Watch Carbon Dioxide Move Through Earth’s Atmosphere | NASA
Sobering. Mesmerizing. This helps so much in understanding the problem. I think one of the biggest things that helps that they don’t really mention is the compression of time. These visualizations are something like a day per second. The scale of the problem is sometimes difficult to comprehend (which I realize that phrase alone is a cliche, but it’s the most accurate way to say it), but by compressing the scale a little bit—–time––you can see this amazingly big ecosystem look like something you may have seen before, maybe another time-lapse video. And that comparative nature helps to understand what’s happening, and thus, what must be done.
Every Frame a Painting (for a limited time) | Patreon
Figured I should log this as a pleasant event to look back on at the bare minimum. (I’m guessing if you’re read this blog, you’ve already heard of this from other people in these circles.)
Taylor and Tony are having a little comeback / publicity tour. As part of a “marketing campaign” for their new short, they will be releasing a series of new EFAP videos!
Some more details from their Patreon.
patreon
Not only is the quality of work and what these videos are about excellent, I believe in the method of how they’re made. They peeled the curtain back a bit in their postmortem ‘video’, and it’s so clear how strongly they believe in withholding a piece of work until it’s polished enough to be released. This series is a stellar example of how much more rewarding and richer things humans make can be when they’re cared for, and not sacrificed at the alter of an algorithm, attention, or apathy. Slow and steady, keeping focus on what they want.
For ultimate vanity, and because where else am I going to put this, here’s my Patreon badge. I mostly jest, but I also want to support them however I can, and by showing there’s actually other people out their supporting them, I hope to do a small part of normalizing putting your money where your mouth is.
EDIT: Complete sidebar, but I love how they do not create custom thumbnails for their youtube channel. Each video (eh, film) is well named, and the work speaks for itself.
See also: New Every Frame a Painting | kottke.org
BTS Link Dump
I guess somewhat serendipitously, I have come across some really great behind-the-scenes coverage the past week or two. In no particular order:
Entertainment Weekly - Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes - This is kind of unprecedented, showing raw and final footage side-by-side.
This Guy Edits - Reservation Dogs — Rare footage of an editing bay at work, and some of the “cutting room floor” footage.
Whatever It Takes (podcast) — This seems to be a small series about the post-production of Marvel’s Infinity War and End Game movies. Six episodes interviewing one or two people each from the assistant level post-production; this is some really unique insight into some very interesting stories about a massive production. These are from 2020, so the official website seems to be down, but here’s the links to Apple Podcasts and Overcast.
Editing on iPad via Jump Desktop
Just wanted to add my experience to the other praise I’ve seen online that is Jump Desktop. Video editors are quick to fall into those niches of conversations about tech hardware that sometimes end up along the lines of: “well you only need to worry about that if you’re editing a lot of video.
To grossly understate it, computer hardware usually compromises between processing power and storage size. My needs typically lean more towards storage size. I more often need to have multiple or dozens of terabytes ready to access rather than an extra GPU.
All that to say, I’m growing more and more fond of having a dedicated workstation and finding more convenient means of accessing it. And I finally had a use case to test out Jump Desktop on the iPad.
I’ve used Jump Desktop on…the desktop, for about two years now, and most of the time I forget that I’m on a remote machine. I’m not totally sure how much having wired connections at both ends helps since that’s how I typically use it, but it obviously doesn’t hurt. The hardest thing about it is having to reference something on your local machine and getting your keyboard back is kind of annoying. This is the main reason I’ve come to be a side-screen dock person.
I have tried Parsec and even Chrome Remote Desktop in the early stages of the pandemic, and with Parsec I could still feel the lag reminding my I wasn’t on my machine. If anything Jump Desktop will degrade the video quality before introducing lag.
The iPad experience on Jump Desktop is really seamless. I just logged into my account and my remote machines were ready. What really impressed me (and led me to write this) is the input interface. There are several ways to send input commands via an iPad to a desktop machine, but my favorite is Trackpad mode. This turns the entire iPad screen into a trackpad and then common (I’d even say natural) touch commands translate seamlessly; tap with one finger to click, tap with two fingers to right-click, two-finger drag to scroll, double-tap and hold/drag to drag. It was like once I found trackpad mode, my hand was on the remote machines mouse.
Keyboard input is obviously limited, when using just a naked iPad. But, I feel like if the right scenario presented itself and I had to, I could get real work done with just an iPad.
Waiting for the train
And the icing on the cake for me, was that my first time using the iPad for this I was also tethered to my phone on a bus. It was one of the few “other-worldly” experiences I’ve had with technology where I had to stop and (take a photo) assess what was really happening. (Photo taken at the train stop.) Bear in mind this is a circa 2021 baseline iPad, stuffed to the small brim of its embarrasing 32GB of storage. This is not a performant machine, but I am easily manipulating hundreds of gigabytes of 4k 10bit video.
And there’s so much more Jump Desktop is doing behind the scenes; screen resolution controls are so smooth you actually want to try fine tuning it.
So yes, I do recommend Jump Desktop for video editing.
EDT: Aaaaand jump desktop just announced 4:4:4 10-bit option in beta, among other great features like doing this all through a web browser.
Salomon Ligthelm on Work in Process
Absolutely fantastic conversation with one of my favorite filmmakers.
I need to do some more digging into this show, I’m honestly kind of confused by their branding and who is producing this; this took me a minute to find. Here’s the Apple Podcasts link. But I wanted to find the first episode which is 100% on par with this one, a conversation with Ryan Booth.