Git yo'self video lit'rit

Editor's Notes

• #5: Howard Rheingold brings us the extremely useful term “Vernacular Video”—the notion that video itself is a new medium presently in the process of adapting itself as a mass medium—not just for viewing or consumption, but for producing!
• #8: In this YouTube gem, we see how video technology is enabling all sorts of new forms of production that we had never imagined possible.
• #12: Malleability—the degree to which a substance can be bent or manipulated—is another attribute of media which is important to consider when looking at the changes taking place today in the medium of video.
• #13: For 99% of the existence of the medium of text, the production and viewing of work in the medium took place in primarily linear ways. Even a monkey could produce a stream of text.
• #14: As word processors developed, text itself became a much more malleable medium. Complex systems for organizing ideas with notecards and dozens of retyped drafts became continually evolving documents.
• #15: This wikipedia article on indexicality highlights an important quality of video—that it points more clearly to a specific state of affairs—Video is more indexical than text. Later, tools like wikipedia allowed for non-linear and collaborative editing to take place between people across continents.
• #16: Though even wikipedia, with its hundreds of thousands of collaborators still has its own markup language which is ultimately a barrier to the malleability of its text.
• #17: The capturing of moving images, shown here in an early stage, was initially a complex process. (Video with lots of lenses, eventually monkey operates camera). ?Does anyone know the difference between linear and non-linear editing?
• #18: As camcorder technology evolved, linear capture remained the norm.
• #19: While form factor shifted, tapes continued to be the prime means of recording today.
• #20: Solid-state capture media will soon dominate the market, which makes a significant difference for filmmakers who previously needed to “digitize” hour-by-hour each hour of tape that they shot.
• #21: The Flip camera brings solid-state capture technology to the masses.
• #22: The editing of moving images, however, is a completely different beast from capture. In the beginning, editing was—much like the case with the typewriter—a linear process that required literal cutting and reattaching of strands of miniscule images one to another.
• #23: Linear editing suites like this one required the constant fast-forwarding and rewinding of tapes and relied on transfers always going from one linear piece of media to another.
• #24: While this image and the one before it may look similar, there is a major difference. Once the tapes are digitized, all footage resides on hard drives and editors can access footage at random without the manipulation of linear media.
• #25: As non-linear editing software improved...
• #26: Tools have allowed editors to manipulate images in more and more intuitive ways.
• #27: This is a very rough experiment that I’ve done, trying to compare some of what I’ve been taught about the written word and how to use it and what I’ve learned in working with video in the past few years. These two media have more similarities than one might initially think, and as video becomes a more broadly used medium, new genres of video production are developing that produce new sets of practices and standards for format and style.
• #28: ?Who knows the hypothesis? If you don’t learn a language while you’re young, as an adult, it will be a lot harder. When I watch professional video editors who have been cutting since they were teens or younger manipulate video using Final Cut Pro and all the keyboard shortcuts available, I realize that in many ways, I missed my own critical period for becoming a fast and efficient video editor. Muscle memory and specific types of hand-eye coordination play a big role here.
• #29: The Chicago Manual of Style presents a codification of standard practices in the written word. For video, the strange thing is that so far, there isn’t one! Big TV networks like BBC have their own internal documents, but for academic video, fiction/narrative film, documentary, comedy, news, and TV/web video in general, there really is nothing comparable.
• #30: But don’t get overwhelmed
• #31: Tools have allowed editors to manipulate images in more and more intuitive ways.
• #39: An intro to a video clip from the IFTF BRIC families project.