51–60 of 175 posts
Having said that, if these comments were an audiobook, or a word for word movie script, I'd probably only be through about 5 of them.
Words rule!
On the other hand, if a picture is worth 1,000 words, a movie must be worth billions! Unfortunately it takes a lot of study of a picture to get 1,000 word out of it. That's a lot of pausing.
> Human brains process it absurdly well considering there's nothing really built-in for it. That's unclear. The sheer bitrate of reading suggests that it might tap into some deep structures -- hacking some parts of the visual and speech systems, if you prefer. I don't click on HN video links because I find video slow and frustrating way to learn almost anything. Text is so random access -- you can skip over boring bi…
As well, you can quickly copy paste and remix text in a way we can't with video yet.
The applications that we built were an attempt to resolve some of this. We were building editing / curation tools to help improve video, and some of the people using our software created incredible things, that I absolutely loved.
I especially dislike the trend in the past (5?) years toward programming tutorials in video. Give me a written tutorial. Give me a blog post. Give me a well-commented repo, or at least a poorly commented one with a decent README file. When teaching anything involving a textual artform / profession, give me Anything but a visual / audial medium. I write and read code for a living, and otherwise I write and read about problems solved with code all day. When it comes to programming, video is a square peg in a knife fight.
That said, I have an enormous collection of TV shows and Movies, and I have a great deal of appreciation for the medium, in general. One of my close friends is an Editor in Hollywood and I have such an absolute respect for him and the creative sides of his industry. I love to see his work and hear about the intricacies therein. When edited and curated, video is splended. I can dive in and forget the world exists and appreciate nuance and symmetry of visuals, sounds, and ideas. And despite my feelings about programming videos, I know it's possible to learn from video, depending on the subject.
I don't want to watch videos of everyone I know doing every day things. I don't want to watch unedited, uncurated crap in real time. Every time a "Live" video link shows up on my FB notifications, I skip it. I don't want to see you live. If I did, I'd video chat with you, or I'd call you up to hang out. But if you want me to take some time out to watch your broadcast, then I expect some planning, editing, and and overall respect for my time. This is video, after all. It's all-consuming. I have to watch AND listen in real time, which means I'm not doing anything else. Asking that much of me requires respect.
Of course another benefit of text is that it's so easy to edit. I don't know if you've actually enjoyed reading this post, but I assure you the first version was much, much worse.
And if you just skimmed it and ended up here, at this sentence, well there it is: my favorite part about text over video.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since I started playing all YouTube videos at 2x speed[0] I enjoy watching/listening to videos much more. Watching videos at 1x is just unbearable to me now. I wish FB added 2x playback too. [0] using https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improvedtube-youtu...
Interesting! I do the same with video lectures from Coursera. For example, Odersky's lectures may be interesting, but boy is he a slow speaker. I simply cannot stand his -- and to be fair, most -- lectures unless I play them at 2X speed. And still, I'd rather read the PDF slides. Video isn't a particularly good way of conveying formal information. Text with graphics is way better.
The cost of video production is at least 50X or 100X more than text and hence, we take extra caution to make sure that it's precise and accurate. What is said in 1500 words is trimmed down to 250 words to create a video. It goes through multiple talents like motion graphics team, anchors etc before it hits the screen and hence it's interesting to watch. Text, caption etc are just there for SEO. Bandwidth is the only constrain, especially in developing nations.
And then there are low-quality mugshot videos, which takes less budget than what it takes to present the same content in text.
The quality ones will replace text forever.
Text will rule for a long while yet.
I work in eLearning and we create a lot of visual content as its easy to convey ideas in video than through text. The cost of video production is at least 50X or 100X more than text and hence, we take extra caution to make sure that it's precise and accurate. What is said in 1500 words is trimmed down to 250 words to create a video. It goes through multiple talents like motion graphics team, anchors etc before it hit…
And this need to be a startup.
> Human brains process it absurdly well considering there's nothing really built-in for it. That's unclear. The sheer bitrate of reading suggests that it might tap into some deep structures -- hacking some parts of the visual and speech systems, if you prefer. I don't click on HN video links because I find video slow and frustrating way to learn almost anything. Text is so random access -- you can skip over boring bi…
I worked in television for a number of years in a technical behind-the-scenes capacity where I would have to flick switches and hit buttons on audio/scripted cues. Sometimes this would take me from the script for what I felt was a long time and I would always struggle to get back to where we were in the script. 'Surely we must have gone through two pages of this double spaced script that only uses one half of the pag…
(The above comment is 49 words)
I guess maybe I'm too old to understand (38) but to me, reading some text is simply way faster than watching someone read that text in a video... but they are saying the exact opposite. This is completely baffling to me.
Also, writing is SO MUCH EASIER than creating video. Do you really think I would have bothered participating in this conversation if it meant opening up a camera and NLE and cutting together a video of my ugly mug yapping away, with the signature youtube jump cuts to remove the "umms" and "uhhss" and other pauses that you're not currently reading?
Cuz this reply wasn't a coherently delivered, smooth stream-of-conscious delivery. I've already gone back and rephrased several thoughts-- easy to do in text, a pain in the ass to do in video.
And I'm certainly not going to FIRST write this, then read it out loud, THEN edit it, and hope you sit back and watch. And the idea of text-to-video-- seems like adding an extra step.
Video is great, but its the wrong medium for quite a bit of communication.