It's a conversation, not a service

We're getting ready to launch our Arctic Questions (poor name I know, but what can I say, working title becomes title) exhibit and I'm starting to field a lot of questions about it.

A partner recently asked me about Questions exhibit, which is basically a message board or forum that is on the exhibit floor, presented beautifully and linked to the web and iphone.

It's a neat implementation of some pretty standard technology, but as far as I know, no one has really done it this way in a gallery before.

Anyway, this partner asked me whether or not someone from the Aquarium would be on this board to answer the questions. The answer is "sort of". But the real thing is the way in which this person was looking at this exhibit. They were looking at it as a service. The Aquarium would provide a service for answering questions. And that's not really true. The Aquarium would provide a platform. A place where, if all goes well, discussions happen and these discussions answer questions, solve problems, or serve as a steam release system.

So my take away was that I didn't just have to explain that the crowd was going to answer questions, I had to explain the underlying concept and change the POV that our exhibit was a service.

Please step away from the camera

The thing about this whole social media thing, is that people who do not understand media, but understand social, have convinced the world in general that everyone, given a chance, is a great storyteller.

This is simply not true. Most people are terrible storytellers. Most social media is not insignificantly awful, it is awful at a very significant level.

Cheap cameras are now really cheap and the refrain of citizen journalism floats on the wind. This is a very dangerous situation. It leads to temptation, the temptation to buy cheap cameras and send them to citizens. It's like that deal where you park illegally for just a second while you run into the store, you know you could get burned with a ticket but you take the risk anyways because you can save a few cents.

You get the ticket and you owe forty bucks. Same with cameras.

Faced with a massive budget and the denial of that budget, we tried to cheat things by sending cheap cameras to people to record the stories for us. We did the pre-interviews. We prepared training documents, and we hoped we wouldn't get caught. We got caught.

I'd give our attempt a 30% success rate. With work, 30% of the footage will be usable, the rest, not so much.

The people we sent the cameras to appeared to try very hard to do a good job, but the truth of it is that you can't replace professional storytellers with a canon in a pelican case and 3 sheets of instructions.

And I'm thankful for the work they did for us, and I think for some, if we'd keep sending them cameras they'd get better and better as they learn the craft, but then that's kind of like training professionals isn't it?

I equate what we tried to do with many social media efforts, same idea, pros aren't needed when amateurs, or neverteurs are willing.

1. Social media only works because you don't expect it to do anything other than whatever it wants to. Once you have expectations, then you are doomed.

2. Social media only works because with 8 billion people an hour submitting videos to youtube an hour, 1 or 2 of them are going to be naturally gifted, or uniquely strange enough to draw eyeballs.

Are Screens Killing Museums?

Are Screens Killing Museums?

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I don't really think I agree with this post but it is something worth thinking about. Even though we support 45, soon to be 60 screens, not all of them are used properly. We're moving to fix that.

There is a lot of bad screen design everywhere you look (not in our place heh). Screens are put up with 10 minute long videos on them. Screens are loaded with text. Screens have amazingly primitive, straight out dumb games put on them so they appear interactive and it is wrong and nobody benefits.

It's like a checklist approach to digital design. People that do no know what they are doing watch TV, so they think they know how screens work. People that design for screens, want to be getting credits in TV so they build for TV. Both groups lead people down the wrong path.

The checklist comes in when they look at the exhibit and they say we want some interactive stuff and we want screens, screens are great, we'll put lots of info on them.

So then they get some games, or some standard button pushing, and check, they have their interactive. They get some five minute profiles, or talking head interviews, and they are delivering a whole lot of info through their 65 inch plasma. Check and check, interactive and lots of info. Everyone gets a commemorative mug and a hug. Job well done.

Their checklist has led them astray. Their is no accounting for visitor interaction and visitor satisfaction. They built for a spec sheet checklist instead of a visitor experience. Screens will always fail under that approach

How to make video play smoothly on video wall

Well I think I finally cracked it. Forty plus renders down the line it's a good old-fashioned codec that saves the day.
I've been struggling to get video to run smoothly on our quad screen setup. It has been dropping about half the frames. It turns out that good ole MPEG 2 is the winner for rendering 2560x1440 smoothly at 30 frames.

Everyone just scales 1080p, but I don't want to do that. We're compositing a bunch of photos with the video and I don't want them scaled I want them at 1:1 pixel mapping. It's really quite dramatic.

I was starting to feel like there is a reason that nobody does it that way, the reason being that it doesn't work. But now I know it works with MPEG2. 35megabit MPEG2 works like a charm.

setting up a matrox m9120 card and video wall

This wall is going in our Arctic exhibit, and if I deliver on promises it will look very good. The catch is I have to deliver on promises.

There are so many numbers in making this work optimally that it hurts my brain.

Screens are 1366x768
Card can drive 4 screens but can't drive the native resolution of 1366x768
Card can drive the screens at 1360x768 and the screens look good
Total screen resolution is 2720x1536
Video resolution is 1280x720
Total video resolution is 2560x1440
So what should the digital signage software drive things at? 2720x1536 or 2560x1440?
I can't get four streams of video to run in sync and I don't want to scale a single 1080p stream so that leaves me with building probably a 2560x1440 stream and having something somewhere along the way scale it. It's nasty.

RFP's, multi-touch and a building full of beasts

It just doesn't stop. We have two multi-touch tables in development. A major quad HD screen, 3 interactive kiosks, 2 RFP's out, a digital signage software review, a new 4d theater, a new harbour porpoise, a xserve with final cut server that is out of space and it is 34 degrees out.
And I've been here since 4:30am and should really go home.

server woes solved

Well courtesy of the Apple support discussions I have an answer.
It turns out we had a power failure in which the server was protected but the drobo went down. That means it was not unmounted correctly which means OS X created a volume, with the drobo name on it on the system drive and started filling it up with footage that I was trying to archive.

So restored all that footage courtesy of a file list provided by IS, then they deleted that folder and renamed the drobo drive that had the appended name. Now all is well.

server woes solved

Well courtesy of the Apple support discussions I have an answer.
It turns out we had a power failure in which the server was protected but the drobo went down. That means it was not unmounted correctly which means OS X created a volume, with the drobo name on it on the system drive and started filling it up with footage that I was trying to archive.

So restored all that footage courtesy of a file list provided by IS, then they deleted that folder and renamed the drobo drive that had the appended name. Now all is well.

Server, Final Cut Server, Drobo woes solved

Well courtesy of the Apple support discussions I have an answer.
It turns out we had a power failure in which the server was protected but the drobo went down. That means it was not unmounted correctly which means OS X created a volume, with the drobo name on it on the system drive and started filling it up with footage that I was trying to archive.

So restored all that footage courtesy of a file list provided by IS, then they deleted that folder and renamed the drobo drive that had the appended name. Now all is well.

Arctic Strategy? Digital content plan? Nope, Server woes

Today was another of those days that I had blocked out for all kinds of creative strategy. But, first I figured I'd do a little Final Cut Server house-cleaning. All was well until about 150 error messages popped up on my screen. Much "okay" clicking ensued followed by a server check that shows the servers system drive is entirely full.

Not a good thing.

Whatever files are there are hidden and bad things have happened. Either it is a coincidence or FCSvr decided that the system drives was suddenly a great place to write files.

It looks like OS X server doesn't index the system drive so searches are useless. First the snow, then the power failure, now the server "failure". Something doesn't want me to plan out 2009.