Category Archives: Video

Curating Exhibition Video for Digital Platforms

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First, let me begin this post with a hearty “hello”! This is my first Labs blog post, though I’ve been on board with the Digital and Emerging Media team since July 2015 as Media Technologist. Day-to-day I participate in much of the Labs activity that you’ve read about here: maintaining and improving our website; looking for ways to enhance visitor experience; and expanding the meaningful implementation of technology at Cooper Hewitt. In this post I will focus on the slice of my work that pertains to video content and exhibitions.

Detail: Brochure, Memphis (Condominiums): Portfolio, 1985

Detail: Brochure, Memphis (Condominiums): Portfolio, 1985

The topic of exhibition video is fresh in my mind since we are just off the installation of Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial. This is a multi-floor exhibit that contains twenty-one videos hand-picked or commissioned by the exhibition curators. My part in the exhibition workflow is to format, brand, caption and quality-check videos, ushering them through a production flow that results in their display in the galleries and distribution online. Along with the rest of the Labs team, I also advise on the presentation and installation of videos and interactive experiences in exhibitions and on the web, and help steer the integration of Pen functionality with exhibition content. This post gathers some of my video-minded observations collected on the road to installing Beauty.

The Beauty curators and the Labs team came together when content for the show began to arrive—both loans of physical objects and digital file transfers. At this time, my video workflow shifted into high gear, and I began to really see the landscape of digital content planned for the exhibit. Videos in Beauty fall into roughly two categories: those that are the primary highlighted object on display and those that supplement the display of another object. Sam Brenner recently posted about reformatting our web presentation of video content when it stands in as primary collection object and has a medium that is “video, animation or other[wise] screen-based.” This change was a result of thinking through the flag we raised earlier for the curators around linking collection records to tags, i.e. “what visitors get when they collect works with the Pen.” As has been mentioned before on this blog, the relationship of collecting points (NFC tags) to collection objects does not need to be one-to-one; Beauty expanded our exploration of the tags-to-collection records relationship in a few interesting ways.

Collecting Neri Oxmann

When visitors collect at the Neri Oxman tag they save a cluster of collections database records, including 12 glass vessels and a video.

In the Beauty exhibition, collecting points are presented uniformly: one tag in each object label. Additionally, tags positioned beside wall text panels allow visitors to save chunks of written exhibition content. The curatorial format of the Triennial exhibition organized around designers (sometimes with multiple works on display), however, encouraged us to think carefully about the tag-collecting relationship. I was impressed to see the curators curating the Pen experience, including notes to me along with each video, like “the works in the show are jewelry pieces; the video will supplement,” “video is primary object; digital prints supplement,” and “video clips sequenced together for display but each video is separately collectible.” They were really thinking about the user flow of the Pen and the post-visit experience, extending their role in organizing and presenting information to all aspects of the museum experience.

Another first in the Beauty exhibition is the video content created specifically for interactive tables. With the curators’ encouragement, the designers featured in the exhibition considered the tables as a unique environment to present bonus content. For example, Olivier van Herpt provided a video of his 3D printer at work on the ceramic vessels on display in the exhibition. It was interesting to see the possibilities that the tables and post-visit outlets opened up—for one thing, the quality standards can be more relaxed for videos shown outside the monitors in the galleries. Also notable is the fact that the Beauty curators selected behind-the-scenes-type videos for tables and post-visit, suggesting that these outlets make room for content that might not typically make it onto gallery walls.

Still from Oliver van Herpt's "3D Printed Ceramic Process"

The video “3D Printed Ceramic Process” by Oliver van Herpt is an example of behind-the-scenes video content that was made for tables and website display only.

The practical fallout on my end was that these supplemental videos added to the already video-heavy exhibition, putting increased pressure on the video workflow. In turn, this revealed a major lack of optimization. The diagram of my video workflow shows, for example, several repeated instances of formatting, captioning and exporting. Multiplied by twenty-one, each of these redundant procedures takes up significant time. Application of branding is probably the biggest time-hog in the workflow—all of it is done manually and locking in the information of maker, credit line and video title with curators and designers is a substantial task. It’s funny, the amount of video content is increasing in exhibitions at Cooper Hewitt and it’s receiving increased attention from curators, but the supplementary videos in the galleries are not treated as first-order exhibition objects, so they don’t go through as rigorous a documentation process as other works in the show. Because of this, video-specific information required for my workflow remained in flux until the very last minute. Even the video content itself continued to shift as designers pushed past my deadlines to request more time to make changes and additions. In truth, the deadlines related to in-gallery video content are much stricter than those for table/post-visit-only content because gallery videos require hardware installation. The environment of the tables and website afford continual change, but deadlines act as benchmarks to keep those interfaces stocked with new content that stays in sync with objects in the physical exhibition.

Exhibition Video Workflow

The workflow that videos follow to get to gallery screens, interactive tables and the collections website.

I maintain a spreadsheet to collect video information and maintain order over my exhibitions video workflow. These are the column headings.

All the steps and data points that need to be checked-off in my exhibition video workflow.

By the exhibition opening, I had all video information confirmed, and all branding and formatting completed. The running spreadsheet I keep as a video to-do list was filled with check-marks and green (good-to-go) highlighting. I had created media records in TMS and connected them to exhibition videos uploaded to YouTube; this allows a script to pull in the embed code so videos appear within the YouTube player on the collections site. I also linked the media records to other database entries so that they would show up on the collections site in relation to other objects and people. For example, since I linked the “Afreaks Process” video record to all of the records for the beaded Afreak objects, the video appears on each object page, like the one for The Haas Brothers and Haas Sisters’ “Evelyn”. Related videos like this one (that are not the primary object) are configured to appear at the bottom of an object page with the language, “We have 1 video that features Sculpture, Evelyn, from the Afreaks series, 2015.” Since the video has its own record in the database, there is also a corresponding “video page” for the same clip that presents the video at the top with related objects in a grid view below. I also connected object records to database entries for people, ensuring that visitors who click on a name find videos among the list of associated objects.

Screenshot of Haas Brothers record webpage

The webpage for the Haas Brothers record includes a video among the related objects.

It is highly gratifying to seed videos into this web of database connections. The content is so rich and so interesting that it really enhances the texture of the collections site and of exhibitions. Cooper Hewitt curators demonstrated their appreciation for the value of video by honoring video works as primary objects on display. They also utilized video in a demonstrative way to enhance the presentation of highlighted works. Beauty opened the doors for curating video works on interactive tables, and grouping videos in with clusters of data linked to collecting points (aka. tags). I’m pleased with the overall highly integrated and considered take on video content in the latest exhibition, and I hope we can push the integration even further as the curators become increasingly invested in adapting their practice to the extended exhibition platforms we have in place like tables, tags and web.

Sharing our videos, forever

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This is one in a series of Labs blogposts exploring the inhouse built technologies and tools that enable everything you see in our galleries.

Our galleries and Pen experience are driven by the idea that everything a visitor can see or do in the museum itself should be accessible later on.

Part of getting the collections site and API (which drives all the interfaces in the galleries designed by Local Projects) ready for reopening has involved the gathering and, in some cases, generation of data to display with our exhibits and on our new interactive tables. In the coming weeks, I’ll be playing blogger catch-up and will write about these new features. Today, I’ll start with videos.

jazz hands

Besides the dozens videos produced in-house by Katie – such as the amazing Design Dictionary series – we have other videos relating to people, objects and exhibitions in the museum. Currently, these are all streamed on our YouTube channel. While this made hosting much easier, it meant that videos were not easily related to the rest of our collection and therefore much harder to find. In the past, there were also many videos that we simply didn’t have the rights to show after their related exhibition had ended, and all the research and work that went into producing the video was lost to anyone who missed it in the gallery. A large part of this effort was ensuring that we have the rights to keep these videos public, and so we are immensely grateful to Matthew Kennedy, who handles all our image rights, for doing that hard work.

A few months ago, we began the process of adding videos and their metadata in to our collections website and API. As a result, when you take a look at our page for Tokujin Yoshioka’s Honey-Pop chair , below the object metadata, you can see its related video in which our curators and conservators discuss its unique qualities. Similarly, when you visit our page for our former director, the late Bill Moggridge, you can see two videos featuring him, which in turn link to their own exhibitions and objects. Or, if you’d prefer, you can just see all of our videos here.

In addition to its inclusion in the website, video data is also now available over our API. When calling an API method for an object, person or exhibition from our collection, paths to the various video sizes, formats and subtitle files are returned. Here’s an example response for one of Bill’s two videos:

{
  "id": "68764297",
  "youtube_url": "www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAHHSS_WgfI",
  "title": "Bill Moggridge on Interaction Design",
  "description": "Bill Moggridge, industrial designer and co-founder of IDEO, talks about the advent of interaction design.",
  "formats": {
    "mp4": {
      "1080": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/videos.collection.cooperhewitt.org/DIGVID0059_1080.mp4",
      "1080_subtitled": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/videos.collection.cooperhewitt.org/DIGVID0059_1080_s.mp4",
      "720": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/videos.collection.cooperhewitt.org/DIGVID0059_720.mp4",
      "720_subtitled": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/videos.collection.cooperhewitt.org/DIGVID0059_720_s.mp4"
    }
  },
  "srt": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/videos.collection.cooperhewitt.org/DIGVID0059.srt"
}

The first step in accomplishing this was to process the videos into all the formats we would need. To facilitate this task, I built VidSmanger, which processes source videos of multiple sizes and formats into consistent, predictable derivative versions. At its core, VidSmanger is a wrapper around ffmpeg, an open-source multimedia encoding program. As its input, VidSmanger takes a folder of source videos and, optionally, a folder of SRT subtitle files. It outputs various sizes (currently 1280×720 and 1920×1080), various formats (currently only mp4, though any ffmpeg-supported codec will work), and will bake-in subtitles for in-gallery display. It gives all of these derivative versions predictable names that we will use when constructing the API response.

a flowchart showing two icons passing through an arrow that says "vidsmang" and resulting in four icons

Because VidSmanger is a shell script composed mostly of simple command line commands, it is easily augmented. We hope to add animated gif generation for our thumbnail images and automatic S3 uploading into the process soon. Here’s a proof-of-concept gif generated over the command line using these instructions. We could easily add the appropriate commands into VidSmanger so these get made for every video.

anim

For now, VidSmanger is open-source and available on our GitHub page! To use it, first clone the repo and the run:

./bin/init.sh

This will initialize the folder structure and install any dependencies (homebrew and ffmpeg). Then add all your videos to the source-to-encode folder and run:

./bin/encode.sh

Now you’re smanging!