Video views and reviews.

I could subtitle this feature “Kate’s Cool Video Clips” because the three Molecular Biology of the Cell (MBC) movies I review here were suggested by Kate Durda, a biology major at Colby College in Maine, who is compiling an index of MBC videos for ASCB. On a technical note, many of the video records I review in these features were obtained by “time-lapse photography”: that is, the images were captured at a slow rate (1 image s−1 or min−1 or h−1, for example), not at the usual rate of 16 or 24 images s−1. Most playback formats (such as QuickTime), however, project images at a standard rate of 24 s−1, and consequently, videos are usually speeded up with respect to the rate at which the events they record actually happened. The effect is quite dramatic and arresting but also artifactual! Thus, a movie containing 240 images may last 10 s, but if the events it portrays lasted 240 min (and were recorded at a rate of 1 image min−1), viewers will observe those events as if they were speeded up “1440-fold” or “1440 times.” I use this terminology to indicate how much the video records I review telescope the temporal events they record, but unfortunately, it is not always possible to obtain this information from the articles.