The iPhone Keynote – Apple Being Cheap
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The iPhone Keynote – Apple Being Cheap

Byrichard

Recently Apple shot its entire keynote on their most expensive mobile phone. Whilst this sounds fantastic and empowering, it isn’t. In my eyes this is a marketing gimmick and a sad commentary on the state of video production today.


Video as Art


Video is an art. Video is a creative pursuit. If you use an iphone to film a keynote then you do show that the cameras are high quality. This is available at a cost of 1750 CHF for the 1 terabyte iphone 15 Pro Max. That’s a lot of money for a phone that you can’t drop, without breaking the front or back pieces of glass. That’s 1750 CHF for a camera where you can’t swap the battery if you run out of juice. That’s 1750 CHF for a camera that doesn’t have a proper lense on the front.


For clarity, for me a proper lens is one that has several bits of glass to provide an excellent image, as well as some zooming ability, to frame the shot as we want it to be, without having to walk backwards or forwards to get the image that we want.


Limited Shot Value Control


My individual frustration with iphone video is that we are limited by the zoom. We have one or two shot values, and the rest is digital. We’re not zooming into the shot we want. We’re cropping pixels, to give the illusion of a zoom. When we look at the result we see how awful the image quality is.


With a broadcast lens we can frame the shot as we want, without moving the camera. Imagine filming a conference where the camera has to be in the seat right in front of the speaker, rather than several meters away. With a broadcast camera you can cover an entire room with two or three cameras placed strategically.


As we see with the Apple Keynote they use 1700 CHF iPhone Pro Max cameras with rigs costing tens of thousands of dollars each. This isn’t grass roots production. This isn’t minimalism. This is absurd.


And there’s more. A few years ago I was asked “Would it be possible to film the High Commissioner walking from this room to that room?” and I said yes, but the aim was to do it for less money. My solution was to use an iphone on a DJI Osmo 3 streaming via Skype or a similar tool. It worked well. It was minimalist.


Maximalism


What Apple did was maximalist, as the name of the phone implies. The notion that we can film high quality video with mobile phones is not new and this has more to do with the switch from analogue to digital, than with the mobile phones made by a specific brand.


Analog Versus Digital


When people were filming with VHS, Hi8 and similar formats the signal was analag and upscaling it to broadcast quality was a challenge. Amateur video looked like amateur video. With the arrival of DV, DVCAM, DVCPro and other formats the ability to film high quality video with more affordable cameras became an ordinary part of life. If we’re shooting for broadcast then we need one image quality, and if we’re shooting for the web we need, or at least needed another image quality.


With MPEG-4, H.264, H.265 and future formats the image quality that smaller and smaller devices could get increased. Mobile phone video has been good enough for broadcast for years now. Even in-built laptop cameras have been good enough for broadcast for years.


The advantage of Digital video, as opposed to analogue video is that generation loss is almost inexistent. You can film, edit, edit again, and theoretically there is no loss from generation to generation.


Why Not Use the iPhone SE?


If Apple had shot the keynote with the iPhone SE, and pushed that forward, then it would be worthwhile, because they would have used the most affordable solution, rather than the most absurdly priced.


“We used our highest spec phone to film this” is nothing special. “We used the iPhone SE” would have been really interesting. Shooting with minimal rigs would have been more interesting too. Using film grade rigs with the most expensive iPhone is not noteworthy. It’s absurd.


More than absurd, it’s simple marketing. “If you buy our most expensive camera you can do the same”. That’s just stating the obvious.


Other Options


You can get the Sony A7 II for from 1200 CHF onwards and you can get the Blackmagic cinema camera for 1100 CHF. there are cheaper options that will provide cinematic quality at a lower price.


If you’re wondering why I look at the one terabyte phone, rather than the 256 and 512 options the reason is simple. Video files are large, and if you take a smaller capacity phone, once you fill it, you will be stuck waiting for data files to transfer from the internal memory to an external device. With professional cameras you might record to two cards simultaneously and they are can be hot swapped if you write from one whilst swapping the second. You don’t have that option with the iPhone Pro Max.


If the battery dies production stops, if the phone’s memory is full, production stops. If you want another shot value you need to move the entire camera rig to set up again. An iPhone is interesting, when it’s about minimalism, rather than maximums.


And Finally


I took a few seconds to scrub through the footage and the “shot on iphone” bits are just pieces to camera. Broadcast journalists have been doing this for year, but without a million dollar budget. I love the idea of using an iPhone to shoot video, when a bigger camera is too heavy, or not practical, but I don’t want people to forget the beauty of using broadcast quality cameras that give camera operators more control on what they’re shooting.


For all of the fuss that the event was shot on iphones I saw a lot of CG, animations and more. I think people made a big fuss about very little.

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Video Editing And Social Media

Byrichard

In the past if you wanted to be a video editor you also needed to be a camera operator, and to be a camera operator you needed to be a video editor. By knowing both skills you shot good material because you knew how hard bad material was to use. As a result of this videos were worth watching with all of our attention.


In recent years, there has been a move towards multimedia editing, where you don’t expect people to watch the video while sitting in front of a TV. You expect them to be looking at a mobile phone while commuting, or scrolling through a social media feed. Job offers reflect this. You often see jobs that required perfect spelling and grammar, Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects. The need for an editor to be a camera operator is gone. We have gone from videos being made by camera operators and video editors who love their medium, to graphists, who overlay graphics over video. They’re making slideshows, rather than video content.


Today I started to watch a video about desertification and the graphics were so huge and prominent that I lost interest after just two shots. They are not using video appropriately. Videos should not be optimised for social media. They should be made interesting to view.


I spend hours a week watching videos on YouTube where the use of graphics is minimal or even non-existent. I watch hiking and camping documentaries that are half an hour to an hour long with minimal music and minimal graphics.


For a long time, there was the notion that content should be 1 to three minutes long for people to watch the entire thing. I think that this view is now wrong. I believe that with the coming of age of YouTube content creators, so the desire for longer form content has grown.


Tik Tok and User Generated Spam


For a while I really liked TikTok during this pandemic and then I fell out of love with it for two reasons. The first of these reasons is that it forces you onto the For You Page so you end up watching and following strangers, whom you will never interact with and the second is that everyone uses the same song, does the same action, but in their own individual way. This could be seen as fun, and many do, but for me this is User Generated Spam.


Over a decade ago we had Qik, We had Seesmic, we had Livestation and plenty of other video sharing apps, some of them live, others pre-recorded, and others for multi-camera streaming. TikTok had great potential to be a Seesmic style channel. We could have logged in, recorded a video, and had someone comment or respond. It could have been a way of conversing people with our voices. Instead, it is a talent show. There is little to no engagement. We don’t talk. We don’t get to know others. Furthermore, we’re just eyeballs looking at mediocre content, when we could do something more interesting.


I considered unfollowing plenty of accounts, but this takes time. I also considered that I could follow accounts that create original content. Paradoxically, TikTok gave me just the video to illustrate the point I am making. 😉


@bmcdiving

Been a Long Week Of Diving In This Beautiful WasteWater ??? #commercialdiving #underwaterwelder #wastewater #shitjob #livingthedream

? Astronaut In The Ocean – Masked Wolf

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Thoughts on The Google IT Support Course

Byrichard

I am currently studying the Google IT Support Course. I am familiar with many of the topics and I have used many of the tools discussed. What the course offers, and the reason for which it has so much value, is that fills my knowledge gaps.


One example of this is the TCP/IP model. Until I studied the networking module I never thought about the five layers. I never thought about the complexity of getting packets from one machine on one network to another machine three or more hops across on another network.


Before I studied this course I was familiar with adding an IP address and Gateway address but did not understand how subnetting works. In the process I learned to count in binary. It is a simple concept to understand once you have played with examples a number of times.


One of the strengths of this course is that it tests you at the end of the chapter to ensure that you remember what you learned. In some cases it took more than three attempts to pass certain quizzes and I had to wait twenty four hours before I could continue. I like that there are these challenges. It encourages you to do some background research to ensure that you understand the topics that are making you struggle.


I also like the practical tests where you have to either SSH or RDP into remote clients and accomplish tasks using what you have just learned. You can fail here too, and that is where you invest more time in ensuring that you have really learned the topic.


One exercise I liked is SSHing into a test server, fixing a file name, checking that the page loaded, and then SSHing into the production server and doing the same. I had often seen SSH mentioned but until recently I had not had the curiousity to accomplish tasks with it.


On Linkedin Learning I studied AWS Provisioning And Deploying before I took the Google IT Support Course and I was able to get through the course and understand most of the concepts and tasks, but the Google IT support Course really added to my knowledge and understanding of the entire workflow and environment.


Yesterday I was learning about the opportunity to record actions in terminal and if I had known about this earlier then I could have written scripts to deploy and breakdown instances that I was required to install for projects.


When studying web development I had to install Ruby, Ruby on Rails, NPM, Angular, React and more and they sometimes interfered with each other. If I had the knowledge I have now then I could have had a clean install for each, and I could have configured and used virtual machines.


I started the course with knowledge of how to use computers. Now my knowledge is well founded, with many of the gaps in knowledge and understanding filled.


Day 33 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – A video walk
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Day 33 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – A video walk

Byrichard

Today I went on a video walk with the DJI OSMO pocket three or whichever number it has and I took a series of frames. Before going for my daily walk I searched through the Vision Du Réel virtual Film Festival list of films and I found “The Bridge“. It’s available for all to watch during the festival. I didn’t watch it in full but from what I saw it’s a series of shots in the style of Dziga Vertov’s Man With the Movie Camera.


This inspired me to get out and go for a walk and try an experiment of my own. It’s nine minutes of footage of a village during lockdown in Switzerland. You can hear birds cheeping, banging of some kind or other, people playing in the distance and more. You can also see the occasional car, pedestrian or cyclist. If ever you wanted to go and get B-roll for a post-apocalyptic film it would be now.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsYjDnzj0EM
A few minutes of footage for a small village in Switzerland during self-isolation.


The footage was quickly edited using DaVinci resolve and I simply removed the chrominance. It would take seconds to prepare the version with normal colours. This is as an hommage to the vision Du Réel documentary.


Of Twitter Threads (mice) and Blog Posts (Humans).

Byrichard

With the sentence “Of Twitter threads (Mice) and Blog Posts (Humans)” you’ll see that I’ve done two things. The first is that I’ve modernised a well-known book title to draw parallels with the practices of writing Twitter threads and blog posts.


People write twitter threads because they think that it’s fast, convenient, will draw an audience and it’s trendy. It keeps people within the same site. No browsing between platforms and websites. There is the notion that people do not want to leave the social networks where they find themselves. Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks are portals, except that once you’re inside your trapped.


The beauty of writing threads is that it’s easy. You only need two hundred characters per tweet. You don’t need to develop and justify your ideas as you would with a blog post. Twitter threads are fleeting. Within a few minutes, they’re gone.


Blog posts, in contrast, requires your inspiration to last. You look at that empty window and you see an insurmountable challenge. You see three hundred words as a challenge not worth attempting. That’s how I often feel about blogging, and that’s why I usually write after a day of sports or other activities. It’s easy to write when the story exists and you’re just remembering it.


By blogging rather than writing twitter threads you’re pushing yourself to learn to write. The more you write the more ideas flow, and the more ideas flow the easier it is to go back and edit. The fear of the blank page dissipates, as does the lack of consistent inspiration.


Another feature of writing a blog post rather than a twitter thread is that you have time to think. There are no updates, no “press to refresh” and other distractions. From the moment you start to write until the moment you run out of momentum you are focused.


The length of my blog posts, and the quality of my writing have improved. I’m taking longer and longer breaks from social media. I’m reverting from a distracted individual who doesn’t follow curiousity to one that explores more.


If you’re worried about being distracted then reading twitter threads will not resolve this issue. You read two or three posts in a thread and see a reply that will take you in another direction, before returning to the original stream of thought.


Contrast this to a blog post. If, and when you skim Wordpress and other websites you’re seeing each post and their description before clicking and reading that post for a few minutes. You are fully engaged with the message that the writer wants to share. You then share that post, and people will read it as easily as you did.


Jaiku had threading, but similar to bulletin boards. Twitter’s algorithm fed threads promote the people and threads that make noise without anyone conversing, rather than the other way around.


If you’re inspired and have something to say then blogging is a fantastic avenue because as you’re learning to write with a voice there is a small audience, and as your voice gets stronger, and as your writing improves, so will your audience. In contrast, writing twitter threads gives the illusion of being a writer. You’re getting the attention, but writing snippets.


There is an exception to that rule, of course, poetry. If you’re a poet, and I am not, then Twitter might be an excellent avenue.

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Socialising and Networking

Byrichard

After university, I estimated that I got to know of at least 600 people. I was on campus every day and I was out almost all the time. Whether it was in the edit suites, the library or the bar. I used to sit indoors with the bags as a non-smoker but within weeks I dressed for the English winter and started to stand outside, warmly dressed.


I went from being a solitary person looking after a table and belongings to short ten to fifteen-minute conversations with several dozen people a night. Such a process is a good way of getting to know people and to learn of projects that you want to work on.


That’s why you go to the edit suites, radio studios and other places. You have the opportunity to chat with people and to learn more about their projects and about technologies that you may not play with for your profession. That’s also when people asked me for help with editing. “How do I do this?”, “How do you do that?”, “Can we work together on that project”.


In post-university life it’s much harder to meet people and socialise like this. On the one hand, the pool of people is much larger. You’re dealing with thousands of people, rather than hundreds. You also need to find places where there are groups to connect with.


For a while, social media filled this role. So does work where you’re in the real world rather than the virtual. I see office life as virtual because when you’re working in an office you’re not meeting people in person. You don’t have the same opportunities for friendships.


Recently I’ve been volunteering at Geneva-based events to meet new people and see interesting projects. It’s a series of events where we’re needed for three or four hours every few days. It’s great if you want free access to an event but I find that it lowers the chance to meet people.


The best events to volunteer for or participate in are those where people are present for the entire time of the event. You meet them at the stands, you meet them at the drinks and other events, and you meet them in the evening. It’s a way of becoming a close group, even if just for a week. It did result in follow up projects.


Growing your network: Finding rockstars from Building Professional Relationships by Skyler Logsdon


I would love to work where I’m in the real world, meeting people and collaborating with a number of teams in person rather than by e-mail or over the phone. In a recent contract, an entire unit came to my end of contract drinks. That doesn’t happen every time.