writing tricks”? How often can you say about that person “he/she has a point there!”? How narrow does that person’s range appear to be in different topics that they can talk about intelligently? Where has this person gone and what have they put themselves through in order to formulate the concepts they’re expressing right now?
I’ve actually learned some of this over the last few months. The ‘value’ isn’t in the production values or the writing tricks & gimmicks. The value is in what YOU take for granted that other people have no idea about and have no way of finding out about unless YOU tell them about it, take them there and show it to them…..
