Slashdot Mirror
Is The Future Of Television Watching on Fast-Forward? (washingtonpost.com)
The average American watches three hours of TV each day, and researchers have found that most people already prefer listening to accelerated speech. "After watching accelerated video on my computer for a few months, live television began to seem excruciatingly slow..." writes the Washington Post's Jeff Guo. "Movie theaters feel suffocating. I need to be able to fast-forward and rewind and accelerate and slow down, to be able to parcel my attention where it's needed..." Slashdot reader HughPickens.com distills some interesting points from Guo's article:
You can play DVDs and iTunes purchases at whatever tempo you like, and a Google engineer has written a popular Chrome extension that accelerates most other Web videos, including on Netflix, Vimeo and Amazon Prime. Over 100,000 people have downloaded that plug-in, and the reviews are ecstatic. "Oh my God! I regret all the wasted time I've lived before finding this gem!!" one user wrote.
According to Guo speeding up video is more than an efficiency hack. "I quickly discovered that acceleration makes viewing more pleasurable. "Modern Family" played at twice the speed is far funnier -- the jokes come faster and they seem to hit harder. I get less frustrated at shows that want to waste my time with filler plots or gratuitous violence. The faster pace makes it easier to appreciate the flow of the plot and the structure of the scenes."
Guo writes that "I've come to believe this is the future of how we will appreciate television and movies. We will interrogate videos in new ways using our powers of time manipulation... we will all be watching on our own terms." Will this eventually become much more common? How many Slashdot readers are already watching speeded-up videos?
According to Guo speeding up video is more than an efficiency hack. "I quickly discovered that acceleration makes viewing more pleasurable. "Modern Family" played at twice the speed is far funnier -- the jokes come faster and they seem to hit harder. I get less frustrated at shows that want to waste my time with filler plots or gratuitous violence. The faster pace makes it easier to appreciate the flow of the plot and the structure of the scenes."
Guo writes that "I've come to believe this is the future of how we will appreciate television and movies. We will interrogate videos in new ways using our powers of time manipulation... we will all be watching on our own terms." Will this eventually become much more common? How many Slashdot readers are already watching speeded-up videos?
I believe that "His Girl Friday" still holds the record for the most amount of words per minute, than any other movie. I don't believe that movie would possibly be more enjoyable at a faster speed.
What researcher said this? Who did they interview? I don't want my entertainment to sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
"I quickly discovered that acceleration makes viewing more pleasurable. "Modern Family" played at twice the speed is far funnier -- the jokes come faster and they seem to hit harder.
Well maybe, but you didn't exactly pick a show worth watching in the first place...
Okay so let's say that overall this concept makes sense. What are you to do if you have several people, who just happen to have different brains, all needing to process different parts at different speeds? You could argue that it's all good if your watching alone, but that could then become maddening when watching TV with other people, who may only be able to watch at normal speed anyway.
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Pitch correctors mostly remove the chipmunk effect.
Personally, I don't need to consume entertainment at high speed, the point of entertainment for me is to enjoy a stretch of time, not to consume a quantity of media. If I consume less media, I don't feel less entertained.
Umm, no. Just no to this.
One-thousand times no.
Truth to be told I *hate* movies longer than 90 mins. You hear me Hollywood. ..?????
I'll assume these are the types who also think sex is better in ff mode
TiVo has something called QuickMode. 30% faster. However, some stuff doesn't feel right on quickmode.
I imagine QuickMode is great when it comes to slow speakers... cough Obama cough.
Any tutorial or educational video that I watch, I watch at increased speed. If there's a part that I found hard to understand, I rewind and watch it again at a slower pace.
This is especially true for videos that use power-point-esque slides. They're already showing me the content, I can read it faster than they can read it to me... Just let me move on with my life, PLEASE.
As for entertainment, no I watch that at normal pace... But the truth is, I don't watch much TV.
I would prefer a plugin that removed bullshit to save time as opposed to just speeding up the bullshit.
Honestly, most TV and movies these days can be watched at 2x or greater speed.
I watched the whole Lord of the Rings series at 7x speed. I don't think I missed much, the dialog is meaningless drivel. I slow down for the action.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Just don't watch it at all.
and I know what happens next:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Next time you are watching TV, pay attention to the amount of time that passes between each footage edit, where the perspective of the viewer abruptly changes (either to a new scene entirely or to a different perspective within the same scene).
Usually it's just a couple of seconds. The result is that many television shows serve as a near constant stimulus, no matter how mundane the content. I've long speculated that this phenomenon has a negative effect one's ability to pay attention to things that are not quite as stimulating.
Watching TV on fast forward would make this worse!
Discuss.
"The average American watches three hours of TV each day". 180 minutes. 10,800 seconds. WASTED EACH DAY. Then there's this comment. "Oh my God! I regret all the wasted time I've lived before finding this gem!!" So they'll be able to waste time quicker? And fancy saying 'wasted' when watching TV is GENERALLY a waste of time. Personally, I stopped watching TV decades ago. Using the above average, then that gave me back 3 hours of time each day. What can you do with that? Study .. get better quals for better money. Hobbies .. voice control my house because I gained the knowledge to do because I had more time to do so. etc etc etc. The internet (has for so long now) allowed me to digest a brief summary of major news headlines while eating breakfast. Most of which has nothing to do with me. Even then it's written in a way to sway opinion. TV is for idiots who have suffered intellectual death long before physical death.
If it's not entertaining at normal speed, it's not entertaining at any speed.
It's entertainment. Efficiency is pointless.
I did a lot of studying via video. About 125% speed was pretty good for material I didn't already know, depending on the person presenting.
I switched to saving the audio to my phone and listening over my car speakers during my commute, at regular audio speed. I do turn it off when traffic requires my attention. In either a traffic jam or light traffic, I have the audio running. Between the commute and errands, that's almost an hour a day, so that's plenty of time to listen to a clip two or even three times.
I don't ever watch tv, but I do watch a lot of youtube. Anything that has a lot of action, like video game videos, or anything that involves normal human interaction, watch on normal speed. For sure.
I also, however, watch a lot of content that is really just a face talking to the camera. Someone conveying informatipn by talking. I watch a lot of these videos at 1.25x and 1.5x speed. Occasionally when there is a video that isn't super interesting and I'm more scanning it, 2x speed. I'd really like if youtube also had a 1.75x speed. Knowing that there are addons to do this is very attractive to me.
I listen to podcasts at double speed and have gotten so used to it that they sound weird and slow if I play it at normal. The only time I have a problem is with people that are heavily accented or speak quickly normally.
That said this idea sounds stupid I can't imagine watching something at double speed.
Don't they some times alter the speed of film by a minor amount like one extra frame a sec or something to adjust long films to play in a certain amount of time? In addition to cutting scenes.
Like Tic-Tac-Toe. "X", "O", oh fuck, you win. Go again?
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
Film or a TV Show has the potential to allow breathing space and pace for the watcher to absorb the information, use other dimensions of creative output and provide a space for the watcher to use their own imagination to unravel and impart their meaning on the story
The need to fast forward is stupid videos that could have been transcribed to text... either that or shit entertainment that isn't worth watching anyway.
30 comments and no one's brought up Blipverts yet? What is this world coming to... >.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Reading! You only enjoy fast-playing video because people ramble on and on in web videos containing about as much information as two Twitter messages. Go read some old-school web pages dense with information. When you get used to that, there will be no speed at which web video is bearable anymore.
Just No
I do this with audio books as standard practice. I'll typically increase the speed by 10-15%. That's fast enough to create a time savings, but not so fast as to make the book unpleasant. I can see the value in doing this with video, particularly since I'm usually binge-watching a show on Netflix when watching video.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
Yes, sadly enough, even sex won't get the attention it deserves from the Vine generation.
Savor the moment will soon be an extinct concept, unworthy of understanding it's true value, all because it requires an attention span longer than a YouTube commercial.
I wonder how actors will feel as they're turned into helium-charged muppets on speed. Soundtracks mutilated by the FF button. The entire point of suspense and drama in a musical score deflated.
And we thought Photoshop was a shitty representation of real life...
I can only do 1.77 on my VLC
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Pitch correctors mostly remove the chipmunk effect.
Even better, is a speech to text converter, so that I can just read the transcript.
the point of entertainment for me is to enjoy a stretch of time, not to consume a quantity of media.
Not all videos are about entertainment.
I know a way that you can consume any content at the pace you want to. It's called READING. Maybe too many videos are being made when there should just be an article. Maybe kids aren't learning well enough how to skim for a topic or word and start reading from that point.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Guo needs to have their attention span broadened, and their choice of quality programming is also suspect.
I'm sure the author thinks the faster he has sex the more partners he can have.
I've been using VLC to play podcasts and audiobooks at 1.5x for years. It's annoyingly frustrating how s-l-o-w-l-y most people talk.
While I do watch most movies and TV shows at 1x the first time around, if it's formula stuff or something I'm rewatching, I prefer the option of bumping the playback rate up to 1.3x-1.5x, sometimes even 2x if it's something like an action movie with a few exciting bits inflated with fluff: zip through the fluff at 2x, drop to 1x for the action, then back up to 2x.
Who gets paid to "research" obvious stuff like this that has years of history behind it? They might as well get a grant to study the wetness of water.
I think the word you are looking for is "sped"
This has been available in the mplayer movie player at least since 2004: https://web.archive.org/web/20... (the speed_* commands) - and yes it's sweet.
Truth to be told I *hate* movies longer than 90 mins.
I thought I was the only one. If I'm doing something else, it's not so bad, but to sit on my backside and watch a film for two hours?
:-)
Okay, to be fair, even 90 minutes is pushing it for me. It's not so much that my attention span has got worse in recent years- it probably has- but that I realised I never really had the patience to sit down for an extended period and watch a film.
So maybe it's just me...
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I've been doing that since the big rise of TPB/piracy in the early 00's with vlc.
most shows can be at 1.33x no problem. many of the more boring or artifically stretched stuff can be at 1.5x+
And the worst tier shit can be at 2x - 4x no problem. think 30 seconds of action scene that usually take 5 minutes
even good stuff like game of thrones is 10% stuff you wanna hear and 90% long drawn out camera work.
then you have things like mythbusters. 5 minutes of actual show and 40 minutes of filler.
Actually, there are good things that are better accelerated as well, and some silent movies come to mind. For example I was re-watching one of my favorite silent films, Buster Keaton's "The General" on DVD and I found out that PowerDVD (this was at around 2003) could play back 25% faster with sound, which made the film even funnier!
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I was trying to watch "Voltron Legendary Defender" but it was sooooo slow it takes sooooo long to get to any of the good parts. Watching it as x2 is amazing. I am getting through the episodes very quickly and it is much more enjoyable. What a great idea!!!! Thanks!
If the story is so disengaging that you want to speed it up then it says a lot about the story and character development. Sounds to me like it is the same thing wrapped up in "different" shows. Once you realize that all the story does is climb up and down Maslow's hierarchy of needs over and over they all become very predictable.
Personally I prefer a good story told well that is engaging enough to not want to slow it down, I am just looking for some down time. On the other hand my friend's autistic son watches up to five videos all at the same time, so maybe he can see these shows in another way, i.e. the same story with lots of different pictures all at once.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
MAX HEADROOM
Exactly. I love watching online educational videos in FFW. Makes an hour video into a 30 minute breeze.
It is _entertainment_! Making it last shorter is about the most stupid thing you can do with it. If you think it wastes your time, then do without it in the first place.
The heights of stupidity some people can reach is truly astonishing.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I've always felt like one of the big advantages reading has over other sorts of media is that it's intrinsically rate-limited. The problem with this technology (and it's a problem that might be overcome at some point) is that it's not dynamic. There are some times, in some shows, where I *do* want to speed it up without losing information, while there are other times when I need to pause and say "WTF just happened, and how does it relate to everything else int the show, or the universe, or my life, or what have you?"
To me, this seems like it might be an evolution of fast-forward. Traditional fast-forward cut out sound, so if you were information-input-starved, that was actually a worse option. I've tried video time-compression, and it didn't work well for me, but I think that's more likely because it was all-or-nothing and was still at a fixed rate that might not be exactly right. Maybe what's needed is a button that says "for the next N seconds (maybe 15?), accelerate slowly, then decelerate back to normal speed", and you can hit that button at a rate that lets you process what you're seeing at a comfortable rate. Of course, the problem with a button like that is that it would completely tear marriages asunder and generally make watching video with company torture for most of the people watching. You'd have to adopt a paradigm like hiking, where the leader should be the slowest person, so as to make sure no one is left behind. And I can think of few party games less fun than "give the remote to the slowest thinker".
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
It seems that these people think that most of our movies and shows are filler and only a few interesting bits exist that they actually want to see.
And bluntly, with the average action movie, you could easily cut it by about 80% and not miss anything important.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not really. The problem is what you are watching is plain old crap and not worth watching. You're wasting time watching it because you haven't found anything better in your lonely existence then watching Hollywood crap.
I've found that many of the recent "blockbuster" action movies (and not so recent, like Matrix {2,3}) are filled with filler and skimming loses nothing. How many people got bored 1/3 into any of the major action sequences in these movies because they were repetitious and/or added nothing to the story?
Certainly there are parts of TV episodes, movies, and books that can easily be skipped w/o losing anything important, but other parts may (should) have more to them than just the words spoken and actions taken and (hopefully) those other attributes add to the meaning and experience. Those things are probably lost when skimming. The experience is more - should be more - than just the verbal information. Jeff Guo needs to cut back on the caffeine, work on his attention span and learn that "smelling the roses" is about more than just smelling roses.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"Cut to the chase" is a phrase I've heard since at least 25 years ago.
There's no news in that "news" anyway.
Watch the show instead of going on facebook every five minutes insteadon your phone. This is why those people get lost or bored.
Agreed on entertainment, but for informational videos, a bit of a speed-up is really handy. The Team Treehouse site has nice material, and when you speed up the videos to 1.5x or so, you really feel like you're moving along.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I didn't have a tv, but read bit on this (I was interested in the technology). So guess now public sentiment has flipped 180degrees? See, the advertisers really do know what's be for people in the long run. MTV did a great job in decreasing people's attention spans and therefor incapable of understanding bigger concepts, problems and solutions. Brave New world
When I watch media I am constantly doing something else, or thinking about something unrelated to the show. Maybe I watch a show faster, but at the same time do I miss out on my extra thoughts, maybe I don't even get the time to think critically about what is happening as it happens.
I've slowly transitioned from TV to audio books. Lots of random informational ones, story lines I like, and the book versions of popular TV shows (the books have always been far better). But audio books are so slow. I don't know why, but they're unbearable slow to me. I listen while doing chores and eating dinner and I regularly increase speed by 200-250% and can still follow everything.
I use Rockbox as customized firmware for my old MP3 player and there is little distortion for some of the readers. Sadly as cell phones have taken over MP3 players Rockbox is dying and I don't think there's any apps that can replace its feature set. Any suggestions for a good audio book player app that auto-corrects speed distortions?
Accelerated and rewindable video is a must for online course-ware lectures. When I participated in MIT's first online course, 6.002x (Circuits and Electronics), I found the lectures by Anant Agarwal thoroughly excellent, but I still sped them up to cruise through the parts I got right away, and slowed down or rewound the parts that needed some extra thought. All in all, I spent about half the time on the lecture videos that real time viewing would have required, and that allowed me to concentrate on learning. It helped me earn a perfect score in the class (along with the inspiring lectures).
Wish I had had that as a college student, it would have made a big difference. If I could have had that capability in university with a live instructor, it would have made the learning process much faster, or allowed me to take in significantly more material. It's more like what happens in a one-on-one tutor situation. The learning is paced to each student.
In conclusion, recorded lectures have real advantages versus a live lecture in a learning environment.
Been watching things accelerated for at least 15 years now. You get used to it, for sure. I don't impose my habits on other people so I'll watch things at normal speed with guests and go to theaters, both of which are fine. Mostly, I watch TV shows to avoid making people feel awkward around me at work; I don't bother with sports because the highlight reel has enough in it. I'd be happy just reading, but such is not the culture in which we live.
Not all videos are about entertainment.
Bingo. If its NOT entertainment, I'd rather not watch it at all, and just read a transcript.
The only reason I fast forward video is that it has shitty information density, and 99.9% of all video is extremely poorly bookmarked to facilitate you getting to the part you want.
For example, youtube... you find an album, and then there are usually time code links to each track.
All instructional, walkthru, tutorial, informational, educational etc videos should have that list:
0:00 - pointless intro
0:15 - i introduce myself for far too long
1:35 - i introduce the topic for far too long
2:54 - i chatter about something and irrelevant
3:05 - this is what you came to see
3:17 - i chatter about my other videos
5:02 - something else random
5:20 - pointless outtro
Then i can click on the 5th link, watch 20 seconds and move on. Better still would be a transcript under each section, so if I get what i need from skimming the transcript, I don't even need to watch the video.
Better still, lose the rest of video elements entirely, and replace with a brief text. And only have the 20 second clip that I might need.
The problem here is that the vast majority of TV that comes out of Hollywood has been stretched out far beyond the the length of time they have story for. They take 9 or 10 episodes worth of storyline and feel the need to stretch it out to 23 episodes presumably so they can sell more advertising space. The result is the glacially slow pace that needs senselessness violence to make it feel like something is actually happening. I'd challenge anyone who thinks speeding up improves TV to watch Orphan Black (BBC America) or the original British version of House of Cards (although the HBO version is pretty good too) at high speed and see if they can actually follow the subtleties of what is going on. Same for most European drama serials as they make them as long as they have storyline for not what fits into the space available to maximise profit.
OBEY.
Whom? I thought Andre the Giant didn't have a posse anymore since he died back in 1993.
Happiness is slavery.
Fans of closed platforms like iOS and game consoles would agree.
With an entire planet's worth of English (+bad French/Spanish/Japanese/Mandarin) content to choose from, I rarely find more than 2 hours a week of mainstream content worth watching - including movies.
Xrobots gets more of my attention than all of the inane shit produced by Hollywood/HBO/BBC combined.
> How many Slashdot readers are already watching speeded-up videos?
could you repeat that, a little slower please?
At least in a Windows 8.1 tablet I have connected to a TV.. In IE11 just hit + for faster - for slower... Works quite fell.. I use IE because it's builtin html5 player requires fewer system resources.
I only read your last paragraph
Some of the supporting claims quoted are so spurious as to be laughable.
["I quickly discovered that acceleration makes viewing more pleasurable. "Modern Family" played at twice the speed is far funnier -- the jokes come faster and they seem to hit harder. I get less frustrated at shows that want to waste my time with filler plots or gratuitous violence. The faster pace makes it easier to appreciate the flow of the plot and the structure of the scenes." ]
Seems like an onion article to me but the original article link is to the Washington Post.
Alfred Hitchcock was known as the "master of suspense" precisely because he avoided chopping the scene to pieces with a million different camera angles.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I have thought about this for American football games. Sure, there's the 3.5hr live version. Later, there could be the 2hr version without commercials. I thought a 30 minute version with just the plays would be great. NFL rewind does that now. We also have the 30 second version with just highlights on ESPN.
But what if we could get people's reactions to their DVR -- then you could selectively slow or speed up the game by showing the parts that others (with DVRs that don't mind someone watching what they watch ) deem important. Then you could have a 4 or 10 minute version -- however much time you want to spend on that event.
Totally agree, which is why I'll read/skim a dozen text pages before clicking on a YouTube "HowTo" that is clearly labeled as being "exactly what I'm looking for."
Once in a great while, it's nice to kick back and watch somebody do a technical walkthrough of something I'm interested in... I especially like the tools demonstrations where they take you through from ground zero through getting all the tools you need, showing you how the tools are used, and completely doing the job on the video - this could be for cars, software tools, construction, or whatever. But, that's mostly for entertainment, when I'm actually doing the job, a page of procedural text is usually more useful than 30 minutes of instructional/demonstration video.
...you might learn something new about yourself.
Yes, exactly.
Personally, I don't like the acceleration very much unless I can get captioning to work at the accelerated speeds (works great on my Roku; on DVDs not so much). Instead I just fast-forward through the predictable boring scenes -- skip 5 minutes of scenic driving here, 2 minutes of overhead establishing shot there, 10 minutes of chopsocky fight scene, upwards of 15 minutes of characters agonizing over some trivial emotional trainwreck that doesn't advance the plot... I can easily see a movie or TV episode in half the production time just by skipping past the filler scenes that I don't care about.
You know what would be a hugely profitable business? Providing TL;DR (or is that TL;DW) truncated versions of movies.
I once saw a film about a woman in some austere religious community who had an affair. It was very slow and dull but it was in Danish or something which meant it had subtitles, so it was much improved by watching it at 8x speed. I might use the same technique if I ever have to watch Lost In Translation again.
You can also do Louvre exhibition round under 5 minutes, if you program a script that flashes photographs of those paintings at your eye 20 images per second.
Say that you're watching a video on oil painting techniques. I don't think you would get the full effect of just reading the transcript.
My wife watched porn at double speed, and got mad at me because I cannot jizz fast enough. Now she watches it backwards and gets mad that I cannot clean up like they do.
Table-ized A.I.
probably if you have the attention span of a hamster
I don't think you would get the full effect of just reading the transcript.
Yes. In some cases watching the video helps. If you'd actually read my post, you'd realize that i not only acknowledged that, but suggested that a much better presentation of that sort of material might be text interspersed with short video clips.
I mostly speed up my lecture videos. Depending on the speaker, some videos are greatly improved.
They think of this as a race or what? I watch entertainment for the enjoyment of it. Not for the sake of consuming the most in the least amount of time. IF something is boring then I don't watch it simple as that.
A few days ago I watched Hardcore Henry, imagine that at double speed. These people are crazy.
Fast forward any shooting/fighting scene in a superheroes/transformers/action movie and you get the five minutes with the actual plot.
TV is really hard to watch if you have not watched it in a while. The commercials are exceedingly high compared to ads on online content. And the "local content" usually consists of hearing 5 second teasers about something interesting on the x-oclock news, every 10 minutes, then when x-oclock comes, the interesting news is only 5 seconds.
And for online "TV":
Netflix: nothing to watch. If you like HBO-style dramas I guess you may like house of cards of something. but the selection is poor on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu. Even if you combine them, still nothing.
No, thank you. I have enough of double-speed from watching courses records before exams. True, it made many of the lecturers to finally speak like a normal human, but still...
Ideally, people want to do things on their terms. Some like it, some do not. The pacing of many TV shows and movies is very, very poor and speedups to a subtle degree help mitigate that. People these days pirate, Netflix, or YouTube, none of which have intermission ads, thus it's not being done for the sake of profit.
And I hate movies shorter than 90 minutes. To each their own.
Me too, but I've noticed starting especially 10 years ago that a lot of the more TV (especially reality shows) has reduced the amount of content without reducing the runtime. Think: repetitive long lingering shots on people's pensive faces in an amateurish attempt to create suspense. It just comes across as cheap TV, but then I don't suppose this is what you personally are thinking of when you want to sit down to watch some entertainment.
This is the fix! I can listen to anything at higher speed while retaining quality, and does NOT change the pitch. YouTube, Netflix, lectures on EdX, what did I do without this? This will save me weeks per year... (80's music sounds good again at 1.2x -1.3x ... lol PLUS TedTalks are just so much more interesting this way!)
"While one might expect speeding up to reduce comprehension, Herb Friedman says that "Experiments have shown that the brain works most efficiently if the information rate through the ears--via speech--is the "average" reading rate, which is about 200-300 wpm (words per minute), yet the average rate of speech is in the neighborhood of 100-150 wpm."
From Audio time-scale/pitch modification - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_time-scale/pitch_modification
The problem is too much fluff and things that drag on that dont need to be.
Make better content and get to the point.
This used to be quite common. Silent films were often played back at higher speed than they were recorded. The introduction of sound made that difficult: sped-up speech is funny for about 3 minutes, sped-up music just sounds horrible
Known as the Wadsworth constant. 30% of the first part of any informational video can be skipped.
I had some time in hospital, so I bought the first 4 seasons of The Walking dead and watched them through.
I watched the first season in real time, that was ok. For the second season, things just went too slowly, so I watched it on 2x.
After that, I watched all of the remaining series in 2x. Far better pacing. I know that the show likes to set the atmosphere and be slow, but it was too slow for me. At 2x speed, it was perfect.
Occasionally, I had to go back and watch a scene in normal speed again, but that wasn't too often.
"The best part? I became an ordained minister while not wearing pants." -- CleverNickName
Just watch the extended promo. Takes 3 minutes to watch an entire show.
....movies and shows made DECADES ago. Did you know John Wayne is dead, yet you still see him talking on screen? Freaky.
and then complain about the lack of pace in todays series.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
In Europe, the standard for video is PAL, which is 25/50 Hz. The standard for film is 24 Hz.
As a result, when it came to video, most movies were sped up 25/24 to match the standard. This kind of manipulation is becoming obsolete now that TVs can work at the proper refresh rate.
A 1.04x speed up is probably not what the author had in mind but it is still a speed up.
The average American watches three hours of TV each day, and researchers have found that most people already prefer listening to accelerated speech.
They might have preferred it for the 1 minute they spent listening to it with the researcher. I mean, it's obvious, innit - faster is better!
But then people also "prefer" loud music over quieter music, which is why we have highly compressed music thanks to the loudness war.
I watched a few episodes of Smallville at 1.25x to save time. Then I thought: if I'm so unimpressed by it that I can't be bothered to sit down and watch it at the speed it's meant to be watched, maybe it's just not that good enough to watch at all.
If your time is that precious, just look a movie up on moviepooper and be done with it.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Yes, but when the oil painting instructional video cuts away from showing painting to show you three cute squirrel babies that the artist is raising, that's content that could be more efficiently presented.
I remember a documentary about Chuck Jones (Looney Tunes) and his careful use of timing. Thinking about that helped me realize that timing and tempo are tools that a skillful artist can use to very good effect. (Other well-timed videos that come to mind are Fargo, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Kill Bill.) I think timing and tempo are critical parts of a very well-told story. And of course in media like music, timing and tempo are critical.
But watching a desert predator being repeatedly hurt by an anvil or TNT is not really watching a good story. But it's the TELLING of that story that makes Road Runner brilliant, and that includes the timing and tempo.
In other instances, the story itself is compelling (thinking of some documentaries), but the TELLING of the story is either poorly done or not important. Probably these can be helped by fast-forward consumption.
For informational-only media, firehose = good.
TL;DR
Don't forget the dramatic montage sickness that infects otherwise decent shows. I'm convinced many montages with pop music are more about tossing fresh musical talent onto the wall to see what sticks more than anything.
Then you've got the signature Abrams Montage which pointlessly amps up drama in shows like LOST and Fringe or movies like his Trek reboots.
Method of processing duck feet
Hear, hear!
A couple years ago I watched a webinar video file speeded up... so much BS, story-telling, promo, and filler in that thing, and maybe 5-10 minutes of real information. Thank the gods I didn't have to suffer thru that in real time.
Interesting, I consider any movie shorter than 90 minutes rubbish, it's usually low budget crap, if they manage to get it past 90 minutes it's usually a little better quality.
This ^. Most of the time I listen to TV it is background noise while I work on a project. I don't want to have to concentrate full time on the TV. When I'm not working on a project, I usually just want to relax and not think that hard.
It is not just you, and it's a huge reason why my wife and I rarely even go to the theater anymore. There are lots of other reasons such as the high cost, but honestly it's so much nicer to just get the Blu Ray and watch it on my big TV where I can pause it, stop it to watch the rest later, etc.
Even a 30 minute TV show episode ends up being 15 or 16 minutes after you cut out the commercials and the opening and closing credits.
I don't watch in fast forward I just skip the intros, credits, commercials and keep half my time.
When you cut out the commercials, opening, and closing credits on a tv episode you have already cut out the majority of filler and nearly half the run time.
TL;DR
Sometimes when I get to the end of a movie I feel like the plot didn't develop then was cut short or that there was information inferred but never related leaving a hole. Three hour movies like the postman or braveheart are just too long although I still liked them, they may have been better broken up into multiple episodes maybe like a trilogy.
My only experience with accelerated video is with my old Panasonic DVD player. It has an option to speed up by 40%. I have used that on many movies or videos that are only moderately interesting. Also great for speeding up old historical documentaries with slow-talking old men. It doesn't work for everything, but the time saving is awesome.
Unfortunately these days most of my video watching is via crappy streaming h/w and s/w in my Sony Blu-Ray player (Netflix mostly). No acceleration options there. Heck you can't even do intelligent pause/rewind due to long lags and delays.
For TV my PVR acceleration consists of fast forwarding over commercials plus occasional FF over boring scenes and credits.
With the pitch-correction I've found I can watch videos at only around +10% to +15% before it becomes permanently noticeable. At those speeds I only notice the difference for a minute or two and then my brain tunes it out and it just seems normal. Above that speed and I'm continually aware that I'm viewing something at the wrong speed. (Audiobooks, on the other hand, I can often run at +25% and still have it seem normal). It's not a lot, but I suppose on a Netflix binge even a 10% savings could add up to hours saved.
" Instead I just fast-forward through the predictable boring scenes -- skip 5 minutes of scenic driving here, 2 minutes of overhead establishing shot there, 10 minutes of chopsocky fight scene, upwards of 15 minutes of characters agonizing over some trivial emotional trainwreck that doesn't advance the plot... I can easily see a movie or TV episode in half the production time just by skipping past the filler scenes that I don't care about."
Isn't that akin to looking at a piece of art, say the Mona Lisa, but at postage stamp size?
Don't get me wrong -- you are entitled to watch a movie any way you want. I'll continue watching TV/Movies as they were intended rather than some self-imposed cliff's notes version.
BTW, I feel the same way about books. I have what I call a few "useless superpowers". One of which is an ability to read incredibly fast. I have found that if I slow down my reading to that of the spoken word I ENJOY the material much much more. Passages which would MAYBE get me to smile reading at full speed will get a loud belly laugh. The downside is I finish a book in 20 hours vs. 30 mins -- I can live with that. It's about ENJOYING the material -- not how fast I can get through it.
I can only see this being useful if watching tutorials, documentaries or other "learning" videos where the point is gathering information, not enjoyment.
As others have stated, if I watch something on TV, I want to relax and enjoy it, and increasing the tax on my brain has the opposite effect.
I also make it a point to not watch so much TV/video that this makes much of a difference (in time spent/saved). Perhaps some people watch that much video - in that case I would suggest some life-balance and perspective.
"And I hate movies shorter than 90 minutes. To each their own."
Depends on the movie. While still dating my now wife, she talked me in to seeing The English Patient. About 90 mins in I look at my watch and sigh with relief -- 'it's almost over'. Oh, how wrong I was.
I guess everyone is different. If I'm really into the movie I almost always think it was too short.
The ADD generation has grown up and they can't pay attention long enough to watch a TV show uninterrupted. God help us all.
Jesus christ you illiterate fuckwit editors. Do your job.
To each their own, I guess. There are some things I want to watch and soak up - maybe a marathon sitting of Star Wars (4,5,6 only) or the LoTR trilogy for example. On the flip-side, if I'm binge-watching a new series or playing catch-up, I'll watch accelerated. My wife just got me hooked, after 6 years, on GoT. Got caught up on the whole 50 hours of the first 5 seasons by watching it on double-speed during my morning workouts.
Bingo. If its NOT entertainment, I'd rather not watch it at all, and just read a transcript.
The only reason I fast forward video is that it has shitty information density, and 99.9% of all video is extremely poorly bookmarked to facilitate you getting to the part you want.
For example, youtube... you find an album, and then there are usually time code links to each track.
All instructional, walkthru, tutorial, informational, educational etc videos should have that list:
0:00 - pointless intro 0:15 - i introduce myself for far too long 1:35 - i introduce the topic for far too long 2:54 - i chatter about something and irrelevant 3:05 - this is what you came to see 3:17 - i chatter about my other videos 5:02 - something else random 5:20 - pointless outtro
You have some excellent points. It's important to remember that most of thee people are amateurs and just posting to try to help others. Some times a shaky phone camera, sometimes an ego trip. I don't care a huge amount since I'm after the info, not much else.
As well, communication skills are a gift, and some folks never seem to get them.
I do instructional videos deling with computers and Software defined radio, and often instruct people to pause on occasion in order to carry out the instructions.
But the intros should be short, I never introduce myself except in some text in the title - what is the point of that? I'm an ugly fuck, and doing this to help, not salve my ego. I try to keep everything as short as possible, except for the credits, because there are often a lot of people to thank, and by that time, people with short attention spans are long gone.
Also the final point is that when all the criticisms of a video are compiled, someone has a complaint about every second of them, so you have to develop a thick skin in such matters.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Say that you're watching a video on oil painting techniques. I don't think you would get the full effect of just reading the transcript.
I've also found that in dealing with software instructional, it helps to actually see the menus that you have to go through. I'll say and illustrate Third menu item from the left, Fifth item down while it's on the screen. Well versed people won't need that, but then agin, they probably don't need the video in the first place
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
This only emphasizes his point!
Yes, but when the oil painting instructional video cuts away from showing painting to show you three cute squirrel babies that the artist is raising, that's content that could be more efficiently presented.
But that is when you make a clear and concise video that only has the relevent parts and no more.
These jerks that take their own free time to try to help people will then go away.
I have different standards for professional videos and some backyard mechanic with a handheld explaining how to change out the DISA valve on a BMW.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I couldn't even make it through the initial sample in the WaPo article. If I had to watch television at that speed, then I simply wouldn't watch television.
It depends on why you're watching in the first place. If you're trying to cram your entertainment into the smallest timeslice possible, either because you're low on free time, or high on ADD, then go for it. But if the point is to enjoy the presentation or to kill some time, then why speed-up? You've only decreased the amount of time you can enjoy the show, or increased your work in finding something else to occupy your time. And if the point is just to get caught up on the plot, then why watch at all? Just read the summaries online in 1/60th of the time it takes to watch an episode. Pleasurable events -- whether it's eating, or sex, or watching a show -- can be completed very quickly, but many people would argue, myself included, that it detracts from the experience and lowers appreciation rather than enhancing it.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Totally different standards for homebrew - I was just making fun of classic Bob Ross stuff... I guess PBS was the closest thing to homebrew back in that day.
We bought an old Mercedes W220, and the homebrew maintenance videos for that thing on YouTube just blow me away, literally tell and show you the whole process from start to finish - a completely professionally produced video, with a focus on brevity and clarity, might only be 20% shorter - and these guys are still showing themselves having a beer when it's over (or in the middle, when necessary.)
And the already-miniscule attention span becomes even shorter.
Idiots.
about 4 minutes if you just showed the action. But, then again, baseball is about more than just the "action." It's about the act of being in the moment, in the game, as a player or spectator. So reducing it just to the action (hitting, running, etc.) fundamentally changes what the event means in the first place. But, hey, I get 3 hours and 56 minutes of my life back, too!
Honestly for me it's a bit of both. I want to watch a few shows I am following, but I also have other things to do so if I can catch up with my watching and spend less time doing it, this sounds like a good thing to me.
Got caught up on the whole 50 hours of the first 5 seasons by watching it on double-speed during my morning workouts.
I taped a 20-minute workout and played it back at high speed on my machine so it only took ten minutes. I got a great workout.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I don't watch a television show to power through it so I can get on to the next task in my life. I watch a television show to slow down and relax for a while. How sad is it that people feel this way. Life is getting too busy and full as it is without trying to fast-forward your leisure time.
I take it you don't listen to podcasts at all. Almost all pod cast listeners listen at 1.2 to 1.5x playback speed. And no, there's no chipmunk effect these days!
Also, most youtube videos let you speed up playback in the browser the same way, though I always watch youtube with mpv and speed it up with the "]" key.
I've noticed that there is a LOT of repetition of content in History channel content. Don't laugh, but Ancient Aliens, The Curse of Oak island, etc. all feature at least 6 repeated graphics per episode, and in the same context each time. I'd almost pay for a channel to edit it down to the unique content. I bet there's only 15 minutes of original content per episode.
In addition after every commercial, they repeat what they said before commercial.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I am the opposite. Anything less than 90 minutes is a waste for me.
> Isn't that akin to looking at a piece of art, say the Mona Lisa, but at postage stamp size?
Movies will sometimes be released with both a theatrical cut and a director's cut.
This is the viewer's cut.
It may not match creative intent, but it's out of the creator's hands and should be left up to the viewer to decide.
Absolute agreement on this. When I was younger I read fast. Not a novel in 30 minutes fast, but close enough. I also noticed that I wasn't enjoying the material as much. And, it really sucked to finish a whole series in a day -- then I had to find something new to read. Far better to read at a normal pace and *really* enjoy the same material over the course of a week.
The other part of reading so quickly is retention. When you are blazing through material, comprehension and retention both suffer. Reading fast or skimming by themselves don't necessarily cause that, but taken to extremes they do.
I say with confidence that I like my video viewing like my masturbation. Slow and enjoying every minute.
Meanwhile, I am often annoyed by the current trend of YouTubers where they cut out all the breaths and pauses in speech for that neat hip jerk/cut effect. I also have been annoyed by shows like Family Guy because the characters interact so fast as if they already knew what the other character was going to say... something about the organics is lost.
Much of the time when I "watch" tv I am doing something on the side like cooking or surfing the net. Fast forward would probably require my whole attention.
Maybe the problem is that you are watching garbage?
Maybe that's part of the reason why the Simpsons are so successful. I often wish my TV had a slow-down button to catch all the subtle things.
To be fair, the Mona Lisa (a) isn't all that big to begin with, and (b) good luck getting within 10 yards of it thanks to the barrier, the crowds, and the thick yellowish bulletproof glass over the front... but yeah, I agree that cutting out a lot of the "irrelevant" stuff does take away from the purpose of watching the movie. If there's truly tons of useless filler, there are also tons of other (better) movies to watch instead.
I feel like all the comments could be parsed out better if people could identify if they are young or old first, and if they have ever been diagnosed with ADD, ADHD, or are somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Maybe also if you actually think (as the guy writing the original article did) that spoiling the end of a book somehow makes it better.
Seriously....those saying they watched pretty much anything at greater than the intended speed are just freaking me out right now. I can't even conceive of why under any condition I would ever watch something like this; the enjoyment--the experience--would be destroyed by the accelerated playthrough.
Quaifiers: I'm middle-aged and have never been diagnosed with any disorder. And I hate spoiling a book's ending; knowing the ending of a work of fiction usually leads to me putting the book down at that point.
Wow! well said.
Well, hey, that is PRECISELY what I do as well. I just don't have time for these *painfully slow to get to the point* interviewees who keep tripping over their tongues in those show dormats, and often documentaries are tedious as well. :-) and could make out the scenery even..Since then I've reverted to preferring the old B&W version as I like that old "film noir" effect - and it just don't feel right without the sped up "can I kill him now?" line ;-)
Movies, however, I totally enjoy at the correct speed. The exception is those 40s Bogey and Bacall films like the "Maltese Falcon" and "Casablanca", which they always broadcast sped (speeded?) up.. and for the longest time I always assumed they just talked that fast.. Until the remastered versions of these old classics came out. Colorized, even... Initially I rather liked these new (old) colorized and slowed down versions becauseI could finally understand what Peter Lorre was saying
KnockKnockWhosThereHarryHarryWhoHarryUpAndFinishThisJoke
If you read an entire novel sized book in 30 minutes you will retain almost none of it. If you don't retain anything what was the point in reading in the first place?
This guy is nothing more than a retard with special snowflake syndrome.
I listen to all my audiobooks at 1.5x speed. Doing this with video content sounds great, as long as it is comfortable.
I have done a few edX courses in the last 1 1/2 yrs and have sped most of them up. They provide a transcript which, together with the professor lecturing, allow me to read and listen at about the same speed-- 1.25 to 1.5 times the recorded rate. It depends on the professor as to how fast it can go.