I'm glad to see it's up to the usual standards of Professional Anime Translators. That is, making ridiculously basic mistakes, making shit up when you don't know what the original means, and vehemently denying it all when confronted.
Some of us never thought commercializing Linux was a good idea at all. We had a perfectly usable OS for geeks and now it gets progressively dumbed down to make it 'more desktop friendly' with very little market penetration ensuing. We're getting taken for a ride by some folks who want to make money off it. It's bullshit.
I don't think the changes have been all bad - but there are bits of this that I strongly agree with... I think Linux users have come to take it for granted that Linux should become an OS that anyone can use... That wouldn't be a bad thing, but I'm more interested in it as a system by and for computer geeks.
Drinking water is fine, but unless someone is doing some strenuous activity, that particular pressurization (8000 ft) doesn't mean a whole lot.
Oh, I don't know... I went to Colorado by train this summer (elevation about 6000 feet) and it knocked me on my ass for the first day or two... I've never had this kind of effect from flying - but there was definitely a transition period there where we weren't up for any kind of strenuous activity...
Yeah, the Doctor, whose exploits show him to be a magician rather than a scientist and who, in the most recent episode, proclaimed himself a god. That really shows the rewards of a scientific career quite well.
Man, all I'm saying is that it's a show about a doctor...
I think people are missing the obvious potential here. I mean, if you could engineer a computer to accurately simulate a cat's brain, then you could implant that computer in a sexy gynoid body, and have a robot-girl with the mind of a cat!
I mean, you can't really have a proper talk with him unless you spring him from the V.A. hospital - and then you've got to get him back inside before he's missed! And then when he's out he's gonna spend most of his time talking to his imaginary dog, anyway...
You didn't get the reference, apparently... That's OK. I enjoy spouting off references to TV shows and such but it's childish to act as if everyone simply must recognize the same set of pop culture references...
Probably because the distinctive sound of Auto Tune (that is, excessive Auto Tune usage) makes the original voice stick to the note too consistently - stamping out any variation or deviation. A primitive voice synthesizer would do pretty much the same thing - each bit of voice synthesis would be made up of a sequence of commands issued to waveform generators - getting it to hit a certain note would be easy (just change the frequency) but getting it to sound more natural by introducing variations and deviations, would require additional work.
For instance, a vowel sound like the "a" in "Daisy" would probably be done by having the waveform generator output a specific frequency and waveform type (triangle wave? I'm afraid I don't readily recognize the different waveforms by sound...) and set up the filter stage to pass a certain range of frequencies - and then just hold those settings for the length of the syllable.
The Gimp was orgiginally envisioned to demonstrate the power and flexibility of free, desktop systems. The creators wanted to show Linux and free software "stone soup" development was capable of producing and supporting software that rivaled what was available as commercial offerings.
Well, as the old saying goes, "Close, but no cigar." But hey, way to play to the crowd!
Back when I knew practically nothing about Photoshop, I would sometimes fall into the trap of thinking GIMP was just as good... Now that I know a few things about Photoshop, I believe it really is in another class in terms of its overall capabilities... But to me the significance of the GIMP is that it's one of the early examples of a free image editor offering that level of power. These days there are numerous other examples, of course. This would have happened even if GIMP had never existed - some other project would have cropped up. But GIMP was a part of that. Any time the bar is raised in terms of what computer users can accomplish without a massive investment in software - that's a good thing IMO.
I thought that the Gimp was originally a tech demo for GTK that kind of got a little out of hand.
No, originally it was Motif-based. (There was a period where people were trying to muddle along with Motif-alternatives like Lesstif, and use those to get things like GIMP running...) I believe the switch to GTK was about the same time they added layers (early versions had channels only, I think)...
GTK was introduced via the GIMP project. It was originally the "GIMP Toolkit"
I've honestly never understood all the complaints about the GIMP interface...
> People got so hung up on the "Ford isn't supposed to be black" thing
They did? Which people? Where
Probably an american thing I guess, seemed a fairly unimportant point to a Brit like me.
It seemed like a fairly common complaint about the movie when it came out. Really people are just sensitive about familiar things being changed - and so roughly half the folks trotted out arguments about how Ford isn't black, and the other half argued that technically the books never said he wasn't, and the first half said he had ginger hair in the books and so on...
But the point is, all those folks were missing the point. Of course it doesn't matter that they cast a black man as Ford Prefect. What matters is that the man they cast had no business at all playing that part because he wasn't funny. It doesn't help, I'm sure, that they rushed through the whole scene at the bar.
I'm not talking about making the sequence more photo-realistic. I don't care about that.
What I said was that, no, that sequence is not "amazing by today's standards". It's amazing by the standards of 1977 in my opinion... And I can appreciate that. But saying it's anything special by today's standards is just factually wrong.
Computationally, in the present day, plotting a sequence like that would be light work for a scrap of Javascript thrown onto a webpage by somebody who wanted one more bit of eye candy. Modeling and animating a sequence like that would be dreadfully simple in a program like Blender. A piece of work like that is no longer innovative, special, ground-breaking in any way - out of context people wouldn't think much of it. So saying it's impressive by today's standards is just silly.
but at least the puppet is tangible, striking better emotional cues amongst the other actors and the audience.
Uhh yeah. Because if Jar Jar Binks was a puppet instead of CGI he somehow would have been less unfunny and annoying?
That's a separate issue. You're saying that a lame character will be lame whether in CG or as a puppet. This is true, but it doesn't address the argument that CG looks fundamentally unreal in a way that a physical object (even a lame puppet) does not...
I used to have a much stronger bias against CG in movies - these days I think it really depends. CGs has different advantages and weaknesses, and these days I tend to feel that the biggest problem with CG is that people aren't always sensible about where to use it and where not to use it. Making smart decisions about where a special effect can look alright, and under what situations the visibility of such an effect should be minimized - those decisions require experience. You have to understand what the results will be like, and since CG in film is a somewhat recent thing (it's only become reasonably common within the last 15 years or so) I think a lot of the examples from the 90s and early aughts that knowledge wasn't necessarily present. Also, CG is a different aesthetic than traditional special effects - I think that just takes some getting used to.
Personally, I love the craft of making physical models and puppets, and I love when I get to see that craft in movies. But as for the reality of puppets vs. CG - I agree that it's a lot easier to properly integrate a puppet into a scene, but it's still tough to make a physical puppet look natural. 1980-Yoda has only the most basic sort of lip movement... The Xenomorph on the Nostromo looked like a guy in a suit. The Garthim's legs waggle around and barely obscure the human actor's legs... And don't get me started on the landstriders...
People got so hung up on the "Ford isn't supposed to be black" thing that they seem to have forgotten about the "Ford is supposed to be funny" thing...
My personal favorite substitute for expensive early computer graphics was in Escape from New York. To do the sequence where Snake is gliding into New York and looking at a computer generated wireframe of the city; James Cameron simply cut out a bunch of boxes, painted the lines on them with phosphorescent paint, and shot it in the dark.
Yeah, I do tend to wonder why they did that sequence in Star Wars with computers when they could have used the models they were already building and faked a "computer display look" via photographic processes... Among other things I guess this would have meant delaying the briefing scene until they were done with all the Death Star trench parts (since the parts would need to be re-painted in order to do the phosphorescent lines trick) - and it would be a different effect, like wireframe with hidden surface removal... It seems like that guy had a pretty decent set-up for what he was doing, though, so maybe doing the briefing room in Star Wars as a model shot actually would have been more expensive in the end...
That's "bicycle built for two" - and if we're talking about computers in movies, here - HAL's singing "bicycle built for two" was a human actor singing, of course. The inspiration for that bit was one of the early examples of computer music by Max Mathews...
So basically I don't think that's really relevant as an example of computer-generated stuff in films.
Really, you could just use the mouse wheel combined with a single key modifier (hold a key on the keyboard) that would rotate whatever plane (X/Y/Z) you wanted when you spun your mouse wheel.
Mouse wheels have shitty resolution, though. They click to individual stops, they're sent to the host as if they were button presses...
More to the point I think is the fact that in current software, when you rotate a model with the mouse, it normally rotates it relative to the position it's in. I'm not sure if this is how those dials worked, but I'm guessing not: probably it would have been simpler then to have each dial affect rotation parameters in a matrix, and then create the projection just by multiplying those matrices together - as opposed to using the dial to rotate (and then re-nomalize) a rotation matrix...
I think the really neat thing about that system of dials was that it was so responsive. Naturally that's something we can still accomplish...
Twenty years ago this is the kind of project a hobbyist could have taken on, working alone. A PC from that era would have been sufficient to do all the modeling and rendering work.
These days, a $300 computer would be plenty for modeling and rendering a superior final product. It's not just about raw rendering power, either - it's also about having access to software (Blender, for instance) which makes the modeling and animation tasks a lot easier to manage...
Don't get me wrong - I think early examples of early CG work in movies is cool stuff, and I love seeing how it was done. It was impressive stuff by the standards of the day. But today? No... It's only impressive if you look at it in terms of what the guy had to work with.
I gotta say, though, it's interesting that they chose to do that sequence with a computer. I would have thought that, since they were building models of everything anyway, it would have been easier to do the sequence as a set of model shots... With the right treatment and photographic process, a physical model could be used to create a shot that looks like a computer sequence... (Basically: paint it black, paint the edges white, light the hell out of it, and start filming... Or clear-cast a copy of the model parts, paint it black, sand off the paint on the edges, and light it from inside or behind... They could get a stark black/white shot out of that via photographic processes...) The downsides, I guess, is they'd have to have the models ready for this before shooting the briefing scene, and it would be a somewhat different look (more like a wireframe with occlusion, but shadows and such would probably blot out some of the edging, too...)
Slashdot Mirror
One day I will invent a time machine and go back in time and destroy anime before it was ever created.
And you'll be born and grow up in a world where anime never existed... So why will you go back in time?
Fact that Linux still doesn't have half-decent "standard" movie editor is really frustrating.
I haven't had much luck so far with trying to edit video on Linux...
But what's a "standard" movie editor?
I'm glad to see it's up to the usual standards of Professional Anime Translators. That is, making ridiculously basic mistakes, making shit up when you don't know what the original means, and vehemently denying it all when confronted.
"It smells like a colony..."
(See also: "Amuro! You're fast!")
Some of us never thought commercializing Linux was a good idea at all. We had a perfectly usable OS for geeks and now it gets progressively dumbed down to make it 'more desktop friendly' with very little market penetration ensuing. We're getting taken for a ride by some folks who want to make money off it. It's bullshit.
I don't think the changes have been all bad - but there are bits of this that I strongly agree with... I think Linux users have come to take it for granted that Linux should become an OS that anyone can use... That wouldn't be a bad thing, but I'm more interested in it as a system by and for computer geeks.
Wikitravel is your friend. While you're at it, become Wikitravel's friend and contribute.
"Mostly Harmless"
Drinking water is fine, but unless someone is doing some strenuous activity, that particular pressurization (8000 ft) doesn't mean a whole lot.
Oh, I don't know... I went to Colorado by train this summer (elevation about 6000 feet) and it knocked me on my ass for the first day or two... I've never had this kind of effect from flying - but there was definitely a transition period there where we weren't up for any kind of strenuous activity...
D'oh... dad = dead
My condolences.
See, this is what comes of misusing mathematical symbols...
Yeah, the Doctor, whose exploits show him to be a magician rather than a scientist and who, in the most recent episode, proclaimed himself a god. That really shows the rewards of a scientific career quite well.
Man, all I'm saying is that it's a show about a doctor...
I think people are missing the obvious potential here. I mean, if you could engineer a computer to accurately simulate a cat's brain, then you could implant that computer in a sexy gynoid body, and have a robot-girl with the mind of a cat!
...during shows like "24 Hours"....
Hmm, that's a new one to me.
Oh, that's the one with Eddie Murphy, right? And they're doing a follow-up series called "Another 24 hours"...
No, but lots of kids do want to be doctors and lawyers. Look at how many TV shows are based around doctors or lawyers.
Yeah! Like "Doctor Who"!
I mean, you can't really have a proper talk with him unless you spring him from the V.A. hospital - and then you've got to get him back inside before he's missed! And then when he's out he's gonna spend most of his time talking to his imaginary dog, anyway...
troll alert
You didn't get the reference, apparently... That's OK. I enjoy spouting off references to TV shows and such but it's childish to act as if everyone simply must recognize the same set of pop culture references...
Sounds like Auto Tune to me.... :P
Probably because the distinctive sound of Auto Tune (that is, excessive Auto Tune usage) makes the original voice stick to the note too consistently - stamping out any variation or deviation. A primitive voice synthesizer would do pretty much the same thing - each bit of voice synthesis would be made up of a sequence of commands issued to waveform generators - getting it to hit a certain note would be easy (just change the frequency) but getting it to sound more natural by introducing variations and deviations, would require additional work.
For instance, a vowel sound like the "a" in "Daisy" would probably be done by having the waveform generator output a specific frequency and waveform type (triangle wave? I'm afraid I don't readily recognize the different waveforms by sound...) and set up the filter stage to pass a certain range of frequencies - and then just hold those settings for the length of the syllable.
The Gimp was orgiginally envisioned to demonstrate the power and flexibility of free, desktop systems. The creators wanted to show Linux and free software "stone soup" development was capable of producing and supporting software that rivaled what was available as commercial offerings.
Well, as the old saying goes, "Close, but no cigar." But hey, way to play to the crowd!
Back when I knew practically nothing about Photoshop, I would sometimes fall into the trap of thinking GIMP was just as good... Now that I know a few things about Photoshop, I believe it really is in another class in terms of its overall capabilities... But to me the significance of the GIMP is that it's one of the early examples of a free image editor offering that level of power. These days there are numerous other examples, of course. This would have happened even if GIMP had never existed - some other project would have cropped up. But GIMP was a part of that. Any time the bar is raised in terms of what computer users can accomplish without a massive investment in software - that's a good thing IMO.
I thought that the Gimp was originally a tech demo for GTK that kind of got a little out of hand.
No, originally it was Motif-based. (There was a period where people were trying to muddle along with Motif-alternatives like Lesstif, and use those to get things like GIMP running...) I believe the switch to GTK was about the same time they added layers (early versions had channels only, I think)...
GTK was introduced via the GIMP project. It was originally the "GIMP Toolkit"
I've honestly never understood all the complaints about the GIMP interface...
> People got so hung up on the "Ford isn't supposed to be black" thing
They did? Which people? Where
Probably an american thing I guess, seemed a fairly unimportant point to a Brit like me.
It seemed like a fairly common complaint about the movie when it came out. Really people are just sensitive about familiar things being changed - and so roughly half the folks trotted out arguments about how Ford isn't black, and the other half argued that technically the books never said he wasn't, and the first half said he had ginger hair in the books and so on...
But the point is, all those folks were missing the point. Of course it doesn't matter that they cast a black man as Ford Prefect. What matters is that the man they cast had no business at all playing that part because he wasn't funny. It doesn't help, I'm sure, that they rushed through the whole scene at the bar.
I'm not talking about making the sequence more photo-realistic. I don't care about that.
What I said was that, no, that sequence is not "amazing by today's standards". It's amazing by the standards of 1977 in my opinion... And I can appreciate that. But saying it's anything special by today's standards is just factually wrong.
Computationally, in the present day, plotting a sequence like that would be light work for a scrap of Javascript thrown onto a webpage by somebody who wanted one more bit of eye candy. Modeling and animating a sequence like that would be dreadfully simple in a program like Blender. A piece of work like that is no longer innovative, special, ground-breaking in any way - out of context people wouldn't think much of it. So saying it's impressive by today's standards is just silly.
but at least the puppet is tangible, striking better emotional cues amongst the other actors and the audience.
Uhh yeah. Because if Jar Jar Binks was a puppet instead of CGI he somehow would have been less unfunny and annoying?
That's a separate issue. You're saying that a lame character will be lame whether in CG or as a puppet. This is true, but it doesn't address the argument that CG looks fundamentally unreal in a way that a physical object (even a lame puppet) does not...
I used to have a much stronger bias against CG in movies - these days I think it really depends. CGs has different advantages and weaknesses, and these days I tend to feel that the biggest problem with CG is that people aren't always sensible about where to use it and where not to use it. Making smart decisions about where a special effect can look alright, and under what situations the visibility of such an effect should be minimized - those decisions require experience. You have to understand what the results will be like, and since CG in film is a somewhat recent thing (it's only become reasonably common within the last 15 years or so) I think a lot of the examples from the 90s and early aughts that knowledge wasn't necessarily present. Also, CG is a different aesthetic than traditional special effects - I think that just takes some getting used to.
Personally, I love the craft of making physical models and puppets, and I love when I get to see that craft in movies. But as for the reality of puppets vs. CG - I agree that it's a lot easier to properly integrate a puppet into a scene, but it's still tough to make a physical puppet look natural. 1980-Yoda has only the most basic sort of lip movement... The Xenomorph on the Nostromo looked like a guy in a suit. The Garthim's legs waggle around and barely obscure the human actor's legs... And don't get me started on the landstriders...
Agreed. Look at the Hitchhiker's Guide movie.
Do I have to?
People got so hung up on the "Ford isn't supposed to be black" thing that they seem to have forgotten about the "Ford is supposed to be funny" thing...
My personal favorite substitute for expensive early computer graphics was in Escape from New York. To do the sequence where Snake is gliding into New York and looking at a computer generated wireframe of the city; James Cameron simply cut out a bunch of boxes, painted the lines on them with phosphorescent paint, and shot it in the dark.
Yeah, I do tend to wonder why they did that sequence in Star Wars with computers when they could have used the models they were already building and faked a "computer display look" via photographic processes... Among other things I guess this would have meant delaying the briefing scene until they were done with all the Death Star trench parts (since the parts would need to be re-painted in order to do the phosphorescent lines trick) - and it would be a different effect, like wireframe with hidden surface removal... It seems like that guy had a pretty decent set-up for what he was doing, though, so maybe doing the briefing room in Star Wars as a model shot actually would have been more expensive in the end...
Daisy was sung by a digital computer.
That's "bicycle built for two" - and if we're talking about computers in movies, here - HAL's singing "bicycle built for two" was a human actor singing, of course. The inspiration for that bit was one of the early examples of computer music by Max Mathews...
So basically I don't think that's really relevant as an example of computer-generated stuff in films.
Yes. I think it's called a mouse.
Really, you could just use the mouse wheel combined with a single key modifier (hold a key on the keyboard) that would rotate whatever plane (X/Y/Z) you wanted when you spun your mouse wheel.
Mouse wheels have shitty resolution, though. They click to individual stops, they're sent to the host as if they were button presses...
More to the point I think is the fact that in current software, when you rotate a model with the mouse, it normally rotates it relative to the position it's in. I'm not sure if this is how those dials worked, but I'm guessing not: probably it would have been simpler then to have each dial affect rotation parameters in a matrix, and then create the projection just by multiplying those matrices together - as opposed to using the dial to rotate (and then re-nomalize) a rotation matrix...
I think the really neat thing about that system of dials was that it was so responsive. Naturally that's something we can still accomplish...
...even for todays standards...
For today's standards? Seriously?
Twenty years ago this is the kind of project a hobbyist could have taken on, working alone. A PC from that era would have been sufficient to do all the modeling and rendering work.
These days, a $300 computer would be plenty for modeling and rendering a superior final product. It's not just about raw rendering power, either - it's also about having access to software (Blender, for instance) which makes the modeling and animation tasks a lot easier to manage...
Don't get me wrong - I think early examples of early CG work in movies is cool stuff, and I love seeing how it was done. It was impressive stuff by the standards of the day. But today? No... It's only impressive if you look at it in terms of what the guy had to work with.
I gotta say, though, it's interesting that they chose to do that sequence with a computer. I would have thought that, since they were building models of everything anyway, it would have been easier to do the sequence as a set of model shots... With the right treatment and photographic process, a physical model could be used to create a shot that looks like a computer sequence... (Basically: paint it black, paint the edges white, light the hell out of it, and start filming... Or clear-cast a copy of the model parts, paint it black, sand off the paint on the edges, and light it from inside or behind... They could get a stark black/white shot out of that via photographic processes...) The downsides, I guess, is they'd have to have the models ready for this before shooting the briefing scene, and it would be a somewhat different look (more like a wireframe with occlusion, but shadows and such would probably blot out some of the edging, too...)
We see evolution taking away limbs but never adding new ones.
Well, I don't know about limbs - but I did have a cat with extra toes...