Wetlook World Forum

Free video clips? Hm, that's a tough call. You can put free clips on YouTube but the quality is horrendous. Actually I am starting to suspect that the playback quality depends on your computer, since Wetinred has no issues with quality even when I am seeing a grey mush at only a few frames per second. (Yet MySpace videos play far better on my old PC, but I've had friends complain thay they can't watch it since their OS lacks Flash 8, mostly *NIX/Linux but my old Mac is equally restricted ;)

In my personal opinion, video is hard to do right. Victor opined that it captures more of what is really happening than still images, which is in theory true -- you get the dynamics of body, hair and clothing movement, the antics etc. But it has to be borne also in mind that the images we see already are 600x800 are probably all lit by flash too, and then perhaps corrected and sharpened, which allows a huge amount of quality. To approach this level of quality as a video clip is no mean feat, although the Into the Water series looks to be pretty damn good, and even the trailers are 6 MB each. This will be after using a lot of professional equipment no doubt. And these are commercial products, whereas we'd have to ask, how are Jennifer and Todd going to host all the large, high quality videos you want to see for free? (If you are happy with YouTube's quality, this is another matter entirely of course, but their playback is horrible ;)

What I personally find, now maybe this is just me, but video scenes tend to pass by faster than I can truly take them in. Still images can capture *more* since you can snap frozen images of fleeting points in time, such as the brief moment the woman emerges from the water when her hair is still smoothly clinging and her clothes are the shiniest. If you make a point of playing in the water slowly for the camera so that every entry into and exit from the water is captured clearly to be savoured, you may do OK; as well as try to keep your head and chest in view of the camera and not too far off.

I have yet to find out for real, but I figure that if you are with the girl in the water for real, you'd see a lot more than you get in a video. For example, a woman's head is surprisingly small on the screen (maybe no more than 150 px), and the whole scene is filmed in 2D to be shown in a small window on a screen. I have found personally that I get much more excited the nearer the photograph of the woman becomes to life-size, and I think that seeing the scene in person in 3D allows the brain to get a handle on the motion more. Plus, you can dynamically choose your angles and closeness, and involve yourself in the scene, by splashing or dunking the girl (even with no romantic or sexual physical contact).

So I find myself a little unsure on videos. Yes there are nice videos around, mostly ones that give a good view of wet hair swishing in the water (as in most cases that is about all you can make out, clothes don't really shine or show clinging wet texture in a smaller, lower quality clip at all). If you can find a way to host higher quality scenes and film them well, they'd work; it may be necessary to sell access to them to simply restrict the bandwidth used otherwise it could get a little out of hand. I am still torn between the dynamic motion of video and the substantially better clarity and size of still images ... it's not easy unless you want to start producing 800x600 video (HDTV res?) and that would be a monster bandwidth eater and not play on the older PCs but it would look so much better :D