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Slashback: ClonesMAX, Animation, Dislaimers
Give me IV any old day. Rupert writes with a review of the newly IMAX-ified Episode II of the Star Wars saga:
"Since it was my wife's birthday today, last night I took her to see Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones: IMAX edition. Notwithstanding the overuse of colons, this is a movie worth seeing, even if you think you already saw the movie.If you haven't already seen AotC, you no doubt have your reasons, and there isn't anything in this edition to make you change your mind. Likewise, the plot still has gaping holes and Anakin is still moody, so if those were enough to make you hate this movie, you won't want to see it again. The action sequences gain little from the new presentation, as objects move too fast across the large screen to follow.
On the other hand, if you want to see the pores in Natalie Portman's skin, or the individual hairs in Christopher Lee's beard, this is the movie you've been waiting for. I suspect that some time was spent re-rendering the digital characters. Yoda, Wattoo and Jex Dexter stood out in close up, looking more real than the human actors.
Some scenes were cut from this edition. Some I didn't miss, such as Ani and Amidala frolicking in the meadow with the giant bed bugs. Others, such as almost all the scenes in Palpatine's office, and many of the Jedi Council made it even harder to follow what was going on.
You might be wondering where you can see the movie."
Always cut with the Groenig.
ari_j writes "It looks like Fox is giving us a new season of Futurama. From the page, "Season Premiere Sunday, Nov. 10th at 7PM/6C". Sure enough, my local Fox affiliate is carrying it as stated. From tv.yahoo.com: '"Crimes of the Hot", Episode #408.
Al Gore's head holds an emergency summit in Kyoto, Japan, to deal with global warming caused by robot emissions.'"
This does not look good on a resume. nautical9 writes "As a follow up to Henrick Schon's dismissal from Bell Labs last month for falsifying data, many of his former co-authors are retracting their articles from the AAAS's prestigious Science magazine. It's apparently the largest retraction for the journal ever. Bell labs is also pulling six different patent applications of his. Here's the Wired article."
Is this the basket you ordered for all your eggs? With regard to the AOL / ICQ integration CowboyNeal mentioned the other day, nxtw writes "At this moment, ICQ users can send messages to AIM users, but AIM users cannot send messages to ICQ users or be seen on your buddy list. However, AIM automatically postpends any screenname or group consisting of all numbers with -ICQ when added to your buddy list. (This applies to the beta AIM 5.1.3009 client.)"
They're in Australia, of course they have flying dreams. VileScum writes "Back in May a reader posted this story of an Australian Guy who built a 747 Sim in his garage. As reported in the Sydney Morning Hearld The builder and a group of his friends are now doing a round the world sim flight for charity. The full story can be found here. The details of the actual flight can be found here."
Note that the "new" season of Futurama isn't quite new... The show is still just as cancelled as before.
Fox just has a few un-aired episodes that were produced a while ago, but still haven't been shown yet.
"There have occasionally been UNIX knockoffs, like the vastly inferior command line "talk" implementation, however it was incapable of letting you know whne new users had signed on, also, it could not do file transfers."
Sorry to burst your bubble, but 'talk' has been around far longer than ICQ has. It is not an IM client nor was it designed to be. It was created back in the days when people had to use text-only terminals on UNIX machines and needed a form of communication.
Trillian, illegal? All it does is use the protocol, they didn't steal the source or whatever. KaZaA only provides file sharing, it doesn't promote distributing illegal files. That's like saying Ford makes money of killing people when someone runs people over with his Taurus.
On another note, 'duplicating effort'? Why did your parents decide to breed? After all, they're just duplicating what Adam and Eve did so long ago...
Scenes were cut out because of a limitation of the IMAX reels. 120 minutes is the maximum running time for an IMAX movie.
By the way they cut scenes from Apollo 13 (IMAX) for this same reason too.
Perhaps if you knew why they cut the footage it wouldn't have bothered you that much.
:)
The reason why footage was cut....and from Apollo 13 as well (first IMAX DMR movie)....was because the current IMAX platters can only hold 2 hours worth of movie. Simple as that.
And if you wonder where I got my info., it was posted on starwars.com
Note that the "new" season of Futurama isn't quite new... The show is still just as cancelled as before.
Fox just has a few un-aired episodes that were produced a while ago, but still haven't been shown yet.
This article has the details.
Somewhere hidden in the Trillian menus (I found it so long ago I forgot where it was) is the option to turn on conversation logging. Considering the standard conspiracy-theory crowd that normally frequents slashdot (no offense intended, of course ;) I would think that having this feature off as a default would be seen as a plus.
PS - I just spent the thirty seconds it took to find the options: Preferences -> Message History.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
. . . . because they steal Yahoo, AOL, and Microsofts intellectual property, in an attempt to make money.
.No Advertisements! . . . . while certain corporations and **AA associations would like us to think otherwise is not stealing intellectual property . . .
My understanding is that Trillian, Gaim, and Fire were developed using standard reverse engineeing methods to duplicate the protocols required to communicate with services from Yahoo, AOL, and MSN. This is not stealing intellectual property, and Trillian Pro aside, considering Trillian is available free of charge and that Gaim and Fire are both GPL, I would venture to say that there is very little or no money being made.
Combined with the fact that you need a valid ID regestered with your choice(s) of IM services. . .
If you want an analogy. . . using an alternate IM program is like skipping commercials on a Tivo or ReplayTV . . .
Roger Ebert has been praising a system called Maxivision48 which is 48 fps (and can dynamically switch to 24 fps to save money).
Also, Douglas Trumbull's ShowScan system has been around for a while, but has only been used for a few specialty attractions. I've read comments that said that ShowScan was too realistic and not "cinematic." That reminds me of the CD vs. vinyl debate.
I've never seen either system.
"Will we ever see > 24fps in the movie theater? "
I can't remember the name of the company, but somebody is fishing the idea around Hollywood of 48 fps film. Saw it on Ebert about a year ago.
I predict that soon after theaters are equipped with digital projectors we'll start seeing >24fps movies. There's technology you can get today that uses morphing algorithms to expand 24fps all the way up to 60 fairly convincingly. As a matter of fact, Lost in Space used that technology quite a bit to slow some scenes down. I bet one day they'll take movies and re-process them up to 60fps.
I got back from seeing AOTC in an Imax dome (very cool!). I sat about just shy of the half way mark and found myself needing to turn my head to see all the action. I recommend that you sit at the top so the center is 10 to 15 degrees below your horizontal eyeline.
The Coruscant chase was made for IMAX!
Oh, and if you have friends that still haven't checked out this awesome flick, you may want to show them the DVD first (Nov 12). Because this movie is not exactly straightforward anyway, and with the cuts, they make the story harder to understand.
--Joey
From the first link: "A TV running at only 30 FPS is picking up a Computer monitor in the background in its view, and with the 30 FPS TV Output you see the screen refreshes on the computer monitor running at 60 FPS."
No. Absolute horse shit. When you see a monitor rolling on film or TV it is because the refresh rates are not synchronized, not because you can see a higher rate. Blatant nonsense like that call the whole article in to question.
As far as higher frame rate projection, IMAX also used a 48 fps system for some productions, but it seems to have been discontinued, probably due to the need for more specialized equipment and for practical reasons (used too much film and was more troublesome)
There is also the MaxiVision format. It uses standard 35mm motion picture film, but with a special frame size that's larger than the typical film frame, and can be filmed and projected at either 24 or 48 fps. The image quality at 48 fps is substantially better, even greater than the difference between regular video and HDTV. I can only imagine what IMAX at 48 fps would look like!
And last but not least, there was the Showscan process, which used 70mm film exposed and projected at 60 fps with a single bladed shutter. The image is much crisper and brighter; the faster frame rate reduced motion blur and also provided more image information (and the 70mm film image has higher definition). The image was smaller than an IMAX image though, but the quality was at least as good.
When Douglas Trumbull was developing the Showscan process, he had extensive tests done to determine the optimal projection rate, up to at least 72 fps and possibly 100 fps. 60 fps was found to be the best rate; anything higher had very little improvement in image quality or perception of motion, and would merely use more film than necessary. I've read articles that some scientists have experimented on determining the "frame rate" of human vision, and it seems to be close to the rate used by Showscan (can't remember the exact number, but it was around 60-70 fps, and very few people could perceive anything higher than 80 fps)
Sadly, Showscan never caught on as well as IMAX did and the Showscan corporation went into receivership. If you never got to see it, it was extremely impressive: I saw the Niagara Falls film and it's pretty amazing to see single individual drops of water in the Falls in 70mm at 60 fps! HDTV (and by extension SW:AOTC) looks like an old Super 8 home movie in comparison. It truly was more vivid than being there...the theater was located a few hundred yards from the Falls themselves so it was an easy comparison to make. The only thing close to it would be to see IMAX at 48 fps, but even IMAX's new DMR process is simply up-rezzing 35mm and HDTV images. While it's pretty damn good (I saw Apollo 13 and it was amazing, I'm sure AOTC will be too) it doesn't quite capture the exquisiteness of an original 70mm IMAX or Showscan frame.
With all of the impetus towards cutting costs, using digital production techniques, and consolidating on lesser-quality but universal digital formats, it's unlikely that anyone will continue to produce films in special, high-quality film formats, especially since most of them require special projectors and/or theaters.
A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's an erection for?
It can only be ~120 minutes long because a reel of 120 minutes of IMAX film is about 12 feet in diameter. There's only so much that the motor can spin. Two reels in a row? I'm not sure, but I speculate that there's a decent amount of time required to load in the second reel, or something. Why not just have an intermission? Again, beats me.
Check out CML, the cinematography mailing list. There this has been a holy war for many years.
Many believe that the higher frame rates of video subconsciously tell us that something is "real" and that good ol 24 fps film tells the subconscious: "You are watching a story"...
--
Is that all there is to relationships -sex and robotics?
So, that's what I do at work.
It's pretty cool. There are some really large unsolved problems with it though - the biggest is that it's really tough to detect when objects go in front of each other (occlusions). If you don't detect them correctly, then you get really bad results. Of course, you can do things with a little human intervention, which lets you get almost perfect results, but the time that that takes is proportional to the number of source frames.
That's why you see those kind of effects for slow-motion (in Lost in Space or the Matrix) which has relatively few source frames, but I doubt we'll see it any time soon to increase framerate in movies, because 24fps for a whole movie is a whole lot of frames to manually tweak.
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Slightly off-topic, but the thread is an interesting one. So:
I shoot motion picture film, as a student. So take all this for whatever it's worth. You probably won't ever see 120-200fps in film for a couple of reasons.
For one, there's just not enough light to expose it properly. Shooting 24fps at f2.0 is hard enough on your average B&W reversal stock, which is ASA 160, IIRC. The fastest motion films that Kodak will sell you go to about 800 speed, but that's only three or four steps up from the 160.
I know Kubrick used some specially-made wide lenses to shoot "Barry Lyndon" in candle-light, but I think they were only as open as f0.5 or f0.7. Again, only a couple steps away from f2.0, which is as wide as the average camera lens will go.
So you'd need some massive wattage to get anywhere. But beyond that, there are mechanical issues: there's a claw that pulls film through the gate by its sprockets. The Bolex and Arriflex cameras I've used won't go any faster than 48fps, because apparently you start tearing the film itself when you go much past that.
So maybe there's specialized cameras out there-- they'd need a huge aperture and smooth mechanics, and the film would need to be super-fast and probably large and durable. Which most film is not.
Hope somebody out there might care about all of this enough to make it worth my writing. You can't really compare film and, say, monitors by numbers alone, as most people seem to want to do. Too many differences. They just happen to both result in moving 2D images.
Did anyone bother to click on the link in the parent post? It's a prank -- there is no UPN story. Yes, I fell for it and got my hopes up. Please mod it down so nobody else does.
The problem with shooting at 48fps as opposed to 24fps is that you cut the amount of light hitting the film in half. This means you need brighter light sources, or you need to open up the aperture more. In many cases this is just not possible (an overcast day, etc.).
Never mind that the cost of the actual film and processing would double.
People who complain about flicker and suchsort when going to see a movie are probably watching the movie in a shitty theater with a substandard projector. The first time I saw Spider-man it looked flawless. I saw it a mere 3 days later, at a different theater, and there were all kinds of problems (wobbling, a bit of flicker, etc.).
I call bullshit!
I'll see your bullshit and raise you a moron. Special Lenses for Barry Lyndon.
I've been playing with one of those TVs for a weekend. The digital natural motion makes movies look like a cheap soap opera, news broadcast, or, indeed, 'making of' footage. And you can actually see that the explosions are just special effects. I tried watching Saving Private Ryan with DNM turned on, but I quickly turned it off. I suppose the real problem is that all the special effects in films were never meant to be watched in such smooth motion, and they only look convincing at the original framerate. Remember that there is quite a bit of processing between the original footage and the final movie, and it's there to make sure the movie looks good. If you then add things like DNM on top of that, you break all that. The right way to make movies look good at high framerates is to shoot the movie at the higher framerate first, and do all the processing to make sure it looks good at that framerate.
You're half-right.
On the one hand, focus is the issue here. Focus is very important, and i myself HATE when the CGI looks like CGI because it's too in focus.
BUT, as someone who's done a few high-quality computer animated shorts, there's a large amount of work that goes into, and a significant number of applications to help with, post-processing effects, such as blur and focus and color temperature. It's fundamentally a very hard problem. For color and lighting, Paul Debevec has been doing a lot of new and interesting things to use real-world lighting to light computer models, and computer lighting to light real people. As for blur and focus, i'm not sure of any really good algorithms or techniques, but in practice, it's largely all hand-tweaked, which is bound to be imperfect.
It's easy to say that "damn CGI artists don't know what the word 'focus' means," but when you take a good look at the problem, it's hardly that trivial.
ben.c