Back on TV: Max Headroom

infofreako writes: " Everyone's favorite 80's construct, Max Headroom, has returned thanks to the people at TechTV. According to their website, they will be rebroadcasting all 14 episodes starting this Friday! This series was doing ethics themes based on designer babies, corporate controlled media, brain scanning and more before some of us were capable of hitting record on the old VCR. "

Comments

not the original though!

[cliveholloway]

rebroadcasting all 14 episodes.

Bet that doesn't include the original Channel 4 series and the original TV movie with a much slimier Bryce. As always, US TV took a good idea and sanitised it for the masses.

(showing age). The 15 minute entertainment show - Max + videos (zoolookology anyone?) was much sharper than anything that came later.

"Oh to be in gay Paris, where only the river is Seine"

.02

cLive ;-)

Re:not the original though!

[usrerco]

I worked on the American version's series as one of the technical directors
doing the on-screen graphics while at Video Image in 1986. I was one of
two or three people who did the graphics; me and another guy did the 3D,
and there was a mystery guy/gal who did the E.CARTER 'edison cam' overlay graphics.

I was more impressed with the original show ("Max Headroom: The Original Story,
Lorimar Homevideo), namely acting, directing, and casting. It seemed to really
have that filmic quality I don't think the series achieved. And I thought
the screen graphics in the original were better than what we did. For one
thing, they used /real/ vector graphics in the original. We had a copy of all
the original graphics which we used for reference. Excellent stuff. We also didn't
have input from the original directors, Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, who
I think had a lot to do with the look and feel of the original.

In the American version, we used a Cubicomp to do all of the 3D graphics
vector sequences, which was a pixel based system that could do anti-aliased
vector rendering. So we basically 'simulated' the look of vector, but didn't
fully achieve IMHO. We used 5 1/4" floppies to save our work, and worked
on PCs. I don't think we ever knew what system the original show was done
on. I assumed it was a custom vector system.. anyone know?

The original also used a great nixie-like fonts that caused me to write
a special font program and hand-massaged bitmapped fonts just to simulate
that look, which I think we used in the show, I can't recall.

We re-did many of the cg sequences from the original, including the
barrier arm, sweeps of the Network 23 building, etc. so that the overall look
was consistent with the new sequences we added, like the spinning crypto
graphic. (I think I may have encoded my initials into that sequence)
Remaking the old graphics was sad, because the original graphics were
done so well, and I didn't feel we were doing it justice. I lamented
to my boss, but he insisted we needed to keep a consistent look,
and I doggedly agreed, but still was disheartened (I was young).

I'm fairly sure the original is easily available for rent.

From what I know of Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, they were a british
husband/wife team that directed many weird and edgy commercials & music
videos. My favorites were the backlit graphics for the Chaz Jankel
music video "Questionnaire" (one of the first music videos I think I'd
ever seen that used animated graphics, circa 1981), the mixed media in a
Joni Mitchell video "Good Friends", which featured cut outs and xerography,
and the Donald Fagen video "New Frontier", among others.

The 80's are BACK!

[Anonymous Coward]

Max Headroom back on TV, Alf doing commercials, a new flavor of Coke hitting the market, Hulk Hogan as WWF champ... the 80's are back! Ronald Reagan should be President any day now.

Re:The 80's are BACK!

[rbeattie]

Ronald Reagan IS president, or hadn't you noticed?

-Russ

Best Episode...

[TrevorB]

Max Headroom was shown on Canada's Bravo network soon after it came out. Already have all the episodes recorded in LP for my time-shifting pleasure.

The best episode by far was #13: Lessons, about cracking down pirated video programming. Children were not allowed to learn because the educational television wasn't paid for, and schools were not free to the public.

SPOILERS AHOY....

The whole thing turns out to be a cover operation for an old fashioned printing press operation, to print real books for kids to read.

It's very 80's of Max to focus so much on how much television will change our society. Sign of the times.. The world could use a lot more freelance journalists like Edison Carter...

Re:Pirate TV

[checkitout]

Thanks! here you go: Pirate TV signal on WTTW

Re:Ananova

[Accipiter]

I mean, if the entire Titanic can realistically be rendered, why not be able to render a person in real time with realistic voice synth and physics?

Are you serious? If you are, you obviously have absolutely no grasp of how 3D modeling works.

Rendering something like the Titanic is easy. (Not easy in the sense that anyone with a copy of 3D Studio MAX can do it, but easy in the sense that it's just a ship.)

When you create something in 3D like the Titanic, it's based on specifications that do not change. Lighting is constant, shapes stay the same, and moving parts are minimum.

Compare that to attempting to duplicate a person, detailed, in 3D. People are tremendously harder to do than objects, because people automatically scrutinize other people. That's why when you look at a movie like Final Fantasy, you can say "Wow, they sure are realistic, but there's just *something* not right."

With a person, you have to deal with mouth movement (a very difficult thing to model in 3D), eye movement, muscle expansion and contraction based on movement, bending limbs and joints, breating, and a whole host of other factors. Then when you get into voice synthesis (which is still not perfect, but AT&T is making leaps and bounds.), and physics modelling on things such as cloth and water... It's all very hard.

So between rendering something like a ship moving through the water, or creating a realistic person in 3D, the ship is a lot easier to do. It may be painstaking in detail to create, but it's still just basic shapes.)

Mascot ?

[lute3]

As soon as I saw Max Headroom on the TechTV commercial announcing the upcoming series, I thought Mascot.

The previous virtual mascot for the channel, Tilde, was female (appealing enough to the first niche gamer-type market ZDTV was shooting for), but she was not good enough. They used on-the-fly 3D graphics based on VR-suit-like encoding, so the movements of the character were not fluid or terribly near accurate.

If Matt Frewer could record new vocals, I don't think anyone would object to a purely-digital Max Headroom. Digital!? But, what about..um..the original..was..good..um..ah.. Oh yeah..they just didn't have the technology to do it in 1985, you know.. psst.. they used a latex mask--it wasn't digital!. Also, surely Mr. Frewer is not doing terribly much since Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Lawnmower Man 2, so he can probably use the money (that is, if a short revival of the original series doesn't load his pockets with royalties).

Oh, and don't watch Lawnmower Man 2...for the love of all that's Holy! Don't watch it!

Max Headroom world is closer than you think...

[lightspawn]

If somebody told me teen would be locked up after refusing to watch TV commercials in school, I'd think they were kidding.

I can't provide a link to this one, but a certain religious radio station gave away three radios as a promotion in a very low-income area - radios that were locked into the station's frequency, with no way to change it.

An ATM tried to show me a commercial for something today.

Does it seem to anybody else that we're in a handbasket going you know where?

Re:A propos 80s: LaserDisks to FireWire, anyone?

[n6mod]

There is no "better than connecting it to Video-In..."

Laserdiscs are, believe it or not, analog. (The video is, anyway, there were a few incarnations of digital audio.) Worse than that, they're composite video, so you need to decide whether the comb filter in your capture device is better than the one in your LD player. (Decide this by testing with a good monitor. Dot crawl sucks.)

I have a pretty sizeable collection of Laserdiscs, and keep meaning to start converting these to DVDR. I have this bizarre hangup that I need to move the AC3 audio, and I haven't found any way to capture AC3 with a S/PDIF card. (Pointers appreciated!)

The reality is that I should ignore that, since anything I might have with AC3/DTS is recent enough that it's likely to be rereleased anyway.

Back to your question, spend as much money as you can bear on the capture device, (I have a Director's Cut, but would get a DA-MAX if I were doing this for money.) think about a proc-amp (might not be necessary) and go for it.