The Tragic Death of Practically Everything http://bit.ly/bpVUQe
Inspired by Chris Anderson’s latest edition of Wired Magazine that declared “The Web is Dead” (by manipulating statistics and graphs to support an incorrect argument) Technologizer takes a walk through the “deaths” of so many things we still use every day: Internet Explore, the Mac, Linux and more are all dead.
Simplistic, inaccurate “journalism” is why newspapers and media should be dead and gone.
RT @iDiyas: Apple patent opens new frontier for gaming-documenting http://bit.ly/a7si9G
I’m not even sure why this interests me, but it does. Taking “action snaps” from your game at crucial moments and making them into a cartoon. Now Apple patents a lot of ideas that don’t make it into products, so this may never come to anything, but it is interesting.
Imagine an Enhanced Reality game – where extra elements are overlaid a live camera view – and getting a comic record of the adventure.
The Future of Picture Editing http://bit.ly/aNRLVA
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Zak Ray when I travelled to Boston. I like people who have an original take on things and Zak’s approach to picture editing – and his tying it to existing technologies (that may ned improvement) – is an interesting one.
And yet, despite such modern wonders as Avid Media Access and the Mercury Playback Engine, modern NLEs remain fundamentally unchanged from their decades-old origins. You find your clip in a browser, trim it to the desired length, and edit it into a timeline, all with a combination of keys and mouse (or, if you prefer, a pen tablet). But is this process really as physically intuitive as it could be? Is it really an integrable body part in the mind’s eye, allowing the editor to work the way he thinks? Though I can only speak for myself, with my limited years of editing experience, I believe the answer is a resounding “noâ€. In his now famous lecture-turned-essay In the Blink of an Eye, Walter Murch postulates that in a far-flung future, filmmakers might have the ability to “think†their movies into existence: a “black box†that reads one’s brainwaves and generates the resulting photo-realistic film. I think the science community agrees that such a technology is a long way off. But what untilthen? What I intend to outline here is my thoughts on just that; a delineation of my own ideal picture-editing tools, based on technologies that either currently exist, or are on the drawing board, and which could be implemented in the manner I’d like them to be. Of course, the industry didn’t get from the one-task, one-purpose Moviola to the 2,000 page user manual for Final Cut Pro for no reason. What I’m proposing is not a replacement for these applications as a whole, just the basic cutting process; a chance for the editor to work with the simplicity and natural intuitiveness that film editors once knew, and with the efficiency and potential that modern technology offers.
It’s a good article and a good read. Raises the question though – if Apple (or Adobe/Avid) really innovated the interface would people “hate it” because it was “different”?
Copyright – what’s it really for? http://bit.ly/dAKuzl
The primary purpose of copyright is not, as many people believe, to protect authors against those who would steal the fruits of their labor. However, this misconception, repeated so often that it has become accepted among the public as true, poses serious dangers to the core purpose that copyright law is designed to serve.
If you think you know copyright and what it’s for, you’re probably wrong.
3-D filmmaking’s radical, revolutionary potential http://bit.ly/bxJb5S
I’m not a huge fan of 3D – I don’t mind it but I don’t generally seek out 3D versions of a film because:
This Salon article considers what we could do with 3D other than what people are doing with 3D.
For the sake of argument, though, let’s think about what might happen if 3-D movies embraced only the first or the second parts of that description — if they became more intimate and character driven, or if they went in the other direction and became more structurally and stylistically abstract, even trippy.
The result could be genuinely revolutionary. It could let us experience movie storytelling — and movies, period — in a new way. It might even give rise to a new art form, one that’s related to its ancestor, cinema, but that takes off in new directions and does things we can’t even imagine yet because so few people in the entertainment industry have been willing to look beyond entertainment as they’ve always known it.
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Monsoon Multimedia – Vulkano for Macs, iPhones, iPads http://bit.ly/93kGwD
Does anyone know more about this than is in the Macsimum News item and on the company website? It looks awesome:
Consumers can now watch and control any home TV channel through a wired or Wi-Fi (and soon on 3G) connection from anywhere by installing a Vulkano and downloading a free software application on to their device of choice or from the respective app store. They can watch and control live TV and schedule a recording through an included EPG (electronic program guide), transfer, watch and control these recordings at any time on their TV, computers, smartphones or iPad type devices.
Vulkano lets users watch YouTube on their big screen TV and by leveraging UPnP (Universal Plug n Play) they can stream video and photos from their smartphones, computers and cameras wirelessly on to their living room TV without having to use cables. In the near future, Vulkano will offer free service upgrades such as Google TV, Yahoo! Widgets, Netflix, Hulu and others.
The link from the article doesn’t seem to work, but follow http://www.monsoonmultimedia.com/products.html and it does.
Why DRM Doesn’t Work http://bit.ly/aIRiuL
Forget the other arguments against DRM – that it doesn’t stop unauthorized distribution, that it harms you customers, that it is always circumvented, that it’s a way of controlling distribution and limiting it to big media – the real argument against it is that DRM doesn’t increase profits.
This basic misunderstanding between pirates and companies is the reason why anti-piracy measures will never work as a means of increasing profits. Game companies assume that if they decrease the ease with which people can pirate their game, they will increase their sales. But that is not the case. The vast majority of people will, if they lose the ability to download an illegal copy of a game, simply choose to not pirate the game and not purchase the game. I’m not making this up, either – independent game developer Reflexive published an article on Gamasutra about their experience trying to curtail piracy to increase sales. Their conclusion was that making pirated copies of their game more difficult to obtain did not increase sales. And this, mind you, was regarding game that only cost 10 dollars to purchase.
Although it focuses on game distribution the lessons apply equally well to music, movies and TV.
Tiny Number Of Creators Hitting The Jackpot… Or Many Making A Living Wage? http://bit.ly/b3Yaog
Put me down squarely in the corner of those who’s goal from “democratized” television (music and film) is to have more people making more money (decent living/middle class wage) than ever before. This will inevitably mean that fewer people win the jackpot of success.
To me this is a much better goal than trying to win the jackpot lottery of outrageous success., Every $2 milliion that a big name makes equates to 20 people early a very decent $100 K. And Ryan Seacrest’s $15 million a year to spokesmodel American Ido is obscene: That’s 150 people’s decent middle class income.
In that post, Parsons calls the old model — the one we described as the lottery ticket — as the “gambler model,” where you’re basically rolling the dice on whether or not your career will be a success or will plummet. And notes that the “cobbler model,” may not be as sexy, but you have a higher likelihood of success. The risk is lower, and the payoff is likely lower, but you can actually build a predictable career around it — and for many content creators, that’s certainly good enough. This isn’t to suggest it’s the only model. In fact, it’s not. There’s still room for rock stars and lottery tickets. But, when we’re looking at some of these content creators who are making a good living as professional musicians, the proper comparison is not to Mick Jagger, but to what they’d be doing if they were living in the world a few decades ago: and the answer is they probably wouldn’t be making music at all.
5 Actions You Want Every One Of Your Video Viewers To Take http://bit.ly/bwbsMK
A good basic reminder that we actually want people to do something when we post a video:
Now, this is just my list. You might group these behaviors differently, and that’s completely valid. But don’t lump all these actions in together as one, because they all have different triggers and they all have a different impact on your overall success. Additonally, don’t assume these actions will take care of themselves. Put yourself in the mind of the viewer. Not just any viewer, but the specific kind of viewer this video is created for. And ask yourself what would cause you to click ‘play,’ and then to complete the clip, to perform a conversion action, or to share it with friends.
Real Life Social Network v2 http://bit.ly/9povRP
A very interesting presentation how we function in social networks, both offline and online and where the problems are right now. It’s a long presentation – I felt it would be a good foundation for a book long before I realized the author had written one.
It’s a Scribd document (Flash, sorry) so I can’t copy anything relevant, but I was amused when “Tupperware Parties” were referred to as an example of how we make decisions in groups: the Tupperware Party was a brilliant model. That’s something I learnt very early in life. When I first went to University post High School, I moved out of home and made my living as a Tupperware dealer. (Not really as strange as it sounds, my parents had been Distributors for about 10 years at that time so I’d grown up with the products and knew them well).
He’s absolutely right, it was much easier to sell Tupperware in a group than I imagine it would be person-at-a-time. It was certainly easier to put some social pressure on guests to book another party. Rewards for hostesses always involved a dollar sales figure plus two or more new party bookings. I’m pretty sure I did some social manipulation to get the second one. “Won’t anyone hold a party? Betty’s got the sales figures and she’s just one party booking away from this wonderful gift.” Â Tupperware “got” social networking!