Buffalo Rumblings
There are always players without star power who generate buzz from fans who cheer on the underdog story. Buffalo Bills wide receiver Tyrell Shavers has been one of those underdog stories since joining the team as an undrafted free agent in 2023.
This preseason elevated his hype significantly (and there was already hype) thanks to a highlight-reel one-handed touchdown grab. I’m sure head coach Sean McDermott and general manager Brandon Beane considered more than one play in their decision, but Shavers has made the cut* this season, landing on the 53-man roster.
*So yeah, the entire article exists just so I could publicly make that pun. But maybe also so I can get more time in before the regular season with my new clip format.
Hey look! I learned from the first crack at the Vimeo changeover. Now the captions are at the top so you can see the opening ones that the UI was naturally covering. Anyway, besides how much nicer I believe things are going to be around here from now on…
I also wanted to point out that Shavers doesn’t catch this in stride because of perfect ball placement. He catches it in stride because he’s tracking the ball at full speed and adjusts perfectly. I’m not trying to knock the throw either. Most passes this distance are at risk for drifting.
Here’s another Shavers highlight from this preseason, but in this instance he’s hip to the dire situation his quarterback is in and buys a little time by moving around and resetting. Notice he resets in an advantageous spot to ensure the first down and increase his odds of being able to come back slightly for the ball.
Confession time. When I first started doing GIFs, the videos were generally of lesser quality and the free software I use didn’t have the same degradation of quality as a result. Exacerbating the problem is that at least one major aggregator site that helps drive traffic to the articles forces a file size limit of 12Mb per GIF, a limit that hasn’t changed since I’ve been doing this.
What I’m getting at is that video technology has improved while the limits of what I can capture size-wise has been static. Over the years that’s forced me to make shorter GIFs, cropped GIFs, and lower framerate GIFs to stay under the file size limit.
Swapping to this format allows me to use MP4 file format. MP4s adore compression. Depending on a few factors I could typically fit 100 – 120 frames into a GIF to stay under the 12Mb file size. Each frame was 480×270 pixels. This MP4 is 436 frames and each frame is 853×480 pixels. Now to be fair, with Vimeo the aggregator doesn’t actually care about the file size, but this file came in at 3.6Mb.
I figure it was safe to talk about the tech behind the new...
