I don't know the show, but when I first watched this clip (under the title of "greatest shot on television") I totally bought in to the hype and thought it really was amazing. You start out just walking alongside him, and only slowly realize where you are and what is about to happen, and everything is perfectly timed and composed: he ends his walk, reaches the conclusion of his explanation, and you realize what is going on, all at the exact time the launch begins. Brilliant!
Except that this is not "a shot" at all. I just hadn't noticed on my first watch that there's a very obvious cut just at the end of the "walk". It's a different angle from a different location at a different time of day, and he just has one sentence to say before he looks back at the blast off.
It would be no different from any news reporter on location at the time, reading a prepared message ahead of the launch, timed to end before the launch itself with no need for extensive rehearsals, the launch timing is widely broadcast, you time yourself accordingly with your talking speed, by adding pauses, etc. And on top of everything they probably had to do it live too.
I have no issue with James Burke or his show. And this scene is really beautifully done. But it's not the greatest shot in television. It's not even one shot!
I always love this video, and I have been a lifetime dedicated fan of James Burke, but few seem to note that the whole segment didn't have to be timed as there is a cut shortly before the launch. If I recall either James or one of the producers talked about it once. They knew they had to start the last bit 13 seconds before launch and had practiced it repeatedly. At 13 seconds to countdown James nailed it. I'm sure even after practicing it I would have stumbled over a word in the clutch moment!
It would appear that this was the Titan IIIE which launched Voyager 2. They would have had another chance to get the shot about two weeks later when Voyager 1 launched. (Due to quirks of interplanetary orbital mechanics, Voyager 1 got to Jupiter several months before Voyager 2 despite launching second).
The IIIE did indeed have a Centaur stage with a "thermos" full of liquid hydrogen and another with liquid oxygen, but that's not what we see in this clip -- the pillars of fire and smoke come from a pair of solid-fuel boosters that burn for about two minutes, followed by about six more minutes of flight powered by two more stages burning non-cryogenic liquid propellants (hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide) before the Centaur was ignited.
Decades ago, I worked a mission that went up on a Titan IV, and I spent a few weeks at Pad 41 working in the IUS clean room. Riding up and down the tower in the rickety (self operated) elevator was frightening. Walking the gantry and looking out at CCAS, you could see for miles in all directions. Standing under the thrust cones was an amazing experience. Unfortunately, no photos were allowed because it was a classified mission. All I got were a few stupid tee shirts.
About 15 years earlier, I had done some work at the VAB and walked around the Saturn IV that was laying on its side there, just as James Burke had a few years earlier. It wasn't there when I worked the above referenced mission. I'm not sure when they moved it, or where it ended up (but it's not in the "rocket garden" at the Visitor Center).
Do you mean a Saturn IV-B? Those were the third stages of the Saturn V. If so, the complete Saturn V was displayed horizontally outdoors for quite a while. I was in the US in 2018 and stopped by KSC too see a Falcon 9 launch, by then the complete Saturn V was in a building.
If you mean just the Saturn IV (no B), that was the second stage of some early Saturn rocket. I don't know much about those or if one was ever on display.
For those wondering, it's actually quite common that two spacecraft launched that way (if two spacecraft are launched, which is not common) would arrive out of order. The reason is that you can think of a "launch window" as really a specific ideal launch time, but a little earlier or later will also work, although being early or later would result in arriving at the destination later. They aim to launch the first spacecraft right at the opening of the window, so if there is any delay they won't run out of time. If it launches "on time", then it actually launched early for the launch window, and takes longer to get there. The second launch right after then launches closer to the actual ideal launch date.
Cuts from the speaker to some background footage, then back to the speaker, are a very useful technique. They can be used to lie, too, of course (cut from the interviewee's face to the interviewer, then back to the interviewee, and you can cut out context that changes the meaning of what was said). But when used with no deception in mind, they can really enhance a powerful moment. And this was a perfect example of it: no deception at all, just a wonderful visual image that makes an impact on the viewer.
Yes, but the YouTube ed channels are such a treasure in and of itself. We had the “tech” to produce content like this for almost a century, but it took the Internet and democratization of content creation to come up with gems like smarter every day, veritasium, extra history, etc
My fear is that this is also being reshaped with ai, mostly for good now but I feel like the personal touch and passion of these creators is being diluted with the advent of generated content.
Maybe we are in a valley of the uncanny valley and the ai tools will become so good that they can successfully translate someone’s passionate vision faithfully, then it could be another renaissance.
Any particular recommendations? I’ve been meaning to queue some up to have in the background playing when the kids are around hoping to stumble across something that that might pique their interests
In among all the MrBeasts and JackSepticEyes on Youtube there are some incredibly creative people.
Two that my 5-year-old loves are OddAnimalSpecimens who could easily have been on BBC children's programming in the 1980s, and Terragreen who would have been his ITV counterpart :-)
Probably the most entertaining child-friendly programme you can watch right now is whatever Jake Carlini is doing. Some wee guy in a house in Austin, Texas is coming up with better stories, better production values, and better life values than any of the "proper" children's TV productions, except maybe Sesame Street.
Thanks for the recommendations - I’m also big fan of 3blue1brown and PBS science, but as a recent dad am on lookout for content for my son to watch when he comes of that age - he’s just 1month now, hopefully by that time AI has not enshittyfied everything
We're a multilingual household, so another that gets a lot of love is Sendung mit der Maus which was originally a TV series but now is on Youtube as well - including some very old episodes. My son's German is way better than mine though, and these days so is his Gaelic - mostly I deal with people in English and I've kind of started to lose that skill.
If you like big 4x4s (and who doesn't?) then Matt's Off Road Recovery is pretty good. Utah looks lovely, and of course they're culturally fairly free of rude words so that's pretty okay for children.
Quiet Nerd is another of my son's favourites, he builds little electric-powered campers and drives them out into the woods near where he lives.
Modern audiences are expected to be glued to twelve different things at once. Producers are being told to adjust to this reality. Watch any movie now and they are all compensating for the distracted audience.
Movies used to be watched in a place for that purpose. Now its the toilet. Now the phone itself is ringing. A message comes in. Time to upgrade. Ding! All while some key scene in the movie is taking place.
Even Golden Age TV documentaries can seem dumbed down compared to actual books. Even at the time, in the 1960s and 1970s, thinkers expressed concern that the medium of television was inherently likely to delight audiences with spectacle more than truly educate them.
My parents have a book published in 1849, "The Chemistry of Modern Life" and it's interesting to see how they transition very deliberately between "technical" and then "dumbed-down" descriptions of things.
It's as jarring as Star Trek's habit of "30 seconds of technobabble followed by a metaphor involving a balloon" trope they keep hammering.
> Perhaps it's just me, but modern documentaries are rather dumbed down?
It's not just you. Most modern TV documentaries, especially series, are dumbed down and sped up. Fast cuts, lots of woo, not too much to challenge your brain, don't want it to get strained.
Gone are the days where someone conveyed the information calmly while not driving a car somewhere irrelevant. No more lingering shots allowing you to process what you just saw and heard.
Thats because we have a trove of in depth specialist and deep youtube content including all those old documentaries to mine through these days
Youtube and the internet is a goldmine and way bigger than old 80s/90s content, im over 50 and remember the 80s well enough.. a few great well produced documentaries are not a comparable to gigabytes or petabytes of videos and podcasts we have today
The cultural format of exchange has changed and the consequences of that - so called tiktok attention deficit folks means perhaps no one watches this content but I think that too is a generalization and great content is watched probably by a greater proportion of smart curious people today than back in the 80s on your phone nonetheless- we have a pocket tv with an almost unlimited amount of content
Im an information junkie and just today I spent 3 hours watching a documentary series on the incan civilization follower by a Stanford video on LLMs and then watching Blaise Arcas’s interesting ideas on computational life and intelligence
Is that to be the end result of the pursuit of knowledge, creating something? There is the true dumbing down, insisting on a vague kind of productivity as the point of life.
I feel it myself, I am dumbed down too. Having trouble even formulating this as I never type formally anymore.
Our state TV SVT buys in documentaries from BBC, Showtime, PBS and some of their own production. Some of their own are still good. The BBC ones are absolute garbage dumbed down now.
The world the aristocrats warned about in the 60s and 70s are here now.
>Perhaps it's just me, but modern documentaries are rather dumbed down?
A pet peeve of mine is the sound effects added to nature documentaries. I had to explain, once, that the ants do not actually sound like robots no matter how far you zoom in, despite the whirring of servos that the editors decided to add in.
It still holds up for the most part, though of course some of the takes, being almost 50 years old, may seem a bit quaint. It's certainly worth watching the first series at least start to finish. Burke is an interesting guy.
I personally feel like _The Day The Universe Changed_ (his second documentary) is better. I love Connections but the basic thesis (there are hidden connections between disparate developments in science and technology) ends up pretty scattershot, spreading out like Brownian Motion. _tDtUC_ is much more focused. Largely based on Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ for individual stories, it traces how the understanding of time in Europe changed from the middle ages to the 1980's- the idea of time as a marker of descent from a previous golden age (1), or at best a repeating cycle, evolves into our modern conception of time as endlessly improving into a better future. And the supporting book was amazing too.
I also want to speak up for the BBC history documentary team that worked with Michael Wood: _In Search of the Trojan War_, _In Search of the Dark Ages_, _The Story of England_, _The Story of India_ they were also a staple of American PBS and informed my understanding of the world.
1: My go to example for this is imagine you walk into the Pantheon in 1000 AD: no one on your entire continent has known how to build a dome like that in 500 years, and won't again for another 500 years. The fundamental way you understand the world has to be completely different from the "newer is better" baseline that we have understood the world by for the past 150 years.
Second the comment re the day the universe changed, and found the episode on how Islamic Spain influenced the world quite surprising. Think it was the 2nd one, starting with two competing views of the world from African Roman scholars/clerics.
Many of these older docu’s wanted you to stop and think.
> "I love Connections but the basic thesis (there are hidden connections between disparate developments in science and technology)..."
Good grief, no. The basic thesis of Connections 1 was that humanity has become fatally dependent on technology (the "technology trap" he speaks of), that that dependence continues getting deeper and deeper, and it's hard to predict what technologies will emerge or where technology will take us, possibly utopia but just as likely a living hell, and finally that we don't even have the option to stop digging ourselves deeper and deeper into the technology trap because technological advancement can't be stopped because its emergence is unpredictable. Re-watch just the first and last episodes and they will terrify you.
Connections 2 and 3 were indeed scattershot because people liked Burke's charming mannerisms and didn't want to think about the ever more complex and ever more fragile panoply of technologies that individuals, even the technologists themselves, can neither understand nor control that is all that stands between humanity and its extinction.
I first saw Connections in the late 2000s... the final scene of the last episode, "inside the British Airways computer" (an entire floor of a large building), had me standing on my couch pointing at the screen.
A year or two before I was born, James Burke wandered between mainframes and reel-to-reel tape machines, speaking with extraordinary prescience about data, communications, decision-making systems, and power:
"This is the future. Because if you tell a computer everything you know about something, it will juggle the mix, and come up with a prediction. Do this, and you'll get that. And if you have information and a computer, you too can look into the future. And that is power. Commercial power, political power, power to change things."
I'm going to watch that scene again, because it's even more important 20 years further along: smart phones, "big data", large language models, Palantir...
It really grinds my gears that the uploader had to ruin the "Greatest Shot in Television" by stretching the 4:3 video to 16:9.
I know I sound like a pedant but so many of these old TV recordings are uploaded this way on youtube. I was so annoyed by this infact that a few years ago I made a dumb extension that squeezes the video element back to 4:3 [1]. I'm not sure if this still works though.
A question about aspect ratio on youtube, Does it care? or can you put whatever aspect ratio you want, I guess my complaint is that I don't see nearly enough (none) square video on the site.
YouTube, as well as any decent player, plays any aspect ratio video, even portrait mode.
As an uploader you should never add black bars (if they are in the source, crop them out before uploading) and of course never distort the video. This ensures the best playback experience for all devices.
In an ideal world yes. In practice, the YouTube layout looks weird on aspect ratios that aren't 4:3 or 16:9. If you upload any vertical video it gets categorized as a short, so that's out of the window - and even for things like 21:9 you get a teeny tiny player on desktop since it just fits the width.
Yes, there are some YouTube-manufactured issues. However it bothers me more when I try to watch a 21:9 video fullscreen on my 21:9 display and get black bars on all four sides.
Ah yes, the good old "shot in portrait mode, converted to 16:9 with added black bars, and then displayed under YT shorts in portrait mode again" category on youtube. This is almost artistic at this point. Sometimes I wonder how small can the content of a video get before people will stop watching it. Is there any research on this?
AFAIK youtube will stretch the player window to match the aspect ratio of the source media, lots of cinematic content that's a wider than normal (21:9 I think?) ratio that youtube adjusts the player window to fit around without black bars.
They won't ever squash or stretch video though, so this means the original uploader stretched the 4:3 content to 16:9 at some point before upload
I think it will show in whatever aspect ratio you upload.
It cares about overall pixel size, and for example standard 720x576 standard def 4:3 video will be brutally compressed compared to the exact same video upscaled using any non-AI upscaler (even nearest-neighbour) to 1440x1080.
I dug into this a bit a while ago, and could probably post my finding here if anyone was interested.
It doesn’t compare to this shot, but I particularly enjoyed the one episode of the The Studio with Seth Rogan where it starts with him driving to a filming location where they were going to do a one shot scene and he was explaining to someone how difficult they are to pull off, etc.
The episode was funny (although cringey too) for the things that happened in it.
But what was quite clever I thought was that the episode was itself done (at least seemingly) in one-shot.
I remember on a podcast interview I listened to that he said he intentionally made every episode as close to a “oner” as possible using very long takes and hidden transitions where possible.
It’s to heighten the sense of anxiety and tension for the viewer in order to amplify the comedy.
I strongly encourage all HN readers to seek out any of his work online. Including the meta, where he tasks about being hired for the job, and the approach he took to communicating. Although some of it will look a little dated, the messages are timeless.
I watched this show religiously as a kid (by then in reruns in the early 90s), along with Star Trek: TNG, Jeopardy, and playing Civilization for PC. The most formative years of my life were spent absorbing as much science, technology, and history as my growing brain could muster. I think that's why I'd grown up to be so optimistic about the future.
I think there's still a lot of room for optimism, despite all of the pessimism in the media, and I'm not even talking about AI. There are a ton of other things which have benefitted enormously from ubiquitous, efficient, and powerful computing that hardly get talked about anymore, we've come to take it all for granted.
The very first episode of Connections walks through might happen in New York City if power went out and never came back on. Pretty much an apocalyptic scenario for people living there!
He didn’t shy away from talking about technology for good or ill, for the ways it liberates us but can also trap us, for the ways it makes new sources of energy possible, and new weapons.
Could have just been intercontinental ballistic human transport... I can't tell you how many times I've wished to just be fired out of a cannon to Hong Kong from SF.
He's even clearer about it in the last episode of season 1, where he assembles all the inventions from the season and shows how they make the US nuclear triad.
In the 80’s I worked for a radio station in Asheville NC. That allowed us to get press passes to launches at the cape. I was in the press area for 2 shuttle launches including the very first night launch of the Space Shuttle. They launched right after an incredible thunderstorm had rolled through. I’m old now but still remember it like it was yesterday. Incredible to see in person.
I’d also mention the ascent of the Apollo 17 LM. The camera could be commanded to move up to follow the ascent, but the command had to be given ahead of time, from the MOCR, to coincide with the launch, which was commanded from the LM. The audio from the LM was delayed, as was the video from the camera, and the command would take about a second to reach the camera on the moon.
I loved Connections so much as a kid, but I'm so tired of this clip. There's so many better clips from this show.
So he nailed a 13 second countdown. Who cares? Newscasters do this at every commercial break. Sports announcers do this without a script and they still nail the cut to commercial almost every time. Yes, there's a talent to timing your speech to a countdown in your ear, but it's a talent that people do thousands of times a day around the world on far less preparation than Burke had here.
The fact that this article calls a simple cut a "sleight of hand" just terrifies me. Does the public really not know what editing is?
I absolutely adore both Burke and the Connections series, and without a doubt this is a lovely shot, but I feel the same: I don't get the hype. It's been memefied to death for no real reason. There's no incredible feat involved. It wasn't a tightrope walk without a net live on air. You can bet they had stand-in footage done before that they could have made a montage of in case Burke stumbled a line.
I suppose it's like a magic trick. It's less impressive once you understand how it all works. But still, it's clearly effective and you can admire the artistry.
If it gets someone to watch the show for the first time then that's a win in my book. I think every young student should be exposed to Connections at various stages of their education.
I love this style of documentary, I feel like we had it even when I was a kid in the 90s - 00s and as an adult in the 10s, but now is totally a dead style.
Sadly, it is not produced anymore. The producers chase a style and person that no longer exist, so they get their panties in a twist and make TikTok style and "true crime" style interviews is all I see from newer documentaries sadly. Women love "true crime" so 50% of new docus are just true crime drama slop.
I used to watch all or most of our state TV ones but they are no longer as good (They do some of their own buy buy in most from BBC, Showtime and PBS.)
I have been watching World at War and The World at War and such. Should watch Civilization and How should we then live?
I grew up watching Cosmos and Connections (and a bunch of stupid prime time on the one TV in the house and something like 5 clear channel [PBS being the best]).
This is my pet peeve.
I don't know the show, but when I first watched this clip (under the title of "greatest shot on television") I totally bought in to the hype and thought it really was amazing. You start out just walking alongside him, and only slowly realize where you are and what is about to happen, and everything is perfectly timed and composed: he ends his walk, reaches the conclusion of his explanation, and you realize what is going on, all at the exact time the launch begins. Brilliant!
Except that this is not "a shot" at all. I just hadn't noticed on my first watch that there's a very obvious cut just at the end of the "walk". It's a different angle from a different location at a different time of day, and he just has one sentence to say before he looks back at the blast off.
It would be no different from any news reporter on location at the time, reading a prepared message ahead of the launch, timed to end before the launch itself with no need for extensive rehearsals, the launch timing is widely broadcast, you time yourself accordingly with your talking speed, by adding pauses, etc. And on top of everything they probably had to do it live too.
I have no issue with James Burke or his show. And this scene is really beautifully done. But it's not the greatest shot in television. It's not even one shot!
(edited: typos)
If you want a single, unedited shot, Neil’s ladder descent would be a candidate. If you didn’t think Stanley actually did it.
I always love this video, and I have been a lifetime dedicated fan of James Burke, but few seem to note that the whole segment didn't have to be timed as there is a cut shortly before the launch. If I recall either James or one of the producers talked about it once. They knew they had to start the last bit 13 seconds before launch and had practiced it repeatedly. At 13 seconds to countdown James nailed it. I'm sure even after practicing it I would have stumbled over a word in the clutch moment!
It would appear that this was the Titan IIIE which launched Voyager 2. They would have had another chance to get the shot about two weeks later when Voyager 1 launched. (Due to quirks of interplanetary orbital mechanics, Voyager 1 got to Jupiter several months before Voyager 2 despite launching second).
The IIIE did indeed have a Centaur stage with a "thermos" full of liquid hydrogen and another with liquid oxygen, but that's not what we see in this clip -- the pillars of fire and smoke come from a pair of solid-fuel boosters that burn for about two minutes, followed by about six more minutes of flight powered by two more stages burning non-cryogenic liquid propellants (hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide) before the Centaur was ignited.
Decades ago, I worked a mission that went up on a Titan IV, and I spent a few weeks at Pad 41 working in the IUS clean room. Riding up and down the tower in the rickety (self operated) elevator was frightening. Walking the gantry and looking out at CCAS, you could see for miles in all directions. Standing under the thrust cones was an amazing experience. Unfortunately, no photos were allowed because it was a classified mission. All I got were a few stupid tee shirts.
About 15 years earlier, I had done some work at the VAB and walked around the Saturn IV that was laying on its side there, just as James Burke had a few years earlier. It wasn't there when I worked the above referenced mission. I'm not sure when they moved it, or where it ended up (but it's not in the "rocket garden" at the Visitor Center).
Do you mean a Saturn IV-B? Those were the third stages of the Saturn V. If so, the complete Saturn V was displayed horizontally outdoors for quite a while. I was in the US in 2018 and stopped by KSC too see a Falcon 9 launch, by then the complete Saturn V was in a building.
If you mean just the Saturn IV (no B), that was the second stage of some early Saturn rocket. I don't know much about those or if one was ever on display.
For those wondering, it's actually quite common that two spacecraft launched that way (if two spacecraft are launched, which is not common) would arrive out of order. The reason is that you can think of a "launch window" as really a specific ideal launch time, but a little earlier or later will also work, although being early or later would result in arriving at the destination later. They aim to launch the first spacecraft right at the opening of the window, so if there is any delay they won't run out of time. If it launches "on time", then it actually launched early for the launch window, and takes longer to get there. The second launch right after then launches closer to the actual ideal launch date.
I'm sure they had a second camera running without Burke in the shot so that they could dub over it if they messed up the shot, too.
Cuts from the speaker to some background footage, then back to the speaker, are a very useful technique. They can be used to lie, too, of course (cut from the interviewee's face to the interviewer, then back to the interviewee, and you can cut out context that changes the meaning of what was said). But when used with no deception in mind, they can really enhance a powerful moment. And this was a perfect example of it: no deception at all, just a wonderful visual image that makes an impact on the viewer.
I was amazed by the perfect timing. I realized, if you listen closely, there is commentary audio feed from the launch with countdown.
So knowing, the engines starts 3 seconds before liftoff, he was able to time the speech.
I saw this clip dozen of times, and only after keeping attention I realized this.
So with the cut technique, it seems like seamless feature, and that's the magic of the TV. Nevertheless amazing delivery.
The late 1970's were the golden age of documentaries: Connections, Cosmos, Civilization, The Ascent of Man and Attenborough's Life on Earth.
Perhaps it's just me, but modern documentaries are rather dumbed down?
As a side note: Quite ironic that he ends up pointing to a rocket propelled mostly by solid fuels.
Yes, but the YouTube ed channels are such a treasure in and of itself. We had the “tech” to produce content like this for almost a century, but it took the Internet and democratization of content creation to come up with gems like smarter every day, veritasium, extra history, etc
My fear is that this is also being reshaped with ai, mostly for good now but I feel like the personal touch and passion of these creators is being diluted with the advent of generated content.
Maybe we are in a valley of the uncanny valley and the ai tools will become so good that they can successfully translate someone’s passionate vision faithfully, then it could be another renaissance.
Any particular recommendations? I’ve been meaning to queue some up to have in the background playing when the kids are around hoping to stumble across something that that might pique their interests
The youtube channels are nowhere near the style and depth of documentaries like the ones above...
Check out Technology Connections. This is way, way, way more in depth than anything one can find on TV.
In among all the MrBeasts and JackSepticEyes on Youtube there are some incredibly creative people.
Two that my 5-year-old loves are OddAnimalSpecimens who could easily have been on BBC children's programming in the 1980s, and Terragreen who would have been his ITV counterpart :-)
Probably the most entertaining child-friendly programme you can watch right now is whatever Jake Carlini is doing. Some wee guy in a house in Austin, Texas is coming up with better stories, better production values, and better life values than any of the "proper" children's TV productions, except maybe Sesame Street.
Thanks for the recommendations - I’m also big fan of 3blue1brown and PBS science, but as a recent dad am on lookout for content for my son to watch when he comes of that age - he’s just 1month now, hopefully by that time AI has not enshittyfied everything
We're a multilingual household, so another that gets a lot of love is Sendung mit der Maus which was originally a TV series but now is on Youtube as well - including some very old episodes. My son's German is way better than mine though, and these days so is his Gaelic - mostly I deal with people in English and I've kind of started to lose that skill.
If you like big 4x4s (and who doesn't?) then Matt's Off Road Recovery is pretty good. Utah looks lovely, and of course they're culturally fairly free of rude words so that's pretty okay for children.
Quiet Nerd is another of my son's favourites, he builds little electric-powered campers and drives them out into the woods near where he lives.
Modern audiences are expected to be glued to twelve different things at once. Producers are being told to adjust to this reality. Watch any movie now and they are all compensating for the distracted audience.
Movies used to be watched in a place for that purpose. Now its the toilet. Now the phone itself is ringing. A message comes in. Time to upgrade. Ding! All while some key scene in the movie is taking place.
To that list I'd like to add Music of Man hosted by Yehudi Menuhin. His interview with Glenn Gould by itself is worth the price of admission!
Even Golden Age TV documentaries can seem dumbed down compared to actual books. Even at the time, in the 1960s and 1970s, thinkers expressed concern that the medium of television was inherently likely to delight audiences with spectacle more than truly educate them.
My parents have a book published in 1849, "The Chemistry of Modern Life" and it's interesting to see how they transition very deliberately between "technical" and then "dumbed-down" descriptions of things.
It's as jarring as Star Trek's habit of "30 seconds of technobabble followed by a metaphor involving a balloon" trope they keep hammering.
> Perhaps it's just me, but modern documentaries are rather dumbed down?
It's not just you. Most modern TV documentaries, especially series, are dumbed down and sped up. Fast cuts, lots of woo, not too much to challenge your brain, don't want it to get strained.
Gone are the days where someone conveyed the information calmly while not driving a car somewhere irrelevant. No more lingering shots allowing you to process what you just saw and heard.
Thats because we have a trove of in depth specialist and deep youtube content including all those old documentaries to mine through these days
Youtube and the internet is a goldmine and way bigger than old 80s/90s content, im over 50 and remember the 80s well enough.. a few great well produced documentaries are not a comparable to gigabytes or petabytes of videos and podcasts we have today
The cultural format of exchange has changed and the consequences of that - so called tiktok attention deficit folks means perhaps no one watches this content but I think that too is a generalization and great content is watched probably by a greater proportion of smart curious people today than back in the 80s on your phone nonetheless- we have a pocket tv with an almost unlimited amount of content
Im an information junkie and just today I spent 3 hours watching a documentary series on the incan civilization follower by a Stanford video on LLMs and then watching Blaise Arcas’s interesting ideas on computational life and intelligence
https://youtu.be/KhSJuqDUJME?si=-TMkLdapsbcWuoft
You watched all that content. Did you take action on it? What did you make or do as a result?
Is that to be the end result of the pursuit of knowledge, creating something? There is the true dumbing down, insisting on a vague kind of productivity as the point of life.
I also feel most of the documentaries are awful these days. There are a feww that are pretty good but I miss the older stuff.
Also The Shock of the New with Robert Hughes.
NOT just you.
I feel it has gotten worse the past 10 years.
I feel it myself, I am dumbed down too. Having trouble even formulating this as I never type formally anymore.
Our state TV SVT buys in documentaries from BBC, Showtime, PBS and some of their own production. Some of their own are still good. The BBC ones are absolute garbage dumbed down now.
The world the aristocrats warned about in the 60s and 70s are here now.
It was the golden age of the US at least also. Times that belittle, defund, or destroy science or art are dark ages.
>Perhaps it's just me, but modern documentaries are rather dumbed down?
A pet peeve of mine is the sound effects added to nature documentaries. I had to explain, once, that the ants do not actually sound like robots no matter how far you zoom in, despite the whirring of servos that the editors decided to add in.
The full series is on Archive:
https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978/Connections...
It still holds up for the most part, though of course some of the takes, being almost 50 years old, may seem a bit quaint. It's certainly worth watching the first series at least start to finish. Burke is an interesting guy.
I personally feel like _The Day The Universe Changed_ (his second documentary) is better. I love Connections but the basic thesis (there are hidden connections between disparate developments in science and technology) ends up pretty scattershot, spreading out like Brownian Motion. _tDtUC_ is much more focused. Largely based on Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ for individual stories, it traces how the understanding of time in Europe changed from the middle ages to the 1980's- the idea of time as a marker of descent from a previous golden age (1), or at best a repeating cycle, evolves into our modern conception of time as endlessly improving into a better future. And the supporting book was amazing too.
I also want to speak up for the BBC history documentary team that worked with Michael Wood: _In Search of the Trojan War_, _In Search of the Dark Ages_, _The Story of England_, _The Story of India_ they were also a staple of American PBS and informed my understanding of the world.
1: My go to example for this is imagine you walk into the Pantheon in 1000 AD: no one on your entire continent has known how to build a dome like that in 500 years, and won't again for another 500 years. The fundamental way you understand the world has to be completely different from the "newer is better" baseline that we have understood the world by for the past 150 years.
Second the comment re the day the universe changed, and found the episode on how Islamic Spain influenced the world quite surprising. Think it was the 2nd one, starting with two competing views of the world from African Roman scholars/clerics.
Many of these older docu’s wanted you to stop and think.
> "I love Connections but the basic thesis (there are hidden connections between disparate developments in science and technology)..."
Good grief, no. The basic thesis of Connections 1 was that humanity has become fatally dependent on technology (the "technology trap" he speaks of), that that dependence continues getting deeper and deeper, and it's hard to predict what technologies will emerge or where technology will take us, possibly utopia but just as likely a living hell, and finally that we don't even have the option to stop digging ourselves deeper and deeper into the technology trap because technological advancement can't be stopped because its emergence is unpredictable. Re-watch just the first and last episodes and they will terrify you.
Connections 2 and 3 were indeed scattershot because people liked Burke's charming mannerisms and didn't want to think about the ever more complex and ever more fragile panoply of technologies that individuals, even the technologists themselves, can neither understand nor control that is all that stands between humanity and its extinction.
I first saw Connections in the late 2000s... the final scene of the last episode, "inside the British Airways computer" (an entire floor of a large building), had me standing on my couch pointing at the screen.
A year or two before I was born, James Burke wandered between mainframes and reel-to-reel tape machines, speaking with extraordinary prescience about data, communications, decision-making systems, and power:
"This is the future. Because if you tell a computer everything you know about something, it will juggle the mix, and come up with a prediction. Do this, and you'll get that. And if you have information and a computer, you too can look into the future. And that is power. Commercial power, political power, power to change things."
I'm going to watch that scene again, because it's even more important 20 years further along: smart phones, "big data", large language models, Palantir...
I was so lucky to be able to grow up watching quality shows like this. Thank you PBS (and BBC).
Thanks for the link.
This clip is Season 1 Episode 8 "Eat Drink and Be Merry" and the shot starts at 48:17:
https://archive.org/download/bbc-connections-1978/Connection...
There is also a fourth season from 2023. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30222317
Also note that there is a book: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Connections/James-Bur...
https://archive.org/details/connections0000burk/page/n7/mode...
It really grinds my gears that the uploader had to ruin the "Greatest Shot in Television" by stretching the 4:3 video to 16:9.
I know I sound like a pedant but so many of these old TV recordings are uploaded this way on youtube. I was so annoyed by this infact that a few years ago I made a dumb extension that squeezes the video element back to 4:3 [1]. I'm not sure if this still works though.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/doddimnledmldclhlbf...
spite driven development is the unsung hero of so many great tools
This will fix it: https://www.stretch.site
And here's the clip with aspect ratio corrected: https://www.stretch.site/?videoUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube...
A question about aspect ratio on youtube, Does it care? or can you put whatever aspect ratio you want, I guess my complaint is that I don't see nearly enough (none) square video on the site.
YouTube, as well as any decent player, plays any aspect ratio video, even portrait mode.
As an uploader you should never add black bars (if they are in the source, crop them out before uploading) and of course never distort the video. This ensures the best playback experience for all devices.
> As an uploader you should never add black bars
In an ideal world yes. In practice, the YouTube layout looks weird on aspect ratios that aren't 4:3 or 16:9. If you upload any vertical video it gets categorized as a short, so that's out of the window - and even for things like 21:9 you get a teeny tiny player on desktop since it just fits the width.
Yes, there are some YouTube-manufactured issues. However it bothers me more when I try to watch a 21:9 video fullscreen on my 21:9 display and get black bars on all four sides.
Ah yes, the good old "shot in portrait mode, converted to 16:9 with added black bars, and then displayed under YT shorts in portrait mode again" category on youtube. This is almost artistic at this point. Sometimes I wonder how small can the content of a video get before people will stop watching it. Is there any research on this?
What do you do if you want to combine several sources with different aspect ratios? Surely black bars are acceptable in that case?
I don't know if YT can, but browsers do handle variable-AR videos.
https://litter.catbox.moe/1x93zdib04wu50kc.webm
You can. I've even seen intentional 4:3 used as an "80s" signifier.
Quick googling suggested that square video under 3 minutes will be automatically classed as "shorts", which much of HN hates and may never have seen.
Not YouTube but regarding the period signifier:
Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel" has every section of the movie shot in the time appropriate aspect ratio.
But the presentation format is actually 1.85:1 so the 1930s part is pillarboxed slightly and the 1960s part is heavily letterboxed.
If you buy the Blu-ray it's presented in 16:9 and 1920x1080 throughout, it's just masked to suit.
AFAIK youtube will stretch the player window to match the aspect ratio of the source media, lots of cinematic content that's a wider than normal (21:9 I think?) ratio that youtube adjusts the player window to fit around without black bars.
They won't ever squash or stretch video though, so this means the original uploader stretched the 4:3 content to 16:9 at some point before upload
I think it will show in whatever aspect ratio you upload.
It cares about overall pixel size, and for example standard 720x576 standard def 4:3 video will be brutally compressed compared to the exact same video upscaled using any non-AI upscaler (even nearest-neighbour) to 1440x1080.
I dug into this a bit a while ago, and could probably post my finding here if anyone was interested.
It doesn’t compare to this shot, but I particularly enjoyed the one episode of the The Studio with Seth Rogan where it starts with him driving to a filming location where they were going to do a one shot scene and he was explaining to someone how difficult they are to pull off, etc.
The episode was funny (although cringey too) for the things that happened in it.
But what was quite clever I thought was that the episode was itself done (at least seemingly) in one-shot.
I remember on a podcast interview I listened to that he said he intentionally made every episode as close to a “oner” as possible using very long takes and hidden transitions where possible.
It’s to heighten the sense of anxiety and tension for the viewer in order to amplify the comedy.
Great show!
Direct link to the youtube video, without this garbage ad-ridden website:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WoDQBhJCVQ
This comment reminded me I have an ad blocker. I reloaded the page without it, and instantly remembered why.
I strongly encourage all HN readers to seek out any of his work online. Including the meta, where he tasks about being hired for the job, and the approach he took to communicating. Although some of it will look a little dated, the messages are timeless.
I watched this show religiously as a kid (by then in reruns in the early 90s), along with Star Trek: TNG, Jeopardy, and playing Civilization for PC. The most formative years of my life were spent absorbing as much science, technology, and history as my growing brain could muster. I think that's why I'd grown up to be so optimistic about the future.
I think there's still a lot of room for optimism, despite all of the pessimism in the media, and I'm not even talking about AI. There are a ton of other things which have benefitted enormously from ubiquitous, efficient, and powerful computing that hardly get talked about anymore, we've come to take it all for granted.
The last line of the video was talking about nuking others...
The very first episode of Connections walks through might happen in New York City if power went out and never came back on. Pretty much an apocalyptic scenario for people living there!
He didn’t shy away from talking about technology for good or ill, for the ways it liberates us but can also trap us, for the ways it makes new sources of energy possible, and new weapons.
Could have just been intercontinental ballistic human transport... I can't tell you how many times I've wished to just be fired out of a cannon to Hong Kong from SF.
We have the technology to do that. What we do not have is circus tents big enough to cover the area.
He's even clearer about it in the last episode of season 1, where he assembles all the inventions from the season and shows how they make the US nuclear triad.
In the 80’s I worked for a radio station in Asheville NC. That allowed us to get press passes to launches at the cape. I was in the press area for 2 shuttle launches including the very first night launch of the Space Shuttle. They launched right after an incredible thunderstorm had rolled through. I’m old now but still remember it like it was yesterday. Incredible to see in person.
If you look at the start of that episode, there is another crazy thing in there, a device which allows you to "see" the bits on a credit card track.
Apparently something called "magnetic viewing film" can allow you to see the bits on the magnetic stripes of credit cards.
I had never heard about this before.
Link to video time: https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978/Connections...
I’d also mention the ascent of the Apollo 17 LM. The camera could be commanded to move up to follow the ascent, but the command had to be given ahead of time, from the MOCR, to coincide with the launch, which was commanded from the LM. The audio from the LM was delayed, as was the video from the camera, and the command would take about a second to reach the camera on the moon.
I wonder if this show is the ”Connections” in “Technology Connections” [1]. I can’t find a reference on it but I wouldn’t be surprised.
[1] https://youtube.com/c/TechnologyConnections
I loved Connections so much as a kid, but I'm so tired of this clip. There's so many better clips from this show.
So he nailed a 13 second countdown. Who cares? Newscasters do this at every commercial break. Sports announcers do this without a script and they still nail the cut to commercial almost every time. Yes, there's a talent to timing your speech to a countdown in your ear, but it's a talent that people do thousands of times a day around the world on far less preparation than Burke had here.
The fact that this article calls a simple cut a "sleight of hand" just terrifies me. Does the public really not know what editing is?
I absolutely adore both Burke and the Connections series, and without a doubt this is a lovely shot, but I feel the same: I don't get the hype. It's been memefied to death for no real reason. There's no incredible feat involved. It wasn't a tightrope walk without a net live on air. You can bet they had stand-in footage done before that they could have made a montage of in case Burke stumbled a line.
I suppose it's like a magic trick. It's less impressive once you understand how it all works. But still, it's clearly effective and you can admire the artistry.
> Does the public really not know what editing is?
I think most viewers would be unaware of the cut unless it was pointed out. Hence this sequence being called a "shot".
If it gets someone to watch the show for the first time then that's a win in my book. I think every young student should be exposed to Connections at various stages of their education.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCJh5D0FCZk with the correct aspect ratio
James Burke is one of Earth's treasures. Connections is the best docuseries I have ever seen.
If you haven't seen it, there was a new season of connections made in 2023 as well.
https://www.space.com/connections-with-james-burke-docuserie...
I love this back when we where not afraid to exhault our own virtues.
If that’s what you got from James Burke’s body of work, may be worth a revisit.
I have not seen it but compared to today I see a white man mentioning Verner Braun in a positive note.
Made today it would be a woman or MtF person screeching about it and a disclaimer in the beginning.
really miss the time when the documentaries take the audience as audience.
I love this style of documentary, I feel like we had it even when I was a kid in the 90s - 00s and as an adult in the 10s, but now is totally a dead style.
Sadly, it is not produced anymore. The producers chase a style and person that no longer exist, so they get their panties in a twist and make TikTok style and "true crime" style interviews is all I see from newer documentaries sadly. Women love "true crime" so 50% of new docus are just true crime drama slop.
I used to watch all or most of our state TV ones but they are no longer as good (They do some of their own buy buy in most from BBC, Showtime and PBS.)
I have been watching World at War and The World at War and such. Should watch Civilization and How should we then live?
I grew up watching Cosmos and Connections (and a bunch of stupid prime time on the one TV in the house and something like 5 clear channel [PBS being the best]).
Wow, I've only known the Carl Sagan shot in Cosmos. I'm happy to know the original now.
Fake. They filmed a rocket landing and he spoke backwards as soon as it touched down.