Seek shelter, right from the start. Getting a perfect video of an avalanche coming right at and then over you is not worth risking your life! Even if you survive it, complete with video proof that you have nerves of liquid helium!
That being said… dude.
Two hours later, I’m ready to smash VLC Media Player into little pieces. I get video, audio stutters. This isn’t a “fix this for me” post, by the way: this is a “I wish to strangle a manatee in the nude” post, to quote the classics. Arrgh.
…I took a couple of videos of the Stary Olsa concert yesterday (they were cool with that): now I’m teaching myself how to upload videos again. It’s been a while. A bit too long for my video software, apparently: it’s had two updates and the company that made it got sold to another one in the intervening time. I should pay more attention to this sort of thing. I’ll update the post once it’s done processing.
Basically: if I want to keep decent sound quality for my phone interviews I need to stop converting them into MP3 format. Unfortunately, I am not exactly a sound engineer, so I don’t know what the alternatives are. I want to mostly keep the audio files on this site, which gives me a single-digit MB limit per file (which I don’t really want to adjust); what format should I be using, and what editing software.
Also: I need something better than Movie Maker for my YT files. I know, I know: evergreen complaint.
I am not adverse to spending money on this, but neither do I need some three hundred dollar professional quality software. I just want to be able to capture video footage on my Windows 8 machine and get it in a form suitable for YT. Opinions?
McClatchy (!) has decided to get in on the Benghazi dogpile, probably because, hey, no line for this one*!
Lost in the controversy over who requested revisions of CIA-written talking points on September’s attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans is one key fact: In every iteration of the document, the CIA asserted that a video protest preceded the assaults, and no official reviewing the talking points suggested that that was in error.
Yet interviews with U.S. officials and others indicate that they knew nearly immediately that there had been no protest outside the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi before attackers stormed it, setting a fire that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and Sean Smith, a State Department computer expert. A subsequent attack on a CIA annex nearby killed two security contractors, former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.
Why the CIA insisted that there had been a protest tied to a YouTube video that mocked the Prophet Muhammad for several days after the attack, mirroring some news reports, has never been publicly explained.
Well, never been publicly explained by the CIA. Everybody reading this knows that the actual reason that the protest was linked to the video is because the Obama administration could argue that there’s no realistic way to predict when a random event like a ‘spontaneous demonstration’ would go deadly. But a planned terrorist operation? Yeah, the American public has an expectation that counter-terrorism agencies are supposed to catch that sort of thing. Goodness knows that the Obama administration has been pushing itself as being hyper-competent and on-the-ball; a disaster like Benghazi** might have destroyed that narrative. Which is why they kicked the can down the road by claiming that nonsense about a video. Continue reading McClatchy circles back to #benghazi, and the lies about the video.
You know how we were promised a future that never showed up? Well, that’s because we were actually working instead on a future where virtually everything that got published for public consumption – particularly video – would end up on one or more social media sites for the perusal of all. And we have that future, only not everybody’s really thought through the implications yet.
Still… since the technology has changed, so must professional habits. For example: in this post’s comments section it’s suggested that the reason why the increasingly infamous Joe Soptic is apparently wearing the same shirt in two supposedly separate videos is because the same people did the filming and provided a shirt picked for its emotional message. Not being an expert in projecting meaning via subtle visual cues, I have no way to assess whether such things actually work – but I do know this: if you’re a filmmaker working on the assumption that critics can’t easily compare two video clips, and easily present that comparison to the public, you’re running a huge risk of being burned.
Hey, I’m sure that the people who did illustrated manuscripts had a lot of trenchant criticism of moveable type, too.
Moe Lane
…and I do hate to disagree with Jonah – still, I feel compelled to note the following with regard to this video:
So I think maybe their parents aren’t completely wasting their money.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
