vog (a BETA videoblog)

Below you'll find the original commentary and what not that accompanied this vog when I first published it in 2003. Things to note. This is pre H.264 and was in the days when Sorenson ruled, so the video is encoded with Sorenson 3. Sorenson was a break through codec, and can do much better than you see here, but I have always treated compression as one of the formal properties that online video has at its disposal to play with, and so as is common in much of my work this vog has different compression settings for each of the three identical clips.

The large canvas for this work served two purposes. The first was to stop thinking of QuickTime (or any video player) as just a space for video only, so to expand it as a more visual space that could contain other elements. In this case a graphic background. In addition there is a text commentary that appears in the right hand side, so this larger canvas also provided a stage for the text track to appear on. As a QuickTime text track this is not rendered into the video but stays as plain ascii text within the QuickTime file. Because of this it can be addressed programmatically and in this one the size of the text is scripted to vary depending on mouse enter events for the top and bottom video panes.

When looking at it again in 2010 I had assumed that the text track component was completely broken, but it isn't. I think it is very poorly utilised in the work, but it is there, just bloody hard to find. If the video runs for 10 to 15 seconds, and you then mouse several times in and out of the top video panel, some text will suddenly appear. This is the text track. Once you've got it there you can then mouse in and out of the bottom video and the text will shrink again. In the original work you could keep shrinking it down to something stupid like 2 points, which was sort of really cool, but as of May 2010 it looks like it will not render until it is is quite a bit bigger. The problem is that once the text track has scrolled out of view it is gone, so you can mouse around all you like, it ain't going to appear again.

It would have made more sense to just have it as a text track that doesn't scroll, and let it shrink and grow in place.

From the original publication of this vog:

Mousing into each of the video panes controls the movie. One increases the font size, one pauses the work, another decreases the font size.

Then, from another blog the commentary that accompanied this vog (because in those days I had a video only blog and a text blog):

A new vog, "edinburgh from the airport bus" using the same structure as the previous few works, which I'd like to explore a bit more. This work has three simultaneous video tracks, though each is compressed differently so that the first track is only 300Kb in size with a data rate of 2.9 kbytes a second. The next is at 7.6 Kbytes a second for a total size of 760 Kb while the final one is 29 K bytes for a file size of 2.8MB. There are sprites over each of the video tracks which either pause the movie, or vary the font size of the text track up and down.

I was interested in tiling a complete video pane, rather than the slicing I have generally been doing, but to then vary the visual integrity or 'cleanness' of these videos by having them be compressed variably. This hasn't been that effective, largely because the difference in quality between the most heavily compressed and the highest quality isn't discernible enough. There is still a lot of noise and artefacts in the highest quality one and so the graduation or variation between them is less visible. (I think I'll return to this very shortly with footage that I think might be more suitable for this sort of experiment.) This work continues the aesthetic exploration of multiple video panes, networked practice, and the relation of text to image. What this series has begun to suggest for me is also a way of using a simple template like this to write a cinema studies piece, largely because here the moving image seems to drive the text. A major issue for me in my exploration of this work, particularly in relation to possible new forms for academic practice, is to move away from the humanities relegation of the image, particularly the moving image, to illustration for the text. This particularly happens in cinema studies where no matter what the work thinks it does the images are always reduced to secondary in relation to the written word. In a vog like "edinburgh bus" the text only plays because the video plays, it pauses when the video pauses, and the rhythm of the text seems to be driven by the moving image and so the relation of text to moving image is reversed. This poses what remains for me the crux of the matter; what would it mean to write so video was prior to or in front of the text, that the text responded to the video and bears witness to the image. This is a big step. At least for a text based humanities practice.

Having the three video panes show the same content, at different frame and data rates (4, 6 and 12 fps) seems to develop interesting rhythms internally. Each shows the same, slightly differently, and something about the difference between is what constitutes the effect of the work.

The textual commentary is just that, a commentary on my brief visit to Edinburgh, much like a blog entry, sans links (I can embed links into the text track but having browser windows popping up over the video just gets difficult to manage). This is, perhaps, getting close to a possible general template for an everyday kind of vogging, particularly since now that I have a template it is very quick to do.