I like Cory Doctorow’s principled, long view of things.
All posts tagged video
I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a Christian, but you don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school. As President, I'll end Obama's war on religion. And I'll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage. Faith made America strong. It can make her strong again. I'm Rick Perry and I approve this message.
This one has to be seen to be believed: Rick Perry on how gay people apparently undermine America.
The BBC put together a nice profile of Steve Jobs, featuring a number of my favorite British actors. It’s an hour, so grab yourself a beverage first, then watch it.
The Computer History Museum has a terrific video of Steve Jobs talking in the late seventies, early eighties about computing. Nice work.
I am always on the lookout for videos to share with my daughter that are both interesting to watch in and of themselves but give us a place to begin conversations:
There’s an amazing video of the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan as seen from a camera mounted inside a delivery vehicle. (Okay, you probably need to think about the fact that the camera was there to monitor the driver for a moment, which makes its presence creepy.) Once you get past that, you get a glimpse into how the progression looked, and felt to some degree, to people going about their everyday lives. The earth shakes. The sudden appearance of floodwater. The water keeps rising.
What captured my attention after a while, as you watched the cars bob about as the delivery vehicle itself bobs about, is both the quantity and diversity of the flotsam. The driver, Yu Moraga, was clearly in something of an industrial area because there are a great number of palettes floating about — all painted green, I should note, which is either the preferred color for palettes in Japan or marking the palettes as belonging to a particular company. (I would be curious to note which is the case.)
Benjamin Dowie has a short video (1:25) up on Vimeo that he shot using an iPhone 4S which is, well, it’s just amazing how good the video is. And it was shot on a phone. Now, obviously there are obviously a lot of other things that make for great video, especially sound, as I have noted before, but in terms of the creative possibilities, I am just delighted. More importantly for someone like me who works with students to document folk culture and everyday life, it just hammers home how much great equipment is already in their hands. What we need to do, what I need to do, is simply to use it to greatest effect. (Maybe that’s what I’ll do tomorrow in class.)
Amazing skill. Nice camera work. Good sound. (I have no desire to do any of this, but I would like to learn basic parkouring.)
That’s right. It’s a video about chopping an onion. It’s mesmerizing.
Grand Rapids, Michigan was unhappy with being in the top ten cities that some list considered to be “dying” and so they struck back by, well, striking up the band. Or, in this case, they struck up the entire town and lip-synced to Don McLean’s “American Pie,” which seems an apt response to the declaration of their dying status. Roger Ebert called this “the greatest music video ever,” and having seen what amounts to a single camera shot of the entire town singing the song, I think I have to agree.
So Cisco bought a perfectly good little company with a perfectly good product and then lost it all by not figuring out how to distinguish their product from the wide variety of multi-use devices that were packing “good enough” functionality into their units. The Flip is dead, and I’m okay with that. No, I don’t think the video recording functionality, including ergonomics, of my iPhone is quite as good as the Flip, but that also goes for my point and shoot Canon camera, which has largely sat in its case of late. I think the really great thing about the Flip was how some of my colleagues were using it in their classes: it was a great “good enough” video camera that made it easy to work with video. That part I will miss — I don’t see my university buying a bunch of iPod Touches any time soon. And negotiating with multiple device interfaces and usages does slow things down in the classroom.
I have been very happy with Amazon’s approach to selling digital materials: I read Kindle books on my iPad and iPhone with ease and I listen to Amazon MP3s on those devices as well as my Mac computer. I was, and am, impressed with Amazon’s valiant effort, by means of their cloud drive, to win a victory for consumer’s owning content.
But, erm, I’m really underwhelmed by their instant video offerings. Consider the following evidence:
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Motion capture and computer-generated imagery (CGI) are fast becoming standards in Hollywood productions, but the ingenuity of folks playing with off-the-shelf hardware and software never ceases to amaze me. Take a look at the video below which details how a handful of guys use the motion capture system built into Microsoft’s Kinect for the 360 game console in order to make the kind of movies they want to make:
