Third Quarterly Report for 2003
(July, August, and September)
for Jay Ruby's Oak Park Research Project

The heading for the Taylor Family Project

To view the portrait without the videos go to http://astro.temple.edu/~ruby/portrait.

Two steps forward and one step back.

As some of you know I returned to Oak Park for the months of July and August and was able to house sit for Bobbi Raymond-Larson and Richard Larson. It is a wonderful house and made my time there very enjoyable. Prior to leaving Mifflintown, I put out a call on the Oak Park listserv for designers who could produce an html template that I could use not only for the Taylor portrait but for all of them (I plan to produce three family portraits and one institutional portrait). Randy Birkey of BIRKEY.COM, an Oak Parker I already knew responded that his company to do the work with the funds I had available. We met in early July and as I was leaving the finished product was available. I am really pleased with the "look" of the portrait and think it will be very usable for all of the portraits. As always I would be interested in any critical responses about the portrait - access it from the url above.

I spent my time during the summer completing the writing of the modules and the final editing of the videos. In the process I discovered the joys of unilinear writing where it is possible to go off on "tangents" without fear of an editor telling you that it made the text unreadable. When I came to a place where I thought some additional information was needed, I simply added a link and created a new module. Instead of having to select one photograph out of a group of good images, I created a slide show. I also decided to be deliberately redundant - another forbidden thing. Because they are a lot of modules, it is impossible for me to know which ones any particular reader/viewer might access. I therefore decided to repeat myself in several places in order to insure that what I regarded as particularly important points would be known by all. I suppose that those reader/viewers who systematically read and view everything might be annoyed by the redundancies. We shall see.

In late August as I was about to return home, I had a few DVDs burned so that I could send them to possible distributors. When I attempted to access the portrait via a DVD I discovered some unanticipated problems. I have been circulating the following description of these problems to people with more technical expertise than I have:

I am attempting to produce a digital ethnographic project that consists of html files (written in Dreamweaver), jpeg files and Quicktime movies that were edited in Final Cut Pro 2 and compressed with Cleaner 6/Sorenson 3 Pro. They are linked together in various ways and designed to run on a web browser like Explorer or Netscape. There are about 2.5 gigs of material that were burned on DVD-ROM as a data disk.


Here is a review of the problems I am experiencing and some solutions that have been offered.


1. I wanted the project to be cross-platform. I now think that is impossible. I am content to produce two versions – one for Mac and the other for Windows. This is not an uncommon solution for others.


A. Autoboot. The designers that I employed placed two files on the DVD - autorun.inf and winopen.exe that cause the file start.html to open in a browser automatically in a Windows machine. That works fine. To open the project in Mac you have to drag the file, start.html onto the Explorer or Netscape icon. I am told by Apple that there are no possible autoboots with a Mac particularly in OSX.


B. Gamma. The video clips look fine in Mac and terrible in Windows. I am told that is a question of the differences in Gamma.


2. Video Clips. When accessing the project directly from the DVD, Explorer and Netscape crashes when accessing the quicktime files. When I open the project directly from the version on the hard drive, Explorer has no problems with the video. But Netscape cannot open the videos either from the DVD or my hard drive. So perhaps using an internet browser to navigate the project is not the way to go. Randy Birkey suggests that “The freezing thing is really more an issue of the particular PC than the browser. If a PC can play a regular DVD OK, it should play yours as well. If it struggles with playing a regular DVD, it will struggle with yours...Depends on the processor chip speed, RAM, what other applications are running, etc.”


3. Alternative Methods – DVD Studio Pro. I have been told by Don Peebles from Apple that I could use DVDStudioPro to produce the project and most if not all of these problems would be solved. He suggests using the DVD@ccess in DSP. According to Peebles, “There is also a scripting capability that would likely enable you to have the DVD boot and directly launch the HTML address that is contained locally on the disk… I recommend you get the new version (of DSP) since it has templates and a much simpler interface. The DVD should be able to run on almost every computer… no one file on a DVD should be larger than 1.2G for a regular DVD… create your text as menus with active buttons to take people to where your web links would have been. You can create these as say photoshop files. You could also specify HTML links to your ROM folder but you may have the same problem with explorer.” I own DSP1.5 and gave up on it because the Manual and the DSP Bible did not discuss projects of this sort. To date I can find no one who can tell me how to do this or give me an example of a DVD produced in this fashion. Peebles suggested contacting Barrett Thompson, a consultant, but he appears uninterested. According to Jen Nowak U of Arizona) “DVDSP is really ideal for DVD video authoring but a bit clumsy with PDFs, web links and HTML files.” I have submitted a grant proposal to pay for a consultant but cannot find one interested and able to find the solution. I may try to learn DSP myself.


4. Suggestions received but rejected.


a. Use Acrobat in place of Dreamweaver. Won’t solve the video problem or start up problem.


b. Change codecs. Rod Coover suggested that “I've never been too impressed by Sorenson for quicktimes in tests I have done, and I have tested on Macs and PCs. Its main advantage is size reduction. You'll find Media 100, JPEG, or DV streaming compressions better, do a couple tests on a couple seconds of you material to see which works best with what.” While I am willing to test this idea I don’t see how that will solve my problem.


c. Autostarts for Macs - http://www.keiserphoto.com/resources/cdauto.htm. Won’t work in OSX.

I have applied for some funds to hire a consultant who can sort of these problems. I have also gotten words of encouragement from my editor at the University of Chicago Press and DER, an ethnographic film distributor, that lead me to believe I will be able to find a distributor once the problems are solved.

 

An Ethnographic Portrait of Bekah and Sophie's Family

 

While waiting for a solution to the technical problems listed above, I continue to work on the next family portrait - that of Bekah, Sophie, Ari and Ben. I have finished transcribing all of the relevant interviews and will begin video editing soon while as the same time roughing out the topics for the written modules. Because the introductory modules constructed for the Taylor Family Portrait will be used in all of the portraits, it will take me less time to complete this work. My hope is to have a rough draft of the written modules and an almost finished version of the video clips by the time I return to Oak Park next summer. I then plan to show them the materials to obtain some feedback as I did with the Taylors.

 

As always I am most interested in what you think about this work. Comments, suggestions and criticisms are all most welcome and encouraged.
Send them to Jay Ruby