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October 18, 2008 — terry33

Please let me know what you think of www.tvsmarter.com

And suggestions are most appreciated !

Also, if you prefer emailing to commenting, my email address is:  terry “at” tvsmarter.com

         
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2 Responses to “Feedback”

  1. Martyn Strong Says:
    June 5, 2009 at 12:17 pm

    Would a video filter that changed “cuts” to fadeout / fade-in help reduce the problem with TV? We now have the technology to make such a filter.

    Reply
  2. terry33 Says:
    June 6, 2009 at 10:07 pm

    Hi Martyn

    “Would a video filter that changed “cuts” to fadeout / fade-in
    help reduce the problem with TV?”

    That’s an interesting question. Perhaps it would help…

    According to the Scientific American article “Television Addiction
    Is No Mere Metaphor”:

    “Lang and her colleagues have also investigated whether
    formal features affect people’s memory of what they have
    seen. In one of their studies, participants watched a
    program and then filled out a score sheet. Increasing
    the frequency of edits–defined here as a change from
    one camera angle to another in the same visual scene–improved
    memory recognition, presumably because it focused attention
    on the screen. Increasing the frequency of cuts–changes
    to a new visual scene–had a similar effect but only up
    to a point. If the number of cuts exceeded 10 in two
    minutes, recognition dropped off sharply.”

    Regarding brain effects, the big problem with TV is when
    the cuts exceed 10 cuts in 2 minutes.

    10 cuts in 2 minutes works out to an average of a cut
    every 12 seconds (120 seconds / 10). Next time you
    watch a TV show, count how many seconds there are
    between cuts. You’ll notice that most shows exceed
    10 cuts in 2 minutes. In fact it is hard to find a
    TV show or movies that does not exceed 10 cuts in
    2 minutes. A cut every 3 to 6 seconds is much more
    common.

    So, would “fadeout/fade-in help reduce the problem
    with TV?”

    I think the fact that a fadeout/fade-in is slower
    than a cut would mean that if a show had fadeout/fade-ins
    at the same frequency as they do cuts, that people
    would find the effect very annoying.

    So, it would seem to me, that if a director was
    forced to just use fadeout/fade-ins that that would
    lead to fewer fadeout/fade-in just because of the
    annoyance factor. And that that would lead to
    fewer Orienting Response activations, which would
    lead to a more involved brain.

    But of course, this is just speculation on my part.
    For a real answer, the experiment would have to
    be done !

    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=0005339B-A694-1CC5-B4A8809EC588EEDF&page=2

    http://www.commercialalert.org/news/archive/2002/02/television-addiction-is-no-mere-metaphor

    Reply

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