"
Video vs. Photos (Score:2)
by patternjuggler (738978) on Sunday August 14, @01:25PM (#13316670)
(http://galacticnorth.blogspot.com/)
I used to be more into video, and may get back into it when HD cameras
are a little cheaper and when distribution over the internet is
easier- but currently I find taking still pictures much more
rewarding.
The first thing wrong with video is that it has a default and
sometimes fixed playback speed. Some players have fast forward and so
forth but it is usually clunky to use, and some compression formats
make scanning the video difficult. The result is most videos are very
boring. With a bunch of pictures, it's very easy to move forward and
backward at whatever speed I want, since most viewers understand
that's what the user wants to do (although some shitty sites out there
force a slideshow playback).
It's much lower quality than a picture from a similarly priced device.
I'd rather look at a high res series of photographs capturing a few
frames of something in motion rather than a smooth but thumbnail-sized
video of equivalent size.
It presumes too much of what the viewer wants to see. A large
photograph allows my eyes to scan to parts of interest at my leisure,
a video typically reflects exactly what the person recording was
interested in, flicking from thing to thing or over concentrated on
something uninteresting to me personally.
It requires much more skill to capture well. You have to hold the
camera steady through out the entire video, not just for a fraction of
a second to take a still picture. A poor photographer who shoots a lot
of pictures will probably end up with a few that could pass off as
nearly professional, but a crappily taken video stays crappy no matter
what.
Unless you set up a camera on a tripod, video taping something really
removes you from the event because it requires constant attention on
the tiny lcd screen rather than experiencing everything normally. To
everyone else you don't even have a face, you're just a video camera.
Taking a picture is a discrete event, inbetween you put the camera in
your pocket or bag and are just experiencing everything normally
again.
It is more annoying to have your video taken than have your picture
taken. There's something more respectable about someone taking
pictures than taking video. Video will capture little annoying things
about you that you dislike, the way you said something or some
mannerism, but a picture is just a tiny slice.
It's difficult and very time consuming to edit. And of course any
editing is presumptuous of what the viewer would like to get out of
the video. Editing with pictures is natural- just don't upload the
pictures that turned out bad (and like I mentioned before, it's easy
to skip over uninteresting pictures quickly).
The file sizes are huge, unless quality and length is compromised.
This makes video hard to share and distribute, over the internet or
even in person. Everyone you know will probably hate you if you force
them to sit through 30 minutes of vacation video, but if you let them
flip through a book of pictures they're going to like it much more.
Someone on the internet may invest very little time to look at some of
my pictures [flickr.com], but it's doubtful anyone is going to
download a video for ten minutes without a good reason (like the
promise of female nudity, say, or the recommendation of a trustworthy
blog).
Perhaps many of these problems will be addressed eventually, sites
like youtube may lead to some solutions (the flash playback seems
awful- how do I save the video and send it to someone, burn it on a
dvd, edit it into my own remix of various found videos?)."
Best,
Raymond M. Kristiansen
http://dltq.org
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