Shannon
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parasocial minisode WIP + "i'm an insane person"-level research
🕑 Added 2018-09-08 10:23:28 +0000 UTC So I don't know much about the technical specifics or the industry standard specifics of this overall, but I've seen a lot of times where someone who worked on a music video will have an upload of that video on their personal vimeo account as part of their portfolio far separated from the youtube upload that has millions of hits or whatever. Vimeo is a more professional website and to my eye (and from quick, very unscientific googling) it seems like vimeo compresses videos less. Or, sometimes, videos will have been uploaded there as parts of portfolios years later, once compression algorithms have improved overall. So, either way, when I am looking for versions of music videos or short films to use in essays, I will check both youtube and vimeo for uploads and try to use whichever one looks better.At some point I watched the vimeo upload of Bo Burnham's "Repeat Stuff" on the channel of Rami Hachache, the music video's director. Since I've watched the music video on youtube a million times in the past year and being a neurotic professional video editor and whatever I IMMEDIATELY noticed a clip difference in it. It's a clip I had never seen before and the color balance is completely off so it stands out a lot.
Here are both versions. It's at around 1:21.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt9c0UeYhFc
I rewatched a couple times and I think I kind of caught that the clips before it were different as well. I really like in the vimeo version the way his body language makes a nice transition from that clip to the next scene where he's dancing and also looking down with his arms out. And I got really curious. Why is this here? Did I miss other clips that are different? I feel like it's a better transition, but the color timing is off and it obviously looks unfinished even though the timing of the cut is great! What is happening?
So, being a very normal person who definitely does not have too much time on my hands, I grabbed both versions at 1080 and I synced both videos as accurately as I could (using premiere's auto-sync by audio) and layered one on top of the other in the timeline with the top one at around half opacity. I watched the entire video. The only discrepancy was the one I had noticed and the clips preceding it. This starts at around 1:12 if you are watching the full videos. I didn't test all of the subliminal text bits but I looked at a couple and they matched fine as well. I made a side-by-side comparison of the "different" segment that I exported as the embedded video with this post.
So, here comes the real challenge. I wondered, was the director's version uploaded prior to the youtube version, hence the unfinished shot? Or was it uploaded after, since you of course would want it to premiere on Burnham's youtube channel for maximum views and impact? Youtube has a date clearly visible ("Published on Sep 24, 2014") but on vimeo it just said "4 years ago". 4 years ago under the video, 4 years ago on a bunch of comments. "4 years" doesn't help me!
SO THEN I keep looking and googling around I find this random blog post http://blog.spiralofhope.com/12466/vimeo-upload-date-and-time.html on some blog called "spiral of hope" (????) on how in order to see the date a video was uploaded to vimeo you have to download the XML file. So using their template and changing the URL to match the video's ID I download the XML file of the Repeat Stuff upload and there it is- "2014-09-24". It went up the same day.
I learned nothing, basically, but like the virtual woman segment of FF2 I found it interesting and will probably talk about it in a video. Oh also this is my way of announcing that I'm probably making a video about Repeat Stuff next. I figured for now spinoff/mini-episodes would be fun and I have so much to say about this video! I might post this weird comparison on twitter and talk about it there and will probably talk about it in the essay but for now here's a patron exclusive. I really enjoy weird inane deep dive stuff like this. I wanted to be a detective when I was a little kid and I like obsessing over stuff nobody else cares to look into. I might try to reach out to and interview Hachache after I publish the analysis video (I'd rather get my own ideas out there before I talk to him) and I will definitely bring up this tiny discrepancy that has been driving me crazy haha.
edit: FOR FUN here's a comparison of me doing roughly two minutes of rough color correction work in premiere and throwing screencaps in ms paint to show the difference and how easy it would be to fix
