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."

Comments

Big Deal

[Dr. Spork]

It seems to me that these interactive features are there to apologize for how terrible most movies are these days. It's like the studios are saying "sure, our directors and scriptwriters suck shit, but hey, you can "re-edit" the movie yourself and make it suck less." Pretty soon, movies will be so "interactive" that we will just periodically mail $10 to the MPAA, get some cameras and friends, film some footage, and edit it to our liking.

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.

Re:Memento edit!

[Masem]

I've heard that the R2 (or R4?) version of Memento does have an alternate chapter ordering as to run through the main plot in order (starting with the B&W calls in the hotel room, ending with the death of Teddy). Sure, it wrecks the way the narration and discussion of the problem and how it's built into Leonard's discoveries in the reverse order, and some of the revelations made in the movie (how not only were others using Leonard but he himself was), but there are thsoe that might want to see it that way to figure it out. And it wouldn't have taken up that much space on the current disc, so I'm surprised it's in an R2 edit but not R1.

My (stalled) project

[swillden]

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.