Seth Keen

At the Prof Tom Barker workshop I learnt about the XMedia Lab from one of the participants, who had their project put through the XMedia Lab think tank.
The about from the website:

X|Media|Lab is the internationally acclaimed digital media event: a unique meeting place designed to help people get their own ideas to market through creative development, business matching, and access to world-class networks of digital media professionals.

Technorati Tags: digtial media, new media

A video interview collection of opinions on the duration of one minute for video for the oneminutes project.

http://pad.ma/about

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.

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.

Dominick Chen‘s presentation at video vortex was impressive in terms of his projects and the connection he made with theory. There was also an informative use of terms as way to describe varying activities occurring on the Internet. (more later once I review the video record)

Other links: A slide version of his presentation on slideshare. The Masters of Media blog post, Participatory Culture on his presentation. Dominick’s bio on the video vortex website. A summary of his presentation. His blog derive.

Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson packed a bit into their workshop session as part of the Videodefunct and Showinabox: Hitting vlogging with a hammer workshop at montevideo in Amsterdam. The showinabox community are frustrated with the way a blog content management system handles video. The video clips posted chronologically cause a big part of this frustration as it makes it difficult to find and access video that are not featured as the latest post. In other words the vlogger may what the user to view clips that have been posted some time ago. They are also wanting more aesthetic control, where as media producers they should be able to alter how there video looks and is published online. The idea in addition to this is to provide simple open source tools that follow the YouTube model of accessibility and ease of use. Showinthebox is a response to these objectives where a number of tools are brought together into a type of package, a box.

To get their point across about being able to archive and locate videos in a more open-ended manner on a vlog, they showed a number of examples that people are working on, in response to this issue. Each of these examples demonstrate varying approaches towards customising the index page interface.

Lost in Light 8mm film project. The number of categories demonstrates in part the process of archiving on a conventional vlog. A file Directory has been added to provide alternative access to the posted clips.

Swanjana Life in India On this vlog the conventional sidebar attributes have been dropped, the interface simplified with a video thumbnails at the bottom that lead to a video archive page. The vPIP plugin is being used to provide a range of online video formats for download. These are featured at the bottom of each poster. (as a side note it was interesting to learn that mefeedia created an early plugin now defunct, to create video archive pages on vlogs.)

Shadow World uses a chronology blog drop down archive.

Columbia Migration Project This vlog has had an HTML makeover. People are the key focus and they have been represented on the index page in simple videowall type layout.

Jay then moved to the blip.tv showplayer. The showplayer is like a self-contained video display window that has thumbnails down the side as a list of videos. What is displayed and searched can be customised to a certain degree. But the feature has limitations in terms of making associations across clips and breaking the self-contained nature. The showplayer Jay argued breaks away from blog functionality. i.e comments; permalinks etc and action scripts are an issue. Using this a key focus the vPIP community are interested in maintaining, utilising and developing this blog functionality.

Moving back to showinthebox, vPIP they stated is one of the few players that offers all the online video formats including open source with the facility to add HD formats. Looking for another way to make connections across clips beyond categories and dated archives there is the related videos feature on YouTube. This type of feature has been added to the Showinthebox index interface. An example is Ryan is Hungry. There is also a recent video strip on the bottom of the page. The related videos are created using a showinabox developed plugin by Charles Iliya Krempeaux called “VideoPress Related Videos”.

Ryanne then went through using vPIP. The process was very labour intensive in regards to setting up compression files for each online video format and then inputting a url address for each uploaded video file. But the plugin provides a lot of flexibility and room for choice.

Following using blog functionality the semanal.org project they are working on provides a function to video comment. The vlog uses comments as a way to post to the vlog. This recent project along with the other features being developed by the showinthebox community demonstrates re-working a vlog to suit video – while still keeping the features which make a blog a blog.

They also pointed out the http://havemoneywillvlog.com/ project where the vlog community are encouraged to raise funds to support each others vlog projects. This project reflects some of the P2P Foundation research into differing types of economies.

Finally, in talking with Ryanne afterwards I was fascinated with her http://revlog.blogspot.com/ revlog project. Here hours are put into selecting and posting chosen vlogs in a revlog as a form of personal vlog archive. A process I am familiar with in delicious only this applies to vlogs, using delicious RSS.

The video website Big Think was developed to publish interviews from intellectuals. Interesting to look at the interface design and other included facebook functions etc.