Traffic is a funny thing (internet traffic, that is, not the kind at left). I don't pay very close attention to which posts are getting the most hits, at least not on a day-to-day basis, but at the end of the year it's easy to sort the hundreds of posts here by "most viewed." Discounting the DSLR Cinematography and Hackintosh guides, here are the most-trafficked (not necessarily the best or most original) posts of 2011:
- How to Build a Hackintosh That’s Faster than a Mac Pro for Half the Price Well, this was surprising. This post essentially just links to the aforementioned Hackintosh guide, but the title of the post seems to have captured an appealing idea: that you can build your own very mast Mac for much cheaper than Apple wants to sell you one. We'll see what the future holds, but until we know more about the future of the Mac Pro -- which rumors have it may be canceled, though I have a hard time believing they'd drop it entirely -- the Hackintosh retains lasting appeal (now Lion compatible).
- RED's $7k SCARLET Camera Becomes $12k EPIC-S Just missing the top ten was the post RED's SCARLET-X Camera Shoots 5K Stills and 4K Motion, Ships December 1st for $10K, which, thanks to RED's servers hiccuping during the actual announcement, became one of the first sources of news for the official SCARLET specs. This post, however, became one of 2011's most-trafficked post due to it becoming a top result on Google for the search terms "RED SCARLET price." SEO FTW.
- Ten Examples of Stunning DSLR Cinematography I would've like to have shared more shorts and videos throughout the year, but it's something I always found slipping through the cracks simply due to limited time. Compilations of videos, however, did very well.
- Ten Examples of Stunning DSLR Creativity Same goes for this post; in 2012, NFS should cover more shorts, trailers and actual films.
- Full Specifications of the Democratizing (and Canon-Beating) RED SCARLET X Camera On November 3rd, a lot of people got caught up in the hype and declared RED's SCARLET camera to be the "winner" -- myself included. I don't doubt for a second that ordering a SCARLET was the right choice for my own particular needs, but if I did it over again (without the pressure of posting ASAP), I wouldn't declare a "winner" and "loser" in such certain terms.
- Canon's Historic Hollywood Announcement is the Canon Cinema EOS C300 What's become clear in the past couple of months is that the Canon C300 is a different camera with a multitude of strengths all its own -- and the fact that it looks like it will retail for $14k instead of $20k helps its cause as well. While Canon brought in Martin Scorcese and spent a pretty penny at the event, it seems they didn't put the same amount of thought into releasing information online, and so once again this little blog became a primary source of news and specs for a major camera release (thus the rank of these posts, despite having only two months to garner traffic).
- Canon-Technicolor 'CineStyle' DSLR Picture Profile Now Available as a Free Download We now know that Canon was working toward releasing the Canon C300, but at the time no one knew what was next. Canon has done a great job of listening to the requests of DSLR shooters, releasing 24p, manual audio controls, and at the time of this post, a flat log-like picture profile.
- Apple Brings Video Editing to the iPad 2 with Touchscreen iMovie Not entirely sure why this post made the cut -- it wasn't shared that many times via Facebook or Twitter, so I will chalk it up to SEO. Also, anything "Apple" or "iPad" tends to do pretty well.
- David Fincher's Streamlined, Almost DIY Post-Production Workflow for 'The Social Network' Look to the number of Facebook shares for the reason why this post made the top 10!
- Seven Inspiring TED Talks About Filmmaking Nadia Jones's guest post compiling seven filmmaking-related TED Talks was perfect Twitter and Facebook bait, but there's a reason there are so many "list" posts on the internet -- they work. Check out the talks if you haven't already.
Happy new year!
[traffic photo by Michael Loke]
