a sense of time

 

This weekend, I knew I'd leave San Francisco. I knew I'd hate leaving, leaving Patricia, leaving one dream of an enterprise. I knew we'd have dinner on the last night I was there. I knew we'd have American Kobe-Style beef at the cliff house. I'd it would be a great time, like always. I knew it was coming and I knew it wouldn't last. It was a great time. It is now yesterday.

 

My sense of timing has changed, everything is flowing more from one thing into another, Time is flowing faster.

 

Patrick and I have been doing quite a lot of driving over the last few days. We have discussed media, technology, people marketing, blogging and journalism and a lot of other things.

 

speed & size

 

Media in the analog world are separated by, amongst other things, size and time. Printed material for example. A book is big. A magazine is smaller. A letter smaller yet. And they differ in their temporal qualities too: a book takes a long time to research (even if the research is not explicit), a long time to write and a long time to publish. A response to arguments put forth in a book take a long time to produce responses in other books. Magazines less so and letters even less.

 

To a lesser degree, we have the same with moving pictures, where we have Hollywood extravaganzas, documentaries and home movies. It's quite clear in most cases what is what.

 

documents

 

But we lack this with digital work. We call all text documents just 'documents'. Doesn't matter what size it is, doesn't matter what it contains or how long it took to produce. On the web, a 'page' with history, blog discussion, news, porn, game cheats, stock tickers, shopping, error messages. They are all web pages, organized into web-sites (which, roughly speaking refers to the domain name they are located under). 

 

Will we develop a new language for differentiating between these? Will we need to?

 

video & video

 

With video it's more startling in a way. I have Final Cut Pro on my PowerBook. With this I have produced broadcast quality documentary work which I filmed with my fancy three CCD SONY camera. It's not a really big one, but no-one mistakes it from anything other than a video camera.

 

 

So then in Singapore this Christmas I bought a LUMIX FX9, a tiny little 6MP camera that fits snugly in my jeans pocket. It turns out it has TV quality video, with very good quality sound. I use it quite often. And I think what I produce with it is not video. It deserves its own name. Let me tell you first about the production process, which I feel is a crucial aspect of why this is a form of a new media. If it were more involved, I just wouldn't do it for the kind of moments I do it for. 

 

The casualness and ease of working with this type of new video starts when something nice or memorable or beautiful or just cool happens. I slide my camera out of my pocket, switch it to video mode and turn it on, all in one operation, without really thinking, much like opening a sketchbook and putting pen to paper.

 

Then I point and shoot. I rarely do any zooming or any other manipulation. I often hand the camera to others and tell them to just shoot. What's actually captured is very secondary to the fact that the moment is captured with sound and motion. A little more of the atmosphere is captured. An atmosphere that would be killed with a large, traditional video camera. The camera's point and shoot un-intimidating nature is a big deal.

 

Then I take the memory card out of the camera, the film, flip it open and insert it straight into the USB port (same as where you might plug a mouse or a printer) and transfer the still pictures and the moving pictures into iPhoto. 

 

Now for something that just tickles me: I then open whatever video I want to edit into the Apple QuickTime video player - that's right NOT into Final Cut or iMovie. Those 'video editing apps' I think should really be called 'video futzing around apps unless you are working a on a pro TB project and someone is paying you good money ro play with fancy edits and sound and music and text and graphics and all that', 

 

No, I just open the video in the Player app. All I can do is cut, copy and paste. Now I just copy sections and paste them into a new file. I cannot do any audio editing. Practically no finessing is possible. So I play around less, and actually get my video edited in a reasonable amount of time.  In other words, it actually gets done.

 

The final wrinkle is that I get to save it as a reference file, that is, a file that doesn't contain any video, just references to the video, so that the file stays real small.

 

What should I call this? Video-lets? mini-movies? What is this new media? Try it and feel the difference. There is an interesting future here.  

 

 

About to land in London now. Short trip, slept the most of it. Emailed my brother the wrong landing time as I heard it wrong at SFO! 

 

Strange to be back. Nice in many ways. Hope to put into action some of the things I have learnt from Patricia (ward work basically), get a regular job for a while, promote Hyperwords and move back to SF to have coffee's with Patricia every few weeks.