u/atatidontregret

I read (or rather, listened to the audiobook of) Reamde awhile back and loved it. Decided I should do a more "legacy" Stephenson novel next and went with Cryptonomicon (again, audiobook - not ideal, but I never have time to actually *sit* and read these days).

I got about halfway through and then got stuck. Unlike Reamde, which had an incredibly propulsive narrative despite its many subplots, Cryptonomicon feels really aimless so far in terms of plot. We've got a WWII Marine doing Marine shit and not really putting much thought into it, a WWII cryptologist breaking codes cuz he's a cryptologist, and a present-day startup co-founder who's trying to break into the Philippines' fiber optic market.

In other words, just a bunch of dudes doing their jobs - albeit with a lot of reasonably entertaining detail and commentary. Now, I'm not an especially impatient reader. I'm fine with wonky thematic or narrative digressions; often I love them. Again, I thought Reamde was a blast, and it wanders all over the place.

My problem is it's totally unclear to me what the *conflict* is supposed to be in each of these storylines, and therefore the narrative overall. Apart from, you know, beating the Nazis - but again, that's just Shaftoe and Waterhouse doing their jobs.

This book seems to be widely beloved, so i'm probably outing myself as a total ignoramus here. What am I missing??

Hey all - sorry for the novel but I'm trying to include as many relevant details as I can.

I'm on the review pipeline for a podcast and recently started noticing degraded quality between the original footage and our final uploads to Vimeo. To be more specific, I'm seeing what could maybe be "combing" from (somehow??) interlaced footage, or staircase noise from compression, or... something else?

For example, the first screengrab below is from the original footage, the second is the final upload:

https://preview.redd.it/oywg4fikx96h1.png?width=1039&format=png&auto=webp&s=215a46e7586b9c9c08278000ae46cb6d83391b98

https://preview.redd.it/96td9u1nn96h1.png?width=1138&format=png&auto=webp&s=562472e59bcf8776c9f7b75a1243c32edcabf465

To make matters weirder, these jagged edges tend to be most pronounced in only one of the three camera angles. We shoot on two A7sIII's and an FX6 - the shot above is from one of the A7sIII's.

At first I thought interlacing might actually be possible, because this came up after we'd started using a switcher that's 1080i compatible (Blackmagic's ATEM Mini Extreme). I thought maybe we'd screwed up a setting somewhere and the ATEM was somehow converting the one camera's progressive footage to interlaced.

But upon further investigation it looks like the ATEM is outputting 1080p as it should be. And in any case, although it can output 1080i files from a 1080i source, it apparently can't convert progressive footage to interlaced. So I've been trying to figure out how the hell else a 1080p video can get combing in it.

Unless, of course, it isn't combing at all, but instead some kind of compression artifact - i.e. "staircase noise" as outlined here: https://www.biamp.com/company/blog/details/biamp-blog/2017/02/16/understanding-video-compression-artifacts That definitely seems more plausible - I've heard mutterings about Vimeo getting flaky in recent years. But I don't understand codecs etc. enough to really troubleshoot it, and I'm not sure anyone on our team does.

Also, there's still the fact that this issue doesn't show up in all the shots. If it's a compression issue, why is it only affecting one third-ish of the video?

Anyway... I'm real confused about this. I don't think it'd be worth chasing down if it were consistent across all the shots; but because it isn't, the final product ends up feeling off and that really bugs me. So if anyone here has other ideas, I'd be thrilled.

Thanks all!