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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, why is the submission to a lower-quality, sped-up Twitter gif?

As _Microft says, the gif is making rounds on the Internet (I've seen it last night on Mastodon).

And to be honest, I'm not surprised that it beats the video - it communicates the exact same information, and the same sense of awe as the original video, but in a much more time-efficient manner. Watching the original now, I can't shake the feeling of how boringly slow it is.

I've noticed that the latest trend on social networks is to have ultra-sped up mini-videos, I think because it's popular on Instagram or TikTok (or both?). It's as if our entire civilization had suddenly caught ADHD.

Frankly maybe I'm old school but I found the Youtube version a lot more palatable, I could understand what was going on much butter, take a few seconds to understand the how the contraptions worked. When I watch one of these shortened ultra-edited versions I feel like I'm holding by breath.

The case study of the ADHD trend in general population is Mission Impossible IV. It is filmed by shoulder cameras and the mounter is just playing piano on the console: there isn’t a shot longer than 4s in the entire movie, and the average of changing camera angle is 0,7s. All you can get is an impression of the main character on any given image, but you can’t rest and you can’t contemplate. This is especially comical in romantic scenes because it makes you wonder how they came up with this idea of fast-paced romantic dialogues. Compare that to pre-2000 movies, even The Gremlins is ultra-slow and makes you wonder whether we were actually slow-minded pre-2000.

> The case study of the ADHD trend in general population is Mission Impossible IV. It is filmed by shoulder cameras and the mounter is just playing piano on the console: there isn’t a shot longer than 4s in the entire movie, and the average of changing camera angle is 0,7s.

Seems like hyperbole. I just looked at Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol (aka Mission Impossible IV).

In the first two minutes there were multiple shots of over 10 seconds.

And at the 0:14:44 mark there is a 24 second shot.

Alfred Hitchcock films would be agony to that crowd. The opening shot for his film "Rope" clocks in at about 9 and a half minutes. All in a single shot!

It was shot in segments but edited to look like one shot.

Back then, there were no such studio cameras to continuously record to film reels over a certain length.

The film camera magazine had a capacity of up to 10 minutes, so Hitchcock could film the scene all in one shot.

Opening shot? That movie only had one shot ;)

Several shots, planned out carefully so it could be edited to look like one shot.

Russian Ark (2002) (Russian: Русский ковчег) is a single 96-minute steadicam shot, and it has over 2,000 actors and three orchestras in it. It was recorded directly to a hard drive carried behind the camera operator, which could hold 100 minutes.

thus the winking emoji. thank you for reminding me that I need to watch Russian Ark again though!

And then watch the 'making of'. Also fascinating.

I honestly don't think it makes a good case study to be honest. Assuming what you say is true, I would still chalk up the shots/cuts to the artistic direction of the director/crew over anything to do with ADHD.

I think this falls apart even more when you compare Ghost Protocol to the most recent MI film, Fallout, which is the highest rated and grossing MI movie in the series. Just from an artistic perspective, it's shot very differently than Ghost Protocol.

I think this is an exaggeration. Short/Long takes are an artistic decision. We have recent movies that are a few long takes (sometime pretending to be a single take) 1917, Birdman, Russian Ark (true single take) all shot in recent years. Same with TV: True Detective has a famous long take scene, Mr. Robot, BCS.

A little cheer for Russian Ark. I liked it. Done as said, in one take.

Spot the bit well into the film where the guy nearly drops the book, you can feel the oncoming-but-narrowly-averted pain.

> there isn’t a shot longer than 4s in the entire movie

is this hyperbole? Genuinely asking.

Seems like hyperbole. I just looked at Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol (aka Mission Impossible IV).

In the first two minutes there were multiple shots of over 10 seconds.

And at the 0:14:44 mark there is a 24 second shot.

- The pictures they make these days are all MTV. Cut, cut, cut, cut. The opening shot of Welles's Touch of Evil was six and a half minutes long.
- Six and a half minutes?

- Three or four, anyway

Parent here. I admit this wasn’t from a scientific method, it is just that when I saw it in the theater, I suddenly understood why it was annoying, and started counting from there. Maybe there were longer shots earlier in the movie (although I’ve tried watching it recently and the first scenes were cut this way), maybe the average isn’t 0.7 which was a ballpark figure based on my counting.

Sorry for being probably wrong on the exactness of the figures, I thought the background idea was important, that pre-2000 movies were slower, and there has been an acceleration to the point of ridicule, and it is probable that directors dialled down from the extremely-fast-paced style because it didn’t find its audience. Yes, more recent movies didn’t go faster than that one, it was really a style that had its apogee in that movie.

Yeah, I cannot stand the trend of sped-up videos. Especially those "life hack" ones where people fold their laundry super fast or that kind of thing. I want to take the time to ingest what I'm seeing. If it's only enjoyable/watchable at 4x speed, maybe it's not worth paying attention to to begin with?

Of course time-lapses and stuff like that are intentionally sped up, but for something like an instructional video, it's going to be challenging to take real meaning from it.

In general it seems that people want to see some "neat" thing, click Like, and move onto the next interesting thing. For me, I don't relate. I like to dive into my interests and invest some real time into them. Otherwise my perception of the world and the things around me is super shallow. In fact, when I want information, I usually want text and images, not video/audio.

Further, I don't find it very rewarding to watch those sort of "clickbait" clips. I understand it can be satisfying in the short term, but I find almost zero need for this type of entertainment. I sense the primal nature of it and find it unappealing. I also feel that those primal "entertainment" desires are being exploited for clicks/likes/advertising, and I prefer to be compensated by greater value than relatively-shallow time-wasting if I am being exploited :)

Watched both, and it was clearer to me to go through the sped up version three times than watching the whole 3 min on youtube.

Most of us are used to faster paced information delivery, and we still go back to what we missed or want to check more in detail.

That’s what we deal with day in day out, and I don’t think we end up with an understanding that is shallower than when stopping at each frame for 5 seconds.

I find it sad it becomes some “kids these days” rant material when it’s just a matter of preferred watching pace.

If you think the 3-minute video was slow, the actual original took 45 years.

I imagine even just driving those (wooden?) pylons at the beginning to create the drainage areas took years. Even modern powered devices take a good day or so to pound in a single pylon around here.

I know some of the bureaucracy and economics that go into infrastructure today, but I feel like the decision to commit to a 45 year bridge must've been a whole different consideration for them back then. But then again, they spent much labor and resources creating tombs like the Pyramids.

How about the cathedrals that are scattered across Europe? Some took centuries. People worked on them their whole lives knowing they’d never see the end result. Compared to that, a 45-year bridge seems quick and practical.

There was an article about that recently, focusing on St John the Divine in NYC (which has also been under construction for more than 100 years)[0]. The argument is basically that since, by their nature, cathedrals can be functional before their construction is complete, having a long-running construction process allows the design to be more responsive to the populace's changing needs.

Also, in a world where leaders lived and died based on the approval of a centralized papal authority, it's just good politics to be known as "that city that's constantly been building that huge cathedral".

[0] https://theprepared.org/features/2019/4/28/building-a-cathed...

That's a super interesting point -- today we live in structures that are built in ~weeks and designed in probably similar timeframe. Then you live with it for decades, flaws and all. The idea of decades+ of design input sounds really interesting. I wonder how much those cathedrals would have their design change as construction progressed. Very cool.

Sagrada Família, begun in 1882, is not planned to be complete until 2032.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Família

Washington National Cathedral was completed over 83 years, 1907--1990.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_National_Cathedral

Maybe projects like that are way easier to stomach when people stick around? The lord who ordered its construction or his son will preside the entire time, and I would imagine the builders would be building it until they retire or finish it. Any modern 45 year old project would probably have every job position involved in it (including, I would imagine, whoever was financing it) change people multiple times

Can you imagine it in an agile world? The value was being delivered by the ferries the whole time.

An 8,000,000:1 ratio,† for what it's worth.

________________________________

Notes:

† Roughly. Using GNU units: 45 years / 3 minutes = 7889231.5

Yeah, but I would not be sitting there watching it 45 years either.

For me its the opposite, I prefer the youtube version. The gif was way too fast and had to pause it several times because I was like "Hang on! what happened at this step?"

Yes, the gif is more time-efficient. But I watched the slower video first, and I'm glad I did. While I received the same amount of information, I spent more time thinking about that information.

This GIF has been making rounds on Twitter for a few days already. I think if I had not searched Youtube for the video, I would not have seen any other version either.

Among others, I'm quite certain that it was also shared by former NASA astronaut Mike Massimo [0] who has quite a few followers on Twitter [1]. (More people might know him from a (few?) cameo appearances in Big Bang theory though.)

It is easy to have seen this on Twitter by now.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Massimino

[1] https://twitter.com/Astro_Mike

Possibly because the original was hard to identify, even for a sufficiently motivated submitter.

Like others, I saw the shorter animation, via Mastodon.

I assumed there was a source video but couldn't find one after an hour or so searching "medieval bridge building", "medieval bridge construction", etc., particularly as the keywords are dominated by gameplay animations.

There are several somewhat related videos on castle construction, employing some of the methods employed on Karlův most, e.g.:

How were castles built / constructed in the medieval period? https://youtube.com/watch?v=pu3O70GeQFY (~15 min)

Building A Medieval Castle Using Authentic Tools | Secrets Of The Castle | Timeline https://youtube.com/watch?v=ydoRAbpWfCU (~1h)

The first relies heavily on contemporary experience from Guédelon Castle, "an experimental archaeology project aimed at recreating a 13th-century castle and its environment using period technique, dress, and material."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guédelon_Castle

There are numerous videos of contemporary methods, e.g., Grady Engineering's dewatering explainer, showing the modern adaptaions of coffer dam / cassion construction illustrated in the submitted piece (https://youtube.com/watch?v=URC125wpMS4), various pre-cast span methods (https://youtube.com/watch?v=QDotEB6Uh9s https://youtube.com/watch?v=S3Kf9e6JgF4). China especially has developed rapid (https://youtube.com/watch?v=zvuufBqp0_4) and extreme (https://youtube.com/watch?v=2jj7gH3569M) span construction to an art form.

But rigorous videos detailing ancient construction, not so much.

Emailing mods can result in source links being substituted.

It's changed now. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24798624.

I liked the lower-quality, sped-up Twitter gif. It was few seconds that made me interested. I would not watch two minutes long original one. I did skipped through original one after seeing short one.

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