Definitly. I think it is more noticeable in Episode 2 because there are so many less than subtle composites constantly throughout the whole movie, and possibly because many scenes are bright and the colors are also very saturated, giving what the original poster said as cartoon like.
I think what you are referring to is not less animation, but less compositing. So many images were taken to form some of the shots, that they can't help but look like they were not shot at the same time.
The music, the environments, and the huge characters. It was an experience. At the end the big metroid sacrificed itself, and I really did feel sad. Much more of an emotional connection than most movies. All the environments had such a distinct feel because of the incredible music throughout.
It is a lossless format. 44.1 Khz Stereo Sound, what you see is what you get, nothing taken out for compression. Just because something is downsampled from whatever the original is recorded at doesn't make it a 'lossy' format. There are definite definitions to follow.
This is not true. I walked by a Virgin records store every day for the past year to go work in a computer lab, listening to music all day every day. I have only bought maybe 3 CDs from the store. I was talking one day about the prices and realized that if a CD was $5 I would have bought on every other day to listen to instead of making one CD of mp3's and listening to it for weeks on end.
It has been my experience that 3D programs have pioneered quite a bit in interface. Just putting all the buttons in a three button mouse to use is a huge start (like XSI). Looking at Maya is a good example of gestures used very very effectivly, but as a lone source of input it doesn't work. A combinations of customizable buttons, using all the inputs available, and prioritizing (assume a certain hand position on the keyboard and put the most inportant keys under it, and work your way out). Using contex creates a very tightly accesible interface. Not everything needs to be available all the time.
I think that using a keyboard is not that far from gestures. How much different is pressing a key than making a gesture, which one has less room for error? How different is holding shift then pressing a key with the same hand?
I think that basically gestures are already how we use computers, and a different input device based on that principal wouldn't be very different, so I don't think that it would be very efficient, because there would be such a switch. I think that mouse gestures are a great tool, it just needs to be implemented thoughtfully and be an accpeted interface tool so that people will stop thinking it is something experimental, and eventually it will get more standardized and consitent, which is half the battle in interface design anyway. So I don't think that for the current state of computers (ie not 3D) the interface really can't, won't, and shouldn't change very much. I think it is more of a software problem than a hardware problem. I also think that truly 3D interfaces are a very bad idea, and should be reserved for the very few obvious applicaitons of them (moving a character around in 3D, etc.). We try to put every interface we have into a 2D space (look at something physical like a reciever, microwave, sound mixing board, oven, combination locks). Only special situations, most of them because of a direct elegant physical connection, have something not deliberatly two dimensional (toilet handle, ice machine from a refrigerator, door handles, faucets).
How does this relate to the article? I think that vastly improved ergonomics is one of last big things we can do to polish off the current state of computer interfaces for some time. The hardware and software have evolved pretty well together.
That's wrong, Alias Wavefront is owned by SGI and doing well, but they are separate companies, and one will not be able to or want to subsidize the other. Mental Images won a technical achievement Oscar for Mental Ray, and Digital Domain won one a year or two ago for Nuke. Other winners include ultimatte and of course Pixar for various research.
Actually in the early begging of CGI and Renderman, this was tried by the CGI research division of Lucasfilm. Commodity hardware eventually caught up with it, hasn't looked back, and that's all she wrote.
The parent post is somewhat misleading and more than a little spotty, but it got modded up, so I feel I should clarify.
That Sun had tried renderman (or whatever they call it) to run on 32 bit processors and it was a horrible disaster. Something about how it seemed more feasible and cost efficient to use Sun until the days in which the competiting 64 bit processors became cheaper.
Renderman is a standard for going exporting frames to a renderer. Pixar's implementation is called Photorealistic renderman. Sun is not involved in this at all. It has run on x86 procs, as well as Linux for quite a while now. Renderers are relativly easy to port, especially from different Unixes. I am not sure if there are speed advantages to 64 bit computers, or if it is just accuracy and memory like always, which is still a big advantage for a renderer. ( can anyone clarify?) I have a PRman rendered image on my desktop right now on my 450 Mhz PIII. The above quote is pretty much completly false.
Doesn't dreamworks use this type of technology already?
The technology is just running off the shelf software and hardware. Different parts of dreamworks do use Linux heavily.
Damned MPAA members... we hate you because of your strives for world domination, but then you go and support linux... bastards we just love to hate you.
This is horribly misinformed. I don't have the energy to go into the whole issue here but suffice to say that this is wildly misplaced frustration. First of all, Pixar is not a member of the MPAA. They have a deal with Disney, which is. That attidude would be fitting and understandable with Disney for various reasons, but making Pixar your enemy is just wrong (except when they sued Larry Gritz personally to hold off competition to Renderman). The same goes for Visual Effects companies. ILM, Imageworks, Digital Domain, PDI, Pixar, Rythm and Hues, Weta, etc. are the best thing that's happening to Linux right now. They are so far removed from the wrongdoings of the MPAA its like me blaming someone for crime when their friends dad is part of the NRA. They are doing only good for Linux, and they are not hyprocrites. They do have deals with studios that are intern part of the MPAA. Not everything is perfect, and these issues are not something that they as companies are, should be, or will be concerned about. They are also starting to contribute to Linux, and I am confident more will come as Linux matures in their pipeline. Building up anger towards Visual Effects companies perpetuates the sterotype of free software advocates being zealots without understanding the whole issue.
This post shows a lot of ignorance about graphics. It is hard to understand without actually doing CG professionally, but it doesn't make it right.
GIMP is not comparable to photoshop, and it is not comparable to painter. They are three separate programs, with photoshop being the fastest and most robust, and painter being used to simulate traditional mediums like paints, and pencils. You can have paper texture and do rubbings, you can watercolor and watch it drip down, you can mix red and yellow to make orange on your canvas.
Film Gimp is a image manipulation program that works with images beyond 8 bits per channel. After Effects is a compositor. They are not even shooting at the same targets by any stretch of the imagination.
I know you didn't mention it, but I will say it anyway, Blender is not comparable to any commercial 3D software that costs more than $200, let alone Maya, Lightwave, 3D Studio or Softimage XSI, it doesn't come close, so if anyone out there is thinking that Blender could ever replace them, just get it out of your head right now.
Linux is making inroads in graphics very quickly, but it depends on commercial support first and foremost and this will continue. Adobe will port photoshop when another image manipulation program that is comparable comes to Linux, enabling people to switch and use that program instead of photoshop. This will probably be Amazon paint, but if Softimage wises up quick, it could be Matador.
Nice troll, and if it isn't, wow. Everything in your post is false. the 700Mhz MIPS certainly does stand a chance against other processors and I would love to have one, but as for price/performance, it is probably a very poor option.
The N64 did well as a system, and had far more power than the playstation. The playstation just did incredibly well.
Hollywood is a city, not a company. I am assuming you are talking about 3D and compositing visual effects studios, of which a few are near Hollywood, California. They aren't going to BSD, they are going to Linux, not just for rendering, but for workstations. Irix is unix and it makes it a very flexible choice for an OS. Because Linux is so similiar, it is also a flexible and powerful.
Canada Trust, one of the biggest banks in west Canada (I am not sure about their reach) use linux heavily. I went there to open an account, and while I was answering questions, what was on their desktop? KDE everywhere. People at desks and people working behind the counter were all using Linux and KDE on PCs. I would also suspect that if Linux is used on every desktop that it, or at very least some other Unix is used for all the servers.
Its definitly a good point to compare prices to other successful buisnesses in the same area. The catch is though, that there are no other successful vendors of operating systems for x86, and I agree, Linux doesn't count because of its open nature. I think that MS would make more sales at a cheaper price, but realistically, how much more could they sell? I agree though, that high profit margins don't make a monopoly, Adobe must have sky high profit margins on Photoshop, with so so many copies out there at a couple hundred dollars per copy, but everything is very standardized, and someone could create a competitor with no real technical (and I think no legal barriers).
The only company using Linux that is a part of the RIAA is Disney. Yes, they are hipocrites, no other studio deserves that kind of scorn though, they are helping Linux immensly. Enough of this crap.
It seems that many people are wondering why anyone would invest in something like this, let alone multiple drives. One thing that this would be great for is working with high-res video, for animation, compositing and editing. A big problem for a very long time (and still even) was just playing back full resolution (720x486) video on a computer. For small things RAM can take care of it, for bigger things you need a scsi drive or a RAID. For higher resolution video like various HD resolutions, playback becomes difficult again. RAM doesn't cut it very well, because if you are working with HD animation or compositing it is probably full anyway. RAID Scsi or some sort of RAM disk like this are the only ways to reliably playback the sequences. It becomes a How much do you need? Anything I can get. sort of situation.
What you are talking about is classic immersion and identity through abstraction. The more realistic something looks, the less you can relate to it. A smiley face works because it is abstract and anyone can relate to it, and identify with it. This is not what I was talking about in my parent post. Doom III is also not a movie of course, and I was specifically talking about movies.
Slashdot Mirror
That's right I don't dangle.
A $99 upgrade adds a Secure Digital card slot and a dongle!"
Its not so bad that I am bought and sold, but that I am not even sold alone, I am bundled with something else.
Definitly. I think it is more noticeable in Episode 2 because there are so many less than subtle composites constantly throughout the whole movie, and possibly because many scenes are bright and the colors are also very saturated, giving what the original poster said as cartoon like.
I think what you are referring to is not less animation, but less compositing. So many images were taken to form some of the shots, that they can't help but look like they were not shot at the same time.
The first European fully CGI feature was made in Spain and called The Living Forest.
That's hilarious
And what if that kid now grows up to be the next Hitler because he doesn't have proper discipline in his life?
Ironically enough, Hitler was abused severly as a child.
The music, the environments, and the huge characters. It was an experience. At the end the big metroid sacrificed itself, and I really did feel sad. Much more of an emotional connection than most movies. All the environments had such a distinct feel because of the incredible music throughout.
It is a lossless format. 44.1 Khz Stereo Sound, what you see is what you get, nothing taken out for compression. Just because something is downsampled from whatever the original is recorded at doesn't make it a 'lossy' format. There are definite definitions to follow.
This is not true. I walked by a Virgin records store every day for the past year to go work in a computer lab, listening to music all day every day. I have only bought maybe 3 CDs from the store. I was talking one day about the prices and realized that if a CD was $5 I would have bought on every other day to listen to instead of making one CD of mp3's and listening to it for weeks on end.
It has been my experience that 3D programs have pioneered quite a bit in interface. Just putting all the buttons in a three button mouse to use is a huge start (like XSI). Looking at Maya is a good example of gestures used very very effectivly, but as a lone source of input it doesn't work. A combinations of customizable buttons, using all the inputs available, and prioritizing (assume a certain hand position on the keyboard and put the most inportant keys under it, and work your way out). Using contex creates a very tightly accesible interface. Not everything needs to be available all the time.
I think that using a keyboard is not that far from gestures. How much different is pressing a key than making a gesture, which one has less room for error? How different is holding shift then pressing a key with the same hand?
I think that basically gestures are already how we use computers, and a different input device based on that principal wouldn't be very different, so I don't think that it would be very efficient, because there would be such a switch. I think that mouse gestures are a great tool, it just needs to be implemented thoughtfully and be an accpeted interface tool so that people will stop thinking it is something experimental, and eventually it will get more standardized and consitent, which is half the battle in interface design anyway. So I don't think that for the current state of computers (ie not 3D) the interface really can't, won't, and shouldn't change very much. I think it is more of a software problem than a hardware problem. I also think that truly 3D interfaces are a very bad idea, and should be reserved for the very few obvious applicaitons of them (moving a character around in 3D, etc.). We try to put every interface we have into a 2D space (look at something physical like a reciever, microwave, sound mixing board, oven, combination locks). Only special situations, most of them because of a direct elegant physical connection, have something not deliberatly two dimensional (toilet handle, ice machine from a refrigerator, door handles, faucets).
How does this relate to the article? I think that vastly improved ergonomics is one of last big things we can do to polish off the current state of computer interfaces for some time. The hardware and software have evolved pretty well together.
That's wrong, Alias Wavefront is owned by SGI and doing well, but they are separate companies, and one will not be able to or want to subsidize the other. Mental Images won a technical achievement Oscar for Mental Ray, and Digital Domain won one a year or two ago for Nuke. Other winners include ultimatte and of course Pixar for various research.
Actually in the early begging of CGI and Renderman, this was tried by the CGI research division of Lucasfilm. Commodity hardware eventually caught up with it, hasn't looked back, and that's all she wrote.
The parent post is somewhat misleading and more than a little spotty, but it got modded up, so I feel I should clarify.
... we hate you because of your strives for world domination, but then you go and support linux ... bastards we just love to hate you.
That Sun had tried renderman (or whatever they call it) to run on 32 bit processors and it was a horrible disaster. Something about how it seemed more feasible and cost efficient to use Sun until the days in which the competiting 64 bit processors became cheaper.
Renderman is a standard for going exporting frames to a renderer. Pixar's implementation is called Photorealistic renderman. Sun is not involved in this at all. It has run on x86 procs, as well as Linux for quite a while now. Renderers are relativly easy to port, especially from different Unixes. I am not sure if there are speed advantages to 64 bit computers, or if it is just accuracy and memory like always, which is still a big advantage for a renderer. ( can anyone clarify?) I have a PRman rendered image on my desktop right now on my 450 Mhz PIII. The above quote is pretty much completly false.
Doesn't dreamworks use this type of technology already?
The technology is just running off the shelf software and hardware. Different parts of dreamworks do use Linux heavily.
Damned MPAA members
This is horribly misinformed. I don't have the energy to go into the whole issue here but suffice to say that this is wildly misplaced frustration. First of all, Pixar is not a member of the MPAA. They have a deal with Disney, which is. That attidude would be fitting and understandable with Disney for various reasons, but making Pixar your enemy is just wrong (except when they sued Larry Gritz personally to hold off competition to Renderman). The same goes for Visual Effects companies. ILM, Imageworks, Digital Domain, PDI, Pixar, Rythm and Hues, Weta, etc. are the best thing that's happening to Linux right now. They are so far removed from the wrongdoings of the MPAA its like me blaming someone for crime when their friends dad is part of the NRA. They are doing only good for Linux, and they are not hyprocrites. They do have deals with studios that are intern part of the MPAA. Not everything is perfect, and these issues are not something that they as companies are, should be, or will be concerned about. They are also starting to contribute to Linux, and I am confident more will come as Linux matures in their pipeline. Building up anger towards Visual Effects companies perpetuates the sterotype of free software advocates being zealots without understanding the whole issue.
The article specifically says that Itaniums do not use emulation for x86.
This post shows a lot of ignorance about graphics. It is hard to understand without actually doing CG professionally, but it doesn't make it right.
GIMP is not comparable to photoshop, and it is not comparable to painter. They are three separate programs, with photoshop being the fastest and most robust, and painter being used to simulate traditional mediums like paints, and pencils. You can have paper texture and do rubbings, you can watercolor and watch it drip down, you can mix red and yellow to make orange on your canvas.
Film Gimp is a image manipulation program that works with images beyond 8 bits per channel. After Effects is a compositor. They are not even shooting at the same targets by any stretch of the imagination.
I know you didn't mention it, but I will say it anyway, Blender is not comparable to any commercial 3D software that costs more than $200, let alone Maya, Lightwave, 3D Studio or Softimage XSI, it doesn't come close, so if anyone out there is thinking that Blender could ever replace them, just get it out of your head right now.
Linux is making inroads in graphics very quickly, but it depends on commercial support first and foremost and this will continue. Adobe will port photoshop when another image manipulation program that is comparable comes to Linux, enabling people to switch and use that program instead of photoshop. This will probably be Amazon paint, but if Softimage wises up quick, it could be Matador.
Nice troll, and if it isn't, wow. Everything in your post is false. the 700Mhz MIPS certainly does stand a chance against other processors and I would love to have one, but as for price/performance, it is probably a very poor option.
The N64 did well as a system, and had far more power than the playstation. The playstation just did incredibly well.
Hollywood is a city, not a company. I am assuming you are talking about 3D and compositing visual effects studios, of which a few are near Hollywood, California. They aren't going to BSD, they are going to Linux, not just for rendering, but for workstations. Irix is unix and it makes it a very flexible choice for an OS. Because Linux is so similiar, it is also a flexible and powerful.
All these mod points an every comment is rocketed to five. Nice sig. What up from vancouver, see ya the 18th.
Canada Trust, one of the biggest banks in west Canada (I am not sure about their reach) use linux heavily. I went there to open an account, and while I was answering questions, what was on their desktop? KDE everywhere. People at desks and people working behind the counter were all using Linux and KDE on PCs. I would also suspect that if Linux is used on every desktop that it, or at very least some other Unix is used for all the servers.
Talk about changing
Lots of press surrounding us
Big discount from MS
Its definitly a good point to compare prices to other successful buisnesses in the same area. The catch is though, that there are no other successful vendors of operating systems for x86, and I agree, Linux doesn't count because of its open nature. I think that MS would make more sales at a cheaper price, but realistically, how much more could they sell? I agree though, that high profit margins don't make a monopoly, Adobe must have sky high profit margins on Photoshop, with so so many copies out there at a couple hundred dollars per copy, but everything is very standardized, and someone could create a competitor with no real technical (and I think no legal barriers).
The only company using Linux that is a part of the RIAA is Disney. Yes, they are hipocrites, no other studio deserves that kind of scorn though, they are helping Linux immensly. Enough of this crap.
It seems that many people are wondering why anyone would invest in something like this, let alone multiple drives. One thing that this would be great for is working with high-res video, for animation, compositing and editing. A big problem for a very long time (and still even) was just playing back full resolution (720x486) video on a computer. For small things RAM can take care of it, for bigger things you need a scsi drive or a RAID. For higher resolution video like various HD resolutions, playback becomes difficult again. RAM doesn't cut it very well, because if you are working with HD animation or compositing it is probably full anyway. RAID Scsi or some sort of RAM disk like this are the only ways to reliably playback the sequences. It becomes a How much do you need? Anything I can get. sort of situation.
What you are talking about is classic immersion and identity through abstraction. The more realistic something looks, the less you can relate to it. A smiley face works because it is abstract and anyone can relate to it, and identify with it. This is not what I was talking about in my parent post. Doom III is also not a movie of course, and I was specifically talking about movies.
Nothing in a movie has to look real, it just has to look believable. How many spaceships, Yodas and Jar Jar's have you seen up close in real life?