Some Flickr users are protesting against Flickr (Yahoo) adding video to their services. “We Say NO to Videos on Flickr”
Archive for the 'online video' Category
dialable | everything you need is already in your pocket.
Dialable is a suite of technologies which allows the public to control big-screen content with simple cellphone interaction. Growing out of thesis work at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, it is a project by Daniel Liss.
A video interview collection of opinions on the duration of one minute for video for the oneminutes project.
PAD.MA - short for Public Access Digital Media Archive - is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films. The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non- commercial use.
We see PAD.MA as a way of opening up a set of images, intentions and effects present in video footage, resources that conventions of video- making, editing and spectatorship have tended to suppress, or leave behind. This expanded treatment then points to other, political potentials for such material, and leads us into lesser-known territory for video itself… beyond the finite documentary film or the online video clip.
The design of the archive makes possible various types of “viewing”, and contextualisation: from an overview of themes and timelines to much closer readings of transcribed dialogue and geographical locations, to layers of “writing” on top of the image material. Descriptions, keywords and other annotations have been placed on timelines by both archive contributors and users. At the moment, PAD.MA has approximately 160 “events” on video, mostly from Mumbai and Bangalore. This adds up to about 100 hours of fully transcribed video footage, which we expect to grow to more than 400 hours by early 2009.
Notes: Pad.ma uses a lot of text-annotating to provide extra information on video content across the timeline.
Q 4.1: What is annotation?
A 4.1: Annotation is the adding of textual information, in this case to parts or the whole of a video event. This is similar to the general concepts: comments, commentary, or marginalia.
Q 4.2: Who has put in the current annotations?
A 5.2: The first layer of annotations have been put in by the original contributors of the video event.
They also have a map function as an overview which utlises google map functionality. The videos are kept at full length and have a scrolling feature for accessing the timeline at any point. Once a point in the timeline is accessed an overview of where you are on the timeline is provided along with a lot of annotated text, including keywords. In a way the features normally hidden in video editing software are revealed in the interface. The application seems to rely on Python and JavaScript programming with the source code available https://wiki.pad.ma/wiki/Source. They are not bothering with supporting IE and there are plans to support Ogg theora.
Q 2.1: Which browsers do you support, on which platforms?
A 2.1: We currently support Firefox and Safari, on Linux, MacOS and Windows. We do not support Internet Explorer. However, if you wish to endeavour to make the site work on IE, please appeal to IE to support web standards in their next version.
Q 2.2: Do I need to install anything to view the videos on pad.ma?
A 2.2: Yes, currently you need to install either the VLC plugin (ensure you tick the “Install Mozilla Plugin” box while installing) for Firefox/Safari on Windows or OSX, or the OggPlay plugin for Firefox on OSX or Linux machines, to play the videos. In the near future, Firefox plans to support Ogg Theora (the open source video codec we are using) natively, and you should not need to download anything to view videos on pad.ma.
Notes on their position in terms of software development:
PAD.MA is not intended as a software product, but you are free to use the code to create your own instance, if you like. Obviously it would be more interesting if these instances fed into each other, if people’s annotations could layer and combine rather than exist in artificially separated environments.
Geert talking to Tom Sherman about his Video Vortex presentation including some views on his notion of vernacular video. This YouTube clip was made by the Masters of Media group.
Daniel a student in Integrated Media this semester has done a lengthy critique of the pedestrian - videodefunct prototype on his blog. The closing paragraph taken from his review:
This is purely explorational; a writerly text. A conversation is in progress between the creators and the functionality and capabilities of multiple-streaming, interactive video. Its creators on the frontier, finding future pathways for video experience. It’s amazing to examine what forms and meanings videos take on when configured this way. Vlogging is evolving at breakneck speeds, video|defunct suggest where this evolution may be taking us.
http://www.blogherald.com/2008/04/09/flickr-gets-video-but-just-for-90-seconds/
Flickr has launched its long awaited video feature, and it’s an interesting addition. First of all, all videos are limited to 90 seconds, and secondly, only pro users can upload videos (everyone can view and embed them though). Why is that?
Alejandro Adams, Preliminary Notes on Web-hosted Cinema, http://www.braintrustdv.com/essays/web-hosted.html
There is nothing unique about returning to early film theory in an attempt to delimit the creative uses of digital video technology. Comparing the infancy of the first manifestation of cinema with the infancy of its successor is as natural as it is profitable. Invoking, as I will, the elaborate investigations of early theorists such as Béla Balázs and Rudolf Arnheim is a way to clarify my own observations concerning digital cinema in general and Web-hosted cinema in particular.
I got his reference from AM’s blog who posted a few notes on the article.
I picked up this 2008 published book Video: The Reflexive Medium by Yvonne Spielmann in Amsterdam at the beautiful Athenaeum Boekhandel.
From book description:
Video is an electronic medium, dependent on the transfer of electronic signals. Video signals are in constant movement, circulating between camera and monitor. This process of simultaneous production and reproduction makes video the most reflexive of media, distinct from both photography and film (in which the image or a sequence of images is central). Because it is processual and not bound to recording and the appearance of a “frame,” video shares properties with the computer. In this book, Yvonne Spielmann argues that video is not merely an intermediate stage between analog and digital but a medium in its own right. Video has metamorphosed from technology to medium, with a set of aesthetic languages that are specific to it, and current critical debates on new media still need to recognize this.
Full reference: Yvonne Spielmann, Video, The Reflexive Medium, MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, (2008) First published in German (2005)
In thinking about developing some content and a major project in the videodefunct CMS, I made the following notes. The planned idea is to produce a larger-scale documentary type work in the system.
I now see this as possibly being multi-layered with multiple perspectives from the self-reflexive through to user-generated AV content. The benefit of the system compared to a television/cinema documentary edit is that the material that is valuable but often discarded can be included, which follows along the line of the hypertext projects being developed in Networked Media. This means varying layers can be included like self-reflexive notes on the process and the subject for example. User-generated content could be another layer in addition to planned coverage.
In contrast to the television/cinema documentary-factual approach this online system is very flexible where it can be adapted to work with content in an unscripted, non-linear way. This means AV content can be recorded in the field with very little planning as the scripting so to speak is done afterwards in the process of classification. Also, existing archives have the potential to be translated into a type of online documentary-factual form that responds to that content specifically.
This notion of a classification process rather than a conventional edit is interesting where the preparation of each individual clip/shot in pedestrian for example is like the logging process in preparing for an edit. Each shot is trimmed with an in and out point named (given a title), put in a category and then tagged. In the logging of shots the editor or assistant works out a way to name the shots in relation to planned scenes; when the footage was recorded or other idiosyncratic classifying system than can be used to help the main edit. The conventional main edit in a way, happens in the actual videodefunct player where the metadata that is added to each shot, along with how the player is configured influences the way the shots are brought together by the user. Actually editing a sequence within a clip (like in The Drunken Truth) creates yet another obvious layer ripe for exploration.
In Banter I was influenced by the neato plug-in Tag Managing Thing. This plug-in is used to tidy up tags afterwards where for example a tag that only features once may be folded into a tag name that is represented a number of times on varying clips. In terms of respecting the way tagging works I am not fully convinced that is appropriate to re-work the tagging process afterwards. But, I did find it useful to look at the tags and categories in the player as away to see how the individual clips worked as a whole. I actually skipped the plug-in and ended up re-working the tags, categories and titles manually. This was because the actual content together presented ideas I had not seen in the posting - tagging process. These ideas I was interested in bringing out with an eye on more content being added into the discussion. In a way this process has connections with a conventional TV/cinema edit where focus on a particular subject is nurtured and developed. By rearranging the metadata which is how the video content is classified the work overall is taken in a particular direction for the viewer.