n1ckFG

Weekly doodle: Untitled-01

Mon, 20 May 2013 08:05:44 -0400

Weekly doodle: Untitled-01

Weekly doodle: The_Castle

Mon, 13 May 2013 08:05:57 -0400

Weekly doodle: The_Castle

Weekly doodle: SWIRLY3a

Mon, 06 May 2013 08:05:46 -0400

Weekly doodle: SWIRLY3a

Video

Wed, 01 May 2013 13:04:03 -0400

Weekly doodle: Robo_20eye

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 08:05:30 -0400

Weekly doodle: Robo_20eye

Weekly doodle: ROYALTY

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 12:05:40 -0400

Weekly doodle: ROYALTY

Weekly doodle: Otto_Full_Plate

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:05:16 -0400

Weekly doodle: Otto_Full_Plate

Weekly doodle: Octopus_20E

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 09:06:06 -0400

Weekly doodle: Octopus_20E

Weekly doodle: Jack_grin

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:33:11 -0400

Weekly doodle: Jack_grin

Gorilla_and_Bird

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 08:05:00 -0400

Gorilla_and_Bird

BURGHER2

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 11:06:00 -0400

BURGHER2

Archiving digital media

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 11:02:00 -0400

I think it’s a mistake to think of film in general the same way as a paper book (probably the most rugged mass medium invented so far). It only lasts for a century if you store it in a controlled environment—and that costs money to maintain; it’s really only the very few reels our society values enough to put in the “ark” that can outlast one human lifetime.

In 2001 I got to visit a giant film vault underneath Pittsburgh—the negative for “Star Wars” used to live there for a time…even back then, they’d long ago transitioned to renting generic climate-controlled storage space, because there wasn’t enough film business anymore. It impressed on me how unlikely it is that the average indie filmmaker will ever have the resources to preserve their own work on its original medium…and in fact, the only reason we have any of the oldest, highly-unstable (and flammable) early films is that somebody had the foresight to transfer the reels to a more mature technology: really long strips of photo paper.

It’s true that film used to be able to score one important point against magnetic media—tapes and hard drives decay at a fixed rate, thanks to the Earth’s magnetic field, and basically _can’t_ be preserved. Optical discs don’t have that built-in death clock—but they depend on a delicate sandwich of metal or dye and cheap plastic maintaining its same optical properties over decades…so it’s just a pick-your-poison situation; instead of steady, gradual corruption of your whole collection, every so often one item out of it will be randomly rendered totally useless.

My understanding is that solid-state media are the current best bet for a medium that can survive for decades in normal room-temperature conditions—they’re a grid of chemical cells that are flipped one way when you put electricity into them, and another way when you take electricity out, making a pattern of ones and zeroes. The genius of them, supposedly, is that when the medium fails it becomes read-only: that is, you don’t lose data when your SSD hardware breaks down. (We’ve all lost data off solid-state USB sticks and SD cards, which would seem to contradict that—but usuallly that’s due to software corruption, a problem with the particular disk format, FAT32, that they come with out of the box. Remember in the early ’00s, when Firewire drives would sometimes spontaneously erase themselves? Same disk format.)

But the relative toughness of SSDs is still just conjecture…in the meantime, I think multiple copies of lossless digital files are the only long-term option for people who don’t have access to a film vault. I used to keep bare hard drives in a safe-deposit box, but that was a pain to maintain (and also a waste of a perfectly good large hard drive’s limited lifespan). Now I have a RAID drive at home that gets backed up to Backblaze ($5/month; there are cheaper alternatives if you don’t need the auto-backup feature), and I give my CC-licensed video masters to Archive.org. If I could bet on anybody’s preservation efforts in the short term, I’d bet on those guys.

For the long term, I hear Hitachi is working on quartz-crystal digital storage…

via fox-gieg.com/blog http://bit.ly/17iln26

6-2x

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:05:00 -0400

6-2x

CameraZOOM-20130123171053399

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 01:50:39 -0400

CameraZOOM-20130123171053399

2013-03-07_18-30-58_HDR

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 23:48:40 -0400

2013-03-07_18-30-58_HDR

Tribeca Hacks project In-progress test of a tool created for the...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 12:27:00 -0400

Tribeca Hacks project

In-progress test of a tool created for the Tribeca Hacks: Archives hackathon.

KinectToPin

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 12:27:25 -0400

Victoria Nece and I have released a compiled app and UI panel for getting Kinect mocap data into After Effects—it’s called KinectToPin. For a step-by-step guide, read through this tutorial.

Rule or Ruin (series)

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 09:17:15 -0400

(download mp4)

Available on: youtube.com | archive.org

A cycle of six short films, created between the beginning of the Afghan War and the beginning of the Iraq War.

format: DV video
software: Flash, After Effects, Commotion, Final Cut, Photoshop, Audition
Los Angeles, 2004.

Multi Medias

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 13:26:41 -0400

Mixed media (1950s?, fine art, 35M hits): Describes a work that mixes two or more visual media, often restricted to the disciplines of painting and sculpture.

Intermedia (1960s, fine art, 25M hits): Describes a work that mixes any two or more artistic disciplines usually recognized as separate. Popularized by the Fluxus group. (Coined by Dick Higgins.)

Hypermedia (1960s, computer science, 20M hits): Describes an organized collection of media files that the user can move between at will. Wikipedia is a hypermedia system. (Coined by Ted Nelson.)

Multimedia (1.2B hits)
1. (1960s, fine art): Describes a work that mixes any two or more media; largely replaced in current usage by “intermedia.” (Possibly coined by Bob Goldstein.)

2. (1990s, computer science): Describes a device that can display multiple types of media—sound, video, text, images, etc.

3. (1990s, popular): Describes a work in any medium either created or experienced using such a device; largely replaced in current usage by “new media.”

New media (1990s, media theory, 69M hits): Describes works which are both created and experienced using a computer.

Transmedia (1990s, media theory, 3M hits): Describes a narrative dispersed across multiple works in multiple media, each of which contains only a portion of the complete story. A long-running franchise like “Star Wars” can be considered one epic transmedia work. (Coined by Marsha Kinder.)

Rich media (2000s?, design, 9M hits): Describes works distributed via the internet that make use of sound and video, as opposed to images and text.

(Hit counts from search performed 23 mar 12.)

Franklin

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 11:23:29 -0500

(download mp4)

Available on: youtube.com | archive.org

A reading of the poem “Franklin” by Karen Solie, with realtime graphics created in Isadora and Processing.

format: HD video
software: Isadora, Processing, After Effects
Toronto, 2012.