:: Key note ::

Friday, July 29, 2005

Video is a space hog*. No other media can match its gluttonous appetite for storage and bandwidth. Even now, with render farms easily assembled from off-the-shelf parts and hard drives below the $1/Gigabyte threshold, working with digital video on any significant scale requires substantial money and space. It's always been this way. Which is why, early on, lots of smart people came up with some techniques to help.

One of the first and most important was temporal compression.

This method of compression looks for information that is not necessary for continuity to the human eye or ear (remember that videotape plays back sound as well as pictures). It looks at the video information on a frame-by-frame basis for changes between frames. For example, if you're working with video of a talking head (a clip of a person sitting or standing with little motion), there's a lot of redundant information in the recording. The background rarely changes, and most of the motion involved is simple head movements and the movement of the area around the mouth. The compression algorithm compares the first frame (known as a key frame) with the next (called a delta frame) to find anything that changes. After the key frame, it only keeps the information that does change, thus deleting a large portion of your file. It does this for each frame until it reaches the end of the file. If there is a scene change, it tags the first frame of the new scene as the next key frame and continues comparing the following frames with this new key frame.

We pay attention to the differences. Display them, and nothing else, until so much changes that you have to reset your baseline.

What are the representatives of a time period? What separates ordinary from iconographic? Distinctiveness. Overwhelming singularity. Differences.

When we look back at history, we mostly see delta frames. This is especially true of our imagery. We pose different people in front of the same monuments, cityscapes, and beaches, using the static nature of landmarks to anchor the ephemeral subject of the photo. We see JFK collapse in his car and we spot the tragic delta; we do not note how remarkable it is that wheeled carriages are unbeholden to horses, nor that street lamps to the side will help ward off night-time crime. We've noticed those before.

There are always clues in photographs to help date their capturing. Most of the time they are deltas - a hairstyle, "don't walk" sign, or the comparative height of siblings contrasted against an indistinct background. Not in western American suburbia. Not in the 70s.

New houses, new culs-de-sac, new communities, new facial hair, new televisions, new blenders, new ping-pong tables, new denim, new curlers, new advertising, new VW bugs, new power lines, new freeways, new sunglasses, new door paneling, new landscapes, new fabrics, new children's toys, new costumes, new lampshades, new suits, new window screens, new tile colors, new blouses, new central air-conditioning. And all of them designed to break hard and fast with the old. Not subtle deltas, pure difference each time, heaps of it. No heirlooms, no old cottages. New scenes. New baselines. Everywhere. Every photo a key frame.

That's what we see from Bill Owens'** "suburbia" collection.

* not in the rock n' roll sense
** not in the gubernatorial sense

Posted by morland @ 03:50 PM

:: Comments ::

baseline = brown pants, black shirt. black shirt with more than 2 buttons? delta.

i suppose these are a token of our wandering attention span. the flight for newness creates our new blouses. recognition in speparation, fighting our knowledge that we are infact all the same. of course, in that little aleph is another baseline.

Posted by: joy on July 30, 2005 06:33 PM

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