Sarv Kreindler's blog

Slate Magazine pontificates on the importance of "Powers of Ten," Charles and Ray Eames' groundbreaking short film which is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year. "Powers of Ten" zooms out from a picnicking couple 10 times for every 10 seconds, until it ends up showing the magnitude of the cosmos. It then zooms back and into the cells inside a human body to demonstrate the relative size of the tiniest sparks of life.

PBS' POV blog has compiled a list of the 25 greatest documentaries of all time. Woodstock, Supersize Me, Hoop Dreams and Fahrenheit 9/11 all made the list. But in what order and what's number one? See the full list here.

In this video from the PSFK Conference, photographer Chase Jarvis talks about his unusual education and how he thinks creative education needs to be revamped for today's day and age. Jarvis is well-known for consistently sharing photography and filmmaking tips and lessons for free on his blog. He says, "[Once the Internet happened,] I had this vision of, wait a minute, I could share something to scale...It was the first time in my life that I had realized that I did not need permission from anybody to make something and share it at scale. The means of the production were with the proletariat for the first time. Creators were distributors, we could control our own work. We didn't need permission from the photo editor, we didn't need permission from the gallerist. We didn't need permission from anyone to make something and put it out into the world."

Ecologist Bill McShea talks to Fast Company's Co.Exist about his work for Smithsonian's Wild program, which is working on collecting thousands of images of wildlife from automatic cameras hidden in their natural habitats. Says McShea, "We’re just talking about collecting a different kind of museum specimen. Instead of having it be a skin in a drawer, it’s a photograph. But that photograph has a date and a place and a time and species identification and a collection ID. It has much of the information that the original specimen had.”

Read more about the history of automated wildlife photography and what it means for research here.

Dave Kendricken of NoFilmSchool.com wonders if social video apps, like Viddy, could ever threaten the livelihood of professional filmmakers. He writes, "An ‘Instagram for video’ can never replace what we do as filmmakers, nor would it ever truly threaten filmmaking outright — I don’t think anyone’s going nearly as far as saying these things. Nor can applying a pre-designed filter displace the careful planning, execution, and post corrections we may be performing. Amateur video is what it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s illegitimate content or considered unworthy of viewing by the average consumer."

Read his full post here.

Kevin Doohan, EVP of marketing for gaming lifestyle website Machinima, gives some tips as to how his company's channel became the number one all-time entertainment channel on YouTube, with over two billion views per month. Says Doohan, "You should really work with the medium. Create content that works on YouTube. Pre-roll is fine. We sell a ton of it and we really appreciate them."

Watch the full interview below.

Ryan William Neal reports from last week's Future of Television Summit panel discussion "Digital Distribution Models: How Technology is Changing the Way Viewers Access TV and Video Content.” The panelists, which included executives from HBO, Disney and ESPN, YouTube, RSG Media and DSB all agreed about one thing: diversity of distribution platforms is ultimately a good thing.

Said Tim Connolly, vice president of digital video distribution at Disney and ESPN Media Networks, “The apps and websites are like the department stores where users can browse and see what they like. In our access points, it’s more like a boutique store. [Disney and ESPN] see them as complementary.”

Read the full recap here on Digital Media Wire.

PCMag explains Ultra HD (formerly known as 4K), what it is, when it's coming and whether you need it. Writes Jamie Lendino, "Is 4K—now known officially as Ultra HD—something you can get today, or at least soon enough that you should hold off on buying, say, an HDTV or Blu-ray player? Is it something you'd even want? Here's everything you need to know about Ultra HD—for now, at least."

Raw video output is supposed to give you the most latitude when it comes to changing the "look" of your footage in post, but Alister Chapman explains why different raw cameras will still give you different outcomes. He writes, "With traditional video cameras a lot of the 'look' is created by the cameras color matrix, gamma curves and other internal processing, but a raw camera bypasses all of this outputting the raw sensor data. With an almost infinite amount of adjustment available in post production why is it that not all raw cameras are created equal?

Tubefilter and Chill are presenting a panel on the paid direct-to-consumer online video business model that Louis C.K. successfully brought into the limelight this year. "Pay to Play: Will Viewers Pay to Watch Online Video?" will dig into the details of direct-to-consumer model, how it works, and its potential to create windfalls for online video creators.

Google's 10,000 Stars is a new Chrome experiment website that lets users zoom in to see visualizations and information on the stars of our galaxy. It uses data taken from the European Space Station, the Department of Astronomy at Yale and Astronomy Nexus to create the info-rich experience. Check it out here. (via Creative Review)

Only 15 Kickstarter projects have ever made it past the million-dollar funding mark, all of them in 2012, and 8 of them in the gaming category. What are some of the other crucial elements that these projects have in common? KickstartersHQ.com has created the handy infograph below to show you. (See it in full-size here on Crowdsourcing.org)

Sandvine has released a grid showcasing data usage on mobile phones and YouTube has come out the winner: accounting for a little over 30% of all incoming data. Facebook, meanwhile, accounts for the most uploaded data at over 15%. See the full breakdown here on All Things D.

CollegeHumor's Ricky Van Veen and Vice Media's Shane Smith will both be at the D: Dive Into Media conference this February, talking about all things web video. Dive Into Media is taking place on February 11-12, 2013 at Dana Point, CA and will also include appearances by Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton, Hearst Magazines president David Carey, Google chief business officer Nikesh Arora, Facebook partnership vice president Dan Rose, HBO co-president Eric Kessler and Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino.

David Shapton of RedShark News writes on the current state of high-quality digital cameras wherein Sony and Canon are now churning out worthy competitors to RED's market. He writes, "The pace of technology sets its own agenda. It doesn't wait for anyone, especially when there are established, competing companies who are consummate developers of imaging technology.

Alister Chapman believes that the Sony F55 and F5 could truly be game-changers and here's why:

Japan Display has developed an LCD screen that combines the paper-like e-ink technology of original e-readers with the ability to show color video. Explains MIT Technology Review, "Most LCDs would simply reflect light, like a mirror--think of an iPad when it’s turned off, say.

TIME Magazine's Jon Dieringer examines Stanley Kubrick's life as a young photographer for Look Magazine and how he forayed that into a career as a feature filmmaker. Kubrick's photographic essay, Prizefighter, was the impetus for his first motion picture, the documentary Day of the Fight.

The A.V. Club's Todd VanDerWerff ruminates on the state of independent television in the wake of this year's New York Television Festival. He writes, "The strongest argument for independent TV (whose definition I will broaden by incorporating more traditional web series) is also the greatest reason it has yet to break through beyond boutique cable channels. At its best, indie TV allows a platform for voices not often represented on TV. Similarly, it allows for more unconventional storytelling.

Youtoo software is taking interactive and second screen television to a whole new level: by allowing viewers to record short videos of themselves via their mobile devices that can then be seen on air alongside television programs.

Says 53-year-old video blogger Teri Osborn, "You press one button to record, one to upload. With a smartphone it's crazy simple. There's just something about seeing yourself on TV. It's the same appeal as YouTube — only it's so much cooler, so much bigger."

Filmmaker Armando Kirwin comments on what he feels is the lackluster video app market and how it could be improved upon. He writes, "I would argue that we have yet to see a startup nail ANY part of the video experience except for sharing...What I tell most non-filmmakers is that 95% of the fun/creative/important parts of the video process happen BEFORE or DURING the actual moment of capture. This phase is also where good content is generated. The analogy here is the film industry, the magic doesn’t happen during distribution, it happens looong before.

Tom Roston laments the lack of subtlety in today's political ads and wonders if they are more akin to propoganda than commercials. He writes, "The non-direct message can have so much more staying power than a head-on collision. Not that either campaign would heed such instruction. And they probably understand the American voter a whole lot better than I do. Too bad that nuance has no place in today’s American political discourse."

In honor of LACMA's upcoming Stanley Kubrick exhibit, Elvis Mitchell writes an appreciation of the filmmaker over on the LACMA blog. He writes, "I may be alone in this, but I think of Stanley Kubrick as an editor. Probably no one who has ever watched Barry Lyndon or The Shining or Eyes Wide Shut can read that sentence with a straight face.

A new postage-sized camera called Memoto will capture a photo every 30 seconds, creating a documented memory trail of the user's everyday life. The camera has already quadrupled its $50,000 goal on Kickstarter.

Dutch photographer Gerco de Ruijter attaches his camera to an airborne kite to get his surreal, abstract images of landscapes. He says, "I’m framing parts of these landscapes with my camera on a kite line looking straight down. Sometimes a composition occurs; the result of nature’s geological force.”