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Showing posts from July, 2015

The high's and low's of videos

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Everyone knows that a compressed image pixellates when enlarged, and that a compressed video doesn't look that good when seen on a larger screen. There is actually a very simple logic at play here. The reason is actually very simple... (Image source: http://www.generalforum.com/images/hosted/bluray_vs_dvd_vs_vhs_01.jpg) When we shoot one hour of full HD video, the frame size is 1920 X 1080 pixels, and the space occupied on the hard disk after it is transferred is about 50 GB. With SD footage the frame size is 720 X 576 pixels for PAl video (Standard Definition - fast becoming outdated) the captured video on the hard disk is about 12 GB. Of course it all depends on the codec you use for capturing the video. The HD video is vibrant, crisp, and beautiful looking on your editing screen. If we make a blu-ray disk after the edit, it is almost as good as the original raw format because you can tranfer the edited video almost in its original format. The capacity of the double lay

Sherlock Holmes - The Master

We see things, but can we listen to what they say? Can we read what they 'write'? I have copied a rather large text from a Sherlock Holmes' Story - The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle. If you are a Sherlock Holmes fan (I mean the books by Arthur Conan Doyle), you have possibly read this before... As always, I am amazed by his powers of deduction and visual analysis.....  I took the tattered object in my hands and turned it over rather ruefully. It was a very ordinary black hat of the usual round shape, hard and much the worse for wear. The lining had been of red silk, but was a good deal discoloured. There was no maker’s name; but, as Holmes had remarked, the initials “H. B.” were scrawled upon one side. It was pierced in the brim for a hat-securer, but the elastic was missing. For the rest, it was cracked, exceedingly dusty, and spotted in several places, although there seemed to have been some attempt to hide the discoloured patches by smearing them with ink. “I c

Speaking Visuals

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All visuals have a message. Some are created by us, some, by nature. The beholder/receiver of the message analyses the message, makes meaning out of it; the visual generates responses at several levels. There are several factors that have an effect on our perception of a visual. According to Norman, there are three levels of design: visceral, behavior, and reflective. At the visceral level, which is based on instinct, physical features like look, feel, and sound dominate. When we perceive something as “pretty”, that judgment comes directly from the visceral level.  Behavior design concerns the use, or ease of use where appearance may not be significant. In most behavior design functionality gets the top priority.  In a reflective design message, culture and the meaning of a product gets priority.  However, today, consumers are more critical, prone to analyse a visual at the visceral and behavior level, so the designing is done to evoke emotion, arouse past experiences, create

Visuals speak. A thousand words, or even more.

Visuals speak. A thousand words, or even more. But are we able to hear what they say? And do we really understand what they say? Rhetoric is the art of persuading the audience, with written or verbal arguments, or using any other means of communication. These other means of communication are non-verbal - using expressions, gestures, mannerisms, and images or visuals, and are sometimes more effective than verbal, textual, written communication. A gesture, a raised eyebrow, a wink, or a closed fist could be more effective than a lot of words. In a previous post  in this blog, I have written about how we form an opinion about an object or a person in a single glance. In that single glance, we perceive, recognize and also form an opinion. How fast is this process? Experiments have proven that it could be as fast as a fraction of a second. But otherwise, there is also a longer process, that of the cortical pathway in the brain, which recalls and matches images, and the meanings they c

Radio - The Coolest One!

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Radio - The Coolest One! I am one of those people, who have actually seen a television set coming into their homes for the first time, a digital immigrant. I remember how excited we were when it was delivered. A black-and-white television, which we immediately fell in love with. But we did not have programmes for 24 hours; instead, we just had a few hours of TV in the beginning. I remember, the time when we used to see a cricket match on TV. The cameramen were so untrained, that if a batsman hit a sixer, by the time the camera located the ball, it would be already in the crowd. We used to feel extremely bored by the commentary. We were used to a fast paced radio commentary, which gave continuous description of whatever went on on the field. It was full of so many words. On the other hand, on the TV, the commentator would just say, "Oh! What a shot!" and shut up, leaving the viewer to see the rest for themselves. We used to find that extremely boring! So we used to turn t

Beautiful and Ugly - A Matter of Perception?

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How does the mind receive and analyse information from a visual? It is a complex process involving the left and right hemispheres of the brain, together synchronising the logical and emotional intelligence, at the same time, involving learning through genetic evolution, and adding to it experiential learning. I came across a Facebook update which described how some primary school textbooks, the meaning of beautiful and ugly were represented. Check the picture.... (Source: Unknown) How many readers agree to this? No, don't give me an intelligent, sociologically relevant, politically correct answer. Truth is, we have all learnt the meaning of beautiful and ugly from this, or some other picture, or have been pointed out a beautiful woman and an ugly one during our childhood and in our college days. In the early stages of childhood, from birth to 3 years, the human brain is extremely vulnerable to external influences. A violent childhood, a traumatic experience, or visuals suc

An article by Sam Pitroda

I had written about Digital India and also about Sam Pitroda.  Here's an article from Sam Pitroda himself.  Four critical things that make a Digital India possible today and challenges ahead  By Sam Pitroda This government's Digital India campaign is a welcome step in creating an India of the 21st century powered by connectivity, technology and the opportunity that such connectivity offers in terms of access, services and platforms for unleashing India's creative talent.  However, it is imperative to understand what it means to create a 'Digital India'. Such an effort requires an entire ecosystem of support and an apparatus for implementation that has to be developed and matured over a period of time. While the face of Digital India may be a website providing e-governance or connectivity between the citizen and the government, the thinking, vision and systems that produce this end product are implemented over several years.  And

Deadlines are deadlines, even if you are Dead!

Working in the media is certainly not for the faint hearted. There are deadlines. If you are dying, your boss would probably tell you to file the report and then die! The deadline remains. I have been speaking about this in my class, and have been trying to live by it for so many years now. You cannot keep your client waiting, and neither your audiences. My students had painted this line on the door of the classroom, and some students still call it the 'Deadline Room'. The news starts exactly at the time it is supposed to, a TV serial also starts when it is supposed to. No TV channel can show a screen asking the viewers to wait while a reporter is busy filing a report. A TV serial cannot wait till an edit is done. Its all done in clockwork precision. If you miss a deadline, you can be sure that you have lost your job. There are several things tied to this. When there is news at nine, millions of viewers and listeners are glued to the television set, or their radio for th

Formula for a hit film?

It is naive to think that you can hit upon the perfect research topic at the first go. Research can be a piece of cake, and you can have it, but you may not really be able to eat it! That's exactly why, instead of starting to work on the concept of a formula for a hit film, I decided straightaway to search for research done on the subject. That's why we do literature review anyway. And look what I found.... Instead of paraphrasing any of the texts that I found, I am directly going to copy-paste the relevant sentences and give links at the end of this post - Wikipedia style... Psychologist Professor James Cutting and his team from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, analyzed 150 high-grossing Hollywood  films  released from 1935 to 2005 and discovered the shot lengths in the more recent movies followed the same mathematical  pattern  that describes the human attention span. The pattern was derived by scientists at the University of Texas in Austin in the 1990s who stu