New Video Magazine Offers a Glossy Look
The new-wave high-fashion look--Los Angeles residents know it as Melrose Avenue chic--has come to video magazines.
With its sleek graphics and perfume-ad-style cover photo of Glenn Close (her head turned, her eyes closed, her hair drop-dead coifed, her film “Fatal Attraction” newly released on video), the July issue of V could easily be mistaken at first glance for a copy of Vanity Fair. But look closely enough and you see that V isn’t another trendy-people-in-trendy-clothes mag. It’s “The Magazine of Videocassettes.”
In terms of content, V isn’t much different from those other top “magazines of videocassettes”--Video and Video Review. There are reviews (of more than 100 tapes), interviews (Close, director John Sayles), other celebrity features (on what videos Robin Williams, Billy Crystal and Chuck Norris like to watch), video-equipment tips (“A Basic Guide to Camcorders”), an article on all those baseball-tips tapes by star players and another one on “Cooking a la VCR.”
The writing in V (by Joan Goodman, Tom Soter and video-magazine-vet M. George Stevenson, among others) is lively, clever (“ ‘Fatal Attraction’ is “the ‘Reefer Madness’ of adultery”) and often intelligent and artful as well. But so is the writing in V’s two chief competitors--sometimes. Though Video and Video Review may be slightly better tuned to the inner workings of video--particularly when it comes to equipment--they’re not quite so consistently readable. They lack V’s depth--and certainly its hipness.
V also contains its own “RSVP” mini-catalogue featuring 250 titles. Order $100 or more worth of tapes from it and you get a free one-year subscription to the magazine. However, one year means only six issues--V, unlike Video and Video Review, currently comes out only every other month. Its circulation is about 100,000 now, with subscriptions running $11.95 annually; individual copies cost $3.
Of course, it will probably be V’s look that makes it or breaks it at the newsstand. Readers may supplement Video and Video Review (which also feature excellent--if more splashy and less sophisticated--layouts) with this uppity upstart . . . or else overlook it or wrongly classify it because of its glamorous cover. But if there’s room for a third video magazine in your budget, let it be V.
Information: (800) 634-8478.
CLOSE DIMENSIONS OF THE THIRD KIND: The future of video will be wall-size screens, crystal-clear images and--many experts believe--three-dimensional pictures.
In the case of 3-D, the future has arrived. Sort of.
Three Japanese-based video companies--JVC, Toshiba and Sharp--are offering three-dimensional equipment in that country, and the gear may begin showing up in U. S. stores before the end of the year. One firm, Toshiba, even has a 3-D camcorder.
In its August issue, Video magazine reports on some consumer reactions to this old idea in a new (and, as it turns out, flawed) package. The conclusion: How people react to the system seems to depend on how old they are.
This 3-D video format (others are in development) doesn’t use those cardboard glasses that we’ve seen with film/print 3-D, but there’s a similar catch: Since the method depends on electronic synchronization between images seen by the left and right eyes, the viewer must don goggles with liquid crystal diode (LCD) lenses. A lens shutter for one eye opens while the lens for the other closes off--in fractions of a second, of course.
On top of wearing the goggles, there’s a flicker in the picture that can be annoying.
Just how annoying the lenses and flicker are, Video found, depends on the age of the viewer. In the magazine’s tests, participants over 30 were bugged by both, while teen-agers didn’t mind either too much. Not so surprisingly, the teens said they enjoyed best the less subtle 3-D effects--like the shark in “Jaws 3-D,” while older folk preferred scenes from nature and “Dial M for Murder,” a Hitchcock film where 3-D was used but downplayed.
Did Video’s research indicate that there’ll be a demand for the (so far) expensive equipment? The kids were all for it. Their elders said get the flicker out and then maybe .
Is 3-D video the way of the future or just another fad? We’ll probably have to wait until this system is improved, or others are introduced, before we’ll be able to tell.
