I signed back up for an Unlimited account at Rdio for my trip back east two weeks ago. Coincidentally I came home to find the external hard drive that holds my iTunes Library wasn’t mounting. At least I could use Rdio to rock out to some tunes while troubleshooting it.¹

Anyway, all of this is to say that Rdio can very nearly be an iTunes replacement. If that’s the route you’re headed, definitely check out Jacob Budin’s Trnsmit. It’s a simple webapp that will move your iTunes playlists over to Rdio.

The process isn’t exactly automated. First you need to export each playlist as an XML file out of iTunes and then upload each one separately to Trnsmit. It’s a start though.

A few childhood friends are trying to save an Oakhurst, California moviehouse by selling monthly movie subscriptions. Diana Marcum reports for the LA Times:

They ran models of [James] Nelson’s subscription-based theater idea, showing that to break even they would need 3,000 people, or 15% of the mountain communities, to sign up. For $19.95 per month, a member would be able to see each movie one time and buy individual tickets for friends. Non-members could buy a $16 day pass.

Looks promising, but making theatrical subscriptions work is an uphill battle. Just look at MoviePass, a convoluted experiment that has found no support from theater-owners or studios. Consumers want this, Hollywood doesn’t. Keep an eye on the Met.

Anne Thompson on digital Oscar ballots:

Sure enough, whoever designed the electronic ballot did so not only with complex hacker-prevention passwords that have bedeviled some of the Academy’s 5700 members–the average age of the Academy voter is 58–it also doesn’t work with Mac browser Safari. Some Academy members who are not Luddites still had to call the 24-hour help hotline, and were told to download another browser.

Makes me wonder what technology their voting system relies on. Leave it to AMPAS to screw up a web form.

Marco Arment:

The Leica M9 is disappointing, especially for $6,500, and clearly not a good fit for our purposes.

Once upon a time I had access to some amazing camera gear including a Leica M8, the company’s first digital camera. I was so mystified by its abilities I plunked down money for my very own Leica CL, a camera I sold with all of my other film gear a few years back.

I hope Marco gives the rangefinder system another try sometime. It’s a bitch to get the hang of and absolutely terrible for capturing fleeting moments, especially of a child. However, once you get the hang of it, you start seeing photos without holding the camera up to your eye. The whole world becomes a set of images waiting to be captured.

With an SLR I always feel like I’m exiting the moment to hide behind my camera; with my Leica I could see the framelines in the world around me, and in turn find the right moments to capture as they unfolded. This, I imagine, is why rangefinders are a staple of street and war photography.

But they’re tough as hell for capturing fast-moving kids.

The night of Christmas Day I went to the movies with the girlfriend and her family. Naturally I insisted that, if we were to see Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, we had to see it at 48 frames-per-second. My reasoning was simple: none of us could ever reproduce the experience at home, so why not try it out? No one cared, so they humored me.

I’ve heard all the complaints and defenses of high frame rate (HFR) projection. It looks like a soap opera! It’s the future! There has been so much cheering and hand-wringing and confusion surrounding the format, I simply had to try it out for myself.

Make no mistake: the shift to 48 fps is a jarring one, especially considering that Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth is already a familiar place. Gone is the gauzy, smeary look of cinematic motion. In its place is a look that I can only describe as hyper-real, so real that the world of the film barely feels like a film at all anymore. Rather it feels like live action unfurling before the viewer’s eyes; it feels like the characters are in the room with you, bludgeoning orcs and outwitting trolls. It feels, in a word, spectacular.

Now there are a few reasons why the 48 fps picture crackles with what I perceive as “live action.” It looks very similar to live broadcast television. A good, recent, analogue would be to compare the look of an episode 30 Rock, normally shot on lush 35mm film, to one of the live broadcasts the series did in its fifth and sixth seasons.¹ In part I’m conditioned to equate that “video” look with “live action.” It means I’m watching football or the Oscars or the news.

The harshest critics of the high frame format hang onto the “TV look” of The Hobbit as though it’s inherently a step backwards. I can see that. I’m not yet ready to say that the digital formats that have revolutionized visual storytelling are equal to the look of film; they’re simply not. However, I can try to accept them for what they are: new and exciting leaps forward.

So going into the HFR screening, I tried my damndest to let my love of that ineffable film look fall to the wayside. Jackson isn’t trying to ape film, he’s trying something new.

HFR isn’t perfect, and it’s far from appropriate for many sorts of stories. The Hobbit, in fact, feels an odd fit for the format. The harsh edges and sharp movement seem out of place in what was once an ephemeral landscape. The scale seems off too, reducing what I presume are actual sweeping New Zealand vistas to a miniature countryside, something akin to a model train set. Optically I haven’t a clue why this would happen, but it feels similar to the effect a tilt-shift lens has on a large-scale environment.

Peter Jackson’s roving camera is sometimes a nuisance, pushing my own eyes to their optical limits. At 48fps the picture remains almost too crisp for handheld motion; my eye simply couldn’t take in all of the visual information as the camera would bob and weave, even through simpler, less kinetic scenes.

All of that said, the format is still an absolute wonder. The digital characters blended seamlessly with their human counterparts in ways I never imagined possible. The old Gollum was good, this one is better. Thousands of goblins and orcs felt more weighty than in films past. A pack of forest trolls look stunning. They feel like something cooked up in a Jim Henson studio, and feel as weighty and physically present as those puppets to boot.

I am on the 48fps train. For all of Jackson’s indulgences and stubbornness, this is clearly a format that opens up a whole new set of tools to storytellers. It’s so easy to discount the look of the format, but don’t be fooled, this is as much of a visual revolution as the advent of digital characters. I can’t wait to see where things are headed next.

My thanks again to The New York Film Academy for sponsoring the candler blog this past week.

Formerly confined to a few art house theaters and public television, documentary films have emerged as commercially successful ventures for a handful of filmmakers (including Michael Moore with Fahrenheit 9/11, Marilyn Agrelo with Mad Hot Ballroom and Morgan Spurlock with Super Size Me). Cable television channels are also providing a venue for distribution that brings additional capital to the industry.

The popularity of these films is attracting more producers and distributors—as well as enthusiastic students who want to make documentary filmmaking their life’s work.

The Documentary School at the New York Film Academy is well positioned for training future documentarists. Offering a range from 6-week workshops to one-year and two-year Masters of Fine Arts degree programs at the school’s New York and Los Angeles campuses, students learn from award-winning masters of the genre. They include Maryann DeLeo (Chernobyl Heart), Vanessa Roth (Freeheld) and Geof Bartz, supervising editor of documentary programming at HBO.

Peter Kafka reporting for All Things D on a bill that would allow Netflix users’ to automatically post their viewing habits to social media:

The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that would give the video service the go-ahead to facilitate “frictionless sharing” of users’ viewing history with Facebook or other online services.

Music services like Rdio and Spotify currently offer sharing like this, but Netflix can’t make the leap in the U.S. because of the Video Privacy Protection Act from 1988.

The only reason that bill ever made it into law was because Congress was scared shitless after a reporter at a D.C. alt-weekly got ahold of the rental history of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, who passed away earlier this week.

Kevin Systrom of Instagram infamy, again (emphasis his, actually):

Because of the feedback we have heard from you, we are reverting this advertising section to the original version that has been in effect since we launched the service in October 2010.

Yayhooray! No ads! Unless…

Going forward, rather than obtain permission from you to introduce possible advertising products we have not yet developed, we are going to take the time to complete our plans, and then come back to our users and explain how we would like for our advertising business to work.

Whoa whoa whoa. I had to read that sentencegraph a few times over because at first blush it’s too grammatically hilarious to tell whether or not it’s patronizing. Turns out it is.

Let’s start with Systrom’s fantasy that Instagram tried to “obtain permission” from us to introduce “possible advertising products.” In my mind, asking permission usually constitutes asking someone for permission to do something, not slipping out a legal document one afternoon that millions would passively agree to if no one had, you know, read it. And that possible advertising product sounded pretty damn actual on paper.

So then: rather than doing something Instagram didn’t actually do, what does Systrom propose? Why, they’re going to take time to work on their “plans” and then explain it to the users when they’re ready. Here’s the thing, Kevin, you already did that and everyone hated it.

My Instagram account is still up but I’ll be deleting it once I know all my pictures and metadata are in order after the holidays.

I just renewed my Flickr Pro account and I have to say there isn’t much I miss about Instagram, not even the people as it seems my small photographic network has made the jump as well. And, you know, I pay them so they don’t clutter up my feed with ads. Win-win, it seems.

Systrom and Instagram (and social overlord Facebook) are on damage control this week, but make no mistake about this latest blog post: there is nothing that will stop Instagram from becoming the cluttered ad network users roared over this week. They’ve got investors’ mouths to feed, after all. I say get out now, while you still can.

By the way: here I am being a pro back in 2007. I honestly didn’t think I’d be back on Flickr in 2012, but here we are.

Speaking of ads on Facebook and its subsidiaries, looks like big FB is prepping video ads for your news feed. There’s more:

In what’s sure to be a controversial move, the visual component of the Facebook video ads will start playing automatically – a dynamic known as “autoplay” – according to two of the executives. Facebook is still debating whether to have the audio component of the ads activated automatically as well, one of these people said.

Thus dashing my dream that autoplay would join <blink> in the trash heap of markup history.

Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s co-founder,¹ doing a little damage control on the company blog:

To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos.

That is clear.

To provide context, we envision a future where both users and brands alike may promote their photos & accounts to increase engagement and to build a more meaningful following.

That’s not. See ya.