The Daily Grind

We’ve been discussing – again – whether we should make ‘big’ versions of the SciCast films available for download, or just the embedded H.264 versions. By ‘big,’ I mean about 20Mb/minute, 640×480 resolution or higher, H.264 or WMV9 (VC-1?) – nigh-on broadcast quality, and in most cases high enough quality to reveal problems with the original camera rushes. Archival-quality big.

I’ve felt all along that it’s the right thing to do, and of course this is all Creative Commons-licensed so there’s nothing stopping me doing it on my own time and bunging the films into Archive.org. But yesterday I found myself saying something that ‘feels’ right:

We publish high-quality versions of the films because they allow people to do things with SciCast we haven’t thought of.

I’ve even got an example of this – somebody has a quasi-commercial idea that would rely on their being able to munge the films in specific ways, and they couldn’t do that without access to large-frame versions.

We should be pushing these ludicrous-quality versions up in the next week or so, though we haven’t yet worked out how to integrate them with the site, so it might be a bit of a kludge in the short term.

Excellent story about programming laziness relating to leap seconds, from the Risks Digest.

This article won’t be the last WordPress-vs-Movable Type 4 comparative review, but the comments thread is extremely useful. Credit to the respective product managers for showing up and answering questions too – to be fair, Movable Type staff have a long history of doing that.

…which should probably alert the wary reader to coming flakiness on this blog, when I finally get around to updating it.

In chat, Vinay and I just came up with a new web application protocol we’d like to see. Our options:

1. Do nothing about it.
2. Seek venture capital, then build it.
3. Build a slick website about it, write reviews of example apps, and see if anyone reverse-engineers the protocol. Thus saving us from having to write it in the first place.

I’m veering towards option #3.

Jeff Carlson has an excellent first look at iMovie’08, over at Macworld. Worth a read.

Having now had a little chance to play with the package, here’s my present thinking:

• It’s easier to lash a bunch of clips together in iMovie’08 than in iMovie’06. The new interface is very, very slick indeed.
• You hit the limits of iMovie’08 much sooner than you do those of ’06, mostly because it simply does less.

The issue for me is that you can’t cut dialogue-driven, classic ‘drama continuity editing’ style films in iMovie’08. You just can’t do it. You can do it in ’06, but it’s a pain in the arse. What I was hoping for was a revision to iMovie that helped mere mortals cut such sequences, letting them keep an audio track intact while trimming an edit from the mid-shot to the detail close-up, and back again.

Evidently, the famous diving-holidaying Apple video engineer either didn’t get that at all, or decided it was Way Too Hard. So, what we have is a tool that makes crashing clips together really really simple. This is, quite likely, what the world has needed for the last three years.

But as more and more people discover the joys of video, they’re going to hit the limits. What’s really interesting isn’t what iMovie’08 does, it’s what it doesn’t do, and where they’re headed with it. There’s no obvious reason why they couldn’t add a conventional audio timeline to the project window, and show video timeline length as at present. If they’ve really thought it through, then by iLife ’09 we might – finally – have the video editor for the rest of us.

In the meantime, there’s Premiere Elements. If you’re on Windows.

Man, did I call this one: Adobe Labs have released a beta update of Flash Player 9 that incorporates H.264 playback. Finally the video wars are over, and we have a winner: It’s not Flash, it’s not Quicktime, it’s not Windows Media, and it’s not DivX/XviD – it’s H.264.

For once, this is the right outcome. With YouTube encoding their entire back-catalogue as H.264 for iPhone and Apple TV, it’s been clear for months that they must be heading to the same codec on the main site. Now we know how – still in Flash.

What’ll be interesting to see is how they’re encapsulating the video. Done right, it might be viewable with either the Flash or Quicktime plugins, but Adobe’s initial demo embeds a Flash-only .swf file.

Still, this is great news. Around the end of the year we should start seeing a huge jump in quality for online video.

[update: They’re claiming it’ll play .mp4 and .mov. Wooohoo! See also this; .m4v (iPod/iTunes/AppleTV format), .3gp (mobile phone H.263), and so on.]

[update 2: here’s the full developer blah. Looks peachy so far.]

Merde. We’re about to hit a situation where we’ve half a dozen people phone-bashing and generally agitating for SciCast. We’ll be spread around different organisations and even cities, and we’ll all be doing this part-time. Coordination and ‘the big picture’ is going to be hard.

I’d love to use Highrise to bring us all together. Unfortunately… that would be exporting personal information to the US. Which is, one suspects, a bit of a no-no when it comes to the Data Protection Act. Dang.

Discussion in the Highrise forums. On the other hand, 37signals’ hosts, Rackspace, are on the Safe Harbor list (notes about which are here).

I guess I’m going to have to read up on what all this stuff means…

One of the things that rather amuses me about the Nokia N95 is that the more I use it, the more I stumble across features that are spectacularly brain-dead.

This morning’s example: I wanted to know if the thing will play H264 video, since it’d be quite handy to carry SciCast films around with me. Now, I could go and look up the information, but it’s easier to fire up Bluetooth File Exchange and wave an example film over to the thing. 5Mb or so at 85Kb/sec – it’s quick enough.

The trouble is, the N95 puts the received movie not in its filesystem, but in the Inbox. From where I can do… absolutely nothing with it, except move it from one Messaging folder to another. It doesn’t appear in the filesystem browser, and I can’t open it from the Messaging app. Does this mean it doesn’t work? I don’t know.

Obviously, anything arriving via Bluetooth must be a message, right? Even if it’s a 5Mb video file. Rrrrright.

Stupid stupid stupid. As I’ve said before, I’d be at least entertained if it was a good phone. But it isn’t. The phone UI is clunky and crashy; it’s so keen to offer me the option to video call somebody that it enforces an extra click I just don’t want, every time; the SMS application has real problems with screen redraw, which slow it down tragically; etc etc.

It’s plain laughable. And not in a good way.

Yes, I know the front page of SciCast has a big black hole in it, and the movie doesn’t play. I’ve no way of fixing this, I think – it’ll be like that for the weekend, until the backroom boys return on Monday.

Dang.

Damien has a set of photos up on Flickr from The Big Bang, the kids’ TV show we used to make in Leeds. They give you an idea of what it was like to make – involved lots of goofing around in an office with rolls of sellotape and string. And, yes, getting paid to do that. Fun!

Amusingly, I’m not in any of these pictures. By my reckoning this was series 6, shot in 2001. According to my notes, that was the last year we did significant location work – poor Sue in costume had to deal with 70+ outfits for all the history inserts, which was insane. I recall sitting in the online when dear Patrick asked us to rotoscope out the TV aerials in the back of shot, and us saying ‘This has gone too far.’

After series 6 we refocussed on studio make&do only, but by then CITV was starting the death spiral. For series 7 there was a change of presenters, and the resulting delays pushed the studio dates back so they straddled the technical closure of the department in Leeds. I wasn’t involved until the last gasp of shooting, when both Patrick and Colin (the original and then replacement series producers) had left the company.

When it came back for series 8 we were all a bit shocked, and it was a consolidation year, cherry-picking the good bits of the turbulent series 7. Damien was well gone by then, as I recall, heading eventually to his current feature film surfing magnificence.

Happily, series 9 was a fabulous return to the glorious behind-the-scenes atmosphere of the early years. If we had to finish the run, I’m glad it was then. A wonderful group of people, great ideas, and some corking telly out of it.

Big Bang was a nightmare at times, and I usually finished a series vowing never to do another one. But I still miss it.

[can you tell I’m in H264 compression greybarland, by the way?]