Harry Knowles' site declines on a weekly basis as he continues to focus on how he can make money off his notoriety. He only has one real scooper anymore, and the scoop was confirmed in Daily Variety today - with a huge disclaimer.
Raimi has been offered the Spiderman project. The problem is, he's all set to direct a Billy Bob Thornton script called The Gift with Keanu Reeves and Cate Blanchett. It's ready to roll. In order for Spiderman to happen, Paramount will have to let Raimi go as soon as photography wraps on the Gift to go shoot Spiderman, and then he'll edit them together - Sony has to have Spiderman out for summer 2001 for some arcane contractural reasons that have kept the project stalled for years. Read about it here.
Raimi is a perfect fit - imagine Darkman with a huge budget, and James Cameron worships the guy - and Cameron wrote the treatment for Spiderman that would be the greatest comic book adaptation ever made - and probably the best nerd movie ever made. Well Sony bought the Cameron treatment, and have since moved on to multiple drafts by different writers, but hopefully Raimi will stick to the Cameron one, which you can read here. And for anyone who hates Cameron vis a vis his success with Titanic, just read the damn thing. It's incredible.
I find this is Slashdot worthy news - news for Nerds. Raimi is a huge nerd, with a huge nerd audience, and why does every bowel movement George Lucas make get reported here, especially when he just seems obsessed with crapping on the heads of his loyal audience?
Just for those who don't want to go reading everywhere else...
The really impressive thing about those Bullet Time sequences is not really the camera setup (and yup, they were Canon EOS) - which is one of those ideas that several people seem to have come up with at once - but rather the frame interpolation work Manex did, as explicated in the article above. That was truly flawless stuff, as the individual character elements (live action plates) of Keanu, et. al had frames rendered by a puter to complete the range of motion in an automated fashion.
But even more impressive is that the background plates for those shots were also developed from photographic stills - taken from several different angles on the set or location, and a computer then developed 3 dimensional geometry so that there was a model of said set and textured properly without having to do it by hand. The potential application of this for filmmaking is enormous, and a massive step towards the truly virtual set.
I'm really, really hoping Manex clinch the Oscar this year, for their work truly was groundbreaking as opposed to the Phantom Menace team who refined existing techniques to, admittedly, unbelievable highs. However, none of their work really goes out there in terms of future potential apps. It's a given, though, that ILM will be getting the lil statue this year. Tis a pity.
Thanks, Lopht, kickass reply to my inane bantering.
Just a slight clarificiation though, since I worded it badly. I meant does THE NET itself still have the potential to be the singluar, defining, medium of liberation - not the underground itself. With such talk as taxes on the Internet, and courts deciding linking itself can be illegal, then there are serious threats to the idea of an open medium - and your repeated analogy of democracies undermined by uniformed people is particularly telling. Think about how many people use the Net just to read corporate owned portal sites on Entertaiment and fashion news.
Anyways, signing off - It's 2 AM here in Central London. No civil disruption. My puter is working fine. Had an amazing view on the rooftop of The Savoy hotel shooting with a mini DV camera and a 16mm Canon Scopic - next to a bunch of Int'l news crews - now that's the kind of hack I can pull off. The Hotel staff told me off for bringing a skateboard into their building. Suckers.
The moment leading up - such exhilaration. I just have a feeling like I'm walking on other people's hopes. 1999 years without annhiliation, new challenges, but there's people out there working on them, at least.
Just want to say, babbling here, that I for one have a strange sense of hope. May you all have a safe and emotionally reflective New Year.
a) Image and audio capture capabilities - this is pretty much a given. Pinhole type single CCD camera and microphone embedded into cloth. I'm sure some people will have misgivings with this idea, but I can think of plenty serious applications. Also, low level light amplification. Access to other spectrums.
b) LARGE memory capacity - I don't think this is a problem - with no moving parts. R&D flash ROM cards can hold, what is it, nearly a gig? Think about parts of clothing that take up space - the soles of shoes. Have them contain the memory units.
c) Solar power source - so we don't have to wear goddamned batteries - stored charge can also be diverted into heat.
d) Either stereo eye display or virtual light - some sort of HUD overlaid normal vision. Single monitor entirely covering one eye = eye strain, poor focus, too much weight.
e) Vitals monitoring linked to Emergency services. Health information - steps and mileage recorded.
You know, thinking of the wishlist here, introducing fashion to it is pretty silly. Function is going to have be dictated before form, and my solar power source means black or green cloth that will have a pretty rigid texture in order to hold silicates. The first people to adopt these in a functional sense will probably look like gargoyles out of Snow Crash, but this is the replacement of the wallet as far as I'm concerned.
One way to get around it is to make sure you come up with systems that don't work on one eye only, or use some form of virtual light (i.e. instead of monitor - surface which reflects light into the eye - photons directly fired into the retina). As someone who has done a fair share of camera operating, and wears contacts due to horrible eyesight, one of the real strains is a situation where you need both eyes open and one is stuck in the viewfinder - like shooting a rock concert on stage. You're looking out for cables, you're in the dark, you don't want to bump into the band members - but you've also got to have one eye stuck on a short focal length in the viewfinder to compose the image. That strain is pretty horrible - and some of the models shown are single eye devices. Trust me, bad idea.
Because we're cyborgs. We wear silicone in our eyes to enhance our vision. We determine the pace of our day by worn microprocessors. We take drugs to fight off the body's natural compliance to entropy. Clothing offers a large surface - albeit flat - in which to thread a microprocessor system, and thereby allow true portability of the extensions of certain criteria intelligence computers afford. Just as watches or glasses improve our vision, computers hidden in clothing will enhance our memory, our ability to deal with foreign languages, spatial sense, etc. I for one, would much rather prefer not having to lug around a heavy laptop everywhere I go. I want to show a new video I've shot to someone - I download it into my shirt, show up at the conference relaxed and hands free, and plug it into their system for viewing on a monitor of some sort. Fine. These things will become ubiquitous - just you wait and see. The funny thing is - how is someone who needs a wearable computer going to get around the need to wear a 2 ghz processor woven into a single shirt every day. They'll get pretty stinky soon, don't you think? The fashion implications have been avoided, really.
Whenever I see tech like this, I try to picture it at the ubiquitous level - the point at which it becomes real - and therefore the real societal consequences. The glamour is diversionary, and obscures the truth. Like what kinda wearable computer will your average, mulletted, acne ridden guy who drives a '70 Malibu in Nebraska have - will he able to access Megadeth MP3s to blare out of speakers hidden in his shoes? Anyone with answers, please share. All this stuff is too Sony R&D. I want to see the Bruce Springsteen equivalent.
The halcyon days of the net are gone. With ubiquity - the underground vanishes. Is it well on its way, with people like the CEO of Amazon being worshipped by the mainstream press, to becoming an enormous cyber strip mall, marketing tool, PR exercise in control of perception...
Or is there still an underground? Does it still have a potential to be the one true medium with liberation? Will governments and coroporations end up controlling it? Cause they are winning small, important victories relentlessly...
I actually remember seeing this as a kid. For years I have been derided for saying I saw Boba Fett before ESB. But it's clear as day - the hideous child wookie and musical numbers. I'd very much like a copy, but you don't have an email addy listed. Write to me please.
I've posted elsewhere the same point - you're absolutely correct that that as far as digital effects ending up in film goes - you're at a lower rez than pure HDTV. But as for going from negative to theatrical print, there's all sorts of variations on this - Interpositives, Internegatives, answer prints, Neg Cutting, silver retention processes - there's also reversal stock, which two major features have been shot on recently. But by going to a dupe print or dupe neg - you are not going down in resolution - the same number of viable silver halide crystals are present in the print film. You may, depending on your color timing, trigger less crystals. Most prints are done on quite slow stock as it is, in order to make it finer, with less grain.
As far as scanning / recording goes, you're dead on. I've posted about that elsewhere.
But my real point is that there isn't, as such, a line or pixellated resolution to film because of its randomness. It's a chaotic, analog medium. It's like the hiss on old records that some people actually associate with having a mood. And there are also tones and moods to film, mostly to do with its arcane, random processes. At the end of the day, I know for a fact digital will win as a medium - but what I'm saying is that it is, like vinyl, an aged medium that will persist through certain romantic attatchments. It'll be like using one type of brush rather than another. It's why they're developing digital imitations of analog artifacts, like digital grain. But who wants to hear a CD being scratched when you're listening to hip hop?
The street finds its own uses for things - and overspecilization leads to extinction.
Film cannot be compared to pixel or line resolution - the definable resolution of film is determined by the number of silver halide crystals present in the emulsion, which on every single frame of film are scattered and sized differently. There are roughly 4000 x 3000 of these crystals in a frame of film emulsion. But every frame is different. The stock of the film - i.e. the size of the crystals, and their chemical sensitivity to light - also has different effects. Faster film stocks (i.e. more light sensitive) have larger crystals, thereby more "grain" - the visible texture of those crystals.
Film is still going to be used in time to come - but as a distribution medium for mass, popular visual storytelling, probably not. For once I agree with Peter Greenaway who believes film as an analogue medium will become like comissioned painting - regarded as a medium more for "fine art".
DPs will be hardly obsolete with WYSIWYG filmmaking. DPs are more responsible today for almost painting with light - composition, given the worship of the director - has become a directorial, camera operator realm. To light well on any sort of video system, and do it well, is much more difficult than on film. Gaffers do not just set lights where they feel they should or is necessary. They do it under the supervision of the DP who knows that this light will fill out the key light coming from the overhead 10k which has been diffused in order to make it feel more like early evening. By using a Kino Flo as the fill light, they will get a clean, soft white light, leading to a more radiant face in close up. But if they tilt the Kino Flo so, which the gaffer doesn't know, they'll put the left eye of the actor into shadow, etc. None of this will change on video.
Just because a person can see what they're filming does not mean they have a trained or intuitive eye to subconsciously alter a picture using lights - where you put darkness and light, what colors will pop out and which won't, where the depth of field is and where that draws the viewers eye. Look at your average, say, television soap opera shot on video. Now look at the video segments of Run Lola Run. Both shot on WYSIWYG video, but entirely different in tone and mood. Because of the DOP.
Having worked with DPs, and met and talked with some of the greatest in the world, this tech will not make them obsolete. It will make them even more vital. What's difficult for them is adjusting to the fact that most of the time they are dictating, and sometimes hoping, that what they imagine will end up on film. But there is no way a gaffer can match say, the images in The Thin Red Line on video, without the eye of John Toll. Much of what you think is natural filming, where you just point the camera and shoot, is a carefully maintained illusion. There are diffusion nets and silks up and maybe even a 10k HMI in broad daylight.
I'm sorry, having worked on films, I have to say, you're just plain wrong. The reason films look different, and feel different, and have different textures, and tones, and emotions - is often the result of light, and the DOP who understood to combine this light would result in that. And the reason why Sony Imageworks has leading DPs come to lecture the effects designers is so that they understand this process of painting with light when they do effects.
As for dailies, a HD monitor does not for one moment replicate what its like to see dailies on a cinema screen. Having edited in analog and digital formats - a good Steenbeck or Avid with the best monitor system will not show you what something is like when it's blown up to ten feet high. Ever seen the Pixar crew watching their all digital films at sessions on lil monitors, everyone huddled around? No, they all sit in a traditional cinema.
I don't doubt for a moment that Maxivision is incredible - the main gist of my other post is that it seems unfeasible given where things are going, and adds expense to the cost. Imax is a viable public format despite being so unusual to film, and in the new film format wars I just cannot imagine Maxivision becoming the standard for various reasons. Given my own personal preferences, I wish that: a) Cinema owners would show films at a consistent level of quality with the finest prints available. b) 35mm camera rental was at a similar cost to DV. c) 35mm color stock was at a much lower cost. d) Light rentals were cheaper. e) The entire industry had a clearly defined standard for video systems involving both TVs and PCs. I.E. the whole world used PAL widescreen TVs and all DVDs were anamorphic, and film scanners / recorders were as affordable as desktop NLEs. Unfortunately... You get the idea...
Finally, a topic on/. I actually know something about. I was hoping this article of Ebert's would turn up, cause it pissed me off and thrilled me at the same time. And please, if any you know Ebert's public email (he does have one at compuserve) address, please post it.
First I'd like to discuss Ebert's misconceptions.
They were computer-generated in the first place, so they arrived at the screen without stepping down a generation to film. And because they depicted imaginary places, it was impossible to judge them on the basis of how we know the real world looks.
This is not true at all. The film was scanned into the digital medium for digital projection from film (analogue) negative. Even the effects shots. See American Cinematographer, Sep 1999. In fact, one shot in the film - a non effects shot - was shot on a prototype digital camera. It's when Anakin talks to Qui Gonn outside his house in the desert at night. No effects in that shot, just an unpublicized ruse to see if anyone would notice.
* It can project film at 48 frames per second, twice the existing 24-fps rate. At 48 frames, it uses 50 percent more film than at present. But MV48 also has an "economy mode" that uses that offers low-budget filmmakers savings of up to 25 percent on film.
He doesn't detail this saving problem. The fact is, for independent filmmakers, the prohibitive cost is film, the raw stock and processing and development of negative. It's why so many have turned to digital. Shoot an hour for ten U.S. dollars on Mini DV. Shoot an hour on 35 mm film at 24 fps works out to roughly $4000. Now, at 48 fps, this cost doubles. So what's the "economy" mode here? As well, he completely skirts the issue of the fact that the system's vibration free tech would need to be implemented on nearly every camera in Hollywood. The main mechanism for filming today is the claw / registration pin system. Filming in the analogue sense is really a matter of taking 24 still photographs per second. A claw pulls down a perforation in the film, aligining it into the picture gate, while a registration pin aligns the perf so the film remains within the register of this gate. 24 fps is the standard, and running at higher speeds often needs serious maintenance and reengineering. As well, running at higher speeds = more light. The faster your framerate, the more light you need. This increases costs on film.
And it can handle any existing 35mm film format--unlike digital projection, which would obsolete a century of old prints.
And how good have those prints been maintained? The fact is, such classic immortal films as Vertigo needed extensive digital restoration work in order to present it as it was seen in its year of release. Thousands of films have been lost forever. Earlier this year Ebert even mentioned that there might not be an existing print of Robert Altman's Nashville - a film from the 70s. Classic films now are safer as digital masters.
One advantage of a film print is that the director and cinematographer can "time" the print to be sure the colors and visual elements are right. In a digital theater, the projectionist would be free to adjust the color, tint and contrast according to his whims. Since many projectionists do not even know how to properly frame a picture or set the correct lamp brightness, this is a frightening prospect.
And at the same time - most films shown in cinemas are underpar to the cinematographers wish. A recent popular technique, known as many things but basically silver retention, desaturates color and creates bolder contrast. These prints are more expensive and as a result only a few prints are shipped utilizing this tecnique - which the film was shot for - so that the majority of viewers never see the film as intended. Seven is a particular case of this.
Add to this the fact that Kodak themselves, and Martin Scorcese has campaigned against this, have found that most cinemas dim their projector bulbs under the misguided idea that it extends the bulb's life. It flat out doesn't. It just leads to a muddy, darker picture. Kodak sent technicians to several theaters armed with light meters and found most films projected at a full stop or two under their proper foot candle level. Add to this variations in print reels - and films are on several differnt ones - and you have a subpar projection process. Many cinematographers love the process of approving a DVD transfer because they can properly time the entire film - and a helluva lot of color timing is done digitally now. The cinematographer of The Full Monty shot a film called Hideous Kinky in Morocco, and he told me that he could've turned shots in daylight in the desert into midnight blue using new digital color timing tecniques. The digital projection tecnique could have s locked down system approved by the filmmakers so that the projector is rigged to only show it at their levels of choice - thereby making sure that there is an optimal standard for all showings of the film.
* What about piracy? Movies will be downloaded just once, then stored in each theater. Thieves could try two approaches. They could grab the signal from the satellite and try to break the encryption (as DVD encryption has just been broken).
Digital projection is not MPEG or MJPEG. The compression algorithim is 50:1 - adaptive block size rather than fixed block size. It compresses frames without regard to one or the next, whereas MPEG and MJPEG compress the information that is the same in each subsequent frame. This leads to picture artificating, which the digital projection system does not have. In other words, it is a proprietry, high storage medium with its own compression algorithim at a high cost. Pirates would need more than a simple telecine (transferring film to video) to pirate the film - first they'd have to break the encryption, which would be vastly superior to DVD's pathetic 48 bit, then they'd need the extremely expensive tech to decode that signal to a low fi master for pirating. Good luck, pirates.
As for the image recording itself - we do not know what system it will utilize. Sony and Panavision have yet to elaborate on what test shots for Ep. 2 have turned out as - nor what compression or resolution etc. it will use. It will not be an existing format like DV or DigiBeta or MPEG.
Hollywood has not spent a dime, for example, to research the intriguing question, do film and digital create different brain states? Some theoreticians believe that film creates reverie, video creates hypnosis; wouldn't it be ironic if digital audiences found they were missing an ineffable part of the moviegoing experience?
Umm, which is why video rental is such a huge business? The fact is, for the most part, the audience just doesn't care. And I have experienced states of emotional reverie from movies watched on DVD rather than a cinema. I went to see the IMAX film Everest during which a hair ended up in the gate of the projector. The result - during an emotional moment- an enormous tentacle from space lashed out at our heroes, and continued to do so until the end of the film - was hugely annoying. I complained to the manager. He told me I was the first, indignant, and rude, customer to complain about their high standards. The amount of misconception that still exists about letterboxing is insane. Letterboxing means you see more of the picture as intended. It's as simple as that. How many DVD users know what 16x9 anamorphic means, despite attempts by the DVD community to educate them?
There are issues here. For instance, watching a film projected means that you spend, during a two hour long film, an hour in darkness - maybe creating a dream like state. Digital projection does remove this flicker effect. But this is esoteric, and I doubt audiences even care.
As for questions raised here in slashdot:
The resolution in the TI system doesn't fit the width of films shot in a widescreen aspect ratio.
There are many different ways to make a film have a wider picture. Super 35mm, for example, utilizes the area in a frame that an optical sound wave is normally stored on, creating a fuller frame image. This is usually cropped down to 1.85:1 or 2.35:1 for a widescreen film, chopping off the top and bottom of the recorded image. This is great for effects people because they can reframe shots in the post production process. There is also anamorphic, which uses lenses which squeeze onto a standard frame a wider image and projection uses a lens which unsquezes the image. Star Wars was projected in this manner - the raw image was compressed horizontally, and a lens was put on the projector which expanded it to a full widescreen image, no black bars.
The resolution is nothing near that of analogue film
Absolutely true, but it is improving. The TI system cannot be considered as a dot matrix field of pixels in the standard LCD projection or monitor sense. It uses a system of dichroic mirrors to relay each beam of light representing a pixel. The resulting pixels do not have a stacked, square relation to one another. What it cannot reproduce is that film does have a resolution. It's determined by the number of silver halide crystals in the emulsion. But these crystals are of a random shape and size, and do not conform to pixels. It's messy, chaotic, and gorgeous. Picture grain (on analogue) is the result of seeing these crystals in the image, when a film is underexposed. It is true that digital projection cannot match this chaotic aspect of the film picture.
HOWEVER - as much as you read about the digital revolution, I've seen it. I've seen effects technicians working on major Hollywood films. And the amount of work they're doing that is invisible and are not for show - reframing shots, eliminating a modern car in a peroid film - is stunning. And when these are projected on film integrated into picture that hasn't been messed with digitally, at a 2000 line resolution, you do not notice. What you do notice about effects that give away bad effects are lighting discrepancies and bad rendering or false, too smooth movement. Think of Toy Story - which went from 4k line picture in a digital medium onto film - thereby it was sourced at those 4k lines. Did you notice it came from a pixelated source? No. Bottom line: you are already viewing in your cinema images that have less resoultion than real film.
Wow! Higher framerate for film. Just as good as getting 60 fps in Q3A rather than 30!
This gets into theoretical doctrine, which is messy. Film has been, for the past 70 years, a 24 fps medium. No one has complained that Lawrence of Arabia sucks because of 24 fps. 60 fps is more important in virtual point of view exercises because it better replicates real vision and the subsitution for mouse scrolling for your viewpoint. Undoubtedly, I agree with Ebert, the Maxi Vision system must look great. However - when a filmmaker doesn't shoot in the standard, normal 1/60th of a second shutter speed at 24 fps, the result is noticeable and unusual for audiences - such as the battle scenes in Saving Private Ryan, which were shot at a faster shutter speed, removing motion blur in images.
The projection of film is an optical illusion utilizing the perception of persistence. Most film frames individually with movement have motion blur. Persist this image one after the next, and the brain interprets it as movement. This is a huge debate about perception and so on, which I shouldn't get into here - but the fact is, cinema is so old as a standard, that 24 fps is what people almost expect when they see a movie.
The digital revolution is on, and its gonna crush film, Ebert is a Luddite - or - Hollywood is just hung up on buzzwords and trends and thus this system.
Which is why I was so stunned at his article. He is anything but a Luddite. He was one of the first critics to use the Net, and often writes about tech issues. Yes, the digital revolution is on, and there are going to be huge problems. James Cameron, who does know a helluva lot about this, has said the problem is that Hollywood will go for the cheapest, and therefore nastiest, system. Whatever system they get so they can maintain control of distribution even greater. Imagine if the studios were hooked up to every projector and ran them from their HQ - yeah, it's not a pleasant idea is it? Two weeks into a films release and a scene is causing a media uproar - HQ deletes it from every projector in the world. Etc, etc.
Likewise, the digital revolution is on - and it's not just a buzzword. The fact is, 90% of all films go through some form of digital process now, be it in editing or corrective opticals (traditionally done with an optical printer) or FX. This often entails painful procedures to get film to match the framerate of video systems (30 fps or 60hz NTSC) - 48 fps will make it even worse. There is so much money squandered getting film from one analogue medium into a digital one then back to analogue - that in the long run it's more effective for all parties concerned to move entirely digital. I'm telling you, here at ground zero, as a film student who has managed to see the new tech - that filmmaking in the traditional sense is undergoing a massive change - and it is unstoppable. What astonishes me is butting heads with traditionalists who believe everything must be done to stop filmmaking going digital - but haven't realized it already has - and that this new tech is liberating in that the real indie filmmaker can really make something for cheap, really cheap. Films that would never get made otherwise have been done on DV.
We are getting to the point of - if you can imagine it - you can show it. Which I find personally liberating. Especially if I can do it faster and cheaper - or if a kid in Kansas in his basement can. I own, in my PC, for less than a really cheap car, the equivalent to a mid 90s TV station's image processing and editing capabilites. At the same time, too much content is now being produced - too many crap webcam soap operas, the Truman Show made real but in an almost more craven manner. The many headed Hydra that digital has brought to image capturing and editing has only just appeared, and none of us knows where it will really take us, or what the future of filmmaking will be. But it's better to be informed of the truth of the situation than to give into preferences for more familiar formats - because of some kind of notion of "purity". Filmmaking is the manipulation of time, space, and emotion. It is an optical illusion. Nothing more, nothing less.
A few questions... Why is it that in the early 90s it was reported that one in every four black men would be either dead or in prison by the age of 25 - yet considering this statistic was based largely upon ghetto youths - how many of these young men had access to Quake? Why did nobody care that inner city schools needed metal detectors installed? Why wasn't it important chest beating news when a friend of mine's father who teaches in an inner city school had a gun pulled on him by a student? Why is it only when it happens to a largely middle class, affluent suburb that we actually care this happens in America? Why does this sort of thing not happen in Britain, where I'm living at the moment, where there is no easy access to guns? Why is it that I play Counterstrike at least three times a week, have experience with firing firearms of all sorts, work in special effects simulating gore and violence of all sorts, got picked on as a kid, and my father took me to see Alien in a theater when I was four, yet I have never shot a living entity in my life, and have no urges to do so? Why is it when the media ran that same clip from "The Matrix" over and over covering the Columbine shooting, they showed the assault with guns - but never showed people running up walls or stopping bullets with their mind? To paraphrase David Cronenberg "The problem with censors is they do what psychotics do. They confuse fantasy with reality." I wish J.G. Ballard's Running Wild was still in print. Prophetic Mr. Ballard, who is usually on the ball predicting the development of our psychopathology, who inferred that adolescents living in a sterile middle class suburb go apeshit and violent when they are cut off from cultural dealings with violence and sexuality. On a case by case basis, with accurate fact checking, one would see that essentially no link can be proven between violent cultural material and actual violence. The British Film Institute published an entire issue of its journal, Sight and Sound, devoted to using the latest data from clinical psychologists and sociologists working in the field, and were able to refute a concrete link between the two. The fact is that for psychopaths, any cultural material could become the trigger for their psychosis because they attempt through force of will to make fantasy reality. The violence in culture is just gravy that they fit into their train. There has never, NEVER, been irrefutable evidence of a link between the absorption of violent media and violent behavior, despite attempts to do so for the past century. Lt. Col Roger Ramjet has a serious major malfunction. At least he has let us know that a former West Point instructor believes the U.S. military is brainwashing ("desensitzing") its recruits with mind control programs. Which is hilarious news to me - I thought they were supposed to be developing "combat awareness". But then again, what do I know, I never taught at West Point.
Got in touch with friends and family back in Seattle. Heard about the bashing of the Niketown store. Heard about the girl who led the charge kicking in the glass door - how she was wearing Nikes.
Heard about my friend who just wanted to get to work on time and ended up getting tear gassed.
Heard about how peaceful protest was banned in certain areas of Seattle - not rioting, not looting, not violent anarchy, but peaceful protest was prohibited and people were arrested for doing such near the convention center. The ACLU and Amnesty International issued statements.
On the other hand heard firsthand from people who were peacefully protesting many grievances how youthful, net using, educated, affluent white kids wearing Rage Against the Machine T shirts came down to S Town looking for a ruck - and nothing more. Ask them what it was about the WTO that gets their goat - they can't answer. Then they start kicking the Starbucks stores. Terrific. It's like that moment in Fight Club where all the Space Monkeys start chanting "His name is Rob Paulson... His name is Rob Paulson..." We're all part of the movement - we just don't know what the fuck it is.
Heard about how gas masks were declared illegal in the Seattle city limits. Now guns, on the other hand... Next time I fly into Seattle the chances of me not being able to buy a gun on I-5 from Sea Tac (which seems, near the airport, to have an inordinate amount of adult video stores and gun shops) - jack shit and jack just left town.
Saw a picture of a cop dressed in new Robocop TM style armor kicking a protester in the balls while forty people took pictures around him.
And for all the news coverage I could plug into, the story was civil disobedience (and I love how this was continally referred as the worst act of protest since Vietnam - what about the L.A. Riots? Or does that not count as protest? When white Trustifarians - Rastas with trust funds loot and riot it's an anarchic marxist statement, but when African Americans in the ghetto do it, it's just looting) with very, very little content about what was the contentious issue in the first place.
At least Jon Katz gets that right. But in some instances he doesn't get it right. Because this is not a simplistic, reductive issue, despite many forms of media attempting to make it one. So much easier to get your air time with images of tear gas attacks than to actually address the complexity and the hyprocisy and the hopefulness this last week signifies.
But when he says:
"This has sparked an epidemic homogenization of popular culture - not a dumbing down, but a dulling down - as controversial, profane, sexual or other "controversial" cultural offerings from books to movies to music are eliminated or pushed to the margins so that safer products can be mass-marketed."
This is patently untrue. The truth and the problem and the hyprocisy that doesn't make this such a wonderful unifying movement for us youngsters to get invovled in - is that the zeitgeist, the interstitial cultures (whip out that copy of All Tomorrow's Parties) - they are part of the large corporations and the media now. They have become absolved of geographical space, and been absorbed by the OmniCorps of the world. Traditional non net based media - and a hell of a lot of net based media - is part of the corporate world. Why's there so much porn on the net? Any time there's a major advancement in communications technologies porn is involved. What's interesting today is how Middle of the Road porn now is. Bohemian attitudes to dress, sex, clothing, tattoos, your choice of books, your films - all can now be traced back to some piece of the fragmenting culture pie - now owned and sold at the local mall. A wad of spunk in hair - which would have gotten the Farelly Brothers burned at the stake only forty years ago - is now okay in cineplexes all over the world. Our attitudes culturally have not been dumbed down - they've been accepted and compromised and sold back to us. Despite the odd lunatic's attempts to attempt thought control, we do live in a period of, historically, relatively liberal cultural values. It's just that none of them seem honest or free or genuine.
As for environmental arguments - the broader issue is not that large corportations pollute and waste so much - it's a simple economic one, and by that I mean the anthropolgical definition of a civilization's economy. It's that money is generated by turning natural resources into products. Large coroporations go to an area, loot as many resources they can, then leave selling those resources to the highest bidder, maximizing profit - and giving nothing back to that area. Now all the resources are gone and those who make a living agriculturally - which is probably 80% of the planet, since the Third World lives off of agriculture - have no resources, and no job.
The real boon of this net communication is that our culture is fragmenting so rapdily. We don't have single unifying causes or defintions or causes, and Seattle should be proof of that. We have a diversity, with non geographical bohemias like Slashdot here - and look at all the differing opinions. What's important is not that we are all against the Corps of the world - but that we are in so many different ways.
So this is a confused post. Because I am confused. Because there is no easy way to spell this out. And it's so stupid to label the complex systems that make up a protest crowd nowadays. Those people in Seattle were not Techno Idealists. They were people.
You can either opt out and kick in the Niketown store with your Nikes. You can protest peacefully and get arrested. You can just try to lay low and do your job and get tear gassed. You can post messages on Slashdot and then read a thousand differing opinions.
But I suppose, most importantly, what you must do is consider how complex the maelstrom of human reaction the past week signifies.
Everyone has their own opinion, yeah, but I'm surprised at some of the responses in the Slashdot community. Sure, when I saw the protestors preparing on the news here in London I sorta mumbled to myself, "Yeah... THEY'RE going to save the world, sure..." - but the really interesting thing is that it's not just bong addled hippies out there. It's retired firemen and nuns and Union workers. That is how important this issue is - because anyone who has lived in WA state, where I grew up, and hasn't gotten filty rich on MS stock options knows that free trade has been disastrous to our economy and environment. The Salmon runs are nearly dead, hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost in that industry. Loggers were hired by big corporations to strip clear trees from the state that were sold to Japan, then fired once they were all gone (and don't get me started on how they bought public land - PARK LANDS - to get even more timber). Then there's Microsoft. The brief history of this state is our future history praying at the altar of free trade. These were issues that affected blue collar working class people and their ability to support their families - not smelly assed crusties playing bongos worrying about the new batch of Humboldt bud.
The WTO means that hormone injected beef that has been proven to cause cancer cannot be restricted from being sold in a country whose people don't want it. This means that controls on GM food and labelling cannot occur despite a populace agreeing on such an issue. This means Monsanto can sell their self destructing seed no matter what the farmers think. It means a company who makes an enormous profit from one country doesn't have to put one cent back into taxes to that country or jobs or local interest. Basically - it's Microsoft vs. Linux, except it's not the OS you run, it's the food you eat, the air you breathe, the animals in the sea, your local populace's employment rates, the ability of a large corporation to strip mine all the resources in an economy and not put anything back into that economy - rather keep it for themselves - which is the real damage of free trade.
Maybe I'm emotional, because I'm here in London and it's only through webcams and message boards and TV coverage that I can get a sense of what's going on back home, and worry about friends and family, some of whom I know are protesting, while others are worried about getting to work on time, and one or two police officers. Undoubtedly there is a small minority causing trouble. But what I see is a diverse crowd of unarmed people with interests devoted to having a say in the shape of the world versus the latest kevlar protection and non lethal weaponry - against the sheltered protection of large corporations. It's Terry Gilliam's Brazil. For the first time in my life I have empathy with the older generation who protested in the 60s and understand why they were so reactionary. If you're going to consider this issue as non sequitir and having no importance to nerds, then please, like a true nerd educate yourself first and consider what's at stake.
Slashdot Mirror
Harry Knowles' site declines on a weekly basis as he continues to focus on how he can make money off his notoriety. He only has one real scooper anymore, and the scoop was confirmed in Daily Variety today - with a huge disclaimer.
Raimi has been offered the Spiderman project. The problem is, he's all set to direct a Billy Bob Thornton script called The Gift with Keanu Reeves and Cate Blanchett. It's ready to roll. In order for Spiderman to happen, Paramount will have to let Raimi go as soon as photography wraps on the Gift to go shoot Spiderman, and then he'll edit them together - Sony has to have Spiderman out for summer 2001 for some arcane contractural reasons that have kept the project stalled for years. Read about it here.
Raimi is a perfect fit - imagine Darkman with a huge budget, and James Cameron worships the guy - and Cameron wrote the treatment for Spiderman that would be the greatest comic book adaptation ever made - and probably the best nerd movie ever made. Well Sony bought the Cameron treatment, and have since moved on to multiple drafts by different writers, but hopefully Raimi will stick to the Cameron one, which you can read here. And for anyone who hates Cameron vis a vis his success with Titanic, just read the damn thing. It's incredible.
I find this is Slashdot worthy news - news for Nerds. Raimi is a huge nerd, with a huge nerd audience, and why does every bowel movement George Lucas make get reported here, especially when he just seems obsessed with crapping on the heads of his loyal audience?
Just for those who don't want to go reading everywhere else...
The really impressive thing about those Bullet Time sequences is not really the camera setup (and yup, they were Canon EOS) - which is one of those ideas that several people seem to have come up with at once - but rather the frame interpolation work Manex did, as explicated in the article above. That was truly flawless stuff, as the individual character elements (live action plates) of Keanu, et. al had frames rendered by a puter to complete the range of motion in an automated fashion.
But even more impressive is that the background plates for those shots were also developed from photographic stills - taken from several different angles on the set or location, and a computer then developed 3 dimensional geometry so that there was a model of said set and textured properly without having to do it by hand. The potential application of this for filmmaking is enormous, and a massive step towards the truly virtual set.
I'm really, really hoping Manex clinch the Oscar this year, for their work truly was groundbreaking as opposed to the Phantom Menace team who refined existing techniques to, admittedly, unbelievable highs. However, none of their work really goes out there in terms of future potential apps. It's a given, though, that ILM will be getting the lil statue this year. Tis a pity.
And for anyone who wants to read about FX advancements, the Bibles are Cinefex, VFXpro, and ALWAYS, American Cinematographer. Read em and weep.
Thanks, Lopht, kickass reply to my inane bantering.
Just a slight clarificiation though, since I worded it badly. I meant does THE NET itself still have the potential to be the singluar, defining, medium of liberation - not the underground itself. With such talk as taxes on the Internet, and courts deciding linking itself can be illegal, then there are serious threats to the idea of an open medium - and your repeated analogy of democracies undermined by uniformed people is particularly telling. Think about how many people use the Net just to read corporate owned portal sites on Entertaiment and fashion news.
Anyways, signing off - It's 2 AM here in Central London. No civil disruption. My puter is working fine. Had an amazing view on the rooftop of The Savoy hotel shooting with a mini DV camera and a 16mm Canon Scopic - next to a bunch of Int'l news crews - now that's the kind of hack I can pull off. The Hotel staff told me off for bringing a skateboard into their building. Suckers.
The moment leading up - such exhilaration. I just have a feeling like I'm walking on other people's hopes. 1999 years without annhiliation, new challenges, but there's people out there working on them, at least.
Just want to say, babbling here, that I for one have a strange sense of hope. May you all have a safe and emotionally reflective New Year.
While you're at it...
a) Image and audio capture capabilities - this is pretty much a given. Pinhole type single CCD camera and microphone embedded into cloth. I'm sure some people will have misgivings with this idea, but I can think of plenty serious applications. Also, low level light amplification. Access to other spectrums.
b) LARGE memory capacity - I don't think this is a problem - with no moving parts. R&D flash ROM cards can hold, what is it, nearly a gig? Think about parts of clothing that take up space - the soles of shoes. Have them contain the memory units.
c) Solar power source - so we don't have to wear goddamned batteries - stored charge can also be diverted into heat.
d) Either stereo eye display or virtual light - some sort of HUD overlaid normal vision. Single monitor entirely covering one eye = eye strain, poor focus, too much weight.
e) Vitals monitoring linked to Emergency services. Health information - steps and mileage recorded.
You know, thinking of the wishlist here, introducing fashion to it is pretty silly. Function is going to have be dictated before form, and my solar power source means black or green cloth that will have a pretty rigid texture in order to hold silicates. The first people to adopt these in a functional sense will probably look like gargoyles out of Snow Crash, but this is the replacement of the wallet as far as I'm concerned.
One way to get around it is to make sure you come up with systems that don't work on one eye only, or use some form of virtual light (i.e. instead of monitor - surface which reflects light into the eye - photons directly fired into the retina). As someone who has done a fair share of camera operating, and wears contacts due to horrible eyesight, one of the real strains is a situation where you need both eyes open and one is stuck in the viewfinder - like shooting a rock concert on stage. You're looking out for cables, you're in the dark, you don't want to bump into the band members - but you've also got to have one eye stuck on a short focal length in the viewfinder to compose the image. That strain is pretty horrible - and some of the models shown are single eye devices. Trust me, bad idea.
Because we're cyborgs. We wear silicone in our eyes to enhance our vision. We determine the pace of our day by worn microprocessors. We take drugs to fight off the body's natural compliance to entropy. Clothing offers a large surface - albeit flat - in which to thread a microprocessor system, and thereby allow true portability of the extensions of certain criteria intelligence computers afford. Just as watches or glasses improve our vision, computers hidden in clothing will enhance our memory, our ability to deal with foreign languages, spatial sense, etc. I for one, would much rather prefer not having to lug around a heavy laptop everywhere I go. I want to show a new video I've shot to someone - I download it into my shirt, show up at the conference relaxed and hands free, and plug it into their system for viewing on a monitor of some sort. Fine. These things will become ubiquitous - just you wait and see. The funny thing is - how is someone who needs a wearable computer going to get around the need to wear a 2 ghz processor woven into a single shirt every day. They'll get pretty stinky soon, don't you think? The fashion implications have been avoided, really.
Whenever I see tech like this, I try to picture it at the ubiquitous level - the point at which it becomes real - and therefore the real societal consequences. The glamour is diversionary, and obscures the truth. Like what kinda wearable computer will your average, mulletted, acne ridden guy who drives a '70 Malibu in Nebraska have - will he able to access Megadeth MP3s to blare out of speakers hidden in his shoes? Anyone with answers, please share. All this stuff is too Sony R&D. I want to see the Bruce Springsteen equivalent.
The halcyon days of the net are gone. With ubiquity - the underground vanishes. Is it well on its way, with people like the CEO of Amazon being worshipped by the mainstream press, to becoming an enormous cyber strip mall, marketing tool, PR exercise in control of perception...
Or is there still an underground? Does it still have a potential to be the one true medium with liberation? Will governments and coroporations end up controlling it? Cause they are winning small, important victories relentlessly...
I actually remember seeing this as a kid. For years I have been derided for saying I saw Boba Fett before ESB. But it's clear as day - the hideous child wookie and musical numbers. I'd very much like a copy, but you don't have an email addy listed. Write to me please.
I've posted elsewhere the same point - you're absolutely correct that that as far as digital effects ending up in film goes - you're at a lower rez than pure HDTV. But as for going from negative to theatrical print, there's all sorts of variations on this - Interpositives, Internegatives, answer prints, Neg Cutting, silver retention processes - there's also reversal stock, which two major features have been shot on recently. But by going to a dupe print or dupe neg - you are not going down in resolution - the same number of viable silver halide crystals are present in the print film. You may, depending on your color timing, trigger less crystals. Most prints are done on quite slow stock as it is, in order to make it finer, with less grain.
As far as scanning / recording goes, you're dead on. I've posted about that elsewhere.
But my real point is that there isn't, as such, a line or pixellated resolution to film because of its randomness. It's a chaotic, analog medium. It's like the hiss on old records that some people actually associate with having a mood. And there are also tones and moods to film, mostly to do with its arcane, random processes. At the end of the day, I know for a fact digital will win as a medium - but what I'm saying is that it is, like vinyl, an aged medium that will persist through certain romantic attatchments. It'll be like using one type of brush rather than another. It's why they're developing digital imitations of analog artifacts, like digital grain. But who wants to hear a CD being scratched when you're listening to hip hop?
The street finds its own uses for things - and overspecilization leads to extinction.
Film is still going to be used in time to come - but as a distribution medium for mass, popular visual storytelling, probably not. For once I agree with Peter Greenaway who believes film as an analogue medium will become like comissioned painting - regarded as a medium more for "fine art".
This is a pretty ignorant comment.
DPs will be hardly obsolete with WYSIWYG filmmaking. DPs are more responsible today for almost painting with light - composition, given the worship of the director - has become a directorial, camera operator realm. To light well on any sort of video system, and do it well, is much more difficult than on film. Gaffers do not just set lights where they feel they should or is necessary. They do it under the supervision of the DP who knows that this light will fill out the key light coming from the overhead 10k which has been diffused in order to make it feel more like early evening. By using a Kino Flo as the fill light, they will get a clean, soft white light, leading to a more radiant face in close up. But if they tilt the Kino Flo so, which the gaffer doesn't know, they'll put the left eye of the actor into shadow, etc. None of this will change on video.
Just because a person can see what they're filming does not mean they have a trained or intuitive eye to subconsciously alter a picture using lights - where you put darkness and light, what colors will pop out and which won't, where the depth of field is and where that draws the viewers eye. Look at your average, say, television soap opera shot on video. Now look at the video segments of Run Lola Run. Both shot on WYSIWYG video, but entirely different in tone and mood. Because of the DOP.
Having worked with DPs, and met and talked with some of the greatest in the world, this tech will not make them obsolete. It will make them even more vital. What's difficult for them is adjusting to the fact that most of the time they are dictating, and sometimes hoping, that what they imagine will end up on film. But there is no way a gaffer can match say, the images in The Thin Red Line on video, without the eye of John Toll. Much of what you think is natural filming, where you just point the camera and shoot, is a carefully maintained illusion. There are diffusion nets and silks up and maybe even a 10k HMI in broad daylight.
I'm sorry, having worked on films, I have to say, you're just plain wrong. The reason films look different, and feel different, and have different textures, and tones, and emotions - is often the result of light, and the DOP who understood to combine this light would result in that. And the reason why Sony Imageworks has leading DPs come to lecture the effects designers is so that they understand this process of painting with light when they do effects.
As for dailies, a HD monitor does not for one moment replicate what its like to see dailies on a cinema screen. Having edited in analog and digital formats - a good Steenbeck or Avid with the best monitor system will not show you what something is like when it's blown up to ten feet high. Ever seen the Pixar crew watching their all digital films at sessions on lil monitors, everyone huddled around? No, they all sit in a traditional cinema.
I don't doubt for a moment that Maxivision is incredible - the main gist of my other post is that it seems unfeasible given where things are going, and adds expense to the cost. Imax is a viable public format despite being so unusual to film, and in the new film format wars I just cannot imagine Maxivision becoming the standard for various reasons. Given my own personal preferences, I wish that: a) Cinema owners would show films at a consistent level of quality with the finest prints available. b) 35mm camera rental was at a similar cost to DV. c) 35mm color stock was at a much lower cost. d) Light rentals were cheaper. e) The entire industry had a clearly defined standard for video systems involving both TVs and PCs. I.E. the whole world used PAL widescreen TVs and all DVDs were anamorphic, and film scanners / recorders were as affordable as desktop NLEs. Unfortunately... You get the idea...
Finally, a topic on /. I actually know something about. I was hoping this article of Ebert's would turn up, cause it pissed me off and thrilled me at the same time. And please, if any you know Ebert's public email (he does have one at compuserve) address, please post it.
First I'd like to discuss Ebert's misconceptions.
They were computer-generated in the first place, so they arrived at the screen without stepping down a generation to film. And because they depicted imaginary places, it was impossible to judge them on the basis of how we know the real world looks.
This is not true at all. The film was scanned into the digital medium for digital projection from film (analogue) negative. Even the effects shots. See American Cinematographer, Sep 1999. In fact, one shot in the film - a non effects shot - was shot on a prototype digital camera. It's when Anakin talks to Qui Gonn outside his house in the desert at night. No effects in that shot, just an unpublicized ruse to see if anyone would notice.
* It can project film at 48 frames per second, twice the existing 24-fps rate. At 48 frames, it uses 50 percent more film than at present. But MV48 also has an "economy mode" that uses that offers low-budget filmmakers savings of up to 25 percent on film.
He doesn't detail this saving problem. The fact is, for independent filmmakers, the prohibitive cost is film, the raw stock and processing and development of negative. It's why so many have turned to digital. Shoot an hour for ten U.S. dollars on Mini DV. Shoot an hour on 35 mm film at 24 fps works out to roughly $4000. Now, at 48 fps, this cost doubles. So what's the "economy" mode here? As well, he completely skirts the issue of the fact that the system's vibration free tech would need to be implemented on nearly every camera in Hollywood. The main mechanism for filming today is the claw / registration pin system. Filming in the analogue sense is really a matter of taking 24 still photographs per second. A claw pulls down a perforation in the film, aligining it into the picture gate, while a registration pin aligns the perf so the film remains within the register of this gate. 24 fps is the standard, and running at higher speeds often needs serious maintenance and reengineering. As well, running at higher speeds = more light. The faster your framerate, the more light you need. This increases costs on film.
And it can handle any existing 35mm film format--unlike digital projection, which would obsolete a century of old prints.
And how good have those prints been maintained? The fact is, such classic immortal films as Vertigo needed extensive digital restoration work in order to present it as it was seen in its year of release. Thousands of films have been lost forever. Earlier this year Ebert even mentioned that there might not be an existing print of Robert Altman's Nashville - a film from the 70s. Classic films now are safer as digital masters.
One advantage of a film print is that the director and cinematographer can "time" the print to be sure the colors and visual elements are right. In a digital theater, the projectionist would be free to adjust the color, tint and contrast according to his whims. Since many projectionists do not even know how to properly frame a picture or set the correct lamp brightness, this is a frightening prospect.
And at the same time - most films shown in cinemas are underpar to the cinematographers wish. A recent popular technique, known as many things but basically silver retention, desaturates color and creates bolder contrast. These prints are more expensive and as a result only a few prints are shipped utilizing this tecnique - which the film was shot for - so that the majority of viewers never see the film as intended. Seven is a particular case of this.
Add to this the fact that Kodak themselves, and Martin Scorcese has campaigned against this, have found that most cinemas dim their projector bulbs under the misguided idea that it extends the bulb's life. It flat out doesn't. It just leads to a muddy, darker picture. Kodak sent technicians to several theaters armed with light meters and found most films projected at a full stop or two under their proper foot candle level. Add to this variations in print reels - and films are on several differnt ones - and you have a subpar projection process. Many cinematographers love the process of approving a DVD transfer because they can properly time the entire film - and a helluva lot of color timing is done digitally now. The cinematographer of The Full Monty shot a film called Hideous Kinky in Morocco, and he told me that he could've turned shots in daylight in the desert into midnight blue using new digital color timing tecniques. The digital projection tecnique could have s locked down system approved by the filmmakers so that the projector is rigged to only show it at their levels of choice - thereby making sure that there is an optimal standard for all showings of the film.
* What about piracy? Movies will be downloaded just once, then stored in each theater. Thieves could try two approaches. They could grab the signal from the satellite and try to break the encryption (as DVD encryption has just been broken).
Digital projection is not MPEG or MJPEG. The compression algorithim is 50:1 - adaptive block size rather than fixed block size. It compresses frames without regard to one or the next, whereas MPEG and MJPEG compress the information that is the same in each subsequent frame. This leads to picture artificating, which the digital projection system does not have. In other words, it is a proprietry, high storage medium with its own compression algorithim at a high cost. Pirates would need more than a simple telecine (transferring film to video) to pirate the film - first they'd have to break the encryption, which would be vastly superior to DVD's pathetic 48 bit, then they'd need the extremely expensive tech to decode that signal to a low fi master for pirating. Good luck, pirates.
As for the image recording itself - we do not know what system it will utilize. Sony and Panavision have yet to elaborate on what test shots for Ep. 2 have turned out as - nor what compression or resolution etc. it will use. It will not be an existing format like DV or DigiBeta or MPEG.
Hollywood has not spent a dime, for example, to research the intriguing question, do film and digital create different brain states? Some theoreticians believe that film creates reverie, video creates hypnosis; wouldn't it be ironic if digital audiences found they were missing an ineffable part of the moviegoing experience?
Umm, which is why video rental is such a huge business? The fact is, for the most part, the audience just doesn't care. And I have experienced states of emotional reverie from movies watched on DVD rather than a cinema. I went to see the IMAX film Everest during which a hair ended up in the gate of the projector. The result - during an emotional moment- an enormous tentacle from space lashed out at our heroes, and continued to do so until the end of the film - was hugely annoying. I complained to the manager. He told me I was the first, indignant, and rude, customer to complain about their high standards. The amount of misconception that still exists about letterboxing is insane. Letterboxing means you see more of the picture as intended. It's as simple as that. How many DVD users know what 16x9 anamorphic means, despite attempts by the DVD community to educate them?
There are issues here. For instance, watching a film projected means that you spend, during a two hour long film, an hour in darkness - maybe creating a dream like state. Digital projection does remove this flicker effect. But this is esoteric, and I doubt audiences even care.
As for questions raised here in slashdot:
The resolution in the TI system doesn't fit the width of films shot in a widescreen aspect ratio.
There are many different ways to make a film have a wider picture. Super 35mm, for example, utilizes the area in a frame that an optical sound wave is normally stored on, creating a fuller frame image. This is usually cropped down to 1.85:1 or 2.35:1 for a widescreen film, chopping off the top and bottom of the recorded image. This is great for effects people because they can reframe shots in the post production process. There is also anamorphic, which uses lenses which squeeze onto a standard frame a wider image and projection uses a lens which unsquezes the image. Star Wars was projected in this manner - the raw image was compressed horizontally, and a lens was put on the projector which expanded it to a full widescreen image, no black bars.
The resolution is nothing near that of analogue film
Absolutely true, but it is improving. The TI system cannot be considered as a dot matrix field of pixels in the standard LCD projection or monitor sense. It uses a system of dichroic mirrors to relay each beam of light representing a pixel. The resulting pixels do not have a stacked, square relation to one another. What it cannot reproduce is that film does have a resolution. It's determined by the number of silver halide crystals in the emulsion. But these crystals are of a random shape and size, and do not conform to pixels. It's messy, chaotic, and gorgeous. Picture grain (on analogue) is the result of seeing these crystals in the image, when a film is underexposed. It is true that digital projection cannot match this chaotic aspect of the film picture.
HOWEVER - as much as you read about the digital revolution, I've seen it. I've seen effects technicians working on major Hollywood films. And the amount of work they're doing that is invisible and are not for show - reframing shots, eliminating a modern car in a peroid film - is stunning. And when these are projected on film integrated into picture that hasn't been messed with digitally, at a 2000 line resolution, you do not notice. What you do notice about effects that give away bad effects are lighting discrepancies and bad rendering or false, too smooth movement. Think of Toy Story - which went from 4k line picture in a digital medium onto film - thereby it was sourced at those 4k lines. Did you notice it came from a pixelated source? No. Bottom line: you are already viewing in your cinema images that have less resoultion than real film.
Wow! Higher framerate for film. Just as good as getting 60 fps in Q3A rather than 30!
This gets into theoretical doctrine, which is messy. Film has been, for the past 70 years, a 24 fps medium. No one has complained that Lawrence of Arabia sucks because of 24 fps. 60 fps is more important in virtual point of view exercises because it better replicates real vision and the subsitution for mouse scrolling for your viewpoint. Undoubtedly, I agree with Ebert, the Maxi Vision system must look great. However - when a filmmaker doesn't shoot in the standard, normal 1/60th of a second shutter speed at 24 fps, the result is noticeable and unusual for audiences - such as the battle scenes in Saving Private Ryan, which were shot at a faster shutter speed, removing motion blur in images.
The projection of film is an optical illusion utilizing the perception of persistence. Most film frames individually with movement have motion blur. Persist this image one after the next, and the brain interprets it as movement. This is a huge debate about perception and so on, which I shouldn't get into here - but the fact is, cinema is so old as a standard, that 24 fps is what people almost expect when they see a movie.
The digital revolution is on, and its gonna crush film, Ebert is a Luddite - or - Hollywood is just hung up on buzzwords and trends and thus this system.
Which is why I was so stunned at his article. He is anything but a Luddite. He was one of the first critics to use the Net, and often writes about tech issues. Yes, the digital revolution is on, and there are going to be huge problems. James Cameron, who does know a helluva lot about this, has said the problem is that Hollywood will go for the cheapest, and therefore nastiest, system. Whatever system they get so they can maintain control of distribution even greater. Imagine if the studios were hooked up to every projector and ran them from their HQ - yeah, it's not a pleasant idea is it? Two weeks into a films release and a scene is causing a media uproar - HQ deletes it from every projector in the world. Etc, etc.
Likewise, the digital revolution is on - and it's not just a buzzword. The fact is, 90% of all films go through some form of digital process now, be it in editing or corrective opticals (traditionally done with an optical printer) or FX. This often entails painful procedures to get film to match the framerate of video systems (30 fps or 60hz NTSC) - 48 fps will make it even worse. There is so much money squandered getting film from one analogue medium into a digital one then back to analogue - that in the long run it's more effective for all parties concerned to move entirely digital. I'm telling you, here at ground zero, as a film student who has managed to see the new tech - that filmmaking in the traditional sense is undergoing a massive change - and it is unstoppable. What astonishes me is butting heads with traditionalists who believe everything must be done to stop filmmaking going digital - but haven't realized it already has - and that this new tech is liberating in that the real indie filmmaker can really make something for cheap, really cheap. Films that would never get made otherwise have been done on DV.
We are getting to the point of - if you can imagine it - you can show it. Which I find personally liberating. Especially if I can do it faster and cheaper - or if a kid in Kansas in his basement can. I own, in my PC, for less than a really cheap car, the equivalent to a mid 90s TV station's image processing and editing capabilites. At the same time, too much content is now being produced - too many crap webcam soap operas, the Truman Show made real but in an almost more craven manner. The many headed Hydra that digital has brought to image capturing and editing has only just appeared, and none of us knows where it will really take us, or what the future of filmmaking will be. But it's better to be informed of the truth of the situation than to give into preferences for more familiar formats - because of some kind of notion of "purity". Filmmaking is the manipulation of time, space, and emotion. It is an optical illusion. Nothing more, nothing less.
Called The War in Heaven, by Eternal Warriors. Check out this.
A few questions... Why is it that in the early 90s it was reported that one in every four black men would be either dead or in prison by the age of 25 - yet considering this statistic was based largely upon ghetto youths - how many of these young men had access to Quake? Why did nobody care that inner city schools needed metal detectors installed? Why wasn't it important chest beating news when a friend of mine's father who teaches in an inner city school had a gun pulled on him by a student? Why is it only when it happens to a largely middle class, affluent suburb that we actually care this happens in America? Why does this sort of thing not happen in Britain, where I'm living at the moment, where there is no easy access to guns? Why is it that I play Counterstrike at least three times a week, have experience with firing firearms of all sorts, work in special effects simulating gore and violence of all sorts, got picked on as a kid, and my father took me to see Alien in a theater when I was four, yet I have never shot a living entity in my life, and have no urges to do so? Why is it when the media ran that same clip from "The Matrix" over and over covering the Columbine shooting, they showed the assault with guns - but never showed people running up walls or stopping bullets with their mind? To paraphrase David Cronenberg "The problem with censors is they do what psychotics do. They confuse fantasy with reality." I wish J.G. Ballard's Running Wild was still in print. Prophetic Mr. Ballard, who is usually on the ball predicting the development of our psychopathology, who inferred that adolescents living in a sterile middle class suburb go apeshit and violent when they are cut off from cultural dealings with violence and sexuality. On a case by case basis, with accurate fact checking, one would see that essentially no link can be proven between violent cultural material and actual violence. The British Film Institute published an entire issue of its journal, Sight and Sound, devoted to using the latest data from clinical psychologists and sociologists working in the field, and were able to refute a concrete link between the two. The fact is that for psychopaths, any cultural material could become the trigger for their psychosis because they attempt through force of will to make fantasy reality. The violence in culture is just gravy that they fit into their train. There has never, NEVER, been irrefutable evidence of a link between the absorption of violent media and violent behavior, despite attempts to do so for the past century. Lt. Col Roger Ramjet has a serious major malfunction. At least he has let us know that a former West Point instructor believes the U.S. military is brainwashing ("desensitzing") its recruits with mind control programs. Which is hilarious news to me - I thought they were supposed to be developing "combat awareness". But then again, what do I know, I never taught at West Point.
But it's not.
Got in touch with friends and family back in Seattle. Heard about the bashing of the Niketown store. Heard about the girl who led the charge kicking in the glass door - how she was wearing Nikes.
Heard about my friend who just wanted to get to work on time and ended up getting tear gassed.
Heard about how peaceful protest was banned in certain areas of Seattle - not rioting, not looting, not violent anarchy, but peaceful protest was prohibited and people were arrested for doing such near the convention center. The ACLU and Amnesty International issued statements.
On the other hand heard firsthand from people who were peacefully protesting many grievances how youthful, net using, educated, affluent white kids wearing Rage Against the Machine T shirts came down to S Town looking for a ruck - and nothing more. Ask them what it was about the WTO that gets their goat - they can't answer. Then they start kicking the Starbucks stores. Terrific. It's like that moment in Fight Club where all the Space Monkeys start chanting "His name is Rob Paulson... His name is Rob Paulson..." We're all part of the movement - we just don't know what the fuck it is.
Heard about how gas masks were declared illegal in the Seattle city limits. Now guns, on the other hand... Next time I fly into Seattle the chances of me not being able to buy a gun on I-5 from Sea Tac (which seems, near the airport, to have an inordinate amount of adult video stores and gun shops) - jack shit and jack just left town.
Saw a picture of a cop dressed in new Robocop TM style armor kicking a protester in the balls while forty people took pictures around him.
And for all the news coverage I could plug into, the story was civil disobedience (and I love how this was continally referred as the worst act of protest since Vietnam - what about the L.A. Riots? Or does that not count as protest? When white Trustifarians - Rastas with trust funds loot and riot it's an anarchic marxist statement, but when African Americans in the ghetto do it, it's just looting) with very, very little content about what was the contentious issue in the first place.
At least Jon Katz gets that right. But in some instances he doesn't get it right. Because this is not a simplistic, reductive issue, despite many forms of media attempting to make it one. So much easier to get your air time with images of tear gas attacks than to actually address the complexity and the hyprocisy and the hopefulness this last week signifies.
But when he says:
"This has sparked an epidemic homogenization of popular culture - not a dumbing down, but a dulling down - as controversial, profane, sexual or other "controversial" cultural offerings from books to movies to music are eliminated or pushed to the margins so that safer products can be mass-marketed."
This is patently untrue. The truth and the problem and the hyprocisy that doesn't make this such a wonderful unifying movement for us youngsters to get invovled in - is that the zeitgeist, the interstitial cultures (whip out that copy of All Tomorrow's Parties) - they are part of the large corporations and the media now. They have become absolved of geographical space, and been absorbed by the OmniCorps of the world. Traditional non net based media - and a hell of a lot of net based media - is part of the corporate world. Why's there so much porn on the net? Any time there's a major advancement in communications technologies porn is involved. What's interesting today is how Middle of the Road porn now is. Bohemian attitudes to dress, sex, clothing, tattoos, your choice of books, your films - all can now be traced back to some piece of the fragmenting culture pie - now owned and sold at the local mall. A wad of spunk in hair - which would have gotten the Farelly Brothers burned at the stake only forty years ago - is now okay in cineplexes all over the world. Our attitudes culturally have not been dumbed down - they've been accepted and compromised and sold back to us. Despite the odd lunatic's attempts to attempt thought control, we do live in a period of, historically, relatively liberal cultural values. It's just that none of them seem honest or free or genuine.
As for environmental arguments - the broader issue is not that large corportations pollute and waste so much - it's a simple economic one, and by that I mean the anthropolgical definition of a civilization's economy. It's that money is generated by turning natural resources into products. Large coroporations go to an area, loot as many resources they can, then leave selling those resources to the highest bidder, maximizing profit - and giving nothing back to that area. Now all the resources are gone and those who make a living agriculturally - which is probably 80% of the planet, since the Third World lives off of agriculture - have no resources, and no job.
The real boon of this net communication is that our culture is fragmenting so rapdily. We don't have single unifying causes or defintions or causes, and Seattle should be proof of that. We have a diversity, with non geographical bohemias like Slashdot here - and look at all the differing opinions. What's important is not that we are all against the Corps of the world - but that we are in so many different ways.
So this is a confused post. Because I am confused. Because there is no easy way to spell this out. And it's so stupid to label the complex systems that make up a protest crowd nowadays. Those people in Seattle were not Techno Idealists. They were people.
You can either opt out and kick in the Niketown store with your Nikes. You can protest peacefully and get arrested. You can just try to lay low and do your job and get tear gassed. You can post messages on Slashdot and then read a thousand differing opinions.
But I suppose, most importantly, what you must do is consider how complex the maelstrom of human reaction the past week signifies.
Everyone has their own opinion, yeah, but I'm surprised at some of the responses in the Slashdot community. Sure, when I saw the protestors preparing on the news here in London I sorta mumbled to myself, "Yeah... THEY'RE going to save the world, sure..." - but the really interesting thing is that it's not just bong addled hippies out there. It's retired firemen and nuns and Union workers. That is how important this issue is - because anyone who has lived in WA state, where I grew up, and hasn't gotten filty rich on MS stock options knows that free trade has been disastrous to our economy and environment. The Salmon runs are nearly dead, hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost in that industry. Loggers were hired by big corporations to strip clear trees from the state that were sold to Japan, then fired once they were all gone (and don't get me started on how they bought public land - PARK LANDS - to get even more timber). Then there's Microsoft. The brief history of this state is our future history praying at the altar of free trade. These were issues that affected blue collar working class people and their ability to support their families - not smelly assed crusties playing bongos worrying about the new batch of Humboldt bud.
The WTO means that hormone injected beef that has been proven to cause cancer cannot be restricted from being sold in a country whose people don't want it. This means that controls on GM food and labelling cannot occur despite a populace agreeing on such an issue. This means Monsanto can sell their self destructing seed no matter what the farmers think. It means a company who makes an enormous profit from one country doesn't have to put one cent back into taxes to that country or jobs or local interest. Basically - it's Microsoft vs. Linux, except it's not the OS you run, it's the food you eat, the air you breathe, the animals in the sea, your local populace's employment rates, the ability of a large corporation to strip mine all the resources in an economy and not put anything back into that economy - rather keep it for themselves - which is the real damage of free trade.
Maybe I'm emotional, because I'm here in London and it's only through webcams and message boards and TV coverage that I can get a sense of what's going on back home, and worry about friends and family, some of whom I know are protesting, while others are worried about getting to work on time, and one or two police officers. Undoubtedly there is a small minority causing trouble. But what I see is a diverse crowd of unarmed people with interests devoted to having a say in the shape of the world versus the latest kevlar protection and non lethal weaponry - against the sheltered protection of large corporations. It's Terry Gilliam's Brazil. For the first time in my life I have empathy with the older generation who protested in the 60s and understand why they were so reactionary. If you're going to consider this issue as non sequitir and having no importance to nerds, then please, like a true nerd educate yourself first and consider what's at stake.