A Quick Technology Note

Today in the lab, I discovered a problem when I tried to copy the .AVI file of my raw video from the workstation onto my portable hard drive. While the file was a bit over 5 gigabytes, and my hard drive had 232 gigabytes of free space, when I tried the copy I got an “Insufficient Space” error message.

The problem, as it turned out, was in the way the drive was formatted. Most USB hard disks will come with a FAT32 format applied. This format is used because virtually all versions of Windows can cope with it, and Mac OS from about 9.5 until current versions can load the disk without much trouble. The problem is that there’s a file size limit in FAT32, and that maximum file size is 4 Gigabytes. Obviously, some of the files we’re going to deal with can be larger than that.

The answer is to reformat the drive to use the NTFS file system. This is the latest Microsoft file system, and it has a lot of advantages for a disk that doesn’t hold the basic operating system. Now, it will take a while — on my 250 gigabyte Toshiba drive it took almost four hours for the format to complete — but it should get rid of the file size limitations.

If you need to go back and forth between Macintosh and Windows with your drive, you can find instructions (and a link to a simple program you’ll need) here at lifehack.org.

That’s it. I’ll head back to the lab tomorrow to pick up the raw files, and the process of turning that into a video can begin.

Video Storytelling at the Toronto Star

The assignment was fairly simple: find two videos at any one of several newspaper web sites, then compare and comment upon them. I looked at some of our options, but was impressed by the very rich (and easy to find) options at The Toronto Star.

The first video I chose at covered the opening of a snowboarding venue in downtown Toronto.

Urban Rail Park

You expect plenty of action in a video about snowboarding, and there is a lot here, with different angles and points of view. The snowboarding action is interspersed with interviews of snowboarders, and the very static setting of the interviews plays nicely against the movement of the snowboarders.

Does Urban Rail Park tell a story? I’m not sure it does, in the classically-constructed sense. It does, however, report nicely on a new venue in the city.

The next video I chose covers the process by which an animated character was created.

How Laurie Maher became MMe. Tutli-Putli

This is a very deliberate video that does tell a story of an actresses process for creating a character — from emotion to eyes to costume. The music behind much of the video increased the deliberate mood of the piece, and enhanced the connection between the video and the film. This is a much slower-moving video visually, concentrating on two characters, those of the actress and her animated creation. It was interesting to see a recurring artifact in the video screen behind the actresses head during some of the interviews: it’s almost impossible to synch the video refresh rate of a video camera and a monitor, and the moving shadow we see is the result. It doesn’t distract greatly, though, and the video we see with the actress is worth the bother.

Now, the very first thing I looked at on the Star site didn’t really qualify for this assignment, but it was very powerful, nonetheless.

Airsick: An Industrial Devolution

Airsick is the work of Lucas Oleniuk, a Toronto Star photographer who, we’re told, took 20,000 images in a span of 20 days. The images were used to make a stop-action video. The music behind the images and narration through titles give the video a Koyaanisqatsi feeling that’s very powerful. It is astounding to see what can be accomplished with a camera, a computer, and the commitment to a vision. It’s not like either of the other two video presentations, and doesn’t tell a well-formed story, but the overall effect is quite powerful and completely unambiguous.

The Very Short NFL Documentary

During the Super Bowl, we watched for the commercials as much as for the football game (hey, none of the Florida teams made it), and finally saw a great NFL commercial in the fourth quarter.

The ad, titled “Mr. Oboe”, is the story of an NFL lineman who didn’t play football until he reached college. It’s a complete story told in about 55 seconds, and a great example of cutting video to tell a compact story.

You can see a “Making of…” video here, at the Houston Texans’ web site. It does a good job of describing just how much work (and how many minutes of raw footage) went into the commercial.

Together these two are a great example of telling a solid story in a brief time — a good lesson for on-line video journalists.