And even if they do have 3 hours of story to tell, they really should go the Lord of the Rings route. Do an initial release in theaters with a shorter cut, and save the full length cut for a special edition home video release.
The Fellowship of the Ring was the one (and only one) of the trilogy there that was much much better in every way with the extended release. The other two packed in scenes that disrupted the flow of the movie (IE, too many cutaways to Merry and Pippin during Helm's Deep) or really were unnecessary. But Fellowship worked better in its extended edition. The pacing was better, and the movie didn't drag nearly as much in the second half since the intermission set expectations on how long the second half would actually be.
But the LOTR movies actually had enough plot for three hour movies. The Hobbit movies, as a counter, absolutely did not. They should have been 90-minute movies at the longest, or just two regular-length ones. Something like that.
Sure. Like the Rocky Horror shows. Good point. If being part of a crowd is worth the price of admission to you, then that's super cool. Can't edit a slashdot post, so best I can do is acknowledge the point.
There were a number of movies that were fantastic to see as part of a communal experience. Jurassic Park is one that came to mind since back in '93 you could actually hide details of movies before they were released. IE, no one outside of the movie industry knew the dinosaurs were going to look as good as they were. The sheer awe and excitement that rippled through the theater during the first brachiosaurus scene was a movie magic experience, something you can't get at home. Star Wars was another example, Lord of the Rings something similar. IE, any time an 'event' film is worth the build-up, the payoffs are better than I'd get at home.
Also common: two schmucks getting into an argument and one guy ending it by pulling a gun - not because he's a criminal, just because he had it and he felt threatened and his defensive instincts kicked in. The more guns you bring into a crowded room full of fallible people, the more likely someone is going to get shot.
And not necessarily the people involved. If two nitwits get into a fist-fight in a theater, I'm not worried that when one swings and misses, his fist will keep going another 20 feet and hit me in the head.
That leaves somewhere around 1000 to 2000 murders.
And, appropriate to the discussion, how many of those murders are committed by people that the murdered knew? If you're going to get killed by your spouse, for instance, chances are that it won't be at the packed multiplex. It'll be at home.
Even then, you still get stupid adults who think they are on-call brain surgeons who cant leave their comms device off for a solid two hours.
There are quite a few companies who think that you're on-call and that it's EXTREMELY IMPORTANT for you to answer an on-call alert within minutes. Whether that's true or not isn't the point, it doesn't stop the demands from being placed on them by employers.
The Swedish authorities want him for questioning, yet they refuse to fly to London to interview him and refuse to do it via a videoconference. Why? It's not like this is against Swedish law or has never been done before. No, the Swedish government is demanding that he appear in Sweden. At which point the U.S. government will have him extradited and arrested for "espionage"
This doesn't make any sense -- are you implying that Sweden is more likely to extradite Assange than the US BFF, Great Britain is? That he would be in total danger of this in Sweden, but somehow he'd be totally safe in London? No, he's worry that he'd be tried for a Swedish crime under Swedish law.
Hillary got to Assange - the check cleared, suddenly no leak.
Total corruption.
Another conspiracy theory... Hope it is going to stick, huh?
It happened before -- Assange started forgetting his promises of Russian leaks around when Putin started to praise him about his defiance. Funny how that works.
No, what you see is the democrats having an active hand in the media. Or did you forget that the Obama administration was directly leaning on reporters and media organizations by denying them access
Are you saying this is not standard operating procedure for the White House, regardless of which party is in power? "Access" has been a weapon for decades now that the White House can use to try to being the media into line.
Yeah, and you're the type of person who'd say that there are no connections when 10+ outlets suddenly all come out yesterday with exactly the same talking points about Pence [google.ca] and his non-2020 campaign
You know, I have no connections to the media so I don't hear what rumors they might be circulating, what they're talking about, or any of that. But needless to say, I came to the same conclusion.
Maybe they came to the same talking points about Pence because, given the performance and the circumstances surrounding it, it was a FUCKING OBVIOUS conclusion to make? In fact, it was obvious well before the debates because everyone was saying it. Most Democrats wish they had Tim Kane as their presidential candidate. Most Republicans would rather Pence be the candidate as well. Very few are actually excited about their candidate, which is why are aweful as the other side is, neither side is really able to get traction against the other. Both candidates SHOULD be so very easily beatable, but when they're both the worst choices, it's a tossup that Hillary is narrowly winning at the moment.
Pence is hitched to a very bad candidate. No surprise that he wants to be seen on his own terms and to not get dragged down by Trump. That the "smart politician" way of doing things, to pay your dues by supporting your party, and look good while doing it. Trump is the outsider, but Pence is the more established politician playing by traditional politician rules.
I think if you dig into her history on non conservative sites, you'll find the same things.
For the most part, I don't distrust her motivations. I distrust her honesty, obviously, but I think her worst flaw is she has something of a "I know best" attitude. Almost all of these scandals she's gotten into were a result of her rejecting the advice of experts who knew what they were talking about because she thought she had a mental picture of what was going on and what would happen. Whether it was ignoring security warnings in Benghazi, or ignoring sysadmin warnings about her private email server, situations that could have been avoided had she followed the recommendations given to her. I know a few very intelligent people who have that as part of their personality, and it can be frustrating when they walk into pitfalls after you try to warn them away.
Imagine every primary there were no "D" and no "R" after peoples names, and you got to vote for anyone you wanted.
The primary is the means by which a political party decides which of its candidates it will send to the general election. It's not specified in the Constitution how this should be done; it's a party process. I don't think it makes sense to remove the (D) or (R) after the names, and in some states voting for dems or repubs happens on different days. It's not an election to whittle down the candidates, it's a party function, because each party has one candidate in the general.
Uh, no. The Bush clan wanted Jeb to run for president. That didn't sit will with George W. and he ran for president first. Now Jeb is sidelined, perhaps permanently, from becoming president in the future. A real tragedy.
George W. was always the more popular choice for President. I think Jeb was more thoughtful and articulate, but W knew how to court and -motivate- the powerful evangelical side as well as the business side. Jeb wasn't quite as good at the motivate and inspire thing.
The fact that she had to enlist the DNC to help get her election rigged enough to beat Bernie isn't much better (it is actually worse) than Trump beating 16
That's not a fact, that's an opinion. And my opinion in response is that most Americans aren't interested in having a socialist.. sorry, a "Democratic Socialist" as a President. The United States is not quite THAT liberal.
There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans. Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to survive, somewhere beyond the heavens.
Who else read that in Lorne Greene's voice?
Ah, but it was Patrick Macnee who gave that opening credits introduction, not Lorne Greene. Patrick was the voice of the Imperious Leader and Count Iblis (in two episodes).
I used this quote in my Encoding & Encryption class about how DRM is pointless and Media should instead move towards invisible watermarks so as to be able to track down leakers. (Got lots of laughs, and basically cemented my argument)
I also attended a demonstration where I saw exactly that -- very minor changes made to specific scenes with background objects that could be altered with effects in post. Different regions get different variations that you will only be able to notice if you have stills from both and can check them side by side. This was mostly done for actual film prints that went out internationally to track what locations pirated copies of film prints and scanned them for online distribution. They admitted that once they release a movie on Blu-Ray and DVD, there's not much that can be done to stop piracy. So the effort was put into stopping, or at least delaying, piracy during the theatrical release window, and the first step is finding out where the high-quality rips come from. The low-quality rips, the shaky camera with a bad screen and bad sound and people talking? They're not quite as worried about that.
They then analyze the rips that they find on torrents to see what region the high-quality rips come from and see if they can detect a pattern. If a specific region tends to get a lot of high-quality film copies, then that region will find its release dates will lag far behind the release dates for other regions. This isn't to "punish" a region, it's to try to delay the release of the high-quality rips, to increase the time that a movie in the theater is not competing with its pirated copies online. And this is all done with unnoticeable watermarking to the film copies.
I find the frame rate of many movies in theatres to be too low. 24fps is crap.
Unless you're watching the Hobbit in HFR, that's what almost all films are recorded as. When you're watching at home, you're watching 24fps content. And if you're watching it on one of those weird TVs where you HAVEN'T turned off "jitter correction" or "120 Hz output," then you're watching 24fps content with plenty of artifacts.
I liked The Hobbit in HFR (the content of the movie, maybe another question), but people are used to 24fps. They complained it looked too soap opera-y, it made the sets look fake (which of course they are..). People like cinema quality.
.. about a decade ago, why were movie studios really pushing ahead on the 3-D movie boom, when 3-D hadn't worked well before and audiences were ambivalent. He said that the studios were looking for something that would get people into the theaters, some way that they could differentiate themselves from just DVD entertainment, and special theaters with special gear to give you an experience you won't get on your couch. Think of arcades today -- if you can find them, they're full of games with fancy controllers, or Dave and Buster's styled attractions, not screens with games you can play on your X-Box. Same reason.
I then asked him why these same studios were also pushing 3-D TVs and projection systems and super-high-quality sound at home, and he said that the movie industry was not above shooting itself in the foot.
(This wasn't the head of Warner or Disney, it was a small independent studio that released about a movie a year)
Studios will get alarmed at something that threatens the traditional cash cow of the movie theater, just as they saw great gains in the DVD era, and also great great declines in revenue as the DVD era petered out. If the movie theaters fade, then they won't -really- know how to market and sell their films, and they'll work to protect what they know rather than face the great unknown.
Here's the problem -- this makes the roads much much much more expensive. Heavy vehicles operating on the roadways degrade them fairly quickly. Heavy vehicles on the road's surface will very quickly degrade their solar efficiency. How are workers supposed to dig into the roads to install cables, lay need sewer lines/etc?
Think about how many roads around your city or town are in poor condition because "there's no money to fix the roads." And that's for extremely cheap asphalt. "Underfunding municipal projects" is a problem I don't think we're ever going to solve.
Slashdot Mirror
And even if they do have 3 hours of story to tell, they really should go the Lord of the Rings route. Do an initial release in theaters with a shorter cut, and save the full length cut for a special edition home video release.
The Fellowship of the Ring was the one (and only one) of the trilogy there that was much much better in every way with the extended release.
The other two packed in scenes that disrupted the flow of the movie (IE, too many cutaways to Merry and Pippin during Helm's Deep) or really were unnecessary. But Fellowship worked better in its extended edition. The pacing was better, and the movie didn't drag nearly as much in the second half since the intermission set expectations on how long the second half would actually be.
But the LOTR movies actually had enough plot for three hour movies.
The Hobbit movies, as a counter, absolutely did not. They should have been 90-minute movies at the longest, or just two regular-length ones. Something like that.
Sure. Like the Rocky Horror shows. Good point. If being part of a crowd is worth the price of admission to you, then that's super cool. Can't edit a slashdot post, so best I can do is acknowledge the point.
There were a number of movies that were fantastic to see as part of a communal experience. Jurassic Park is one that came to mind since back in '93 you could actually hide details of movies before they were released. IE, no one outside of the movie industry knew the dinosaurs were going to look as good as they were. The sheer awe and excitement that rippled through the theater during the first brachiosaurus scene was a movie magic experience, something you can't get at home. Star Wars was another example, Lord of the Rings something similar. IE, any time an 'event' film is worth the build-up, the payoffs are better than I'd get at home.
Also common: two schmucks getting into an argument and one guy ending it by pulling a gun - not because he's a criminal, just because he had it and he felt threatened and his defensive instincts kicked in. The more guns you bring into a crowded room full of fallible people, the more likely someone is going to get shot.
And not necessarily the people involved. If two nitwits get into a fist-fight in a theater, I'm not worried that when one swings and misses, his fist will keep going another 20 feet and hit me in the head.
That leaves somewhere around 1000 to 2000 murders.
And, appropriate to the discussion, how many of those murders are committed by people that the murdered knew?
If you're going to get killed by your spouse, for instance, chances are that it won't be at the packed multiplex. It'll be at home.
Even then, you still get stupid adults who think they are on-call brain surgeons who cant leave their comms device off for a solid two hours.
There are quite a few companies who think that you're on-call and that it's EXTREMELY IMPORTANT for you to answer an on-call alert within minutes. Whether that's true or not isn't the point, it doesn't stop the demands from being placed on them by employers.
The Swedish authorities want him for questioning, yet they refuse to fly to London to interview him and refuse to do it via a videoconference. Why? It's not like this is against Swedish law or has never been done before. No, the Swedish government is demanding that he appear in Sweden. At which point the U.S. government will have him extradited and arrested for "espionage"
This doesn't make any sense -- are you implying that Sweden is more likely to extradite Assange than the US BFF, Great Britain is? That he would be in total danger of this in Sweden, but somehow he'd be totally safe in London? No, he's worry that he'd be tried for a Swedish crime under Swedish law.
My point is that recently the hive mind on Slashdot is attacking WikiLeaks instead of supporting it. What changed?
They stopped curating and redacting information, that's about when they lost me.
Hillary got to Assange - the check cleared, suddenly no leak.
Total corruption.
Another conspiracy theory... Hope it is going to stick, huh?
It happened before -- Assange started forgetting his promises of Russian leaks around when Putin started to praise him about his defiance. Funny how that works.
No, what you see is the democrats having an active hand in the media. Or did you forget that the Obama administration was directly leaning on reporters and media organizations by denying them access
Are you saying this is not standard operating procedure for the White House, regardless of which party is in power? "Access" has been a weapon for decades now that the White House can use to try to being the media into line.
Yeah, and you're the type of person who'd say that there are no connections when 10+ outlets suddenly all come out yesterday with exactly the same talking points about Pence [google.ca] and his non-2020 campaign
You know, I have no connections to the media so I don't hear what rumors they might be circulating, what they're talking about, or any of that. But needless to say, I came to the same conclusion.
Maybe they came to the same talking points about Pence because, given the performance and the circumstances surrounding it, it was a FUCKING OBVIOUS conclusion to make? In fact, it was obvious well before the debates because everyone was saying it. Most Democrats wish they had Tim Kane as their presidential candidate. Most Republicans would rather Pence be the candidate as well. Very few are actually excited about their candidate, which is why are aweful as the other side is, neither side is really able to get traction against the other. Both candidates SHOULD be so very easily beatable, but when they're both the worst choices, it's a tossup that Hillary is narrowly winning at the moment.
Pence is hitched to a very bad candidate. No surprise that he wants to be seen on his own terms and to not get dragged down by Trump. That the "smart politician" way of doing things, to pay your dues by supporting your party, and look good while doing it. Trump is the outsider, but Pence is the more established politician playing by traditional politician rules.
I think if you dig into her history on non conservative sites, you'll find the same things.
For the most part, I don't distrust her motivations. I distrust her honesty, obviously, but I think her worst flaw is she has something of a "I know best" attitude. Almost all of these scandals she's gotten into were a result of her rejecting the advice of experts who knew what they were talking about because she thought she had a mental picture of what was going on and what would happen. Whether it was ignoring security warnings in Benghazi, or ignoring sysadmin warnings about her private email server, situations that could have been avoided had she followed the recommendations given to her. I know a few very intelligent people who have that as part of their personality, and it can be frustrating when they walk into pitfalls after you try to warn them away.
Imagine every primary there were no "D" and no "R" after peoples names, and you got to vote for anyone you wanted.
The primary is the means by which a political party decides which of its candidates it will send to the general election. It's not specified in the Constitution how this should be done; it's a party process. I don't think it makes sense to remove the (D) or (R) after the names, and in some states voting for dems or repubs happens on different days. It's not an election to whittle down the candidates, it's a party function, because each party has one candidate in the general.
Uh, no. The Bush clan wanted Jeb to run for president. That didn't sit will with George W. and he ran for president first. Now Jeb is sidelined, perhaps permanently, from becoming president in the future. A real tragedy.
George W. was always the more popular choice for President. I think Jeb was more thoughtful and articulate, but W knew how to court and -motivate- the powerful evangelical side as well as the business side. Jeb wasn't quite as good at the motivate and inspire thing.
The fact that she had to enlist the DNC to help get her election rigged enough to beat Bernie isn't much better (it is actually worse) than Trump beating 16
That's not a fact, that's an opinion. And my opinion in response is that most Americans aren't interested in having a socialist.. sorry, a "Democratic Socialist" as a President. The United States is not quite THAT liberal.
There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans. Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to survive, somewhere beyond the heavens.
Who else read that in Lorne Greene's voice?
Ah, but it was Patrick Macnee who gave that opening credits introduction, not Lorne Greene.
Patrick was the voice of the Imperious Leader and Count Iblis (in two episodes).
I used this quote in my Encoding & Encryption class about how DRM is pointless and Media should instead move towards invisible watermarks so as to be able to track down leakers. (Got lots of laughs, and basically cemented my argument)
I also attended a demonstration where I saw exactly that -- very minor changes made to specific scenes with background objects that could be altered with effects in post. Different regions get different variations that you will only be able to notice if you have stills from both and can check them side by side. This was mostly done for actual film prints that went out internationally to track what locations pirated copies of film prints and scanned them for online distribution. They admitted that once they release a movie on Blu-Ray and DVD, there's not much that can be done to stop piracy. So the effort was put into stopping, or at least delaying, piracy during the theatrical release window, and the first step is finding out where the high-quality rips come from. The low-quality rips, the shaky camera with a bad screen and bad sound and people talking? They're not quite as worried about that.
They then analyze the rips that they find on torrents to see what region the high-quality rips come from and see if they can detect a pattern. If a specific region tends to get a lot of high-quality film copies, then that region will find its release dates will lag far behind the release dates for other regions. This isn't to "punish" a region, it's to try to delay the release of the high-quality rips, to increase the time that a movie in the theater is not competing with its pirated copies online. And this is all done with unnoticeable watermarking to the film copies.
....I can get full bitrate film quality streaming with no buffering. Otherwise I'll still go to a theater for this.
I'll always take Blu-Ray over streaming. Every time.
Honestly, who gives a shit. I have a Pioneer 7.2 setup at home and it sounds fantastic. Theaters have a monopoly on exactly nothing anymore.
Yeah, but then the guy next door starts banging on the wall and you have to turn it down again.
I find the frame rate of many movies in theatres to be too low. 24fps is crap.
Unless you're watching the Hobbit in HFR, that's what almost all films are recorded as. When you're watching at home, you're watching 24fps content. And if you're watching it on one of those weird TVs where you HAVEN'T turned off "jitter correction" or "120 Hz output," then you're watching 24fps content with plenty of artifacts.
I liked The Hobbit in HFR (the content of the movie, maybe another question), but people are used to 24fps. They complained it looked too soap opera-y, it made the sets look fake (which of course they are..). People like cinema quality.
.. about a decade ago, why were movie studios really pushing ahead on the 3-D movie boom, when 3-D hadn't worked well before and audiences were ambivalent. He said that the studios were looking for something that would get people into the theaters, some way that they could differentiate themselves from just DVD entertainment, and special theaters with special gear to give you an experience you won't get on your couch. Think of arcades today -- if you can find them, they're full of games with fancy controllers, or Dave and Buster's styled attractions, not screens with games you can play on your X-Box. Same reason.
I then asked him why these same studios were also pushing 3-D TVs and projection systems and super-high-quality sound at home, and he said that the movie industry was not above shooting itself in the foot.
(This wasn't the head of Warner or Disney, it was a small independent studio that released about a movie a year)
Studios will get alarmed at something that threatens the traditional cash cow of the movie theater, just as they saw great gains in the DVD era, and also great great declines in revenue as the DVD era petered out. If the movie theaters fade, then they won't -really- know how to market and sell their films, and they'll work to protect what they know rather than face the great unknown.
... it's price hike almost entirely impacted large hospitals and insurance companies instead
And ultimately, who do you think pays that?
Shkreli is a leech, nothing more, nothing less.
"Fuck.. you?"
Here's the problem -- this makes the roads much much much more expensive. Heavy vehicles operating on the roadways degrade them fairly quickly. Heavy vehicles on the road's surface will very quickly degrade their solar efficiency. How are workers supposed to dig into the roads to install cables, lay need sewer lines/etc?
Think about how many roads around your city or town are in poor condition because "there's no money to fix the roads." And that's for extremely cheap asphalt. "Underfunding municipal projects" is a problem I don't think we're ever going to solve.
Speaking of lasting knowledge, perhaps that Arctic seed vault should have accompanying knowledge vault
Or some sort of "Library of Congress."
When I'm dead, why should I care what happens to future people?
Careful, take that attitude and people aren't going to care about you in particular while you're alive. You'll be seen more as a leech, a parasite.