Idiotic Previews

Sometimes, for discernible reasons, the corporate marketing hacks who try to control our lifestyles, do something really really annoying. And then again, sometimes they do it for no discernible reason.

Case in point. I just rented the VHS tape of the movie “Walkabout” by Nicholas Roeg. I popped it into the machine, pressed the “play” button, and watched. What I saw was a preview for the movie… “Walkabout”, by Nicholas Roeg.

I thought, whoa! That’s cool. A preview of the movie I just rented.

Now, wait a minute. Do people go to a video store, pick a movie at random, take it home, watch the preview, and then decide if they are going to watch the movie?

Not very likely, you’ll agree. No, like most people, I picked a movie I wanted to watch and then took it home to watch. So why is there a preview for the same movie on the tape?

Now, previews are designed to peak your interest. They show you the most interesting or provocative scenes from the movie, in the hope that you will want to see the whole thing… a few weeks later at a movie theatre.

But when you are about to watch the movie, do you want the preview to show you what is going to happen to the people in the film? Do you want to know that the car you see them driving in at the beginning, is going to end up burning in the dessert? Do you want to know that the girl is going to go skinny-dipping? Do you want to know that she and her little brother will run into somebody out in the dessert?

Yes, you do, when the movie gets to it.

It’s like the loudmouth leaving the movie theatre as you are going in, muttering, “can you believe it? The butler really did do it!”

Digital Vs. Analog

I have read with great interest some of the discussion about the differences between digital video and 35 mm film.

At this same time, I have been converting some of my old films to digital video for preservation and convenience. I am really dazzled by all the progress made by digital video over the past few years, but as I watch some of those cheesy “Super 8” era movies, I find myself more and more in love with the “look” of film.

In the same way, I still like vinyl for music. I am convinced that under ideal circumstances (a top notch turntable, for one thing) vinyl records DO sound better than MP3’s or even CD’s. Many people describe it as “warmth”, but we do know that digital recording IS inherently reductionistic. Every byte of sound is a precise mathematical expression, at a time when our data storage capacity is still relatively limited (even if a 75 GIG drive sounds impressive to you). Analog recordings “mimic” sound and video. They record a kind of mirror image of what they see and hear, rather than “process” it. But when a digital camera or recorder scans images or sounds, it translates it into a string of data bits that refer to parallel data structures that try to reconstruct the image or sound on your computer. We know that in order to fit this data onto a computer disk, the data has to be limited and restrained, because there is an immense amount of data in a picture or a sound.

Film and tape have limits too. These limits are defined by the maximum (or minimum, depending on how you look at it) granularity of the medium. Film has developed to the point where it’s granularity is quite good. It takes a big computer file to match the true resolution of a 35mm picture.

The key point is that if there is a really, really strange color out there, a computer may not be able to match it to its internal references. But a computer is clever. It won’t crash just because it can’t find an exact color match. It will simply adopt the nearest approximation.

Logically, digital media will likely eventually catch up to the best films or vinyl records, as they continue to expand storage capacity and accuracy of the scanners (the CCD or the microphone), but it may be many years before digital video really compares favorably to film for the subtlety of colours and shades, or vinyl for the subtlety of overtones and reverberations.

Interesting aside: didn’t Marilyn Monroe consider her mole (which apparently “moved” around on her face) a distinctive beauty mark? It may be the flaws that give something beautiful “character” and richness that people really want to experience.