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Cross-posted from the Planet SciCast blog:

There are several reasons we’re not using YouTube to publish SciCast. Chiefly that it’s blocked in many schools, which would rather limit the utility of our films, but there are issues surrounding quality too.

Quality of video playback, for one thing – we want these films to be projected on a classroom wall, and that’s hard with grainy YouTube quality. The downloads we’ll make available will be high-resolution, high-quality, and in our tests have looked terrific on big screens.

Quality of discussion is another worry. We all know the web is full of knee-jerk, intemperate comment, but even given that, does anyone else think YouTube comments are still below average?

The third issue is quality of content. We can’t rigorously vet SciCast films, and they’re not all textbook-accurate. But they’re rarely complete rubbish, and we haven’t any yet that I’d describe as ‘anti-science.’ We want SciCast to be a source you can trust to be frequently entertaining and at least mostly accurate – and with current web video, that’s unusual.

The first piece of work I’ve seen on this issue was published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and it makes for alarming reading; there’s an excellent summary at Ars Technica.

There are good reasons why scientists need to be capable and effective communicators; part of SciCast’s ambition is to raise standards, and disseminate skills and best practice.

In discussion with Vinay, on the natural lifecycle of institutions and what happens when each generation runs into the limitations of the existing structures, we mentioned that the open-source software world feels like it’s institutionalised. I wrote:

I hear the bazaar has a roof now.

Quite proud of that.

Entirely safe for work, I assure you — but if you like your Zeiss Mk 1s, lookie here.

Ironically, steampunk planetarium projectors are all smooth and flowing and translucent; reminiscent of early Ives-era Apple designs.

A friend and colleague is mentoring a science engagement project today. Since it involves video, he asked me:

Do you have 3 key “producer” questions that I can use inside my head to help me review their film on the spot?

Well, gosh. Here’s what I wrote, somewhat stream-of-consciousness:

Basic stuff:

• Does the story make sense?
• Can you hear and understand what people are saying?
• Are there moments when you find yourself saying ‘What was… oh, right, I see’? Fix those.

Advanced stuff:

• What’s the ‘take-home’?
• what, specifically, are you expecting a viewer to remember/think about/learn/be impressed by/etc?
• Where do you get bored?
• The first time you watched the film, when did you first glance away? When did your internal voice first say ‘Oh crap, there’s six more minutes of this’? Why?
• Is there something that could be left out that, by omission, would improve the film? (note that ‘shorter’ is almost always ‘better’ with video. While there’s a lower bound to that, it’s far lower than anyone expects).
• The other way of looking at this; does each element of the film earn its place? Does it advance the story, add information, provide breathing room, entertain, set the scene? Or is it padding?
• Is it sticky?
• What makes me want to share the experience of watching the film with other people? Is the idea so cool and exciting I have to tug someone’s sleeve? Do I have burning questions I need to discuss with someone? Do I immediately want to see it again?
• ‘What will they talk about in the playground’ is a mantra of kids’ TV. It’s one of the few bits of dogma to which I subscribe, though my interpretation may differ from that of others.

Over-arcing stuff:

• The producer is the viewer’s proxy.

The viewer is – for TV, at least – a very large number of disparate individuals. The producer’s job, then, is to smooth the film’s acceptance to as broad a range of people as possible; you’re trying to reach into the tails of the distribution, to broaden the appeal. So you’re looking for big stuff, but also really finicky little bits of annoyance, because every tiny niggle you spot will be a deal-breaker for someone else. And you want each of those people to watch.

Can’t believe I’ve boiled down ten years’ experience to that, and then given it away. I’m an idiot.

I’d expected more of our gear to get trashed during SciCast workshops, but it seems old Sony DVCAMs are made of sterner stuff. One PD100 has a dodgy focus switch, the PD150 menu dial is skipping, and the tripods are a bit more dodgy than when they fell off that particular lorry, but everything’s basically intact. I’ve had cables fray on a couple of battery chargers and we’ve lost microphone clips: which leaves the main casualty as my headphones. Which got sat on.

Which is fine, really, because they were rubbish – Sennheiser 210s. Closed-back, which was occasionally useful for noise rejection, but they were uncomfortable to wear and their sound quality was pretty rubbish. It’s now very rubbish, in that there’s a knackered-connection crackle superimposed. Nice. Fixable, but only to return to ‘pretty rubbish,’ and did I mention they got sat on? Right.

They were £50. I’m also using £30 Sennheiser PX100 which are flimsy and have too short a cable, but sound great – however, I’d like another closed-back set to replace the 210s. I’m leaning towards the Sennheiser HD25SP at about £90 – they’re the cheapskate version of the already-bottom-of-the-range HD25 ENG headphones, but cheapskate sounds about right for the likes of me.

Anyone have any thoughts?

Vexing me for some time: working out what to say about series 2 of Heroes without ruining it for those of you who won’t see if for months. While I’ve been meandering my way around to the position of ‘honestly not caring,’ I find that Mark Pursey has found the right words:

The writers of second season of Heroes are so incompetent that they have managed to make me retrospectively hate the first season, which I had originally quite enjoyed.

I still think the detail script editing has been brilliant, but really – did nobody look at the end-point of volume 2 and notice how close they’d come to resetting the whole continuity? Didn’t they care? Worse: did they think they were being clever?

Years ago, I had a concept of a constriction through which one forced ‘stuff’ – matter, geometry, organisational planning, screenplays, etc. Doing so required effort, but at the conclusion of the process all the ‘stuff’ was right back where it started. I dubbed this constriction a ‘Klein Bottleneck.’

Current evidence points to the Heroes storyline as being in a tight orbit through one. Ugh.

Perhaps that line wasn’t so much about Sith – who, after all, have the disadvantage of being fictional – but about English-language online geek humourists.

Consider: in late 2006 we had Ze Frank, clearly a Master of his craft, and xkcd was underway but not really in its stride.

Now, in late 2006, Ze has moved on to a higher plane of existence (or ‘Los Angeles’ as we like to call it), and xkcd has risen to become the undisputed honesty mirror of the new geek republic.

So… who is the new apprentice?

Waiting for Leopard was bad enough – oh, the six-month delay: the horror, the horror – but now we have all these whizzy new developer features one has to ask: where are the whizzy applications? Hmm?

There’s Anxiety, an ultra-simple front-end to the new system-wide Tasks store. Great. Anything else? Not so much.

I get the distinct impression that across the planet, thousands of Cocoa developers are staring at their monitors, lost in the awesome majesty of CoreAnimation. “It’s so pretty! Ooooooh!” they intone, as they cycle in and out of TimeMachine like moths flickering around a particularly beautiful streetlight.

Absolutely amazing story at the LA Times analysing the budget of Sahara, one of the most costly flops in Hollywood history. Reasonable success at the box office has been swamped by production costs around the $160m mark.

The LA Times’ story is confusingly laid out, but there are some real eye-openers in there. Movies are big business, but some of this spend seems astonishing. And the culprit for the doubling of budgeted cost? Blamed on ‘failure to lock down a script,’ it seems. Ah, that old chestnut. It seems the entire industry is mired in the inability to actually make decisions.

And yes, I realise I wasn’t exactly a paragon of producorial decision-making. It’s simply impossible, even on a small production, to make every decision that someone believes is necessary – I sometimes think that the judgmental skill lies not in making correct decisions, but rather in choosing the right things on which to decide.

And hey, my productions came in on budget, so I wasn’t that bad.