

The Problem With Mobile Video - puja108
http://fr.anc.is/2012/07/24/social-video/
Why hasn't anyone succeeded at "Instagram for Video", yet?
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kugelblitz
Actually, the aspect ratio is because our eyes are side-by-side, so a longish,
non-square screen is mimicking our eye-view.

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c1sc0
Anyone care to chime in why portrait & square aspect ratios seem to work for
photos but not for videos? I know the very first film formats were actually
square for both moving & static images. Why did video quickly settle on 4:3 /
16:9 while photo explored the portrait, landscape & square formats? Is it
really just because of the technical constraints (the device to 'play' the
media) or is there a more fundamental, natural reason?

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ars
It was done for exactly one reason: To be different.

Whenever video and tv got a certain aspect ratio, film "one upped" it. Part of
it was also the size of 35mm film, once they moved the audio track off of the
central area it made it wider, so they used that area.

Basically, there is no fundamental reason for it. But these days people are
used to it and think it was done because video somehow requires it.

Now that they make lots of money from selling home video they will probably
not move too far from 16/9, but it wasn't always so.

It's the same with the poor FPS of film: It makes it look like a "film". Same
for graininess. It's not better, people just associate it with movies.

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kugelblitz
Thanks for the infos! I had thought I read it somewhere, but at the moment, I
can't find the facts to support my views (pun not intended).

The closest I can find is (<http://reviews.cnet.com/aspect-ratio-guide/>) "At
comparable screen sizes, the wide-screen image is a distinct improvement: it
offers a larger image, and the horizontal orientation is more akin to how your
eyes--next to each other, not on top of one another--view objects."

But that's hardly scientific. Does anyone have studies or so on how
widescreens are an improvement and why it's better?

What I can also find is that it's based on 35mm film from way, way in the
past, because back then, it was standard material and thus cheaper.

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twerquie
As I mentioned above, it's not so much about our eyes being side-by-side as it
is about our world being horizontally organized. Our eye muscles are optimized
for horizontal movement (two muscles involved for a horizontal scan, one
contract and one relax, where four are involved for vertical movement).

<http://www.tedmontgomery.com/the_eye/eom.html>

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harscoat
I really like the idea of onesec app: solves the pb that "I suck at taking
video" (// Instagram: even if my pics are crap they could look good with
filter). Still imho the best comparison is not "instagram" but Twitter. Onesec
= twitter for video ie: only 1 second format (or 2 or 5s) videos not more.
That'll make video less of a waste of time and more appealing to me.

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dugmartin
I played around with this idea, mocking it up in a Adobe Air app. The UI that
worked best was to allow for unlimited video but if it exceeds seven seconds
(that feels like enough plus it has a nice alliteration) then have a scrubber
at the bottom that lets you select any number of seven second snapshots to
publish ala Instagram.

For the consumption UI I would use a scrolling list like Instagram but just
have start and end of video keyframes alternate in a animation - maybe use a
fade in/out transition so it is not jarring to the eye. This would let you
quickly browse without much interaction required.

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c1sc0
Care to share the UI mockups? I'm working on the editing part right now & I'm
interested.

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dugmartin
It wasn't much - I vertically stacked a Flex VideoDisplay control, a custom
scrubber control and then a Flex Button control to publish. Instead of a fixed
size thumb the custom scrubber's thumb width was proportional to 7 seconds of
the total video width. I did it in AIR/Flex so I could just drop a video on
the app to test with it.

I never tested it on a mobile device but on my desktop I needed a lot of
keyframes in the video to make it work. I'm not sure what it would look like
with native video on a iOS/Android device.

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blacktar
Initially, I was absolutely convinced that one second videos would be an
incredibly stupid idea. Then I watched Cesar Kuriyama's video of one second
videos of a year of his life and was blown away by the storytelling potential:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyx6O_WFJhU>

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delinka
Excellent work. I would personally love to do something like this, but alas it
looks like it takes an enormous amount of work to edit. If I had a head-
mountable life recorder, I could revisit clips in my leisure time for editing
perhaps.

Or perhaps living life is more important than documenting. This video is
certainly inspirational like that. After all, the only people who will really
care about my life videos are me, my spouse, probably my kids and maybe their
kids.

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puja108
You wouldn't need a head-mountable life recorder to do a one second video
every day or every several hours, like shown in that video.

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delinka
You know not my personality or lifestyle. Yes, I would. Also, to get the
"right" second I'd need lots to choose from. Yes, I would need a head-
mountable life recorder.

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bradleyland
Suggestion: Give the option to shoot in 8mm mode. Shooting in this mode would
apply a filter reminiscant of old 8mm cameras, and would not have any sound. A
lot of the reason I dislike watching other people's short videos is the
intrusion of the local noise. Shooting video is hard enough to begin with, but
getting the sound right is equally difficult. When you take away sound, you
take away one more thing that's easy to get wrong. When you apply the 8mm film
filter, you mask the typically poor lighting and filming conditions, creating
something nostalgic, just like Instagram.

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debacle
The problem with mobile video is that there will be so much of it. If you
create an Instagram for video, you're going to massively hemorrhage bandwidth
as soon as the video becomes remotely popular.

If it was financially feasible, it would have happened, but as it stands any
company that tried this would get obliterated quite quickly. There's no way to
monetize against that much data.

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puja108
The aspect ratio / vertical video (PSA:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt9zSfinwFA>) point is a really good one, I
like the idea of "preventing" vertical video through norming/squaring the
aspect ratio

