Media

Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ named most-streamed Classic Rock song of all time

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Variety:

Today (Dec. 10), the original song and official video for “Bohemian Rhapsody,” taken from the group’s 1975 album “A Night at the Opera,” surpassed 1.6 billion streams globally across all major streaming services.

And:

Brian May, Queen’s guitarist and founding member said, “So the River of Rock Music has metamorphosed into streams! Very happy that our music is still flowing to the max!”

And:

-“Bohemian Rhapsody” is the only song in history ever to have topped the U.K. charts twice at Christmas.

Whoever pulled together the marketing campaign for the Bohemian Rhapsody movie did a masterful job.

Video taken on Mars, listen to the Martian winds

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[VIDEO] NASA:

NASA’s Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) lander, which touched down on Mars just 10 days ago, has provided the first ever “sounds” of Martian winds on the Red Planet.

Incredible to me that this video (embedded in main Loop post) was shot on another planet, and I get to embed it in this post. Will humans eventually live on other planets? Will we someday see videos like this that include news from other extraterrestrial outposts?

Can you spot the continuity errors?

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[VIDEO] Lori Dorn, Laughing Squid:

Legendary script supervisor Martha Pinson, who has worked with such luminary directors as Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet, Oliver Stone, Milos Forman, Brian De Palma and Peter Yates, sat down with Vanity Fair to dissect a scene that was deliberately strewn with serious continuity problems. Pinson spotted many of these errors, explained what was wrong and made corrections in real time. Actually, Pinson spotted all of the errors, but left them for the viewers to find.

I love movies. This was a lot of fun. Video embedded in main Loop post.

Apple, a violent Israeli TV show, and the myth that Apple wants only family-friendly video

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CNBC:

Apple is in advanced talks to buy rights to a gritty Israeli TV show called “Nevelot” (English translation: “Bastards”) and adapt it for the U.S., beating out bids from competitors including Showtime, FX and Amazon, according to several people with knowledge of the deal. The show’s plot involves two military veterans who go on a youth-focused killing spree because they believe today’s kids don’t understand the sacrifices of their generation.

And:

Apple’s heads of programming, Zach Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, who started in June, have been working overtime to dispel the myth that Apple is interested only in family-friendly material.

In general, Apple wants high-impact content based on things people have heard of, like books, franchises or ideas that have resonance, according to people who have spoken to the company.

Not clear that Apple will actually close on this deal and, if they do, whether Apple’s version of the show will retain the grittiness and violence of the original.

Hard to judge Apple’s true aims here until the new wave of shows actually hit the market.

Van Amburg and Erlicht, who were previously presidents of Sony Pictures Television, are highly respected in the entertainment industry. One of their biggest successes was bringing “Breaking Bad” and its showrunner Vince Gilligan to Sony.

The duo has made it very clear they are now looking for Apple’s version of the series, which revolved around an high school teacher turned meth dealer.

Apple brought this team on board. Hard to believe they would hamstring them, keep them from doing what they do best. Time will tell.

Microsoft takes on the iPad in their Surface Go holiday ad

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[VIDEO] Treacly snarky. Cloyingly awful. Includes the line “Grandma don’t run out and buy an iPad”. I kid you not.

Microsoft, you can do so much better.

And don’t miss that shot, right at the very end, showing Grandma and our star in the Microsoft Store. They are the only customers at that end of the store. This rang true to me. Do you ever see a shot of an open Apple Store that is not crowded?

Video embedded in main Loop post.

Verizon takes aim at Tumblr’s kneecaps, bans all adult content

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Peter Bright, Ars Technica:

Oath, the Verizon subsidiary that owns the Yahoo and AOL digital media brands, has announced that as of December 17, all adult content will be banned from the Tumblr blogging site. Any still or moving images displaying real-life human genitals or female nipples and any content—even drawn or computer-generated artwork—depicting any sexual acts will be prohibited.

Here’s a link to the Tumblr Help Center post that lays all this out.

On how much of Tumblr is dedicated to porn:

Nowadays, pornography represents a substantial element of Tumblr’s content. A 2013 estimate said that around 11 percent of the site’s 200,000 most-visited domains were porn, and some 22 percent of inbound links were from adult sites.

Supposedly, the porn detection will all be automated. That’s an oddly specific machine learning problem to solve. I can’t help but think that oddly specific knowledge will wind up getting used outside of Tumblr. What could go wrong?

Apple commissioned this Shot On iPhone Japanese decorated trucks video

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[VIDEO] Apple:

Step into the world of decotora, Japan’s lavishly decorated trucks, where drivers’ livelihood and passion meet in one extravagant machine. Shot on iPhone XS.

Interesting that Apple commissioned this work. I love the video. Embedded in main Loop post.

Fantastic footage of Queen rehearsing “We are the Champions”

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[VIDEO] This is a wonderful combination of musicianship, performance, and some great interview clips with Freddie Mercury.

One of the highlights for me is the separation of the instruments, with the piano high in the mix, and those beautiful adds of Brian May’s guitar flourishes. So well done. Video embedded in the main Loop post.

Newly discovered film footage of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, doing their thing

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[VIDEO] Washington Post:

In the grainy footage, a giant of a man, wearing a dark baseball uniform, walks past the camera holding two bats. Another man, in a white uniform, walks just behind him. And then the two take turns whacking pitches from the left side of the plate.

From the first moment Tom Shieber saw the clip, at an exhibit on pre-World War II life at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, he knew those were no ordinary ballplayers. They were Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

And:

the video was part of a curation of items from a family-owned general store in Oregon. The video, captured by Reverend Sensho Sasaki, a Buddhist priest and amateur filmmaker, was thought to show part of a local pickup game.

What an incredible find. Ruth and Gehrig, arguably, belong on the Mount Rushmore of baseball, on the short list of all time baseball greats. Amazing to see video (embedded in main Loop post) of them together, in the height of their prime.

This is craftsmanship

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[VIDEO] This is just beautiful work, a two year project by metalsmith Seth Gould, a complex box forged and filed from scratch.

Just watch. All the way to the end. (video embedded in main Loop post).

Netflix and Apple are upending Hollywood hierarchy with studio deals

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Rebecca Keegan, Hollywood Reporter:

In a Viacom earnings call on Nov. 16, Paramount Pictures CEO Jim Gianopulos described a new, multipicture deal his studio had set — not with a producer or star, but with Netflix.

And:

Movie studios are no longer making films just for themselves, but for the deep-pocketed technology companies that have become Hollywood’s latest conquistadors.

Fascinating article. Makes me wonder if this will be the undoing of the traditional studio model, one where the studios choose the people to make into stars, then feed the distribution system that provides revenue for movie theaters.

Will Netflix, Amazon and, eventually, Apple, be the new movie star makers? Will movie theaters be shut out of this new supply chain, forced to watch as people consume content without them?

Grammy winning producer teaches audio engineer how to mix using iPad

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[VIDEO] Yesterday, we posted a video interview of top music producer Henny Tha Bizness and top audio engineer Ken Lewis talking about the value of using an iPad to produce music.

This video (embedded in the main Loop post) goes a bit deeper, actually showing the iPad screen as Henny teaches Ken the basics.

Lots to love here, but my favorite is watching their heads bob in unison as soon as the music kicks in.

Commercial food photography tricks

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When I was a kid, my dad would take me to a product photography studio in Manhattan to watch them do their trickery. Fascinated me then, fascinates me now.

https://twitter.com/MachinePix/status/1067266284914585600

If this interests you, head over to YouTube and search for “commercial food photography tricks”. Lots of videos showing off the tricks of the trade.

[H/T the thematically thin Not Jony Ive]

This guy is suing Adobe for a bug that deleted years of his work

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Motherboard:

At issue is a feature in Premiere Pro called clean cache. Editing video takes up a lot of hard drive space as video editing software creates various redundancies and backups during the editing process. Programs such as Premiere Pro store those redundancies in a cache and, once a project is finished, users can clear that cache to free up disk space.

The knee-jerk reaction here? Why didn’t you backup your work? Why depend on Adobe’s backup process?

And those are probably fair questions. But the complaint seems more nuanced than that:

“The ‘Clean Cache’ command permanently deleted substantial and numerous Files and Data that were not within the ‘Media Cache’ folder or any of its subdirectories, including but not limited to Files and Data that had never been associated with [Premiere Pro]”

And:

The mass deletion isn’t a one off and Cooper likely isn’t the only user effected. Adobe itself acknowledged the bug. “With 11.1.1, only files that are within the Media Cache folder’s subdirectories will be deleted,” a blog post from Adobe said when they fixed the bug. “Files that sit next to it will no longer be affected. However, we still strongly recommend keeping the Media Cache folder separate from your original media.”

From Adobe post on unintended deletion:

Premiere Pro CC 2017 (11.1) introduced a new feature to manage and automatically remove aging and unnecessary media cache files. This feature was designed to assist users in managing existing project media cache files more easily. In the default location for media cache preferences, there is no issue. However, incorrect usage of this feature has the potential for unintentional file deletion.

Whose fault is this loss? Ultimately, I suspect a backup would have saved the day, and will be at the heart of Adobe’s response to this lawsuit.

Woz on Apple

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[VIDEO] To me, Woz and Steve Jobs were the yin and yang at the root of the Apple tree. They were very different people, each with his own flaws and particular brand of genius.

Steve being gone makes me appreciate Woz all the more. Watch the interview, embedded in the main Loop post.

[VIDEO] The new iPad Pro: An artist’s review

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[VIDEO] If you are considering laying out the bucks for one of the new iPad Pros, take the time to watch Ian Bernard’s video, embedded in the main Loop post. It is a thoughtful, rich piece, told from an artist’s perspective. [H/T Tim

Gorgeous low-angle satellite photo of San Francisco

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Follow the link, check that second photo. Stunning. Simply stunning. Amazing to me that this picture was taken from a satellite.

Lots of links to explore in the linked Kottke.org piece.

Three year old Freddie Mercury fan belts out Bohemian Rhapsody

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[VIDEO] This is just impossibly cute. And I’m thinking she learned this from watching Wayne’s World. Why? Cause of the bit at about 1:20 in, in which young Holly Lee proceeds to head-bang, like a boss. Video embedded in the main Loop post.

Rene Ritchie interviews Apple’s Sr. Director of Mac Product Marketing Tom Boger

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[VIDEO] If you watched Apple’s event last week, you’ll know Tom Boger as the person who introduced the new Mac mini.

This is a subset of a longer interview (here’s a link to the longer version, a podcast) that focuses on Apple’s Mac product grid (Steve Jobs famously introduced the Desktop/Portable vs Consumer/Pro grid back in the day) and the MacBook Air’s place in the product line, as well as how Apple decides which parts to make user serviceable.

This is absolutely worth a watch/listen. I found Tom’s explanation of where the MacBook Air fits to be interesting, but it still doesn’t click for me. Listen for yourself (video embedded in main Loop post). Nice work, Rene.

Chris Cornell, doing a solo acoustic of Black Hole Sun

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[VIDEO] This was a bit tough for me to watch. Chris Cornell was an immense talent who took his life last year. This is a chance to see him up close, talking about and playing his signature song. The video is embedded in the main Loop post.

The video of Apple’s Brooklyn Mac/iPad Pro event

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[VIDEO] I started watching this again (embedded in the main Loop post), just to see those cool animations at the beginning. I do hope Apple continues down this creative path, even if there’s no direct payoff in the presentation itself.

Paint it Black, on a weird guitar/harp hybrid

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[VIDEO] I’ve heard other songs played on this instrument, but somehow, this guitar-harp hybrid seems made for Paint it Black. Video embedded in main Loop post.

Rene Ritchie hands-on with the new iPad Pro

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[VIDEO] Terrific, densely detailed, hands-literally-on look at the new iPad Pro from Rene Ritchie, part of his excellent Vector series. Lots to absorb here, 5 minutes well spent. Video embedded in the main Loop post.

Koss headphones commercial filmed entirely on an iPhone XS Max

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[VIDEO] Amazing to me. If I hadn’t read about this experiment, I would never have known this (embedded in the main Loop post) was filmed on an iPhone.

From the director, via this Reddit thread:

I wanted to share this for anyone interested in the full potential of the iPhone XS Max camera system or interested in hearing the thoughts on the Xs Max potential from someone who shoots video and photos professionally.

I just got my Xs Max a week ago and I was totally blown away by the new camera system. The dynamic range, color saturation, af acquisition and af tracking and over all image quality had me thinking, ‘I wonder if I could actually shoot a commercial with this, and if so could anyone even tell?’

Steven Soderberg who is a filmmaker I idolize shot an entire full length film on an iPhone and I’ve seen a ton of other examples from other filmmakers trying the same thing, so I figured why not! Ha.

Expect more and more of this sort of thing.

Watch Tim Cook deliver his fervent privacy speech

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[VIDEO] Take two minutes to watch Tim Cook speak (video embedded in the main Loop post). The content of his speech is strongly held, fervently delivered. I really got caught up in it.

Has he memorized this speech? I might just be missing it, but if he is reading from a teleprompter, he’s hiding it very well.

No matter, interesting to watch this political side of Tim Cook emerge, especially as compared with those early Apple rollouts, as he first dipped his toes in the keynote waters.