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DVD Format Changing Movie-making
rgmoore writes "The Los Angeles Times is running an interesting article on the impact of DVDs on the movie making process. They briefly mention the possibilities of end-users being able to re-edit the movie (with a veiled reference to The Phantom Edit) but focus more on the way that it's starting to influence directors and producers during the course of making the movie."
But seriously, I am happy that LOTR-FOTR is being released in a four-hour version. I really like the idea of DVD-directors cuts. I'm pretty confident FOTR would have made a lot more money if it had only been 2 hours long, because it could be shown five times a day per screen, rather than three. There is a lot of pressure on studios to avoid long movies. They want people to pay and free their seats as fast as possible. DVD releases are not under that same pressure, so I think we will see more "unshortened" versions of movies.
I hope that enough people buy the FOTR DVD for the extra footage that movie studios actually learn to always shoot extra scences (character-development, background explanations, and cheap stuff like that) that don't appear in the theater release, but show up on the DVD to drive up sales/rentals for people who loved the movie in the theater and want to see more. FOTR is one movie that definitely needs another hour or so to make it seem less rushed.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
THis would help in editing the bad content of movies (cursing, nudity, etc.) and making some movies out there viewable for the whole family. I like this and hope to see this soon.
I've been thinking about and half-heartedly working on this idea for quite some time.
What I'm working on is taking an open-source DVD player (I picked Xine, but I'm questioning the wisdom of that decision) and hacking on-the-fly editing capabilities into it.
The basic idea is that for a given DVD, a person can go through the movie and carefully "mark it up", generating a file that annotates all of the portions of the video and audio tracks that are potentially offensive, tagging each one with descriptive information including the nature of the material, relevance to the plot, etc. Then, an individual can create a personalized "viewing stylesheet" that specifies how he or she would like kind of offensive material to be handled. Obviously, some default stylesheets could be provided as well. The markup and stylesheet languages will both be extensible, (so you can add the "Jar Jar tag"), and you should be able to edit pretty much anything that's marked up in any way you want. A buddy of mine wants to make himself a stylesheet that will show *only* the offensive parts ;-)
Then, of course, when you play a DVD on my hacked-up player, it would look up the markup file and use that and your personal viewing stylesheet to automatically edit the movie.
I think it would also be cool to provide another sort of editscript that allows more sequential editing, rather than a rule-based system, so that you could do more "artistic" edits, grabbing snippets of video and audio from various places and maybe mixing them with your own. That's not my major interest, though, mainly since such edits probably wouldn't be done 'on the fly' anyway.
The project has been languishing for a few months, though. The Xine support for playing DVDs is quite rough and doesn't seem to be improving quickly. The Xine developers had been talking about a 1.0 release in December, but it hasn't happened yet, AFAIK (haven't checked for a while). Actually it's the dvdnav plugin (which supports menus and such) that has been really lagging, and the regular DVD plugin doesn't support encrypted DVDs, which makes testing difficult, since I don't have any unencrypted DVDs.
What I have done is implemented various edits (masking blocks of the image, skipping short scenes [long skips are much harder; seeking doesn't work in dvdnav yet], muting the sound and substituting alternative snippets of audio, altering subtitles, etc.) to verify that it can be done easily. I have also found what I believe is the best way to insert the editing stuff architecturally; as part of a general filter plugin architecture. I've also begun to define the markup and stylesheet languages (both in XML).
I've mostly been waiting on Xine, though. Just recently I've gotten tired of that and I've started looking into some of the other options. Ogle, VLC and gstreamer are three I'm considering.
If anyone knows of other players I should look into, or has any interest in helping me with the code, drop me a line.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I think it is interesting that the phantom edit was directly made possible by DeCSS, and the DVD format by itself would have actually prevented its creation because of the copy controls. (in the future when VHS is no longer used, this will become even more relevant.)
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Where have we already seen these groundbreaking developments?
Porn, that's where. Where the porn industry (and niche market filmmakers in general) innovates, Hollywood trails along, years afterwards.
Want the know the Next Big Thing? Real time audience generated scripts. I'm thinking ho cams chat sessions, I'm thinking Troma and their script contests, especially the one where each scene was written by a different fan. Throw some budget at it, put a film crew and some Semi Big Names in a shiny van with a satellite uplink, webcast the filming and solicit "what happens next?" in real time from viewers. Zoom around Hollywood (or Toronto, more likely) with a lawyer and a light meter, spending bushels of money to shoot a quick scene in this cafe or that warehouse among real honest Joe Public, then edit it up and release a movie/DVD of the final version, complete with various alternative scenes, "the making of" documentary, and some stuff about the scene submitters. Cinema verite on steroids: "Yeah, my aunt's boyfriend's dog walker wrote this scene! Look, that's him in the credits, telling Harvey Keitel what to say!"
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I'd really like to see the DVD laid out so you can pick and choose which edition you want to see. This would be perfect for something like Star Wars. Wanna see the original? Great. Press "Play Original Version" and you get just that, no Special Edition footage. Wanna see the special edition? Great, press that button instead. And if you let me program the scene order myself, I can keep in the cool scene where the Millenium Falcon takes off out of Mos Eisle but take out the lame Jabba scene just before it.
This was one of the promises of DVD that I haven't seen used in any title yet. I remember hearing it touted that you'd be able to switch between, say, an R-rated original or the PG-rated cut-for-TV release. Or maybe I'd like to see the deleted scenes in the context of the movie rather than as snippets to be viewed separately. *sigh*
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.