Category: Uncategorized

Last week, the International Space Station made some terrific passes over the UK. I took this on Tuesday from the beach at the end of our street – it’s a terrible photo of an amazing sight.

A couple of nights later, in Cardiff Bay, I skipped away from the table of the café I was sitting outside, to catch another glimpse. The waitress thought I was a bit weird, but reckoned my excuse was sufficiently implausible that it had to be true.

The Cardiff pass was even brighter, and directly overhead. I stood with my friend Wendy and her son Oakley, the three of us gaping in astonishment (well, two in astonishment, one drooling gently). A passer-by back-tracked to ask us, “What is that? You look like you were expecting it.”

We showed him the print-out from Heavens Above that we had, and explained that it was about the brightest pass of anything manmade that’s likely to happen all year. He was as giddy as us about it.

There are people in that little dot of light, whizzing around the planet. Crazy.

The BBC’s iPlayer system manages to deliver remarkably high-quality video over the web, but it’s not flawless. Most of the problems I’ve seen, like this one, seem to revolve around interlaced video. Specifically, the way it’s deinterlaced.

This is a straightforward transcoding goof – the fields should have been deinterlaced to one set of frames, not… er… four – but I’ve also seen some pretty ghastly field inversion issues – where successive frames on iPlayer have ping-ponged back-and-forth, so that fast pans and tilts have stuttered terribly. Most notably, the high-res iPlayer version of one of Stephen Fry’s Last Chance to See programmes was unwatchable. Not merely ‘broadcast-wonk-turning-his-nose-up’ unwatchable, but ‘oh-hell-I-feel-ill’ unwatchable.

It’s not quite clear to me how this could be happening, in that you’d think the digital masters they’re working from would be in one of a small number of tightly-defined formats. Certainly, BBC technical review is extremely strict, as anyone who’s had a Kafkaesque argument with that department will confirm.

Also, it seems that there’s not much quality control on the finished transcode – or at least, not by anyone who recognises field issues when they see them. The Last Chance to See clip was fixed after a few days, but the programme of Bang Goes The Theory from which this frame is taken is still live, two months later (still is from around timecode 27.43).

Much as I hate to sound like Disgusted of Tynemouth, this is the sort of thing the BBC should get right, every time. They should be humbling the rest of us with their sheer technical prowess.

As it stands, oiks like me shoot everything we intend for the web with progressive frames and proper square pixels, edit and deliver via formats that retains those properties (ProRes and H.264, in my case), and thus never see any problems. It’s the national broadcaster who get tripped up by the details.

Irony.

Shawn Blanc may have persuaded me to try Yojimbo.

Damn. More toys.

[update: I’m a little scared to read Shawn’s review of Inman’s Fever, which I was thinking of playing with anyway. Oh, bother. Even more toys.]

Explaining the difference between a ‘producer’ and a ‘director’ is rather hard, partly because the answer changes depending on the type of film one is making. In movies, the producer is the money guy, while the creative control is held by the director. In factual programmes, however, the director is usually the person literally calling the shots.

The producer, meanwhile, is the one who decides what the story is, and how it’s going to be told. They are at once the budget-holder, project manager, and creative decision-maker.

Thing is, when you’re starting out, and it’s just you with a camera, it’s not obvious what that means. Pointing the camera is camera operation; telling people where to stand and how to move is direction; what else is there?

This article at Pro Video Coalition does a pretty good job of explaining, and it does so in a useful context – that of a promotional film for YouTube, rather than a broadcast documentary. I’m not entirely keen on the finished film, mostly for technical reasons (ironically, it could have done with a director…), but the article is a useful read.

If you’re dipping your toe into web video, and starting to wonder if maybe something’s missing – it is, and that space is called ‘Producer.’

Here’s a demo I haven’t seen before. Glorious… and try doing this in Powerpoint:

Remember Palin’s resignation speech, as edited by Vanity Fair? Here’s the Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien getting William Shatner to deliver it as poetry:

Genius.

Oh. My. Heavens.

I’ll have more to say about Bang Goes The Theory – short version: I rather enjoyed it – but this little film of Jem enthusing about his magnificent vortex cannon is well worth a look:

Damn. Wish I’d seen that.

Incidentally, I’m rather surprised this isn’t on Boing Boing yet. Tsk, tsk.

Update Friday 30th: Gizmodo have it, via Makezine, though both seem to overlook that this is a supersonic shock-induced vortex, not merely whacking a bit of flappy fabric.

Part of the problem, I think, is that the longer item and Jem’s wonderful explanatory piece, above, are available only on iPlayer, within the UK. If they were on YouTube…

Flossie and I toddled up the coast to St. Mary’s Island, where we admired turnstones and waves and… the Red Arrows. They looped around the island before cutting inland, Red 10 dropping back while the display aircraft assumed the classic diamond 9 formation. Somewhere off to our North-West they performed a loop and break.

Whatever they were up to isn’t in their public schedule. First time I’ve seen them for years.

This is wonderful: Vanity Fair have given Sarah Palin’s resignation speech the editorial once-over, and published their red-pen scribblings. Wonderful to pick through and work out their reasoning.

Remember, though: this is simply getting the facts and form right. The harder part is taking the tight draft and thinking through the flow, the emotional arc, the overall shape of the thing. When the writing’s this bad it’s hard to see the structure, but getting the structure right is crucial.

Sticking with the automotive theme briefly: I think I know what I’m going to trade my Audi towards. And no, it’s not a Lotus, sorry.

Honda have announced that they’re going to put their CR-Z concept car – or something broadly like it – into production, as early as next year.

A funky little coupé thing, the CR-Z should be:

• light
• fairly nippy
• petrol-sipping
• a giggle to drive
• at least marginally practical, and
• affordable. Though sources vary on what ‘inexpensive’ means, in this context.

So far, so Smart Roadster Coupé, but with any luck the CR-Z won’t ship with the impressive water features of that model (if you owned one, you’ll know to what I’m referring). It’s also not being sold by Mercedes, which is a huge win, and it has rear seats, which is probably a marketing joke but we’ll run with it for the moment. And it’s a hybrid.

[cough] what? A hybrid, you say? Oh, drat.

It’s not that I have much against hybrids per se; I think they make a deal of sense for commuting and local trips. However, I don’t commute, nor do I make many local trips. On the open road, I’d just be hefting around a few hundred kilos of energy-intensive-to-make batteries, the main purpose of which is to increase rolling resistance and take up valuable luggage space.

But hey, we’ll see what set of compromises Honda goes with for the CR-Z. At least in principle, it should be possible to fit a fizzy little petrol engine and back it up with some electric torque to deliver fun performance without the weight and thirst of a big engine and gearbox. Perhaps the hybrid thing will make sense after all.

Or perhaps they’ll decide they have to build an Audi TT-competitor and will saddle the poor thing with a huge engine and a £25,000+ price tag. Personally, I think slow sports cars are the way of the future, but what do I know?

More details at Honda’s official site; lots of pictures around; yes, it does look like they saw spy shots of the back of the Volvo C30, assumed the front looked just as radical, and hence copied something that didn’t exist in the first place. I kinda like it.