Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

David Wolf has made his MA Exegesis—Vidgets: The Development and Use of Interactive, Network Based Video Works—available online and it's worth a read. The paper deals with these questions:

• How can new audio-visual works (vidgets) be created to explore and utilise the capacity for real time interactivity and network awareness found in everyday computer technology?
• What can we learn by looking at the use of real time interactivity and network/environmental awareness in the histories of media and art practice and how can these this inform the development of new works?
• What happens when video media art works shift from being fixed and self contained ‘objects’ to dynamic, distributed systems inviting user interaction and performance?

David has been working with interactive works using QuickTime for years using both LiveStage Pro and Quartz Composer. This is an excellent overview, be sure not to miss the appendix containing a complete list of his works.

As the trend has been lately this is inspired by Adrian Miles. It is actually six movies playing simultaneously. Three large movies and three identical, but smaller movies. Only one of the large movies is in view at the time. You can click on each of the smaller movies to bring that one to the front. Network congestion means that the smaller movies will not be in synch with their larger counterparts. No big deal.

The movies are not looping. At first this was a choice on my behalf — I like the idea that the viewer becomes the editor and makes the cuts. And once the movie is done playing it's done playing. You will never be able to ‘see it all’. After watching my own movie I don't know if this is too frustrating. Unfortunately my demo version of LiveStage Pro has expired so I am unable to open the project and change the movie to loop.

Without further introduction here is my first interactive Quicktime experiment that I built from scratch. It is a tour of my hometown Aalborg one Danish winter day (yes, the idea for this movie is that old).

You can use this movie as a template!

Like Adrian's Rhizome 1.2 and Rhizome 2 you can download a copy of my template and create your own versions of this movie! First download a copy of the template:

• Download Quicktime Template (solQT.mov)

The next step is to create your three movies. Shoot some footage and compress the hell out of them — remember the viewer has to play six movies at the same time. Bandwidth is a concern here. You should save a large and a small version of each movie. The large version should be 320x240 pixels, the small version should be 80x60 pixels. The small movies should not contain any sound! Otherwise all three soundtracks will play at the same time, confusion will be the result. You should now have six movies (three different movies in two versions each).

Upload these six movies to the web. While you're at it upload the Quicktime template (solQT.mov) as well. The next step is to tell the Quicktime template where to find your six movies. Go to the Totally Amazing XML Generator. There you should create a track list which contains three movie tracks and three video tracks. The movie tracks should be the URLs to your large movies, the video tracks the URLs to your small movies. Do the movies in the same order in both lists. In the end your track list should look something like this:

Click the ‘Create XML Document’ and save the resulting file as solQT.xml. This is important! Make sure that the ‘QT’ is uppercase. Upload this solQT.xml in the same folder as the one you uploaded the template file (solQT.mov) to. And you're all done. All there's left is to call up the template file in your browser (or directly in the Quicktime player) to see if everything worked.

Using the demo version of LiveStage Pro I modified Adrian Miles Rhizome 1.2. I changed it in two ways. First the movie now takes three inputs. Two movies and one audio track. It's a request from Michael Sullivan. I don't know what he's going to do with the audio, but it's there now. Secondly the movie now relies on a different XML format. This format is more extensible, and the brand new automatic XML generator is awesome. You will need to generate a track list of two movie tracks and one audio. Save the XML file as rhizomeSol.xml. As before this XML file needs to be in the same directory as the Quicktime template you download below. Read Adrian's blog entry for more thoughts and instructions.

• Download Rhizome 1.2 Solitude Edition

Once again I'm playing with Adrian Miles' movie template. This time Bre Pettis is my victim. The left scene was shot by me at vloggercue, the right scene is the exact same event captured by Missing Kitten TV. It's Bre Pettis demonstrating the mefeedia quoting tool. I had to cut the video short because it took too long to load with the whole three minute presentation (bandwidth still matters). The soundtracks doesn't quite match up, and the videos aren't even the same length (so as they repeat they will get more and more out of synch). But as Adrian reminded me a few hours ago perfection is not the goal.

It's that time of year again where Ann Arbor goes crazy with its Art Fairs. I created another movie based on Adrian Miles' template. These movies are very easy to make quickly, because it's the viewer who will be making the cuts, so I just dump raw footage. You can get the template for yourself.

Since I presented the preliminary version of the new Quicktime Thingie (which is now called Linkubator — we're moving from one lame name to the next) at the Meet the Vloggers event I should put a link to the service here: Linkubator. The service allows you to easily place a logo on top of your videos, and at the same time make that logo a link to your blog post.

As I demonstrated on the big screen this does not seem to work in Safari for the Mac. I think I know what the problem is, and I wish I'd had an opportunity to test before having it fail miserably.

PS. Apple Store computers should have Firefox or Opera installed.

Adrian Miles has been doing interactive videos (vogs) for a very long time. The concept has been closed territory for me, because you pretty much need LiveStage Pro to create these movies. A copy costs $500 and that's more than I can afford. This week Adrian put up a video template for download, so you can make a vog without having to purchase expensive software. It's the best thing since sliced bread! In the future Adrian will create more of these templates, making it dead easy for any to create these truly new media videos! My first attempt is below:

In late May the conference Blogtalk Downunder will begin. Not that I have any chance of participating because it is… Downunder. It's too bad because after reading the abstract of Adrian Miles' paper I am looking forward to reading the whole thing. I'd like to do more with video than simply slapping it on a webpage and call it a day. Adrian is the guy who has opened my eyes to more interesting uses. I had read some articles and books and things on hypermedia before running into Adrian, but it took a bit more before I could connect some dots and see some practical uses. His paper will be on how audio and video can transform from being small things tightly joined to become loosely joined:

In such a scenario video (and audio) would be expected to have the same qualities as text within a blog. There would be links within the video to other networked objects, including other video entries. Like imagemaps, parts of the video image could also include discreet links, so that clicking on different parts would in fact take the reader to different locations, just as different links within a single text blog post may do. […] This should be as easy to do as using text in any contemporary blog CMS.

As Adrian points out the technology is already here, but they are far from easy or inexpensive to use. I know how to do time based text links in Quicktime, but the process of making them is very time consuming. If I want to do something more I have to invest in very expensive software.

I'm waiting for the killer app that will take videoblogging to the next natural level. It should just handle the basic parts of adding interactivity to audio and video. Stuff that Adrian outlined like adding time based links using text and images. And most importantly it would have to be cheap (like $30 cheap) and simple to use. I need to be able to go through quick steps like these:

1. Pause video.
2. Drag a square around something that I want to be clickable.
3. Right click to determine a duration and destination for my link.
4. Be done.

That's what I want for Christmas (though sooner would be nice).

I hope Steve Garfield doesn't mind being the focus of my experiment. I took 30 seconds from one of his recent video podcasts and added links to show the added value links in video can give.

• Download the clip (1.7 megabyte; Quicktime required.).

It took around 15 minutes to add the links to the clip. It would've taken a lot less time had my Quicktime Thingie been able to calculate the height of the text track more intelligently (I've added that to the list of bugs).

This is just one example of how using contexual links in video adds value over using straight video.

You've seen how cool contexual links in Quicktime are, but you can't figure out how to add these easily. The help is here: Quicktime Thingie! This tool will help you create these links easily, just follow these short instructions.

1. Point your browser to Quicktime Thingie.
2. Fill out the movie information and the text information.
3. Add links by clicking the (edit) text beside each link entry. A box should pop up where you can enter the start time, end time, link text and link address. Saving links do not currently work in Internet Explorer 5.5 (possibly also 6.0). I don't know why not, and I'd love to hear from you if you know why.
4. When you are done adding links click the Create Text Track Button. A download dialogue should appear. Save the file as a text file on your computer.
5. Open a new window in Quicktime Pro.
6. Choose Import and import the file you just saved.
7. Quicktime will ask you to save it as a movie. Do that.
8. Copy the contents of the timeline to the clipboard.
9. Add them to your movie by choosing Add from the Edit menu.
10. Save your movie and you're done. Remember to save as a complete movie!

Extra credit

By default the text track will appear at the top of your movie. You might want to change this. After adding the text track to your movie go through these steps:

1. Choose Show Movie Characteristics or something to that effect from the Edit menu. My version of Quicktime has Danish menus so it's unknown to me what the exact wording is. The keyboard shortbut is Ctrl+J on Windows.
2. Choose to only view text tracks from the top left dropdown.
3. Click the Adjust button. You can now move the text track around with your mouse.
4. Click Ok and you're done.