Slashback: ClonesMAX, Animation, Dislaimers

Slashback with a reader review of the IMAX version of Star Wars Episode Two,the continuing courtship of AIM and ICQ, episode 408 of Futurama, and more, including How to go around the world without going anywhere at all. Read on below!

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."

Comments

Futurama

[jimmcq]

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.

Re:Futurama

[WankersRevenge]

Actually, it's not smart business sense. Here's the deal - if the show does wonderfully well and they decide to hire everyone back - now they got to wrangle all the original creative talent who will probably want way more money who are most likely committed to other projects. It'll probably take a year or longer to produce new episodes. And by the time those new episodes have hit the market, chances the public will have since long moved on.

My girlfriends father is an animation producer and this exact scenario is happening to him.

SWEp2IMAX: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut!

[Anonymous Coward]

With the formerly-missing musical number, "Blame Amidala."

Forget A-B-C plotlines and 2 dimensional charcters

[Anonymous Coward]

If there's one thing wrong with movies today, it's the frame-rate.

Re:Eliminating duplicity

[IanA]

AIM and ICQ are both owned by AOL. ICQ is the original IM. And at one point was the most poular. 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.


It's interesting talk can be a knockoff of ICQ when talk came first.

Re:The IMAX experience.

[Target Drone]

The reason the scenes were cut is because the original AOTC was 143 minutes but an IMAX flick can only be 120 minutes (although apparently AOTC is 128 minutes so they must of crammed a few extra feet onto the reel).

This article has the details.

Intellectual Property Theft?!

[mofu]

. . . . because they steal Yahoo, AOL, and Microsofts intellectual property, in an attempt to make money.

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 . . . .No Advertisements! . . . . while certain corporations and **AA associations would like us to think otherwise is not stealing intellectual property . . .

Not as funny as you'd think

[Osty]

You moderators mark him as funny, but he has a point. Modern movies show in 24fps (most theaters double-shutter, so you get an effect 48 fps, but each frame is doubled). This is extremely noticeable on any pan. And before anyone jumps in with the, "Human eyes can only see 24fps anyway, so what's the point?" argument, let me just say you're wrong wrong wrong. 24 frames per second is near the bare minimum required for the human eye to distinguish motion rather than individual frames. I've never seen a study claiming a maximum value, but I'd expect it to be much higher than even the 60fps some people suggest. If that were the case, then nobody would be able to tell the difference between 60Hz refresh rate monitors and 100Hz refresh rates. Movies can get away with this because of intrinsic "artificats" like motion blur, that help create a better sense of motion in fewer frames. (Incidentally, that's also why 24fps in a video game feels really jerky, while 24fps in a movie is usually pretty smooth -- video games tend not to have motion blur, because it requires lots of computational power. It's easier to push out more frames for a smoother look, rather than add motion blur.)

Will we ever see > 24fps in the movie theater? Possibly, but it's going to take some time. I wouldn't expect it until TV broadcasts have switched completely to 720p (60 full frames per second, not 60 fields or half-frames), and DVDs are encoded at the same (rather than the current 480i encoding, and relying on special hardware to do 3:2 pulldown conversion for progressive display). Until then, the 24fps movie is too entrenched, I think.

Re:Not as funny as you'd think

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Double the frame rate to 48 fps? 60 fps?

My GOD, boy, are you trying to kill the movie industry? Film is expensive! The material costs would would be enormous.

A typical film runs what, about $70M? Take out the fees for crappy actors who need all that money for hookers and you are left with about $1200 for the film. Once you start using more film, the studios would be bankrupt.

Phfff... it's never gonna happen.

Re:Not as funny as you'd think

[NearlyHeadless]

Will we ever see > 24fps in the movie theater? Possibly, but it's going to take some time.

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.

Re:Not as funny as you'd think

[doi]

Actually, most motion picture projectors use a three-bladed shutter, which result in 72 flashes per second with a 24 fps film. This reduces the flickering of the image. I'm not sure about IMAX projectors though, as they are custom-built around a specialized film format, but they do run at 24 fps.

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.

Imax Advice

[Joey7F]

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

How to go around the world without going anywhere?

[autopr0n]

Just sit on your ass and wait a day. Duh.

AotC in Omnimax not all that great

[Burdell]

I saw AotC Friday night in the US Space & Rocket Center's Spacedome theater (it is an Omnimax dome), and I was underwhelmed. The print seemed too dark (which I don't think was the fault of the theater or projector; I've seen lots of movies in this theater and never seen that before), making some scenes like the chase on Corescant very difficult to follow (most action scenese tended to blur and be difficult to follow). I sat near the center (just a couple of seats from the projector), and it was just too big - when two people were talking on the screen, I had too look back and forth too much.

However, the scroll at the beginning looked like it was going straight up a wall, which was kind of cool. :-)

Re:Not really

[Murdock037]

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.