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Comment by fermienrico | Hacker News Reader

Old instructional videos so much more informative than today’s. They’re so simple. Clear narration, simple animations, music is appropriate and minimal. They don’t overload our senses in the way modern videography does. It seems to me that everything today is optimized for the highest cognitive load - sort of similar to the “loudness war” in music, but for videos. Popular videos on YT are optimized for clicks and likes and subscribes.

For example, compare Mythbusters first season vs the last. Another example is “The secret life of Machines”; amazing BBC series on how things work.

I love old videography so much. I could watch highly technical instructional videos like this all day without fatigue. Such a great pleasure. Thank for sharing this!

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Old technical writing is the same. Check out this camera repair manual from the 80s: https://www.dropbox.com/s/36tlkpnrsbmszar/nikon_fe-fe2.pdf?d...

Clear, easy to understand. A patient person without any prior knowledge of cameras or tools could follow the instructions in here and completely disassemble and reassemble the camera as well as troubleshooting any problems with it.

I think the reason is A) there was no internet! These books and TV shows were as good as it got. No googling if you have any questions.

B) They had to appeal to a lot of people. Now the audience is bigger and everything is more niche. General TV has deteriorated to news entertainment, sports, and reality shows, because that is all anyone who watches TV now is interested in.

I was shocked at how good this segment from the "glory days" of TV was: https://youtu.be/eDw5Y8qSmBk

It's interesting and well researched. They spent plenty of money doing locations etc. Network TV just isn't this good anymore.

> the "glory days" of TV

Thanks for that, I really enjoyed it!

To be fair this clip is produced by the Disney studios, master storytellers at the height of their craft. The Mickey Mouse animation seems to have been produced specifically for this clip, and hand-drawn cell animation is very labor intensive, even if it seems simple. Just realize that every frame has been drawn on paper, inked on celluloid and painted by hand. In short, this clip has been very expensive to produce.

(Not that I necessarily disagree with you, just to point out this is a state of the art instruction clip with extremely high production value, not just some random youtube video.)

Although the voice acting is terrible - the engineers speaking about what they are doing are incredibly stilted and unnatural: "Yes Bob. I was moving it the. Wrong way. I am moving it. In the correct direction. Now. Bob. Thank you."

Probably because they're engineers and not actors. It's actually very difficult to read scripted lines in a natural sounding way, especially if it's phrased in a way you wouldn't normally speak.

If you like old instructional videos and documentaries, the Internet Archive has a bunch of them, particularly in the Prelinger Archives.

Here are a few favorites...

Private Life of a Cat (silent): https://archive.org/details/PrivateL1947

Back of the Mike: https://archive.org/details/Backofth1938

How a Watch Works: https://archive.org/details/HowaWatc1949

Using the Bank: https://archive.org/details/Usingthe1947

One of my favourites is this 1953 explanation of the workings of mechanical analog computers used by the US Navy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4

I was going to link this. I think we should seriously consider how the skill to produce such clear and didactic explanations to complex concepts has seemingly degraded nowadays.

Specifically I wonder: who was making these videos? how where they trained? where they attached to the different unit or was it a dedicated group that was commissioned by the different units?

Wow these are really great thanks for sharing. Heres a couple of others that I like.

Differential Steering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI

Turbo Encabulator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLDgQg6bq7o

One of my favourite old education films, on the Stirling engine:

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqIapDKtvzc

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFfMruoRMGo

Watching such videos makes me wish for a modern explanatory videos done in the same old style, content-rich and distraction-minimizing. Sounds like a niche nobody is willing to cover for some reason.

Related, I have similar feelings for textbooks. When I was still in school, my grandfather used to give me books for learning English and German that were from somewhere around 60s - 80s. I vastly preferred them to modern books we used in school. The old books were content-rich and created to support learning, including self-learning. The modern ones waste space with pictures, and seem purposefully designed to not allow for self-learning, and instead requiring a teacher (with a companion book).

Both old instructional videos and language textbooks are my go-to example of how market pressures can lead to destruction of actual value in the process of maximizing sales.

Try "Essence of Linear Algebra" by Grant Sanderson (3 Blue 1 Brown). He has more topics in the same "contemporary vintage" style.

I agree with your observations. Even though we also have to consider that this video and the text for it was probably written or edited or at least administered by Walt Disney himself. You can see that Mickey is kind of communicating with Walt Disney on the video. That means the cartoon on the video was made just to show this piece of technology. I think we can say that this video is a way to show the technology of Disney at that time. It's kind of an advertisement for a big coporation.

On the other hand Youtube videos are made by people trying to make a living through those videos. None of these Youtubers can have the resources and motivation compared to Walt Disney himself to shoot a scene which can be watched and enjoyed even after 71 years later because your videos has to be produced quickly.

Another obvious tell is that the two technicians operating the multiplane camera have absolutely zero stage presence when they are demonstrating the actual operation. It is plain as day that they have practiced their lines, and not for very long.

But thats ironically how I knew they were the actual technicians, and not paid actors who have no clue how cameras or human vision, or any of these subjects actually work.

The Secret Life of Machines is available here: http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/SLOM/index.html

If you're ever in Southwold, on the Suffolk coast, Tim Hunkin (the presenter) has his "Under the Pier Show" on the pier. Well worth a look. http://underthepier.com/

I wonder how much of this is due to a significant understanding of the underlying principles, that simply weren't present at the time? Today, especially in this community, we have an almost intuitive understanding of layers and parallax etc. My first thought on seeing the title was "uhh, mechanical parallax, neat!" and I was actually a bit disappointed that the machine could be "programmed" to move the planes automatically. This device can not have felt obvious to many people, at all, in 1957.

This video kinda reminds me of the Apple WWDC video I'm watching atm - no distractions, trained / practiced speaker, very well prepared with autocompleting code snippets, minimal code, simple / to the point presentation, etc.

Those people got paid to inform. Youtubers get paid to be seen.

Back then they still held to the belief that humans could make rational decisions given proper factual information.

Then can all of psychology barreling in, and marketing lapped it up like like rats do sugar-water. End result was that the mentality changed to the masses being dangerously unstable beasts, with only marketing knowing whats best for everyone.

A simple matter of hand painting hundreds of frames of Mickey Mouse for a throw away illustration

Possibly thousands. With 25 fps, a thousand frames is just 40 seconds worth of film, and the Mickey sequence was longer than that.

Less than you think.

Film is 24fps, not 25. You generally shoot everything “on twos”, which is to say that you expose a single drawing twice, for an effective frame rate of 12fps.

There are places you go on ones. Fast motions, motions that need to be ultra-smooth. Ideally you also shoot pans on ones, and the walk cycles you use on top of pans are drawn to match. But you can get away with doing them on twos.

If you watch the sequence you can also see several places where Mickey is performing the same action over and over. When he’s walking to the side it’s the same eight or sixteen drawings shot in a loop. When he’s standing there’s twirling his tail, that’s its own set of repeated drawings. The part where Mickey turns and walks off into the distance might be another couple of 8-drawing cycles that were photomechanically scaled up and down, then manually inked and painted.

It is also quite possible that only part of this sequence was done to match up with Walt’s narration; easy enough to start with parts made for a short. Even without that there’s realistically only about 10s of unique drawings here, if you shot them one after another on twos.

You can get by with less drawings, too. My experience is that 10fps is as low as you can go and still have the capability of smoothish motion. You can go lower; Asian animation typically uses a LOT fewer drawings for most of a show than the high-frame-rate work of a 50s Disney piece. And then you get one sequence where they blow the budget, with complex characters (who require like 4x the work to draw a single frame compared to Mickey) moving around.

(I used to work in animation.)

> Film is 24fps, not 25.

25 fps in European TV, though. Ask Wikipedia for "PAL Speedup" for a fun consequence of this.

For the example of Mickey walking, they can paint 16-20 frames and loop it over and over. The moving background hides the fact that the animation is being reused.

As a second order to this effect, I've noticed a general "clumping", so to speak, of timeless machines and designs in general, that seem to originate in the late 1940s, and the 1950s, likely due to the unprecedented rise in the United States overall fortunes, after WWII. It's almost like John Kennedy "tricked" us to thinking that he initiated the US involvement in the space race, instead of the natural IP transfer that occurred from Germany to both the US and Soviet Union as the spoils of victory.

Mid Century Design is even an acknowledgement of this concept, in my opinion.

Transistor - 1947 (William Shockley)

Helical structure of DNA - 1953

Maser, precursor to the Laser - 1953

Polio Vaccine - 1955

Fairchild (William Shockley) loses control of the Fairchildren, and many of the definitive titans of the tech industry pull off the first silicon valley disruption - 1957

The wealth, and easing of human suffering that were precipitated by these 5 events, over 10 years are seemingly peerless in human history.

A formidable contender would be Special relativity, airplanes, radio, and Ford's assembly line all came out of the first decade of the 20th century.

Aside from space programme which descended from V-2 on both sides, can't think where the U.S. advancements were based on German ones. The effects of Operation Paperclip were limited and didn't leave a lasting impact otherwise. In fact the victory achieved over Third Reich was based in massive industrial superiority.

Start with the Manhattan project, and work backwards from there. Operation Paperclip may have been a failure, but that was after the war. Any modern electrical engineer's professional lexicon is dripping with the names of the titans of our field. I assume the same is true for physicists, because we electrical engineers stand on the shoulders of physicists every day.

But don't take my word for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_...

This article describes the letter that Leo Szilard wrote to Albert Einstein, in 1937, which Einstein essentially put his existing scientific prowess behind as an appeal to expertise, and forwarded it on to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In it, he enumerates some of the latest discoveries Enrico Fermi has been finding in Uranium. The letter simply supposes that if these scientists in the US are discovering the possibility to induce a chain reaction in Uranium, it is a safe bet to assume that the Germans were "peer reviewing", if you will. Another factor Einstein lays out is all of the known key Uranium deposits around the world: Czechoslovakia and The Congo, among others.

Einstein/Szilard have the foresight to deduce that the Germans stopping all public sales of Uranium in Czechoslovakia, along with the very short human network from those Czechoslovakian Uranium mines to the German leadership, is extremely compelling circumstantial evidence that Germany has already started their Manhattan Project, and have all the benefits of incumbency behind them.

How did the US close the loop faster than the Germans? We hired Hungarian refugees fleeing Europe, who ran absolute circles around the rest of the known universe in Mathematics. Any modern student of mathematics can easily recite their names:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-conside...

And then in its usual cosmic sense of humor, the universe brought Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem back around the eternal golden braid, and brought us the Cold War.

PBS has a great documentary on the Fairchildren called "silicon valley"

I believe thats on HBO ;)

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