4 ms·

I like the use of gifs, although it loads really poorly on my computer. Half of them don't animate, and the other ones stutter. It feels really laggy scrollin

I like the use of gifs, although it loads really poorly on my computer. Half of them don't animate, and the other ones stutter. It feels really laggy scrolling through the page. I wish browsers could handle animated gifs better, and (from an end user perspective) make them essentially work like an embedded Vine.

anigbrowl 13y ago
I hate it. It's a lazy way to avoid editing a short video and doing some narration. This is what you get when you have cameras that record quality video on the cheap but people who can't be bothered to learn any of the technique to use them effectively.
- rallison 13y ago
  I find it much more likely they went this route for the style. The photographer for these photos is Lam Thuy Vo [1] and based on her gallery, she appears to shoot with a 5D Mark II. She is obviously comfortable with a high quality camera. [1] http://lamivo.com/index.html http://lamivo.com/index.html
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    I'm fine with the shooting - you know it's good because of the framing, exposure, and other factors. It's the laziness of throwing 6 animated gifs on the same page that I find deplorable. Even a slideshow with text would have been an improvement. To me this is like offering someone 6 spoonfuls of different food and saying it's equivalent to a meal. There's an entire visual grammar of sequential image presentation that's getting thrown away for the sake of novelty, so someone at npr.org can feel hip for knowing what a gif is. Let anyone get the wrong idea, I am a huge fan of Vine and think it occupies a happy medium between photo and longer-form video. But you won't make it better by stacking them in big piles, any more than Watching a bank of TVs tuned to multiple channels improves your information intake.
- gdubs 13y ago
  Gifs are a horrible format for video, but yet people love them for their simplicity. Vine is smartly capitalizing on this. Definitely think this was a stylistic choice here -- a narrated video is a completely different experience.
  - baddox 13y ago
    Doesn't Vine use Flash and/or HTML5 video? They do everywhere I've seen Vines.
    - gdubs 13y ago
      Yea, to clarify I was saying they were smart to capitalize on the simplicity of the GIF format (even though they're using movies), using a similar presentation style vs a typical movie presentation UI.
- lobster_johnson 13y ago
  I disagree, deeply. This is simply a different medium — this is basically an illustrated article, where the illustrations happen to contain motion. It's not that text and video are that different in terms of information, it's that they differ in timing. For example, a narrated video will likely linger on some images, then cut to something else, and so on, all the while being edited in a particular way, with a particular tempo. And video presents only one frame at a time. With text, I can choose my tempo, and since everything is presented in two dimensions I can skip or skim much more easily. It should also be said that text can be read much faster than a narrator can give me the same amount of information. Video is seldom information-dense (in terms of useful information, not raw pixels).
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    ACHILLES: You are right on both counts. But even though the record is there "all at once," as you put it, we can draw sounds out of it bi by bit. The idea behind this is that the grooves pass slowly under the needle, and as they pass, the needle vibrates slightly in response to those very fine designs you earlier referred to. Somehow, in those designs are coded musical sounds, which are processed and passed on to the loudspeaker, to dispense to our waiting ears. Thus we manage to hear the music just as you said, "a bit at a time." The whole process is quite marvelous, I should say. TORTOISE: Well, it is marvelously complicated, I'll grant you that. But why don't you do as I do just hang the record up on your wall and enjoy its beauty all at once, instead of in small pieces doled out ove a period of time? Is it that somehow there is a masochistic pleasure in the pain of doling out its beauties so slowly? I am always against masochism. Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach
- prewett 13y ago
  If there had been a video with narration I would have instantly closed the page. Video is just too information-sparse. I thought the GIFs were tastefully done, although the bottle-top making one is confusing. Still images would have been just as good, especially for the front-end loader which isn't exactly a new concept. I did like seeing the hot glass bottles visually cool down, though.
cocoflunchy 13y ago
I don't know which is worse: that my computer can't load and render a simple webpage with 5 gifs, or that a webpage is so poorly optimized that it puts my laptop on it knees...
- rwmj 13y ago
  Or that your OS allows a random webpage to bring your laptop to its knees.
lambda 13y ago
It played fine on my machine; but I have a brand new high-end laptop. It completely brought my phone's browser to a halt; none of the images animated, and it took seconds for it to respond to scroll events. I find it odd that animated GIFs are suddenly in vogue again, right when HTML5 video is starting to become ubiquitous and is much more efficient and high-fidelity than a GIF could ever be.
sagarm 13y ago
The GIFs total 30MB (!), but as videos[1] they're 1-2MB total. That's a 15x-30x reduction in size. Surely that large of a reduction in bandwidth and improvement in user experience is worth it? [1] To get the frames of the GIFs: for i in "* .gif"; do convert $i -coalesce $(basename $i .gif)-%02d.png; done And encode them to webm: for i in "* .gif"; do ffmpeg -f image2 -r 30 -i $(basename $i .gif)-%02d.png -vcodec libvpx -b 1M -crf 5 $(basename $i .gif).webm; done

anigbrowl 13y ago

I hate it. It's a lazy way to avoid editing a short video and doing some narration. This is what you get when you have cameras that record quality video on the cheap but people who can't be bothered to learn any of the technique to use them effectively.

rallison 13y ago
I find it much more likely they went this route for the style. The photographer for these photos is Lam Thuy Vo [1] and based on her gallery, she appears to shoot with a 5D Mark II. She is obviously comfortable with a high quality camera. [1] http://lamivo.com/index.html http://lamivo.com/index.html
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  I'm fine with the shooting - you know it's good because of the framing, exposure, and other factors. It's the laziness of throwing 6 animated gifs on the same page that I find deplorable. Even a slideshow with text would have been an improvement. To me this is like offering someone 6 spoonfuls of different food and saying it's equivalent to a meal. There's an entire visual grammar of sequential image presentation that's getting thrown away for the sake of novelty, so someone at npr.org can feel hip for knowing what a gif is. Let anyone get the wrong idea, I am a huge fan of Vine and think it occupies a happy medium between photo and longer-form video. But you won't make it better by stacking them in big piles, any more than Watching a bank of TVs tuned to multiple channels improves your information intake.
gdubs 13y ago
Gifs are a horrible format for video, but yet people love them for their simplicity. Vine is smartly capitalizing on this. Definitely think this was a stylistic choice here -- a narrated video is a completely different experience.
- baddox 13y ago
  Doesn't Vine use Flash and/or HTML5 video? They do everywhere I've seen Vines.
  - gdubs 13y ago
    Yea, to clarify I was saying they were smart to capitalize on the simplicity of the GIF format (even though they're using movies), using a similar presentation style vs a typical movie presentation UI.
lobster_johnson 13y ago
I disagree, deeply. This is simply a different medium — this is basically an illustrated article, where the illustrations happen to contain motion. It's not that text and video are that different in terms of information, it's that they differ in timing. For example, a narrated video will likely linger on some images, then cut to something else, and so on, all the while being edited in a particular way, with a particular tempo. And video presents only one frame at a time. With text, I can choose my tempo, and since everything is presented in two dimensions I can skip or skim much more easily. It should also be said that text can be read much faster than a narrator can give me the same amount of information. Video is seldom information-dense (in terms of useful information, not raw pixels).
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  ACHILLES: You are right on both counts. But even though the record is there "all at once," as you put it, we can draw sounds out of it bi by bit. The idea behind this is that the grooves pass slowly under the needle, and as they pass, the needle vibrates slightly in response to those very fine designs you earlier referred to. Somehow, in those designs are coded musical sounds, which are processed and passed on to the loudspeaker, to dispense to our waiting ears. Thus we manage to hear the music just as you said, "a bit at a time." The whole process is quite marvelous, I should say. TORTOISE: Well, it is marvelously complicated, I'll grant you that. But why don't you do as I do just hang the record up on your wall and enjoy its beauty all at once, instead of in small pieces doled out ove a period of time? Is it that somehow there is a masochistic pleasure in the pain of doling out its beauties so slowly? I am always against masochism. Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach
prewett 13y ago
If there had been a video with narration I would have instantly closed the page. Video is just too information-sparse. I thought the GIFs were tastefully done, although the bottle-top making one is confusing. Still images would have been just as good, especially for the front-end loader which isn't exactly a new concept. I did like seeing the hot glass bottles visually cool down, though.

cocoflunchy 13y ago

I don't know which is worse: that my computer can't load and render a simple webpage with 5 gifs, or that a webpage is so poorly optimized that it puts my laptop on it knees...

rwmj 13y ago
Or that your OS allows a random webpage to bring your laptop to its knees.

lambda 13y ago

It played fine on my machine; but I have a brand new high-end laptop. It completely brought my phone's browser to a halt; none of the images animated, and it took seconds for it to respond to scroll events. I find it odd that animated GIFs are suddenly in vogue again, right when HTML5 video is starting to become ubiquitous and is much more efficient and high-fidelity than a GIF could ever be.

sagarm 13y ago

The GIFs total 30MB (!), but as videos[1] they're 1-2MB total. That's a 15x-30x reduction in size. Surely that large of a reduction in bandwidth and improvement in user experience is worth it? [1] To get the frames of the GIFs: for i in "* .gif"; do convert $i -coalesce $(basename $i .gif)-%02d.png; done And encode them to webm: for i in "* .gif"; do ffmpeg -f image2 -r 30 -i $(basename $i .gif)-%02d.png -vcodec libvpx -b 1M -crf 5 $(basename $i .gif).webm; done