{"id":2594,"date":"2010-09-24T11:26:40","date_gmt":"2010-09-24T15:26:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=2594"},"modified":"2014-03-21T13:57:18","modified_gmt":"2014-03-21T17:57:18","slug":"a-digital-video-primer-for-geeks-three-thumbs-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=2594","title":{"rendered":"A Digital Video Primer for Geeks &#8211; Three Thumbs Up!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>About an hour ago I watched <a href=\"http:\/\/xiph.org\/video\/index.shtml.en\">A Digital Video Primer for Geeks<\/a>.  This is, hands down and no exceptions, the best instructional video I&#8217;ve ever seen. It takes a complex, dry, detail-filled topic and presents it with lucid clarity and a sense of fun.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>They&#8217;re not kidding about the &#8220;for geeks&#8221; part; the exposition is fast and dense and assumes the reader is able to handle having concepts as complex as Nyquist&#8217;s theorem thrown at them in one go.  But the exposition is also very clear and direct, and delivered with a keen sense of which details need most emphasis.  The effect is only secondarily to impart facts; what they&#8217;re attempting, successfully, is to give the viewer a <em>feel<\/em> for the subject matter, an overall grasp of how the pieces fit together which can be filled in by later deep-diving into the pieces.<\/p>\n<p>Full marks to Monty for his delivery, which is excellent on all levels.  I&#8217;m no slouch myself at presenting technical ideas in accessible language, but I will cheerfully admit that this is as good as me at the top of my form, or possibly better.  I know how much skill and effort is concealed  in making a performance like this look casual; if you don&#8217;t, just trust me that what Monty has pulled off here is quite impressive just as an act of presentation-fu.<\/p>\n<p>And yes, this is a video &#8211; not just an e-book narrated by a well-spoken talking head. The uses of props, whiteboard, and special effects are tasteful and understatedly clever. I particularly enjoyed the playful use of special effects to illustrate things like sample-rate compression, signal-clipping artifacts and how YUV chroma representation actually works.  That was a very effective way to tie those abstractions to experiential reality so the viewer won&#8217;t forget them.<\/p>\n<p>The material was ideal for my level of knowledge at start.  That is, if you have (a) programmer chops, (b)  a bit of basic knowledge of the physics of sound, and (c) you&#8217;ve heard of Nyquist&#8217;s theorem before and broadly grasp the relationship between sampling rate and cutoff frequency, you&#8217;re going to eat the rest of the video up like candy. Probably (c) isn&#8217;t necessary; what it meant for me is that I started getting new material at the point where Monty explained about sample rates above 44.1 being a way to get away with cheaper bandpass filters.<\/p>\n<p>In general, the production is unobtrusively immaculate.  This is all the more impressive because it&#8217;s clear the piece was shot on a tiny budget.  And it proudly announces at the end that only open-source tools were used.  Creative Commons license, natch.<\/p>\n<p>One final thing: On top of all its other virtues, this video is a lovely aesthetic expression of the hacker posture of mind. If you are a hacker, you will know what I mean by this when you watch it; if you aren&#8217;t, there is little to no point in my trying to explain.  If you think you may be <em>becoming<\/em> a hacker, watch it twice.  Then get a night&#8217;s sleep and watch it again.  This will help you in broad and subtle ways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>About an hour ago I watched A Digital Video Primer for Geeks. This is, hands down and no exceptions, the best instructional video I&#8217;ve ever seen. It takes a complex, dry, detail-filled topic and presents it with lucid clarity and a sense of fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2594"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2595,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2594\/revisions\/2595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}