I made this using Worldle. Give it a list of words, a blog or an RSS feed to start making your own word collage. The largest words are those that appear most often in the source text.

Over the last decade Google has been top of the heap through two technologies: its page-ranking search technology and the ability to place relevant advertising right next to the content on pages all over the web. The patent awarded yesterday might hand a similar technology to Apple: the ability to insert relevant advertising into all other forms of media at the point of playback.

If Apple or someone else comes up with a better search algorithm to select the adverts that appear during podcasts, movies and radio shows, Google might face some serious competition.

In fact many people might welcome the intrusion of advertising into digital media - if it means that they get that media for free.

We have to pay for our media one way or another: movie tickets, DVDs, official downloads, TV licenses and Pay TV are obvious payment points. Advertising, PR and sponsorship are less obvious.

One day we’ll be able to live by our preferences - we’ll be able to pay for our media directly and avoid messages from corporations, governments and individuals. On the other hand, we might want to have other people pay for our media:

An imaginary ‘media payment preferences’ control.

It seems as if Apple have been granted a patent that will bring this customisation a little closer. It is in the nature of patents that they are framed to cover as many possible future inventions as possible. They sometimes need to hide their true nature:

1. A method for presenting media by a media playback device, the method comprising: receiving a playback request to play a media group, the media group including a plurality of media items; determining whether auxiliary media is also to be played back; playing back media items from the media group; and playing the auxiliary media if the determining data determined that the auxiliary media is also to be played back.

It may be that patent 612029 granted to Apple today patents the ability to incorporate advertising into media content on playback. This means that every time you listen to a piece of music, a podcast, watch TV show or movie, a different advertisement appears:

In one implementation, presentation of a media group can involve not only presentation of media items of the media group but also presentation of auxiliary media. Another aspect pertains to how and when auxiliary media data is to be presented (e.g., played) by an electronic device. Another aspect pertains to updating or refreshing auxiliary media data. Still another aspect pertains to restricting presentation of primary media by an electronic device unless auxiliary data is also presented.

(my emphasis)

The patent gives examples of ‘a media group’ as any of the content that can be played on an iPod. It implies that a variable amount of content is automatically stored on a device and a method for choosing which media is played as ‘auxiliary media’ before, during or after playing a media group:

the method further comprises:storing a plurality of auxiliary media items on the media playback device; and determining one or more of the auxiliary media items that are to be played by the playing of the auxiliary media.

Here is where advertising is mentioned:

20. A method as recited in claim 1, wherein the media items are selected from the group consisting of: songs, audiobooks, podcasts, and videos.

21. A method as recited in claim 1, wherein the auxiliary media is advertising content.

In one example, the auxiliary media data can pertain to advertising. Advertising information can pertain to specific products, services, shows or events. When advertising is able to be refreshed or updated, improved advertising results can be achieved.

A functional flow diagram from the patent showing a ‘Present Playback Denied’ message if the secondary media (advertising) playback is disabled.

In one embodiment, since presentation of auxiliary data can be ensured, the cost to the user for an electronic device can be lowered. For example, the ability for advertisements or news to generate revenue can be used to offset the cost for the electronic device. For example, the presentation of auxiliary data can be used to subsidize the cost for the electronic device.

Different aspects, embodiments or implementations of the invention may yield one or more of the following advantages. One advantage is that a media playback device can present not only media items but also auxiliary media. The auxiliary data can be automatically provided and integrated (e.g., interspersed) with playback of media items. The auxiliary media can be media such as advertisements or news. For example, advertisements can be audio or video (i.e., multimedia) commercials or promotional segments, and news can pertain to national news headlines, sports highlights, international news, local news, etc. Another advantage is that auxiliary data can be automatically delivered to a media playback device so as to remain current and effective. Still another advantage is that the manner by which auxiliary media is interjected in playback of media can be controllable, such as by: user selections, user preferences, user actions, media item content providers, auxiliary media content providers, online media store, or media playback device manufacturers. Yet still another advantage is that a media playback device can require playback of auxiliary media in order to playback media items.

In a patent of over 10,000 words, the letters ‘advert’ are only used 14 times, but I think this is a major part of this patent.

This means that advertising-supported media will have the option to incorporate different advertising each time that it is played on a device (iPod, iPhone, TV, etc.). The advertising will be streamed automatically if a wireless connection is available. Previous advertising will be stored on the device so that it can be played if there is no connection to the internet.

A functional flow diagram from the patent showing how secondary media data can be updated automatically.

The example I usually give is when we use media content to support our day-to-day conversations. If I mention a piece of music, it is very handy to have my iPod with me - I can use it to play back the specific track I’m talking about. I’d like to do that with TV shows and movies.

Imagine if someone I’m chatting with refers to a specific scene in an episode of Friends. It would be great to support that part of the conversation by viewing that scene. Using a 1TB iPod, I could hold almost any piece of music I could think of. However it will take a while before every movie or TV show I can think of will be storable on a single device.

Soon all media will available to us wirelessly. We’ll be able to pick any nearby surface and stream any media to it. How will we pay for this? It depends on the media. If you are a fan, you could buy the right to watch or listen to the media for the rest of your life (the equivalent of buying a DVD). On the other hand, if you want to see that media a single time, you probably won’t mind a short advertising message playing for a few seconds before or during the film or TV show (the equivalent of commercial TV).

Maybe advertising will be a lot less irritating when we have the option to pay for it not to be shown to us. I wonder if this sort of thing should be patented. It seems a little obvious…

Just when the world’s advertising and media companies think they’ve got a handle on using the internet to build and maintain relationships with millions of people, a new disruption might be on the way. Everyone might have to get into the software business.

An example: Soon Major League Baseball fans will be able to download an application to their phones that will keep them up to date with games as they happen. Using pictures as well as text. And video clips showing replays of the action moments after it happens. This is an application that will be available on the iPhone within the next few months.

Instead of going all over the web to buy music, you can visit one of the very few digital online music retailers - such as iTunes. The more these services act like software applications, the more successful they are. iTunes and similar software may go to the internet to find songs and videos, but the places it goes doesn’t matter to those searching for music.

These are the sort of services people will start to expect on their phones. If Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android (an operating system for telephones - coming soon) and Microsoft’s (they won’t be able to stay out of this) products take off, people won’t expect to jump from page to page any more. They’ll expect government, corporate, social and individual entities to provide services that represent the relationships the entities want to have with their audience.

Governments will provide a service to manage citizens’ relationship with their society. How much tax you pay, how many expenses you can claim, which state you spend the night, what benefits you deserve, what rights you have.

Corporations would have to express themselves by what they can usefully do for their audiences - if anything.

I imagine that some blogs will evolve into avatars. The things we write, the pictures we like, the way we turn a phrase might one day be converted into a digital representation of ourselves. We’ll have the option for our blogs to speak for us if we are too busy to get involved in a conversation.

Will the web of linked pages that most people identify as the internet still be around in five years time? If not, will applications replace it?

More handheld time lapse doodles. Click the Vimeo for an HD version.

There are many edits in this video to make the footage match the music - mainly speeding up and slowing down the picture. I was barely on time for an appointment, so my route was pre-determined. Sadly that meant following a stranger for a few minutes. It was a coincidence! Click the Vimeo for an larger version.

This one is a video version of the Victorian saying: ‘I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I’m writing you this long one.’ I wanted to post the video the same day as I shot it, so I only had just over 30 minutes to do the edit. Click the Vimeo for an HD version.

…in the medium term. At the moment it makes financial sense for freelance editors to buy a drive or two per client and break them out each time a new job comes up. With the transition from DV and HDV to higher-bandwidth codecs, we’re all hoping for a larger capacity long-term backup system.

I think a CD-sized write-once disc that can hold 1-5TB is a good target. Once you write two copies, you got a good backup system that does take up too much space. The Register talks about a possible candidate. They even state a 100MB/s read-write data rate. Not bad.

It is seven years until we reach the date portrayed in ‘Back to the Future Part II.’ There probably won’t be flying cars and weather control, but we might have a new disposable optical format based on lasers and diodes.

The alternative is that everything will be kept in a distributed cloud of storage accessible by the IPv7-enabled internet, and no-one will need to see a storage medium ever again.

The BBC currently provide a a commentary track for the current edition of Doctor Who. Imagine if these were available for new movies.

A recent patent filing by Apple proposes public very local networks for iPhones and iPod Touches.

The idea is that shops, public buildings and restaurants set up location-specific applications that appear on iPhones when customers wander into the area of their wireless networks. Restaurants could provide custom menus (for those with food intolerances or on restricted diets), museums and art galleries could provide extra information. Shops could provide customer-specific offers.

If this works, why not provide commentary tracks for moviegoers? If you’ve see the film before, yet want to go and see it with friends, you can turn up and download an alternate soundtrack. You are more likely to see the film a second time in a short period of time. The cinemas sell more tickets.

You could even have alternate language soundtracks or an audio description track for the visually impaired. Imagine if the audio playing software on your iPhone could be triggered by a wireless signal to sync with the film when it starts (or even whenever the person arrives to watch the film).

The software could also ask permission to deny incoming texts and telephone calls until the film is over!

If you’d like to get up to speed on the nature of publicly-funded broadcasting, you’d better go on over to the BBC iPlayer to see Stephen Fry’s speech on the subject.

For those without access to the iPlayer, here’s a quote:

“How can an audience be brought to a channel that showed nothing but worthy programming? No matter how excellently produced. Isn’t the whole point of the BBC, as a major channel, a real player in TV production - across the spectrum of genres and demographics… isn’t the whole point of that BBC its ability to draw audiences into public service broadcasting programming by virtue of their loyalty and trust in a brand that provides entertainment too, pure and simple [...]
In a sense, the nature of the BBC gives permission to all kinds of people to watch programmes they otherwise might not. What is the alternative? A ghettoised, balkanised ‘electronic bookshop of the home’ - no stations, no network, just a narrowcast provider spitting out content on channels that fulfill some ghastly and wholly insulting demographic profile: soccer mum, trailer trash, teenager, gay, black music lover, Essex girl, sports fan, bored housewife - all watching programmes specifically for them with ads targeting them. Is that what we mean by inclusivity? Is that what we mean by plurality? God help us. I do hope not. [...]“

The full transcript is on the BBC website.

My friend Jean has been very good to me. She’s arranged for my blog to be linked from the Internet Movie Database. Twice. She sends me very interesting links. Here’s one that makes me seem cultured:

This is an example from one of three ongoing photography projects. This one was started in 1995.

When I start making movies, I like the idea of lighting them like this. Unfortunately, it’s been done before:

George Blackstone and I made The Things We Do for Love, a documentary on dating and relationships. It is made up of interviews with many people of all ages. A recent task I had was to make a DVD so that the contributors who couldn’t reach a screening would have a chance to see the film. I also planned to put alternative edits and bonus footage on the disc.

As I was putting it together, I realised that it might be better to make all the content I was generating available online. That is the modern way. So instead of building my menu system, I’m uploading the files to Vimeo.

Vimeo is a site where all the content is generated by the people who post it. As well as standard definition video, they host HD (be in 720p24, 720p25 or 720p30). They have an upload quota of 500MB a week. The great thing about this quota is that it encourages you to use it. Those camera tests and technology demos can now be hosted on a free site with minimal advertising.

Videos and pictures that you upload can be grouped into albums, where content on a specific theme can be gathered together. I’ve grouped the videos associated with our documentary in an album called The Things We Do for Love:

http://www.vimeo.com/album/11274

In the coming days I’ll upload more bonus footage. The videos are smaller than SD for now because Vimeo sees 1024 by 576 PAL widescreen videos as being less than 1280 by 720 HD, so encodes them at a smaller size (for now). We shot at SD and I couldn’t fit a scaled up HD version into my weekly 500MB quota.

Another feature of Vimeo is ‘Channels’ - this is where users curate a channel of videos on a chosen subject. As well as their own videos, they can choose to include other people’s videos. This feature is more about community building - people can post messages that appear on the home page of the channel, and there is an option to include a forum for people to discuss the content of the channel - or anything else they fancy.

Mine is called ‘Our London‘ - it’s a collection of videos featuring London.

I imagine many companies are trying to create the ‘Super YouTube’ - this one will do for me for now.

In an extensive interview at Variety, James Cameron has a lot to say about 3D production, but he also mentions the paper tiger that is 4K resolution for movies:

4K is a concept born in fear. When the studios were looking at converting to digital cinemas, they were afraid of change, and searched for reasons not to do it. One reason they hit upon was that if people were buying HD monitors for the home, with 1080×1920 resolution, and that was virtually the same as the 2K standard being proposed, then why would people go to the cinema?

He suggests that instead of having 4K (a 4096×3112 frame) 24 times a second, it’s better to go for 2K (2048×1536) 48 times a second. This would reduce the motion artifacts seen at 24 fps. ‘Motion artifacts’ most often happen when the camera pans too quickly - a juddering effect when 24 frames every second isn’t enough to show all the detail we would normally see if we turned our heads at the same rate.

[For those of you who are used to 2K being 1920x1080 and 4K being 4096x2160, I'm referring to the resolution of the full 35mm frame, which is cropped down for different aspect ratios when projected. Wikipedia has more on this.]

Artifacts also occur when objects such as cartwheels and hubcaps have detail that rotates at a rate that is close to 24 frames a second - as a picture is taken every 24th of a second and the pattern looks very similar avery 24th of a second, it looks as if the pattern hasn’t moved far and that the wheel is moving very slowly even though the cart or car is moving quickly.

If regular patterns are close the frame rate, you get strobing. The upper wheel is moving three times slower than the lower wheel.

The spokes in the lower wheel are moving so fast that they rotate almost as far the distance between two spokes, which makes it seem as if the spokes are moving backwards. You can see from the broken spoke that the wheel is still moving forwards.

Juddering pans and strobing wheels still occur at 4K. 4K gives us a more accurate representation of these effects. 2K twice as often will reduce these effects a great deal.2K at 48fps is better than 4K at 24fps. Temporal resolution is more important than visual resolution. This is why interlacing has survived into the digital era - those who want to show sport insisted in rates of 50 or 60 frames per second for their broadcasts. Due to bandwidth limitations, the would rather have half the vertical resolution (1920 by 540) twice as often.

Another advantage is the data rate for storing and communicating the footage would be less: 24 times 4096×3112 is 306 million pixels per second whereas 48 times 2048×1536 is 151 million pixels per second.

Cinema owners may have to let go of beating in-home systems using visual technology, they’ll have to concentrate on the architectural and social elements of a big night out at the movies.

If 2K at 48fps is adopted the post process will need to produce content that can be generated at both frame rates. 24fps has been a standard for so long that it will take years for projectors around the world to be replaced with digital projectors. As it costs $1,500 to produce a film print at 24fps, the sum will almost double for 48fps. With reel breaks happening twice as often, film projection at 48 fps isn’t worth the benefits of providing extra temporal resolution.

This isn’t that much of a big deal for editors. If we treat the extra frames per second in the same way we (used to) deal with interlaced footage, there shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Timecode can stay the same. We’ll stick to making edits only on 24ths of a second. If a 48fps movie is being mastered, it’ll get a bonus frame at the end of each shot. We’ll probably edit away at 24fps for now. Once the edits have been agreed on, we’ll be able to watch at 48fps to see if any moments added at the end of a shot are undesirable. We can then move the edit back a 24th of a second if need be.

It won’t take too much effort for Avid, Apple and Sony to add features to enable 24/48 fps workflows in their software. The sooner they do, the better the fidelity of the movies we make.