Dear Cinemetrics Users!
Naum Kleiman sent me this wonderful Byblical drawing by Eisenstein complete with Holiday greetings, which I forward to you all, adding mine:
Date: 2022-08-27 Posted by: Yuri Tsivian
Excellent News
after a year-plus of searching, we were fortunate to find a dream team of IT experts who agreed to restore the FACT tool we lost to the Remove-Flash-from-Browsers campaign and make the Classic tool Mac-User-friendly. Here is an exerpts from the agreement signed today.
"Third North Technologies LLC will develop a Google Chrome extension enabling users to navigate through a film, capture timestamps, and transmit that data to an existing MySQL database.
Developer Deliverables The principal deliverable will be the Chrome extension. Expected features are: 1. User may play a video file stored on user’s machine. 2. User may navigate through the video file at frame-by-frame increments. 3. User may place timestamps at any point in the file. 4. User may input sufficient film metadata for identification: title; year of release; director; country of origin. 5. User may save data, and re-open to continue, at any time; user should be able to re-open an in-progress submission, restoring markers previously placed, to continue the work. 6. User may upload completed data to the existing Cinemetrics database. 7. User may access the extension and make use of the features when not connected to the internet (data will be saved locally as work continues and uploaded to the database upon reconnection). 8. Users will be able to use the tool in both “start-and-stop mode” (using the video player controls) and in “continuous mode” (without using the video player; for example, the user places timestamps while viewing a film in a theater or television set). An additional deliverable will be a written and illustrated tutorial, preferably including a video with instructions how to best use the various features of the toolkit."
Date: 2022-08-09 Posted by: Yuri Tsivian
In the first week of August, a number of data were submitted to Cinemetrics that have no film title (except acronyms like A or TPQS) and year marked, These may be legitimate tests, or a bunch or robotic scams. I have deleted those, as we usually do with submissions missing essential metadata.
Date: 2022-06-03 Posted by: Yuri Tsivian
CINEMETRICS working again.
I'm so sorry for that service interruption last night. It seems our sysadmin Peter was performing some quick maintenance yesterday afternoon, and Adam attempted his submission in that very brief window. There ideally shouldn't be any lingering issues.
Date: 2022-06-02 Posted by: Yuri Tsivian
SUBMISSION ALERT:
One of the Alluder team guys, Adam Peterson, tried his hand for the first time to submit a movie to Cinemetrics, and the system foiled him (see details below);
From: Adam Peterson <adam@alluder.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 2, 2022 5:18 PM
To: Yuri Tsivian <ytsivian@uchicago.edu>
Yuri, I'm sad to report that my first experience with Cinemetrics ended unsuccessfully.
I watched The Night House (2020) and recorded every cut. However, when I submitted the information I experienced a long submission wait time (screenshot below), then was notified my submission was unsuccessful, after which the application crashed and my data was lost.
Adam
Having received Adam’s message, I ran a quick test and got the same “unsuccessful” reply:
I tried the database, and the database works as usual.
IF YOU ARE PLANNING TO SUBMIT NEW DATA TO CINEMETRICS PLEASE MAKE SURE YOUR DATA ARE SAFE BEFORE YOU HIS "SUBMIT" OR WAIT TILL THE PROBLEM IS SOLVED.
Date: 2022-05-21 Posted by: Yuri Tsivian
Wonderful news! Cinemetrics has a younger sister, named Alluder. While its task is usefully broader than Cinemetrics', one can use Alluder for calculating cut frequency as well. I leanded of Alluder's existence from this email from its creator:
Hi Professor Tsivian,
My name is Aaron Peterson and I'm an undergrad at New York University.
About a year and a half ago, my brother and I formed an idea to create a chrome extension that would allow film researchers and makers to create time-stamped annotations to be used for research and collaborative purposes. We called it Alluder (our first idea was to point out every allusion in a film) and have since published it on the chrome store.
This semester, I've been busy upgrading it with features and showing it to both students and professors. One professor I showed it to yesterday told me it reminded her of Cinemetrics. Being unfamiliar with the tool, I used it last night and made a submission (3:10 to Yuma).
While Alluder doesn't provide the same ability to track shots as Cinemetrics does, I think it could and I'd very much like to connect to hear your thoughts and see if I could be helpful.
I'm also going to include a video I made for a film and tv class I presented to last week to demo Alluder.
Look forward to hearing your thoughts and thank you for your time.
Best,
Aaron
Date: 2021-12-24 Posted by: Yuri Tsivian
Happy Holidays to all Cinemetricians!
Yuri
Date: 2021-09-13 Posted by: Yuri Tsivian
Good news: our field is advancing, slowly bur surely. In August, I got this email from Barry Salt: "Dear Yuri,
I have got another piece out in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities in the advance articles online form of that journal, dated 21 May 2021. Lord knows when and if they will put it on paper. Anyway I attach it for you, and it is available for everyone on the starword.com website. That is the important thing. It contains a new metric."
Indeed, a break-trhough thing, titled "The end of the Great Speed-Up." Just click and download. Another good news is that a study of editing by James E. Cutting, mostly researched on Cinemetrics, is out from Oxford University Press: Movies on Our Minds: The Evolution of Cinematic Engagement. Take a look here.
Date: 2021-05-24 Posted by: Yuri Tsivian
A new original study has been added to the section "Cinemetrics of Film Style: Case Studies" in the Mesurement Theory tab:
"The evolution of form in Andrei Tarkovsky's films" by Filippo Schillaci
Take a look, it's really interesting as far as its methods and results.
Date: 2021-03-29 Posted by: Yuri Tsivian
Good news from China:
I just happened to get a message from Shanghai from Prof. 龙井问茶, who had organized and supervised a crash course in Cinemetrics I taught for 4 weeks at one of Guangzhou universities in 2017. Yang has just translated into Chinese and published two essays on Cinemetrics and reports on the growing demand for more Cinemetrics-related literature and cinemetrics-informed teaching. (He was stopped by Covid on the tracks of organizing a conference in Cinemetrics at the Shanghai Normal University, and will go on if we all live). I paste Yang’s account below—not just to boast (that too), like some kind of Marco Polo, of our outreach, but because we just succeeded in hiring a Chinese student, Kevin Cao, to redsign the FACT tool disable by the demise of Flash software. See below…
From: 龙井问茶 <57599625@qq.com>
Sent: Monday, March 29, 2021 2:07 AM
To: Yuri Tsivian <ytsivian@uchicago.edu>
Subject: for the permsion of translation and publication of the essay “A Numerate Film History?"
Dear Yuri,
I am write to tell you that Cinemetrics has genarated more and more warmly discussions science two of you and Barry Salt’s essays translated in Chinese and published in Contemporary Cinema ( “Cinemetrics, Part of the Humanities’ Cyberinfrastructure”;“Statistical Style Analysis of Motion Pictures”). Some have begun to use Cinemetrics as a tool in their Chinese film studies. But my plan to hold (or co-hold with you) an international conference on Cinemetrics has been delayed by covid-19.
I appreciated you two very much for your generous permission for the translation and publication. I am sure that’s the first time for Cinemetrics to appear in Chinese film study journals. Many readers and researchers tell me that they want to know much more about Cinemetrics, some scholars ask me if I can introduce more about it.
Do you remember that last time you mentioned the essay “A Numerate Film History? Cinemetrics Looks at Griffith, Griffith Looks at Cinemetrics,”which I have read many times. Would you please help me get the permission from the authors, including yourself and your wife Daria, for its translation in Chinese and publication in Journal of Guizhou University(Art)? Due to the poor financial status of academic journal, the payments would be poor too. But I would try to pay compensation to the authors in other ways, when I get a chance.
With many thanks and good wishes,
Yang
Shanghai Normal University, China