Record in H.264 and you can never publish your work?
Apparently most all consumer (and even some professional) photo and video cameras embody licensing encumbrances that strive to prevent profitable distribution of your own work: Why Our Civilizations Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the MPEG-LA.
Since the posting of that a couple days ago several other analyses (CNET, Engadget) have been presented, including reaction from Lukas Mathis who concludes that H.264 is not viable for long-term use.
This is sort of a rough situation.
PIXELS by Patrick Jean
A fantastic short film (2:32) by Patrick Jean. If the 8-bit video games of yore came back to seek revenge on NYC...
Hollywood edits tend to follow a formula in cadence
Fascinating little piece here; excerpt:
Psychologist Professor James Cutting and his team from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, analyzed 150 high-grossing Hollywood films released from 1935 to 2005 and discovered the shot lengths in the more recent movies followed the same mathematical pattern that describes the human attention span.
They found that the magnitude of the waves [created by a Fourier transform of the data] increased as their frequency decreased, a pattern known as pink noise, or 1/f fluctuation. (More…)
I guess this means that the editors know their audience.
A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever
I'm a week behind the curve on this one, but it deserves to be re-linked – a very well-done satire in A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever (made by these guys).
Deliberate mis-editing by ABC in Toyota report
CBC: ABC admits tinkering with Toyota report. This is a first-degree fuck-up in news editing. (Filed under "film" because, well, apparently the editor thought he was doing a drama)
11 famous people who changed careers after 30
Well, this does make me feel better about myself and my potential: 11 Famous People Who Were in the Completely Wrong Career at Age 30.
30 pictures of goats being crazy
Just lke the title says. Awesome. (How could I pass up this linkage?)
MacRumors Turns 10 Years Old
MacRumors, one of the go-to Apple news and rumblings sites, is apparently ten years old today. What's most noteworthy is that its founder, having started the site in his fourth year of medical school, eventually decided to abandon his profession to run the site full time.
While I love MacRumors, I can't help but feel that society might be better served by such a person pursuing his talents in medicine.
Photo of weightlifting ant wins U.K. prize
This is cool. The lil guy is holding onto a glass ceiling, while dangling a 500 mg mass – about 100 times that of his own body.
Restaurants with Flash-based web sites are hurting themselves
A conversation Dan Wineman has every month or so, along with me, John Gruber, and countless scores of other people.