vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

In Case

Anyone was wondering. This is good. Let it out so you can see the damn thing, if you don’t let it out, then how will you ever know what is in there? For the unitiated, Dewani has to make an interactive QuickTime essay that uses Barthes “From Work to Text” to think about video and/or audio online. Everyone in Integrated Media is doing the same project, so we’ll have 60 mixed media, interactive QuickTime riffs on Roland.

Good Enough

Well, the semester is drawing to a close, only another fortnight or so to go. And as usual I feel like what we are covering in Integrated Media is being compressed into the closing fortnight. Things we didn’t look at, didn’t explore, didn’t make. This year I think we’ve covered a bit less material than in 2005, but it also feels a bit more thorough, a bit more solid. I always move slowly through material, preferring having some important ideas slowly sink in than some sort of whistlestop tour through modern networked media. Better that everyone can compress and embed video, and wonder intelligently about what TV or radio might be in 5 years, than being able to toss around some cool words but not actually understanding what’s behind them.

Which brings me to something else. One of the things we explore in semester one is the move from professional to personal media publishing. What happens when phones, small cameras and QuickTime with a big of iMovie are used to make media content? When blogs are the publication and distribution format. In classes this is realised in the tension between ‘professional’ standards and everyday media. For students it is in having to get work made and published, and having to trade off what they think of as ‘quality’ to get it done on time. The art of doing good enough in time enough. Why? Because there are times and places for spending all the time you have in achieving excellence, and there are times (like in your job) where if the boss says “cut this to 32 seconds by 4pm” she really means 32 seconds, and 4pm. You can’t make it 35 seconds because it works better, and you can’t deliver it at 4.30pm because it will be better work.

It is also to introduce ideas of just what ‘professional’ standards might mean. Personally I think they’re odd. TV is more than happy to have any footage, of any quality, if the event is important enough (satellite phones from Baghdad, hand held grainy domestic footage of any suitable accident as it happens) – the desire to see or hear over rides pretty much everything else. There is a fetish, which students fully subscribe to, about these ‘standards’ (biggest camera, systems must be industry ‘standard’, and so on). If you can’t tell a decent story using a domestic camera and two minutes, then 3 chips and betacam is not going to rescue you.

Macs as Pets

Read what this product does, and then think about how it describes our relationship to it.

You Know

Blogging is intimidating when Big Media feels obligated to satirise it. The satire misfires, in the way that journalists who in their professional research think they know their topic but actually don’t, but that’s less the issue than all the things that are chosen to be mocked. Academics are routinely criticised for being in an ‘ivory tower’, well, seems Jim has just handed himself the keys to his own. (After all it is only from the point of view of an edited, mediated ‘professional’ ideology of writing and publishing that would even be bothered with getting in a lather over the sorts of things mocked here. Beware all real writers, the barbarians are at the gate.)

Friend’s New Blogs

Two very good friends of mine have new blogs. Yoko has moved to a new rmit server, and Lisa to a nice shiny new wordpress.com site. They were both on hypertext.rmit.edu.au but what with spam, the difficulty of upgrading individual installations to make them more spam resistant I struggled with being able to support them. Both are very good sources about design research, visualisation of processes, and reflective practice. (Highly recommended, 4 stars)

Interpretation and Reading

Kim worries about the fine distinctions being drawn between reading and interpretation (a good thing to be worried about), and answers his own problems. Interpretation, as translated in “From Work To Text” is about interpretation as uncovering the ‘right’ meaning. Barthes’ point is simple, and a long way from just saying that we all interpret differently (naive post-insert critical term-ism), it is saying that the text is about interpretation as the play of possible meanings and so the text is precisely opening onto the plurality of meanings. So it isn’t a work that is just perhaps difficult (so what does it ‘really’ mean), it is a work that you experience as being about many different things, interwoven and not, and deliberately presents itself to be experienced as being plural in this way.

Learning Technologies

Learning Technologies 2006 website is now available. A very generous TAFE sector education conference. I was a guest last year and made the mistake and talking past the very real and legitimate right now needs of people teaching into remote regions, and waffled on about video futures. Sort of irrelevant when your classrooms are separated (literally) by 1000′s of kilometres.

Half or Half?

Will, who makes very beautiful videoblog posts, has pointed out that through viewing each other’s video posts, and reading each other’s blogs, that conversations are happening that does affect what is made, how, and why. He (rightly) notes that we have an “emergent cinema without show business”. Well, we’ve always had this, whether it be via home movies, buff films (episodes made of favourite TV shows, films), enthusiast footage (trains, planes, automobiles, don’t even start on pets) or just alternative cinematic practices. Just as we’ve had literature without a publishing industry, and music with out show business. So we have larger, faster, possibly and hopefully richer conversations, and shared practices, and some new forms are appearing (I think Will is making a major contribution to this). And he’s right. I spend most of my time worrying that the glass is half empty. Dunno why, and it isn’t how I’d prefer to be.

Master Class

Today I have the honour of giving a master class to Masters students on videoblogging. I’m sure the nomenclature is fine, though I am suspicious of the echoes of apprentice and master that it is based on. (On the other hand I also recognise that historically the term is a designation of respect towards the teacher.)

Since I am not certain what these students know and can do, I’m running through the following, though since it is a one off brief (two hour) session I expect everyone’s mileage to vary.

So, they already know how to capture video so will I cover:

Compression

Will briefly discuss key and delta frames, how compression more or less works (it’s ‘logic’) and so what things make a difference and become important. In terms of format will discuss and advocate H.264 and that is the only format we’ll use for teaching. How much data per minute? Frame size, frame rate, and so on.

Embedding

This has two parts. The first is to explain embedding, and then to make a poster movie. This requires using QuickTime for some very basic editing and exporting, and then understanding a little bit about the internals of the embed tag in QuickTime. Our labs have Pageot installed, so we will use that to write the appropriate embed tags for QuickTime. Since pageot lays out the tag with soft breaks it needs to be taken into something like TextWrangler to clean up, otherwise blog systems like WordPress read the line breaks as hard returns – breaking the embed tag completely!

Upload

Straightforward, using ftp or sftp to upload the poster movie and the video footage so that it has a valid URL (and of course understanding how to figure out that URL). The simplest ways to test that the video is where you think it is is to load the URL of the video in QuickTime or a browser, if it’s there move to next step, if not see what the error is. (Common errors on our server are 404, so your url is wrong, or 403, access forbidden, which is a permissions problem.)

Write the new post

Placing some text and adding the embed tag into your post, and voilà, publishing.

Syndication

This could get very complicated, depending on versions of WordPress, and so on. So around here we might just need to sketch what’s required. The barebones are to add a link to the video/audio file (not to the poster movie) that is completely separate from the embed tag, this link can be not visible in the browser (so it does not surround any text, or space, so is not clickable). This href needs to include rel=”enclosure” as a part of its argument. We then take the RSS from the blog and pass it through FeedBurner, making sure we enable smartcasting in feedburner. Feeburner then provides us with a new RSS feed (from feedburner) which will have enclosures enabled. If you add this feed to your blog (for example in the sidebar) then you have a RSS feed that contains the enclosures, and you’re podcasting.

The steak knives

If we get this far then the last bit will be to introduce collage in QuickTime Pro. How to copy, paste, add scaled and the use of layers in QuickTime. A bit of a discussion of how it is different to editing in hardvideo systems, and that should wind up the session. A lot to cover. I suspect we’ll get half way through. I also think if there is sufficient interest we will just run a second one later on.

Trackback and Comments

Ah, I turned comments off and I just realised that trackbacks don’t appear publicly. Will have to investigate WordPress, I’m assuming it is the template and that I can add a bit of code in to the template so that trackback appears. If not might have to turn on comments again so that trackback is public.