Vertical video

The shift also shows off the way that opinions of tech elites can be rendered moot by mainstream preferences. So, whether you are shooting a home video or something for work, you can safely ignore the puppets. To shoot vertically isn’t to be exposed as a tech ignoramus or a lazy philistine who cares little for the creative process. Rather it is to be on the vanguard of a novel and potentially far-reaching artistic trend.
 
The arguments against vertical video all seek to find something inviolable about images that play out horizontally before our eyes. “We live in a horizontal world, and most action happens from left to right,” said Mr. Bova, one of the men behind the puppet P.S.A. He added that “vertical videos feel claustrophobic,” because often they feature one or two people occupying the full frame, and not much of the landscape to show what lies beyond. Finally, Mr. Bova said, “our eyes are horizontal,” by which he meant the human field of vision is wider than it is tall, so it is only natural that our videos match that shape.
 
There is a simple rejoinder to his argument: Our eyes may be horizontal, but our hands are best suited to holding objects vertically, which is why phones, tablets and, in the predigital age, our books and other documents were usually oriented in portrait mode. Watching horizontal video on a phone’s vertical screen is a minor annoyance. With a horizontal video, you have to awkwardly flip your phone sideways so the entire image fills the screen, or you can keep your phone vertical and tolerate the huge black bars displayed above and below the picture.
 

So writes Farhad Manjoo in the NYTimes. Let's throw this in the category of contrarian pieces that are actually just wrong.

Just like professional photographers will turn their camera vertically from time to time, the lens orientation should match the subject. I would not want to watch a mumblecore movie in a Panavision 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio, but for Lawrence of Arabia, the Super Panavision 2.20 to 1 widescreen aspect ratio was crucial to the feeling of the feeling of people against the open expanse of the desert (and it amplifies Lawrence as a great man to see him wield his force of personality against such a broad canvas).

Sure, sometimes shooting vertically on your phone allows you to get closer to your subject, like the baby's first steps mentioned in the piece. However, for most subjects, horizontal is better. Human field of vision is horizontal, and it feels claustrophobic to watch vertical video for long period of time, it's like looking through the vertical slats in a fence.

For a Snap or a Vine, sure, I don't really care that much, neither do most people. Most of those are shot spontaneously, without much regard for the background, and it actually feels more unnatural or artificial if the video is horizontal since you know people usually hold their phones vertically. The vertical orientation suits the casual, disposable nature of those videos and subjects. The rise in vertical video reflects the rise of those networks and the rise of the mobile phone, but it doesn't signal some fundamental change in the difference between the suitability of horizontal versus vertical video.

Yesterday I watched this remarkable eyewitness video of the explosion in Tianjin China. It's stunning, but I couldn't help thinking two things watching it. One: stop filming and get to safety! Two: I wish it was shot horizontally.

GMOs

So people aren’t necessarily averse to GMOs specifically?
 
Not really. I mean, they are, but it's part of a more general aversion to biotechnology, to things people don't understand.
 
In a lot of ways, I think it’s akin to anything that appears on a label that says “may contain X,” where X is literally anything people haven’t heard of or don’t understand, and because of that, sounds somewhat strange.
 
We actually tested this with a label on apples that said “this apple is ripened using ethylene,” which is a very commonly used and safe process. But people were as averse to those apples as they were to GMOs, simply because they didn’t know what ethylene was.
 
People aren’t really differentiating a whole lot in between these things. They are just unfamiliar, scary sounding things about food.
 

Fear of GMOs holds a lot of lessons for innovation in biotechnology. I wasn't around for the introduction of milk pasteurization or microwaves, both were already widely accepted in my lifetime, so perhaps consumer fear of GMOs are just a phase, like white-washed jeans and regular fit men's dress shirts.

Elmo's arrival points to HBO's future

Sesame Street announced a new five season deal with HBO. The seasons will be available exclusively on HBO for nine months before dropping at PBS.

This is HBO pursuing the Netflix, Amazon Video, and Hulu strategy instead of the reverse, the latter three all offer or plan to offer original children's programming. HBO has never had kids programming, and this move is a clear acknowledgment that they view themselves as a mini-bundle in and of themselves, more so than a channel carried by the traditional cable bundle.

HBO was once content to be a brand that stood for movie titles from the Warner Bros. catalog and boxing. Then it offered some comedy, and then original series, most of it targeted towards an adult demographic. HBO has had some great original series over the years, but it's fair to characterize their house style as having a fair bit of sex and nudity along with a fair dose of profanity and violence. They told us “It's not TV. It's HBO.” but if you watched any of their series you weren't likely to confuse the two.

What they didn't offer was family or children's programming. The money was coming in by the truckload, especially during the heyday of DVD, so it wasn't as if HBO felt a great sense of urgency to diversify its subscriber base.

Then came Netflix, which doesn't have a house style. Rather, they have more of a technology companies approach to content and growth: why put artificial limits on your own growth? The limit on entertainment subscription service growth is a function of the diversity and quality of their content portfolio. To acquire a subscriber, you need enough content to entice that person to become a subscriber. Then you need enough interesting content each month to keep them from canceling (that's the main reason subscription services like HBO don't release all their series at the same time of the year).

Once you have enough content to acquire and keep one type of subscriber, the marginal return on your next dollar of content is higher if you produce content that appeals to another type of subscriber. That's the Netflix strategy. If you look at all their original series, they are all over the map in genre, style, tone. They want to offer something for everyone so their subscriber base can include anyone.

[Amazon Prime is an even more bizarre subscription because it includes not just video but free expedited shipping, Amazon music, unlimited photo storage, e-book lending libraries, Amazon-branded everyday essentials, cheaper shipping on groceries, and a personal drone for dropping your kids off at school. I made one of those up, but it might be part of Prime next year.]

And now HBO is following suit. The next step for HBO is to let its original series spill out from Sunday night. If you read the Hollywood Reporter or another industry rag, you'll no doubt have heard of HBO passing on quite a few original series recently. Some of that could be creative differences, but if any of it is HBO limiting themselves to what they can fit in their Sunday night time slots, they're imposing yet another artificial limit on themselves that makes no sense in this streaming, time-shifted age. If HBO Now is the future, at some point it shouldn't even matter if some content on HBO Now never airs on their cable channel, especially if it's something like Sesame Street which would seem out of place on a cable channel chock full of mature content. The MSO's wouldn't love that, and perhaps HBO would just tack on another channel like HBO Family, but they should be willing to consider any concessions to their linear channel to be a strategy tax.

...

Since Twitter has largely replaced late-night talk-show monologues as the joke factory on the day's news, I enjoyed this roundup of humorous tweets riffing off of the HBO and Sesame Street deal.

Like a ringtone for your car

So you’ve bought a new Ford Mustang and you want to hear a perfect deep-throated roar as you punch the gas and pull away from that Chevy Camaro. There’s an app for that.
 
Roush Performance’s Active Exhaust lets an Apple iPhone or iPad customize a Mustang’s sound and save the settings on those devices. It’s available for 2015 Mustangs with Roush’s Quad Tip exhaust system.
 
...
 
The system comes with three preloaded exhaust modes as well as the ability to create a custom sound. Touring is a quieter setting for neighborhood cruising. Sport is louder at lower speeds and less noisy in normal city driving. Track, for off-street use, bypasses the muffler for a full, unrestricted tone.
 

When I first read the headline, I thought Ford was making an all-electric Mustang, and that the engine noise would be synthetic. Electric cars are so quiet some think it's a safety problem as pedestrians, cyclists, and even other drivers often can't hear them approaching.

Everyday messenger bag

I've backed a ton of Kickstarter projects in my day, and experience tells me that projects that require electronics and hardware almost never ship on time. They are almost always manufactured somewhere in China, and somewhere along the line, some part doesn't come back the way the creators hoped, and it's back to the drawing board, and the promised release date becomes a joke, albeit not an amusing one for either party.

Physical goods that don't require electronics, however, have shipped on time more often than not. Fashion items, for example. Thus I'm hopeful to receive one of these Everyday Messenger Bags by the end of 2015, hopefully before Christmas vacation.

I've long wanted a bag that would hold both a 13" to 15" Macbook Pro and a camera body plus a few lenses. This looks like it might fit the bill, and the latest update includes a potentially clever tripod carrying solution.

Check out the video below and/or the Kickstarter page for more detail.