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The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)

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Re: The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)

#71

Post by IdiotSavage »

nananana9 wrote: post #58
IdiotSavage wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube, as well as any decent player, plays any aspect ratio video, even portrait mode. As an uploader you should never add black bars (if they are in the source, crop them out before uploading) and of course never distort the video. This ensures the best playback experience for all devices.

> As an uploader you should never add black bars In an ideal world yes. In practice, the YouTube layout looks weird on aspect ratios that aren't 4:3 or 16:9. If you upload any vertical video it gets categorized as a short, so that's out of the window - and even for things like 21:9 you get a teeny tiny player on desktop since it just fits the width.

Yes, there are some YouTube-manufactured issues. However it bothers me more when I try to watch a 21:9 video fullscreen on my 21:9 display and get black bars on all four sides.

Re: The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)

#72

Post by [deleted] »

mandevil wrote: post #15
devindotcom wrote: post #2

The full series is on Archive: https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978/Connections... It still holds up for the most part, though of course some of the takes, being almost 50 years old, may seem a bit quaint. It's certainly worth watching the first series at least start to finish. Burke is an interesting guy.

I personally feel like _The Day The Universe Changed_ (his second documentary) is better. I love Connections but the basic thesis (there are hidden connections between disparate developments in science and technology) ends up pretty scattershot, spreading out like Brownian Motion. _tDtUC_ is much more focused. Largely based on Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ for individual stories, it traces how the unde…

[deleted]

Re: The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)

#73

Post by cindyllm »

[deleted] wrote: post #72
mandevil wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally feel like _The Day The Universe Changed_ (his second documentary) is better. I love Connections but the basic thesis (there are hidden connections between disparate developments in science and technology) ends up pretty scattershot, spreading out like Brownian Motion. _tDtUC_ is much more focused. Largely based on Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ for individual stories, it traces how the unde…

[deleted]

[dead]

Re: The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)

#75

Post by shmeeed »

DavidWoof wrote: post #13

I loved Connections so much as a kid, but I'm so tired of this clip. There's so many better clips from this show. So he nailed a 13 second countdown. Who cares? Newscasters do this at every commercial break. Sports announcers do this without a script and they still nail the cut to commercial almost every time. Yes, there's a talent to timing your speech to a countdown in your ear, but it's a talent that people do tho…

I absolutely adore both Burke and the Connections series, and without a doubt this is a lovely shot, but I feel the same: I don't get the hype. It's been memefied to death for no real reason. There's no incredible feat involved. It wasn't a tightrope walk without a net live on air. You can bet they had stand-in footage done before that they could have made a montage of in case Burke stumbled a line.

Re: The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)

#76

Post by glenngillen »

seer wrote: post #12
RachelF wrote: post #4

The late 1970's were the golden age of documentaries: Connections, Cosmos, Civilization, The Ascent of Man and Attenborough's Life on Earth. Perhaps it's just me, but modern documentaries are rather dumbed down? As a side note: Quite ironic that he ends up pointing to a rocket propelled mostly by solid fuels.

Yes, but the YouTube ed channels are such a treasure in and of itself. We had the “tech” to produce content like this for almost a century, but it took the Internet and democratization of content creation to come up with gems like smarter every day, veritasium, extra history, etc My fear is that this is also being reshaped with ai, mostly for good now but I feel like the personal touch and passion of these creators i…

Any particular recommendations? I’ve been meaning to queue some up to have in the background playing when the kids are around hoping to stumble across something that that might pique their interests

Re: The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)

#77

Post by ErroneousBosh »

seer wrote: post #60
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In among all the MrBeasts and JackSepticEyes on Youtube there are some incredibly creative people. Two that my 5-year-old loves are OddAnimalSpecimens who could easily have been on BBC children's programming in the 1980s, and Terragreen who would have been his ITV counterpart :-) Probably the most entertaining child-friendly programme you can watch right now is whatever Jake Carlini is doing. Some wee guy in a house…

Thanks for the recommendations - I’m also big fan of 3blue1brown and PBS science, but as a recent dad am on lookout for content for my son to watch when he comes of that age - he’s just 1month now, hopefully by that time AI has not enshittyfied everything

We're a multilingual household, so another that gets a lot of love is Sendung mit der Maus which was originally a TV series but now is on Youtube as well - including some very old episodes. My son's German is way better than mine though, and these days so is his Gaelic - mostly I deal with people in English and I've kind of started to lose that skill.

If you like big 4x4s (and who doesn't?) then Matt's Off Road Recovery is pretty good. Utah looks lovely, and of course they're culturally fairly free of rude words so that's pretty okay for children.

Quiet Nerd is another of my son's favourites, he builds little electric-powered campers and drives them out into the woods near where he lives.

Re: The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)

#78

Post by gjfr »

vova_hn2 wrote: post #52

Direct link to the youtube video, without this garbage ad-ridden website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WoDQBhJCVQ

This comment reminded me I have an ad blocker. I reloaded the page without it, and instantly remembered why.

Re: The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)

#79

Post by DonaldFisk »

s20n wrote: post #30

It really grinds my gears that the uploader had to ruin the "Greatest Shot in Television" by stretching the 4:3 video to 16:9. I know I sound like a pedant but so many of these old TV recordings are uploaded this way on youtube. I was so annoyed by this infact that a few years ago I made a dumb extension that squeezes the video element back to 4:3 [1]. I'm not sure if this still works though. [1] https://chromewebsto…

This will fix it: https://www.stretch.site

And here's the clip with aspect ratio corrected: https://www.stretch.site/?videoUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube...

Re: The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)

#80

Post by Joeboy »

shmeeed wrote: post #75
DavidWoof wrote: post #13

I loved Connections so much as a kid, but I'm so tired of this clip. There's so many better clips from this show. So he nailed a 13 second countdown. Who cares? Newscasters do this at every commercial break. Sports announcers do this without a script and they still nail the cut to commercial almost every time. Yes, there's a talent to timing your speech to a countdown in your ear, but it's a talent that people do tho…

I absolutely adore both Burke and the Connections series, and without a doubt this is a lovely shot, but I feel the same: I don't get the hype. It's been memefied to death for no real reason. There's no incredible feat involved. It wasn't a tightrope walk without a net live on air. You can bet they had stand-in footage done before that they could have made a montage of in case Burke stumbled a line.

I suppose it's like a magic trick. It's less impressive once you understand how it all works. But still, it's clearly effective and you can admire the artistry.
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