WebProNews » Editing

Daily Show Defends Rick Perry, Calls Out Selective Editing Practices

Josh Wolford — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 19:56:54 +0000

In this age of soundbites, it is becoming easier and easier to take things out of context. And with the popularity of YouTube, it’s becoming even easier to selectively edit video clips to suit your specific message. Though the practice is far from an issue of partisan politics (both sides use selective editing), this time, a Republican candidate for President became the target of selective editing.

MSNBC’s Ed Schultz used a clip this week of Texas Governor Rick Perry giving a speech to supporters about the economic situation. In that clip, Perry refers to a “black cloud” hanging over America. On his show, The Ed Show, Schultz chose to stop the clip after that Perry utterance. He then went on to accuse the Governor of racism, saying that the “black cloud” he was referring to was President Obama.

A couple seconds later in the clip, Perry says that the “black cloud” he is referring to is the national debt.

Schultz later apologized for the error, saying “we did not present the full context of those statement, and we should have.”

But the selective editing incident caught the attention of Jon Stewart, who on last night’s Daily Show tore into Schultz about his misuse of the video clip. The relevant part begins at about the 2:15 mark.

The Daily Show – Indecision 2012 – Elephant Stampede to the White House – The Media Turns to Paul Ryan
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Stewart then brings in correspondents John Oliver and Wyatt Cenac to discuss racially charged language in the American political landscape.

The Daily Show – Indecision 2012 – Elephant Stampede to the White House – Black Clouds & Red Herrings
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

This instance of selective editing reminded me of a video that went viral concerning a local news station taking a young boy’s comments out of context. CBS affiliate WBBM in Chicago showed a clip of a young African-American boy saying that he wants to have a gun when he grows up in order to frame a story about gun violence. They news station failed to play the follow comment from the child, that specified the reason for owning a gun in the future: because he wanted to be a police officer.

Final Cut Pro X Skewered By Conan O’Brien

Josh Wolford — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 13:27:30 +0000

Just a few days into the release of Final Cut Pro X and the reviews are still pouring in. The new editing software has been radically redesigned and the change is causing quite the backlash from the internet community. Many of the complaints can be summed up with this tweet from yesterday – “Final Cut Pro X is an enhanced iMovie with loss of professional control. Plus old projects won’t open?! HUGE FAIL.”

While there are some that praise the new software for its relatively low price point ($300) and its simplicity and ease of use, a quick scan of Twitter reveals that a majority of users find it to be frustrating.

It currently has a 2 and 1/2 star rating in Apple’s Mac store. The top three customer reviews lament the fact that many preferences and professional features are gone and one of them simply says “Extremely buggy, overly simplistic.”

The Twitterverse is still on fire about Final Cut Pro X, here are some selected tweets -

@SanjkaBorodach
АлександрFinal cut pro x = iMovie Pro.. Im sad for professionals. 2 minutes ago via Twitter for iPhone · powered by @socialditto

@grum
that grum guyI’m desperately looking for a site that answers all the “how the fuck do I do this” questions generated from “upgrading” to Final Cut Pro X 2 minutes ago via Power Twitter · powered by @socialditto

@findenlake
Ross McMinnSometimes I’m glad I edit in both Final Cut & Adobe Premiere Pro. It comes in handy when one of them decides to self-sabotage their product. 51 minutes ago via TweetDeck · powered by @socialditto

@MattRichardson
Matt RichardsonIf even Conan is making fun of the new Final Cut Pro, I’m definitely sticking with version 7: http://t.co/9IXrAF2 (via @Ihnatko) 32 minutes ago via Twitter for Mac · powered by @socialditto

That final tweet is referring to last night’s skewering of Final Cut Pro X by Coco. He sets up the clip with the premise that his editors are the best in the world, and they love the new Final Cut. The clip that follows is a mess, as you might expect. Check it out –

In this period of freak-outs, The New York Times’ tech guy David Pogue offers some reason. He goes through a pretty extensive list of complaints about X and debunks a good deal of them. He has this to say in the end –

Apple has followed the typical Apple sequence: (1) throw out something that’s popular and comfortable but increasingly ancient, (2) replace it with something that’s slick and modern and forward-looking and incomplete, (3) spend another year finishing it up, restoring missing pieces.

Professional editors should (1) learn to tell what’s really missing from what’s just been moved around, (2) recognize that there’s no obligation to switch from the old program yet, (3) monitor the progress of FCP X and its ecosystem, and especially (4) be willing to consider that a radical new design may be unfamiliar, but may, in the long term, actually be better.

How do you feel about Final Cut Pro X? Let us know in the comments.

Photoshop Express Drives Online

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:41:46 +0000

Adobe released its latest rich Internet application, an online version of its signature image manipulation program, Photoshop.

Dubbed Photoshop Express, the service may have sounded a death knell for competing online image products. Adobe has years of branding and thousands of designers weaned on their desktop Photoshop software; the term “photoshop” has come to mean image manipulation.

Those factors will be in play as Adobe seeks users for the new service. To bring them in, Adobe offers 2GB of image storage, tie-ins to social networking sites Facebook and MySpace, and a price tag of free,

Adobe Photoshop senior product manager John Nack said there will be a paid service, with added functionality. Also, Adobe plans an AIR version of Photoshop Express, which will allow offline image editing.

Adobe’s Terry White summarized the feature set the new Photoshop Express available to its users:

Once you set up your account, you

Flickr Seals Deal To Add Editing Tools

Doug Caverly — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 20:19:42 +0000

I’ve browsed Flickr enough to know that the site is home to some fantastic photographers. But in the event those photographers don’t get things quite right on the first try, Flickr has entered a deal with Picnik to add picture-editing capabilities.

Don’t expect anything too fancy – professionals aren’t likely to abandon their software suite of choice. Still, the deal should bring all the basic options aboard, and Picnik has a relatively large and enthusiastic fan base.

“Picnik was one of the first photo editing sites out there and has done a great job of distinguishing itself,” notes ZDNet’s Ryan Stewart. “It was one of the first applications built for Facebook and has been gaining users at a steady clip. I always wondered how they were going to make money but between the premium accounts and this partnership, it sounds like the company is well on its way. The Picnik team has done a great job and this is very well deserved.”

The exact details of the partnership are unknown, however, so it’s hard to say just how much money this might put in Picnik’s pockets. It’s also difficult to guess when the integration will be finished, but neither company is apt to drag its feet.

Just last week, Flickr announced plans to improve its geotagging abilities, as well.

Google Becoming Wikipedia Without the Talk Page

Aaron Wall — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:35:01 +0000

In a recent post about paid links, Danny Sullivan wrote about how Google’s army of engineers are going to start hand editing PageRank scores if they think you are selling links, which is a move that wreaks of desperation.

Google is only decreasing the PageRank for a subset of the sites they actually know about. …

Google stressed, by the way, that the current set of PageRank decreases is not assigned completely automatically; the majority of these decreases happened after a human review. That should help prevent false matches from happening so easily.

In contrast, if you’re a smaller site not deemed as important to relevancy, a harsher punishment of a ranking penalty may be dealt out.

Introducing the New, Corporate Web

If they actually follow through with any of this then Google, which touts the value of PageRank, clearly no longer believes in its value. They already show stale data in their toolbar, and might as well scrap the whole thing and start fresh. Their mind control exercise is getting a bit obnoxious.

Now they are editing PageRank and relevancy scores. They don’t edit based on quality of information but based on method of promotion. And if it is a corporation breaking Google’s arbitrary shifting ruleset then Google simply decides not to edit, or only fakes that they care.

Google is Wikipedia, but Worse

With this news of more hand editing, Google also shows that they are biased against small webmasters are and actively trying to screw over small webmasters to increase their corporate profits.

Google is becoming much like the Wikipedia, where generalists wrongly assume topical knowledge greater than that of the real topical experts. In some cases Wikipedia is saved by talk pages and community participation that allow the experts to be heard. Google has no talk page though, which means that Google search results will become a dried out and dumbed down version of the web.

The Real Problem With Half Truths & Hand Editing

The response to every move is a counter move. So if they actually try to squash link buying then webmasters will look for indirect ways to purchase links. Google also offers tips on how to sculpt PageRank, but sculpt to much and suddenly the intent is changed, and you are banned.

Why leave such a thing up to a single Google engineer making a judgement call? If they want to increase the quality of the web they need to be more innovative in encouraging the creation of good content, not make people afraid to invest into creating content only to watch a Google engineer kill it.

Link bait is good when you are a large corporation or are syndicating Google spin, but if you are too successful at link bait they will ban your site for it. They did it to one of my sites and they even banned one of their own site.

If you are a small webmaster and get judged by Google don’t expect compassion. They have no talk page, and they already paid an AdSense publisher to steal all your content. They don’t need you.

How to Do Well in Google

If you are a webmaster assume that Google is lying to you and ignore them. If their view of the web and webmaster advice are reduced to half truths and lies then we can only hope something a bit more honest will come out of their downfall.

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Wikipedia To Test Editing Restrictions

Doug Caverly — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 15:50:52 +0000

Some people love Wikipedia, some people hate it, and pretty much everybody knows better than to cite it as a source. A new editing system aims to make the online encyclopedia a bit more reliable, however.

The arrangement will allow only “trusted” users to make instant edits to articles; edits made by other users will need to be reviewed by those trusted individuals. New Scientist Tech reports, “To earn this trusted status, users will have to show some commitment to Wikipedia, by making 30 edits in 30 days, say.”

These restrictions will not have an immediate effect on Wikipedia.org – the system is only going to be tested, and it’s only going to be tested in Germany. A successful run could lead to implementation in the States and elsewhere, though.

As for the odds of its success . . . The system is likely to cut down on the appearance of vulgarities and outright misinformation. But there’s the whole balance-of-power-and-bias issue to consider, and limiting edits could slow Wikipedia down (no more instant updates on current events) and discourage participation.

Making Wikipedia more reliable would be a good thing. The site’s leaders will just have to be very careful about how they accomplish this goal.

Sony Busted Editing Halo 3 Wikipedia Entry

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 22:56:28 +0000

Virgil Griffith’s Wikiscannner has helped uncover some new naughtiness by Sony, this time involving Wikipedia and a forthcoming competitor’s game title.

Sony Busted Editing Halo 3 Wikipedia Entry

Halo 3 might be the most anticipated shooter for Microsoft’s gaming console ever since the original Halo helped gamers everywhere rationalize purchasing the first Xbox. In the competitive world of video games, not everyone shares that enthusiasm.

Not everyone tries to tweak Wikipedia to downplay a rival’s game title, though. Sony has been caught doing just that, according to Ars Technica:

The contributor claims that Halo 3′s graphics won’t look much better than Halo 2, citing a Time story from March. Page 52, if you’d like to look it up.

For some crazy reason MaxConsole ran the IP itself and isolated the IP range to a particular place: SCEE’s Liverpool offices. Someone at Sony isn’t too happy with the state of Halo 3′s graphics, and they want to talk about it.

MaxConsole said, “Sony added “Halo 3 won’t look any better than Halo 2″ to the entry, although the page has been corrected and locked from further alterations.”

Though Ars Technica writer Ben Kuchera said the minor edit does have a credible source, “If I were working for any of the big three (console makers) I’d be telling my employees to stay away from Wikipedia. It just doesn’t look good when stuff like this comes out.”

No Love Between Wikipedia And Overstock

Greg Howlett — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 19:39:08 +0000

More bizarre news from Overstock. Now, Wikipedia has apparently banned them from editing on their site. This comes after a long history of alleged blantant advertising and other nefarious actions by Overstock on Wikipedia.

For an internet retailer that has such a large profile, it seems inexcusable for Overstock to continue to engages in PR suicide. What in the world is going on over there?

For what it is worth, the Overstock model makes great business sense to me. We have talked to them before, and if they did more business in our sector, we would consider partnering with them. It blows my mind that they cannot seem to get profitable.

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WordPress – Extra Text Editing

Thomas McMahon — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 22:12:26 +0000

A client asked me today for more control in their WordPress control panel. Specifically, when posting they wanted to control the font sizes, colors and do a bit more. As a designer I always freak at that question as I think the code is going to be filled with massive amounts of font tags and out of order strong tags and ohhh the madness. But, then again, maybe I’m overreacting.

So, I did some researching and came up with one possible idea, Xinha4WP. It’s a WordPress plugin that replaces the default text editor with a much more advanced version. It also needs the Text Control plugin to work so you need to install that too.

Xinha4WP gives bloggers many features including all font control (sizes and colors), tables, additional smilies, special characters and few more items. The coolest thing is the maximize button that lets you make the editor the size if your browser window.

The downside is that it is a rather large plugin weighing in at 5.5mb. It is also showing up above the built in WordPress editor widow. This is not ideal to have two editor windows especially since the default WordPress one is ignored. This could be a conflict with the video pugin they using too. Not sure.

I’ve also recommended to the client some desktop blogging software that may give added control while not giving to much away. Like ScribeFire, Etco or Flock to name a few.

Personally, I don’t think I’d ever use Xinha4WP and Text Control, however others might find it quite useful. At the same time, I don’t usually have the need for altering text sizes and colors that often. It’ll be interesting to hear back from the client after a few weeks of use to see how they felt the plugin performed.

Do you require more control than the default WordPress editor gives you? If so, what do you use?

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Google Scares Up Free Photoshop

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 18:17:46 +0000

You may be tired of hearing about Google by now. This article is actually about how Adobe plans to create a free Web-based version of Photoshop. But Google’s the reason they’re doing it. Google’s the reason anybody’s doing anything online. That company just can’t seem to find a pair of britches that fit.

Google Scares Up Free Photoshop

Martin LaMonica and Mike Ricciuti over at CNet chatted up Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen, who said the company is taking its Photoshop product online before Google can shove its big butt in the way.

The Web-version of Photoshop, which is to launch sometime within the next six months, will follow a model Google has proven works, and works better than a lot of people thought it would – it will be an advertising supported server-based application.

Just last week, Adobe laid down a precursor to this with its Remix video editing mashup for Photobucket. The most telling quote from the CNet article:

It’s something we are sensitive to because we are watching folks like Google do it in different categories, and we want to make sure that we are there before they are, in areas of our franchises," Chizen said.

This isn’t to say Adobe is abandoning its flagship off-the-shelf software. From the sound of it, Adobe plans to make its Photoshop Web-version just enough better than other Web-based photo applications to get people using it instead of…Picasa, for example.

For the scores of publications, designers, and photographic artistes out there, insistent upon top shelf (i.e., not common) tools, there’s sure to be a more enhanced version you have to actually get from a store. Besides, as Chizen notes, there are a number of things that need to be done without that annoying Internet lag.

Adobe’s new strategy may be a lesson to other companies still waiting to see if the Web is a viable marketplace for their product. It is viable, and if you wait too long, companies like Google are going to beat you to it.

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