OT what happened to the "download video" function on all Youtube videos?

A couple of weeks ago all the "download video" messages on the upper right hand of the video clips on Youtube and most of the Internet suddenly disappeared. Maybe it had to do with the new Firefox browser that I downloaded.

I used to be able to upload a heavy video to Youtube and then download an .flv version of it for my desktop and for sending to people to look at. Why suddenly I can't do that?

What do I have to do to be able to download the videos that I like from the Internet? I'm not trying to bootleg anything; this is just a technical question

i don't know what you had going on there ins Firefox,
and i really don't know much about downloading youtube & similar stuff.

i used Cosmopod for that for a while with some success.
also,
i recently downloaded Real Player,
and now every time i go to a page with some flash video,
the "Real Player Downloader" pops up and has the file ready for downloading.

seems pretty good, if thats what you want.


nick

Oh, that's what it was! Real Player! I'd forgotten.

Ever since I updated Firefox, I lost Real Player. So I have to find Real Player and reactivate it ... or whatever.

Thanks, Nick, for helping me out. Let me know if you ever need 35mm short ends; I've found a super Australian freight service. There is a lot of 35mm film production in Australia. Email me: vic@releasing.net

i made a whole film on short ends, once...
well, it was one short end, and the film was 30 seconds long..
but 15yrs later it's still showing on cable over here!
thanks for the offer,

all the best,
nick

Was it a commercial?

I used to make commercials in the 70s -- 30 second spots.

45 ft of film. You can shoot 5:1 ratio with a 225 ft short end

@ ten cents per foot, that would be $22.50 and developing would be another $22.50

$45 and then you'd have to pay telecine, say, another $45. You're still under $100.

Do they sell digital cameras for $100? I'm sure they will soon now that 35mm still cameras are digital.

Come to think of it there is a Vivitar 12.1 Mega Pixel stills camera at fries that's selling for $97. It shoots movies too.

You know, seriously, Nick, I'm going to start shooting digital the same way I shoot 35mm. If a movie is tightly scripted, why waste the time and just keep the camera running or do unnecessary long takes. I think the discipline of planning the shot in one's head will yield better results than the fire hose style of shooting video.

I'm sure your 30 second movie worked well for it to be screened for years. What was it anyways? An experimental movie or a commercial?

> If a movie is tightly scripted, why waste the time and just keep the camera running or do
> unnecessary long takes.

If you don't care about the actor's performance, sure.


www.derekmok.com

There are many exceptions, Derek; but I'm talking about the majority of cases. Doing coverage should be the same whether one is using film or digital.

An actor fluffs his line and the tendency with digital filmmakers is to just keep going, because they figure in their heads, "oh, well, maybe he's going to do something better, which I don't want to lose." This I don't agree with according to this point I'm making.

I say cut. "Cut! That was very nice," or "it's ok, let's do it over." When an actor blows his line, he's not likely to recover and come back and give you a decent performance. But most importantly, the "tightly" scripted screenplay demands that the whole scene be shot clean -- one take. The writer and or producer doesn't want patched up performances.

Most of the time by just rolling camera hoping that the actor will recover is a mistake, a mistake in terms of time lost on the set.

But of course this is not the only reason you raise the objection of keep the camera rolling. You're hoping that an actor is on a roll and he is going to get upset if the director says, "Cut!" for whatever reason.

Well, this is an example when classical film directors would never tolerate an actor taking over the set and directing his own lines. And we know there are many actors that do that nowadays and how that got to be that way was people treating the actor as the main creative force on a set -- which he is not; it's the director. ... Still

Alfred Hitchock was asked by an interviewer, "What if an actor of the caliber of Cary Grant would ask you, 'let me do that take again; I want to try something.'"

And Hitchcock replied, "I'd say go ahead; there's always the cutting room floor."

But John Ford said it best, when an actor said at the end of a take, "That was great; I loved that take!"

John Ford walked up to the camera and said, "Oh, you liked that, huh?" He opened up the camera magazine and removed the film and handed it to the actor and said, "Here, take it home with you."

I say all this because I'm trying to guard against shooting too much myself, what with digital being so "cheap" to shoot. Well, my point is that it's still time, and I'd like to be able to be more disciplined when directing.

I think there are some exceptions to the rules that I'm speaking about. I've been working along the lines of these exceptions myself. My movie THE CHASE is practically all improvised by actors. I gave them a few lines and the situation and let them go. It turned out very strong and really good. I'm very happy with the movie. You can see a trailer of it under "Show & Tell." I'm actually thinking of posting the whole movie as a 320x180 file so everybody can see it and give me feedback.

Spoken like somebody who's never worked with kids. Or animals. Or ? y'know. Actors.

I'm not a director. This is not my field, and it's none of my business.

But in my opinion, that's a steaming crock.

If the movie doesn't have a means for downloading, go to the Safari menu & select Window/Activity. In the Activity window double click on the largest file (it's usually MB's) The
movie will download either as an mp4 or an flv file. You can then double click on the flv file & MpegStreamclip will open up & you can convert it to a H264 file or whatever else you like.

All the best.

Dave

Quote

My movie THE CHASE is practically all improvised by actors. I gave them a few lines and the situation and let them go. It turned out very strong and really good.

Since you brought it up again and posted your trailer for "Show & Tell", you opened it up for critique and so I took a peek.

My opinion: I don't know what trailer you are referring to as "very strong and really good", but I just watched this trailer:

[www.felliniesque.com]

...and I do not agree. The acting is beyond horrendous. You are right...it definitely looks like they had no direction at all and "winged it"...and with no improvisational training whatsoever. If you let your "actors" improvise, they have to be GOOD ACTORS that make good choices. The edit makes no sense - there's no story there. The beach scene has a yellow filter over it which coves the actors - poor CC choice.

That said, it looks & feels like you are winding up to explode into one of your old fashioned famous "felliniesque" film rants. Please don't. This is a troubleshooting forum and you originally posted a troubleshooting question. Please stick to your own topic.

BTW:

In Firefox, I use this:

[www.downloadhelper.net]

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

"What was it anyways? An experimental movie or a commercial?"
i'll reply off-list.

i've worked on tight TV drama where the ratio was 8-1,
and crazily monied-up films where the ratio was 80-1.
great performances in both, achieved via different methods.

there's no problem getting good performances on a low ratio.
it's called rehearsal.
as Ted V Mikels said "don't shoot rehearsals"

to bring this back (vaguely) to editing,
the economy of a high ration doesn't end on set.
it can be hell in the cutting rooms

a local low budget feature shooting in a an exotic location went crazy with their red cameras and almost never buttoned off.
hadn't planed for that,
and the edit dept totally bogged down.

on the other hand
i cut a show based on people home movies.
as in Super-8 and Standard-8.
and have sat thru many hours of video memories, too.
what do you know?
when people had less footage to roll off, they got better shots.
more considered, better framed.


nick

> when people had less footage to roll off, they got better shots.
> more considered, better framed.

We're veering off topic, and I'm partly to blame. So, just briefly:

Shooting lots of footage and giving the actor freedom is not a digital phenomenon. It is a technique used by directors who approach actors in a more theatre-related approach.

Hitchcock and John Ford could never have gotten the unpredictable "Are you talking to me?" speech from Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. They will get from their actors precisely what they had planned in their heads. Is it good? Could be. Is it better? Hardly. Martin Scorsese, Elia Kazan, John Cassavetes, Mike Leigh -- these are directors who shoot a lot, throw away a lot in editing, but find that bit of magic that was unplanned and purely from the actor.

My directing partner, in his breakthrough film, shot over 60:1 -- 24 one-hour DV tapes, 20-page script, 24-minute final cut, works out to about one hour of raw footage per minute of final cut. But editing didn't get bogged down at all. Because when he did do 14 takes of a shot, there are only three or four in contention. He also had the discipline to not try to use every single bit he liked in every take, so we didn't have to Frankenstein 60 little bits together in a mishmash. And he got phenomenal acting from his two leads, though it took time because he wanted so much nuance and depth in the acting.

Of course it's possible to shoot long takes in a low ratio and get good acting. Just ask M. Night Shayamalan when he was working on The Sixth Sense. But to act like the Hitchcock or John Ford stories above is just unacceptable. If an actor told you he liked the take and you immediately humiliated him by destroying that take, it's an overt, public slap in the face. Try that on Christian Bale or Mel Gibson. Great way to get fired and to have actors never want to work with you again. Look at the reputation David O. Russell got from I Heart Huckabees. Actors are professionals as well, and they deserve some modicum of professional respect.

Back to topic: I think YouTube jumped the gun with the download option. Some people have several hundred videos on there, and YouTube never asked them if they wanted to allow downloads. Yet when the new feature came out, the default position was to permit the download. It's a serious copyright problem, I'm afraid.


www.derekmok.com

First off, in line with the OT request for help:

thanks Nick, I didn't know about the downloadhelper. I'm going to try and download it to my Mac. I'm now on my PC (laptop); I only use the G5 for editing, but sometimes I go online to download such applications and for updates to my FCP Studio 5.04 software and the Operating System and any other apps that are relevant to my work.

And thank you Dave also. Someone had told me about the Safari video download capabilities a long time ago but I'd forgotten. This time I wrote the instructions down. There are many tidbits of video that can be used as reference in developing short movies for the Internet that many times I have wished to know how people do it. And the funny thing is that the more the downloaded footage is flawed due to copying or its old VHS source, the more realistic and effective it looks in compilations.... The copyright infringement is another problem of course. I don't know to what extent a compiler can incorporate web video from Youtube posters. I suppose one must take the trouble to request the use of the footage. I think there are public domain clearing websites also.

Oh, well, thanks for the info regarding the downloading feature that I started this thread for.

Regarding the other issues that have erupted due to my, let's say, enthusiasm for filmmaking I'm humbled by the attention my regards have elicited. Okay, Joey, you didn't like my trailer. I grant you the trailer isn't exceptional at all. It's rather simple. I needed something fast because there was a buyer that wanted my movie fast. I was actually referring to my movie coming out good and strong, or however it was that I described it. I wish I had the budget to hire someone like you who specializes in effects and graphically exciting PR stuff.

But I liked my actors and thought they did beautifully in improvising. I'm very pleased with my movie THE CHASE. It took me three days to shoot it alone -- it was just me and the three actors -- and it took me three days to edit it. I'd tell you more about the shoot but I have a feeling you've made up your mind based on our old interactions on this user group, which I wish to avoid; you're right, this is off topic.

Suffice it to say, I appreciate your critiquing the trailer; I have always benefited by your harsh critiques. We just don't see eye to eye. It's okay, it happens and is part of the business. And you gave me the link to the download helper. I really appreciate it, Joey. Maybe someday we'll meet and have a completely different take on how we see things.

Derek, I don't know what to say; you're such a stickler Of course you have valid points. But discipline in filmmaking works better than unbridled creativity. Okay, maybe I'm not putting it very diplomatically, but you know what I mean. I've learned more from you on how to do things in FCP than from anyone, so I don't want you to think that I don't appreciate your take on things.

Thanks again, Nick. And Jeff, I know you're still a bit riled up but you really helped me determine how to get the most out of my system and 8-bit uncompressed export out of FCP 5.04 for DVD SP purposes. Thanks again for that.

i think everything's been said here.
i'm closing this thread.