Skype now sucks a little less, but only on mobile

Skype for iOS is now apparently five times faster than the current app. It also looks about three times better, and that’s great. Even if FaceTime and Hangout has taken over for most of my video conferencing needs, Skyping is still the Xerox of video conferencing (my mom still refers to FaceTime as Skyping so there you have it), and everyone has it. Yet no one is online on it. You might have a different experience, but most of my Skype calls often starts with a phone call, SMS or mail.

Skype 2014 06 09 kl 22 05 01I might be reaching here, but it could have something to do with the desktop interface. Skype is hands down one of the most cluttered, noisy and clumsy 2000s app interfaces on my Mac, seemingly lacking any direction of what it’s there for and where it’s going (Microsoft acquisitions rarely do).

Clutter

Judging just by the main interface – what does this app do? …If you have never used it before, what would you use this app for? Even if you know it has something to do with video conferencing, the design gives no clue of this. Instead, the default screen prompts you to connect to Facebook… to – I guess – update… your Skype status – on Facebook?

The rest of the interface is a mess of small and big buttons, super tiny and enormous typography, and of course the aforementioned noisy social media integration. It’s also impossible to make the window smaller – my main gripe of even having the app open. (I researched this, and tried downloading the Skype Business Edition as some discussion forums suggested this would do away with the social media nagging window, but alas – it’s PC only.)

I won’t go into any more detail, let’s just say that the desktop version of Skype doesn’t feel like the home of the worlds largest video conferencing app, accounting for 70 million+ video conferences per day (numbers from 2013). My first tip would be to do away with the 2000s and start over with a clean slate and a focus of core services. 2003 is 11 years ago these days, and people are starting to notice.

Is it live or is it Memorex?

Nice videomix from the people behind Skinemax.

SMASH TV presents MEMOREX
STARRING RONALD McDONALD

Memorex is the advertising industry’s collective wet dream. The sequel to Smash TV’s critically acclaimed “Skinemax”, Memorex is a 50 minute VJ odyssey, a tribute to an entire generation who grew up with only a TV and a VCR for a babysitter.

Sourced from over forty hours of 80s commercials pulled from warped VHS tapes, Memorex is a deep exploration of nostalgia and the fading cultural values of an era of excess. It’s a re-contextualization of ads – cultural detritus, the lowest of the low – into something altogether more profound, humorous, and at times, even beautiful.

Digging up long forgotten memories for a generation who spent their formative years glued to the boob tube, Memorex is a veritable nostalgia nuke for children of the 80s. Endless beach parties, Saturday morning cartoons, claymation everything, sleek cars, sexy babes, toys you forgot existed, station idents, primitive computer animation, all your favorite sugary cereal mascots, and so much more. An ode to the hyper consumerism and sleek veneer of a simpler time.

Memorex from Smash TV on Vimeo.

Upstream Color

9 år etter at den tidligere matematikkstudenten og programmereren Shane Garuth regisserte, skrev manus og musikk, fotograferte, produserte og spilte en av hovedrollene i indiejuvelen Primer, er han nå (endelig) ute med ny film.

Primer?

Aldri hørt om Primer? Det er ikke så rart. Filmen har knapt hatt distribusjon, og jeg snublet over den ved en tilfeldighet da jeg så XKCD’s nydelige Movie Narrative Charts (anbefales i sin fulle form) og lot meg fascinere av dens åpenbart noe ukonvensjonelle struktur.


Filmens handling tar utgangspunkt i den tilfeldige oppdagelsen av tidsreiser og denne oppfinnelsens paradokser og utfordringer. Men der filmer med denne tematikken gjerne omringes av utgåtte kjedelige touchpaneler i glass (Når skal Hollywood komme opp med et nytt fremtidskonsept – Minority Report er 11 år gammel – mer om dette senere), flyvende biler, revyaktige forviklinger og latterfremkallende forvekslingskomikk, gjengir Primer tidsreiser på en så dekonstruert og nøktern måte at det nesten virker plausibelt.

…it’s too important to use only for money, but to dangerous to use for anything else.
Chuck Klosterman

Hele filmen ble produsert for 7000$ og vant hovedprisen på Sundance Filmfestival i 2004. (Filmen kan lastes ned i HD for 15$ på Shane Carruth sin hjemmeside.)

Ny film!

I går meldte Comoyo at hans nye film debuterer på Sundance om få dager. Og selv om tittelen faktisk er hakket mer ubegripelig enn forgjengeren – og selv om traileren ikke gir seg ut for å være særlig mye tydeligere, uttaler han til LA Times:

“What I don’t want is this whole concept of it being a puzzle movie or ‘Primer’ being a puzzle movie. That’s not a fun little box to be in.”
– Sean Carruth (LA Times, 14th of January, 2013)

Forventningene er kanskje skrudd noe høyere i taket enn når jeg snublet over XKCD for noen år siden, men om alt går bra kommer det mer. Sundance er ferdig i slutten av januar, og siden regissøren siden sist også har tilegnet seg ansvaret for distribusjon, vil Downstream Color kunne lastes ned fra shanecarruth.com

Upstream Color – Theatrical Trailer from erbp on Vimeo.

Oppdatering:

Upstream Color lanseres rundt 7. mai på iTunes Music store. I mellomtiden er filmmusikken blitt lagt ut på Soundcloud.

Mer om:

FCPX vs Adobe

Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 Icon

I visited the Adobe Roadshow when Premiere Pro CS5 was announced, and I must say I was impressed. After half a decade of intermediate formats, transcoding and all that, the mercury playback engine was miles ahead of FCP7 in terms of uninterrupted workflow.

Final Cut Pro 7

At the time, DSLR video was about to become a major player, and Final Cut Pro wasn’t doing anything about it. Being able to edit in any codec was a godsend for editors more than ever mixing formats. As we all know by now, the background rendering version bumped 64bit of Final Cut Pro never arrived. Instead came a shitstorm of epic proportions following the release of what some called the iMovie Pro – the FCPX.

The Compressed Footage Editing Challenge

FCPX icon

I still haven’t familiarized myself too much with FCPX, but I recently had a small, interesting experience that struck me; Working on a documentary, I was receiving .H264 preview files from my editor. Wanting to test some cuts, I imported the clip into FCPX and told it to not transcode or optimize the file. What happened was just what I was expecting from a modern NLE: hazzle free, real time playback of a compressed 720i@H264 file. No intermediate file, no transcoding, no nothing. It just worked. Great!

But – while FCPX now supports XML, it doesn’t support FCP7 readable XML, so all my rough cuts would have to be redone manually by my editor, requiring a lot of time we didn’t have. This didn’t seem like a smart idea, so I fired up a trial of CS5.

[EDIT: I have later learned that there are multiple plugins avaliable for this process, like Xto7 and 7toX]

Adobe Premiere CS5

Based on the highly advertised mercury playback engine, I was completely sure the proess would be as smooth as in FCPX. I was proven wrong. Trying the same procedure with Premiere Pro CS5 was … crappy. Never mind the heavily touted Breakthrough performance with mercury playback engine; neither my old MacPro, nor my 2011 MacBook Air seemed to cope with the same file. First it needed to conform the video (a process that took a good ten minutes and somehow had to be repeated every 30 minutes or so. But the playback still was terrible. Giga crunchy blocks was appearing between all the GOPs, making the editing session unbearable. In addition, video was breaking up, and I was losing audio sync.

Since I’m missing the FCP XML support from FCPX, and given all the free advertising AVID and Premiere seemingly did get from the killing of FCP7, I thought the new version of Premiere, CS6 would have taken the advantage of fixing this this, so I downloaded it. How would it cope?

Adobe Premiere CS6

Trying CS6 was a bit better, the blocks were gone, but playback was only sporadic; It was impossible to switch between apps without being prompted with a black screen or the media pending window for 20-40 seconds before it let me edit again, and I got the exact same behavior from both my Macs.

So what am I saying really?

Even if they have had two years of perfecting their mercury playback engine, working with Adobe isn’t a breeze either. Compressed H264 might have or not have too much in common with native DSLR footage, but while this might not be anything but a biased test, it is far from insignificant, far from uncommon, and contains a factor I would greatly appreciate from a modern NLE.

In short, Adobe have been beat by a contender that was a laughing stock of the professional editing business only months ago…

Does that qualify for reevaluating FCPX? Not as a single cause, but based on these unscientific tests, it might show proof that Apple actually have done a very deep, and perhaps even superior job in their playback engine, and they aren’t even evangelizing about it. I guess I’m only saying although it still has a long way to go, I have begun taking FCPX seriously.

ALL YOUR AVID ARE BELONG TO US

Prøver å reversere lyd i AVID, et program jeg forlot for en dekade siden. Jeg trodde noe hadde skjedd på disse ti årene, men tok feil. All your base is not belong to you; det er AVIDs way eller ingenting. Skal vedde på at det er raskere å reversere lyden i Word. Blæh. (Men si gjerne ifra hva jeg tydeligvis gjør feil.)

All_your_avid

 


 

 

What happens if it actually works?

Italienere skaper kald fusjon (E24 link) i et rørsystem som ligner mest på noe nordmenn mekker billig sprit med.

Bortsett fra det minnet nyhetsklippet og den teoretisk sett største oppfinnelsen i moderne historie, kledt i sølvfolie (romfartsalderens og kjøkkenbenkens stiligste produkt) meg først og fremst om filmen Primer.

Primer-poster

Filmen, en seig perle av en sci-fi indie-film tar for seg den tilfeldige oppdagelsen av tidsreiser, og har undertittelen What happens if it actually works?“. 

Et godt spørsmål for oljelandet Norge om italienerenes kjøkkenbenkpregede sølvfolietroll faktisk viser seg å ikke sprekke i solen.

 

PS: Filmen anbefales forøvrig sterkt om du ikke lar deg skremme av at manusforfatteren, regissøren, klipperen, komponisten og en av skuespillerene alle er samme person, at han i utgangspunktet er matematiker, og at filmen etter sigende slår selv de fleste shoestring-budget filmer ned i støvlene med sitt produksjonsbudsjett på 7.000$.

Jeg falt pladask for den etter å ha sett denne XKCD-stripen. Her er traileren. Den sier ikke mye om filmen, men det er jo tross alt sånn de beste trailerene er.