Ryanne, Jay and I have been trying to come up with a good way to embed ogg video with the new video tag and have it still work in browsers that don’t support that yet. We want to show people how to set that up at the Open Video Conference. We came up with a method similar to this but hadn’t finalized it yet. Anyway, Kroc Camen’s Video for Everybody code is better.

There were a few things about the Video for Everybody code that I didn’t like so I edited it so that it validates as HTML5 and in the interest of simplification I took out the fallbacks for “QuickTime Installed but no Flash installed” and “No QuickTime and no Flash installed.” Also, the QuickTime object fallback is simplified because it assumes playback only on the iPhone.

So check it out the test page with a self hosted Flash player fallback
and
one with a YouTube fallback.

If you are using FireFox 3.5 beta you will get an ogg video, If you have Safari 3 or 4 you will get an mp4 and if you have FF 3, IE6, IE7 or IE8 you will get the Flash player (actually playing the same mp4 that Safari is playing).

Here’s the code snippet with a self-hosted flash player
and
Here’s the code snippet with the YouTube flash player.

The one big stumbling block to this whole thing at the moment is that poster image attribute is not supported yet and (because of that?) the video will load whether you play it or not. My understanding is that it’s supposed to be resolved in Firefox 3.5 before release (who knows what Apple’s plans are with Safari).

Following up on the last post about HTML 5 and OGG video, here are some ideas that I’ve been thinking about in preparation for the Open Video Conference. If you have some ideas please leave a comment here or email me.

This is an idea that I’ve been playing with for literally years now. It’s a talk show hosted by my Second Life avatar, Aren Mandala. This episode features our friend Poid who I first met when I did the Scion City stuff about a year and half ago. I actually know a few really cool artists through Second Life so I’m going to try to feature as many as possible. There’s a short meta story around the talk show that I’m telling which is a bit open ended so I’ll be publishing every week until it’s done. Please go watch the other videos - I’m having a blast with this.

Last week I hung out with Jay, Ryanne, Jen, Markus and Alicia. It was nice and sunny at the beginning of the week (in the 70s) and then got colder towards the end. It even snowed a little bit on Friday morning.

Today I was playing with Ogg video (Theora) and the new HTML 5 video element which is supported in the Firefox 3.1 beta. This is a short screencast showing Ogg video playing in the new Firefox and the simplicity of using the video element. This video is 1280 x 800 so be sure to click the fullscreen button to see the details.

There is an Ogg version embeded after the jump. (Get the Firefox 3.1 beta)

Jen, Markus, Alicia and I are staying with Jay & Ryanne this week, just hanging out and working on stuff (or not working). Today I spent a lot of time playing with my editing process and trying out a few new things like stabilization with Motion and color grading in Color.

When you start up a LavaLamp it goes through a few phases. First it just sits there while the lava warms up. Then a bit of lava squirts to the top really quickly and seems to “freeze.” A little while later that frozen lava breaks up and falls to the bottom and soon after tiny balls start spitting up (that’s what’s captured in this video). After the tiny ball phase, it enters the regular LavaLamp phase for a few hours before reaching the final giant lava glob. Once you’ve got a giant lava glob it’s time to shut it down and give it a rest already. I shot this so I’d have something HD to upload to Flickr.

This is a quick tour around mogulus for the artists who will be participating in 24 Hours 24 Artists. The video is actually 1280 x 720 pixels so be sure to hit the fullscreen button to get the full effect.

January 2 - 3, 2009 I’ll be broadcasting on the web with artists from all over the world. Check out the website 24hours24artists.com. Subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on artists and schedule.

Back in October I went to Ankara, Turkey to speak at the Video Vortex 3 conference. This was my first trip to Europe and it was amazing. Here are seven minutes of little moments from my 5 days there.

I thought about adding notes to the video but they felt out of place so I’m putting them here. The first half of the video is from the conference at Bilkent University and out at various places in Ankara. The second half of the video is from our trip to Cappadocia. On the way there we stopped at a huge dry salt lake (it kind of looks like the moon). The tunnel we crawled through was part of an underground city there in Cappadocia. The pop song at the beginning and end is one that we heard on the radio - the singer is encouraging listeners to make a video for the song and upload it to YouTube. I also have a bunch of pictures on Flickr.

Before the girls were born, Rebecca and I had 6 cats and a great dane. The last of those, a cat named Judah, died about a year ago. He was strange; liked to be outside and would scratch or bite you if you tried to pet him so he didn’t really seem like “a pet.” He was more like some wild animal who came around, demanded food and left. We’ve been talking about getting a new cat for the last 6 months or so and after a trip to the shelter with the Girl Scouts the other day I guess it was time to find us one. Here she is. We’re still working on a name - trying out Joon.

Last night I was at a party and Willie Nelson was on the stereo and it brought back this memory so vivid and so powerful. Stardust is a great album, you should get yourself a copy.

What can I say, this kind of thing happens to me once in a while. This time it was in London, at the end of a great day, as I left the restaurant from the future with Jan and Dizzy.

It’s been hard living in the middle of Bush country for the last 8 years and it’s nice to see things begin to change.

Today I went out and visited some polling stations for Video the Vote. Churchill High School is where precincts 3111 and 3151 vote. The election judge said that 39% of the registered voters voted early in this election. While I was talking to him, Roger came up to me and asked if I’d interview him about his voting experience. Apparently he wasn’t aware that Bush could not serve a 3rd term. I was not aware that voters did not know this.

[edit] I forgot to mention that he told me off camera (while I was setting up) that he had voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary and was disappointed that she didn’t get the nomination so he thought he’d vote for Bush again.

This is my first video from my trip to Ankara and London. I still have over 3 hours of video to go through - this was just near the end of the last tape so it’s one of the first I worked on. It’s from the restaurant Inamo with it’s cool projection menu. I had dinner there with Dizzy and Jan and had a great time. We also had a pretty strange encounter on the street as we were leaving. That video is almost done.

Verdi - VloMo08A video a day for the month of November

Exporting for iPod/iPhone straight out of Final Cut Pro has been messed up from the day Apple came up with these presets. So I made this screencast to show you how I deal with it. For best results put this thing in fullscreen mode.

Re: An Artist Seeking Your Thoughts About An Upcoming Project…

It’s been around for about a year now but I’ve just really gotten excited about Seesmic. In this video thread I talk a little bit about my reluctance to embrace things like Seesmic but I also think this thread is an example of what makes it great. Here’s an interesting discussion with people I didn’t know about until 2 days ago. The more I think about it the more I come to the conclusion that if the aim is to be social and/or if the aim is for things to be available then I really don’t care much about the branding or TOS. I’m much more interested in the immediacy. So go create an account, search for “verdi” and follow me so we can play. They’re working on a new version that’s not one monolithic flash app and they’ve got a decent mobile site at m.seesmic.com (which will be cooler when the iPhone can record video).

Update: I just noticed that the embeded video is also a mini version of the site. You can log (or create an account) and record a response right here. Pretty cool.

This is the text and videos that I presented at the Video Vortex conference in Ankara on October 11, 2008. A note about the videos embeded in this post: most have been edited so you may want to go back and watch the complete videos and read the discussion that accompanies each one. Also, although the videos are displayed rather small, they each have a fullscreen button that will enlarge them if you wish.

First let me say that this is not an anthropological study of videobloggers’ relationships. I do recommend watching Michael Wesch’s presentation to the Library of Congress entitled “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube” which describes a community’s evolution that is surprisingly similar to the group of videobloggers that formed in the summer of 2004. What I hope to do is to give you a very subjective and passionate view of how I’ve experienced relationships since beginning the practice of videoblogging nearly four years ago and how technology has begun to change not only what we do but who we are.

When I first started regularly posting videos on my blog back in the fall of 2004 my main goal was to become a better storyteller. So, because I like to give myself difficult assignments, I decided that I was going to make lots short films quickly - one a week. My idea was to focus on telling stories not production values. And I thought I’d post them on my blog because that was an easy way to show them to friends and family spread out across the country.

On the evening of the last day of the first week, when I still hadn’t even gotten started I realized that I was going to have to move to plan B which was to interview someone. So there with time running out my daughter Lauren, who was eight years old at the time, agreed to be interviewed. I set up the tripod in her bedroom and she straightened up the pile of stuffed animals on her bed and we began. We probably went on for about half an hour covering topics like movies, music and animals of all kind; real, stuffed and even robotic. Here’s an excerpt.

A few people gave me feedback on the interview either in the comments or via email but the most interesting feedback happened in our house. First, just watching Lauren light up while watching herself was fantastic. I think she also enjoyed the fact that her older sister, who wasn’t initially interested in being interviewed, was now begging to have her turn. We all watched it together over and over and over again with each grandparent. It quickly became the first of many new shared stories in our family.

About 5 weeks later during Christmas vacation, Dylan, my older daughter who was then eleven, was bored. I suggested she make her own video about herself instead of having me do it. She thought that was a good idea and took my camera into her room to shoot. About 45 minutes later she came out panicked that the end of tape warning had come on and insisted that she needed more. I told to just use those last two minutes to wrap it up so she wouldn’t have an impossible editing task ahead of her. When she was done I helped her load everything into iMovie. My advice was to try to cut out the boring parts. She put together a 5 minute video and we put it on the blog she had started about 10 months before.

I thought the video was great. She was surprisingly authentic and unfazed about talking about her braces and headgear. So being a proud father, I told my new videoblogging friends about Dylan’s video and Jay responded by writing a post about to share it with his friends. Six days later she was on ABC news representing bloggers as people of the year.

At least 30,000 people downloaded her video, which was pretty extraordinary at the time (almost a year before YouTube), and many more saw her on television. It was strange. It definitely made a great “what did you do over Christmas vacation” story. But it also brought up a couple of conversations in our house. First there was a lot of unexpected attention both good (TV, lots of praise) and bad (some incredibly nasty comments on her blog). My wife and I tried to help Dylan put it in perspective. The positive attention was certainly fun and exciting but in retrospect it was arbitrary and fleeting. The nasty comments seemed to be even less of an issue for Dylan as by that time she’d already seen that kind of behavior on the internet.

Ultimately I think both Dylan and Lauren began to see themselves differently or at least became a little more comfortable with themselves. Also, I think for them this was just another part of what life is like when you’ve always had email and the web and instant messaging and video conferencing. It really wasn’t all that far out of the ordinary.

In late December 2004, a videoblogger in Los Angeles announced that he’d be making a trip to New York the following month for work and suggested that maybe a few people could meet him for drinks one night. Up until this point most of us (except for the handful that lived in New York) had not met another videoblogger in person. Over the course of a couple of weeks a few people meeting for drinks turned into the first Vloggercon. About 80 people from across the US and Europe got together in Manhattan on a Saturday in January 2005. We had a makeshift 8 hour conference that was streamed live over the web to a few hundred people. I hardly remember what we talked about at the conference. What I mostly remember was a room full of people overwhelmed with excitement to meet each other in person. Over and over again people were happy to find that the people they’d come to know from their videos were actually just the same in person. Since then, that scene - people meeting in person for the first time - has happened hundreds or probably thousands of times over again. Here’s a clip of my friend Jay, who was one of the original organizers of the group, talking about it that night.

Briefly at the end of that video, the woman with the camera was Ryanne. Very quickly Jay, Ryanne and I became friends though video and email. Four years later they are two of my very best friends and we’ve worked on many projects together (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).

Jay and Ryanne are also engaged and live in Virginia where they work on freelance video projects (like documenting dissent at the Bejing Olympics) and produce stories of people hacking everyday life for their site ryanishungry.com. They’ve put much of their lives on their videoblogs. Here are two clips about the beginning of their relationship. Their honesty and willingness to share these with people are inspiring to me. I also think they’re a glimpse of the very near future when in some form or another many people have intimate relationships that happen in a public space.

Next is my father. Three years ago my he had heart bypass surgery. About 9 days later I was over at his apartment to visit and just check on him. We were standing in his kitchen and I asked him how he was feeling and he said, “What do you think about wishbones?” So I say wait a second and pull my tiny mpeg4 camera out of my pocket (it’s my habit to have a small camera with me everywhere) and I say, “What?”

The thing about that video is that it’s absolutely perfect. That is my father. Sure there is more to him than that but really this is what it’s like to hang out with him. This is my favorite video and it makes me happy that my daughters get to see a little of him the way I do.

This post has lots of comments - two from people don’t normally comment on blogs. My cousin Janet, “Your dad is my hero in many ways, always positive and inspiration more than he can imagine.” My dad’s old friend Mark Fishtein whom I’ve never met, “You [have] delivered to me the gift of a visit with your father.” For me this about as good as it gets. And again, it adds another piece to our family documentary which has changed how we remember each other and the conversation that we have about each other.

This last video has been a bit of an odd experience for me and my family. The video was shot one morning while I was playing around with my new camera. The girls were definitely not into being taped so there is only about 15 seconds more on the tape than I’ll show you in this video. About a month after it was shot I found it while going through the tape. It struck me as funny and I’m sure, a pretty typical exchange between a parent and children who are old enough to be annoyed.

I showed the video to my daughters and they thought it was hilarious. So I posted it and when on with life. After a few sympathetic comments, I began getting some pretty angry comments concerned that I had unwillingly put my daughters on the web.

That was an incredibly frustrating situation for everyone. That was certainly not the case and I think it should have been obvious given the context of my the videos that I and my daughters have posted over the years. But I guess that context is critical. Michael Wesch in his work talks about Context Collapse - where when making a video you can never really be sure of the context in which it will be viewed. You may have some small intended audience but often we have unseen audiences.

So how do you fix that? Do you just expect people to learn the context from the complete work - the entire archive of posts? Do you catch people up on each post - “previously on Michael’s videoblog…” Ultimately I think it will be a widespread intuitive understanding of this Context Collapse on both sides that will help. Over the next few years, as Lauren and Dylan’s generation become adults, we’ll become more comfortable with how much of our lives and communications are part of the collective, global mind and of course more comfortable with the idea that it’s collective and global. My experience and observations have been that this technology not merely changes what we can do but more importantly changes who we are becoming.

Yeah I said it. We’ll see for sure in 31 days.

Vlog Anarchy Take 2
W-WTF?

I got a package in the mail the other day for an ARG about the film Blindness which opens today.
iamblind.org
ARGNet post
Unfiction thread

This is a screencast of YouTube’s great new metric, Hot Spots which lets you see what parts of your videos connect with viewers and which parts don’t.

I’m really excited about going to Video Vortex 3 in Ankara, Turkey next week. I’ll be running a Videoblogging Boot Camp on Friday 10/10 and making a presentation about networked relationships on Saturday 10/11. I hope to get some video posted during and right after the conference but I’ll be stopping in London for a few days on the way back so I imagine that some will have to wait until I get back home.

Workshop - Videoblogging Boot Camp
This workshop will take participants through the entire videoblogging process — from setting up a blog, to shooting, editing and compressing video, to making them findable and searchable. This workshop will be a fast paced, practical, hands-on experience. We’ll survey a number of videoblogs that use a variety of storytelling methods before going off to shoot and edit a short video introduction. Participants will use that video to learn how to post to their own videoblogs (or add video to their existing blogs). We’ll also set up a collaborative videoblog that will collect participant’s impressions during and after the conference.

Conference Talk - Videoblogging: Networked Relationships
Video and sound offer such a rich experience that even small, compressed, web-cam clips provide an extraordinary level of intimacy. When you combine this with a network of over a billion people, the nature of self-awareness, relationships, community and our families begin to alter. This presentation will take a look at some of the consequences — both intended and unintended — of videoblogging and the unconstrained personal connection it offers.

This is a nearly hour long presentation to the Library of Congress by Michael Wesch who gave us The Machine is Us/ing Us last year. His talk is about his (and his students’) study of video practice on YouTube. I’ve never been a big contributer to YouTube but I have been seriously involved in videoblogging and web video for four years now. Most of that time has been spent contributing to and interacting with the community of people centered around the Videoblogging email list where we’ve seemed to have gone through an experience parallel to the one Wesch outlines in his talk.

One of the ideas Wesch brings up by way of McLuhan (at about 26:00) is that of new forms of self-awareness. I know I certainly have a much different view of myself today than I did four years ago. And now, not only how we view ourselves as individuals but also how we collectively view ourselves is becoming something that’s undergoing constant revision. What exactly this provides is hard to say because things are rushing along at such at such a rapid pace. Sometimes, like Reuben was talking about recently, it may make you feel a bit crazy but ultimately we want this because as my experience has shown me and what I think Wesch concludes is that, this will be an extraordinarily good thing.

Once again, I continue to be entertained by shiny things in the sky.

The music is the end of 11 Ghosts II and the beginning of 12 Ghosts II from Nine Inch Nails, Ghosts I-IV.

This whole subprime mess is extremely frustrating. I can’t stand when people argue that the government shouldn’t regulate anything. This is the shit that happens when we do that. Of course, in the end, the government is forced to intervene anyway. To me the whole point of having a government is to do the things we can’t do for ourselves - i.e. help to protect us corporations that put profit over people.

So given this mess, here’s a look at our choices (collected from a few of the pieces floating around on the internet).

ABC News - Despite Claims Today He Warned of this Crisis, McCain in 2007 Said He Didn’t See This Crisis Coming
John McCain interviews by The Keen Sentinel
Barack Obama on CNN
Obama, Durbin propose federal mortgage reforms
Obama Urges Bernanke, Paulson to Fight Foreclosures, Hold Homeownership Summit

This video was originally posted back in January 2006 on a now defunct version of this site. It was shot at the SFO Bart station.

Yesterday the evening light on the wall across from my desk was so beautiful that I just had to grab my camera. It reminded me of how I used to listen to music and watch the light and shadows reflected on my ceiling from a lava lamp. The moon just happened to be on the same tape. I’d forgotten it was there and rediscovered it as I searched through the tape to see what else I’d recorded. The music in NIN, track 34 from Ghosts IV. I’ve been waiting for a good excuse to use something from Ghosts I - IV since it’s released as CC - BY-NC-SA.

At the end of July I went to a retreat with my theater company out in Sabinal, TX. It’s not a big place. This is pretty much it.

The music is from Girl Talk. It’s what I was listening to in the car (and pretty much everywhere else for the last few months).