If someone botches a line or flubs a song or whatever, you reshoot it. In effect, when making a movie, you can substitute time for talent, making even a relatively bad actor seem respectable through careful editing of multiple takes with good use of cutaways to mask edits.
Since this is exactly how the "pros" do it as well, this certainly will work.
There are many stories about "good" actors who are that way simply because of good editing. As you note, the ones that do more live theater are more likely to actually be truly good actors.
Let me know when the film Song of the South or an English dub of the series Alegrijes y Rebujos comes to Netflix.
And, if those are too obscure, how about an HD version of True Lies?
The master has already been made for the D-Theater release, but no Blu-Ray is available. Also, both the laserdisc and the D-Theater release had DTS sound, but all the DVD releases have only Dolby Digital. I want to purchase this, but movie studios have forced me to "infringe" copyright by copying the D-Theater tape to hard disk, and then building my own Blu-Ray.
I don't download *any* copyrighted material unless I've been given express permission to do so by the copyright holder, either by CC, or in the form of a letter.
You seriously need a paper letter?
So, no downloading of movie trailers, promo songs, etc., even though the website offering it is something like "www.sony.com" (i.e., obviously authorized)?
You'd be surprised how easy it is to respect copyright when you have a subscription to a service like Netflix, and can get what you want on demand.
Except that I can't put a copy of the movie onto a portable media player for viewing when I don't have connectivity. For this, the studio wants you to pay again. I'd rather pay for the DVD or Blu-Ray (usually used or bargain bin), then "infringe" copyright by breaking the copy protection so I can use the copy the way I want. The "use the way I want" has been upheld in court, so it's only the bought-and-paid-for congresscritters who are causing me to "infringe" copyright when I do this.
the number of R-Rated movies being produced is a fraction of what it was back in the "Back to the Future" days.
That's because the PG-13 rating had just been invented when BttF came out.
Since then, many movies that would have gotten an R rating back then get PG-13. In particular, nudity without sex (like bare breasts) and violence without gore will generally get you only a PG-13 even if there is quite a bit of it, but that would likely have landed an R back in the early 80s.
The fact that two movies by a very big name (Spielberg) got a PG instead of an R are what led to the creation of PG-13, and also show one of the flaws in the system. Because the ratings and appeals board are beholden to movies making money to keep things going, a "big name movie" might get some slack (like LotR).
You do realize that ASCAP and related collection agencies are about a billion dollars and 15 years behind on the payments to artists. Their excuse was often "we couldn't find the artist", even for names like Bruce Springsteen and U2.
Fair use is a defense to copyright infringement, not to circumvention.
Apparently you didn't read the paragraph of the law I posted.
That is part of the section that is commonly called "the DMCA", and specifically refers to that section. In addition, if you read the section in detail, it only concerns bypassing protection for the purpose of copyright infringement.
The actual wording of the DMCA is designed to punish people who create devices/software/etc. with the primary purpose of infringing copyright, even if the creator of the devices/software/etc. does not perform the infringement themselves. Basically, without infringement, there is no DMCA violation, and even if there is infringement, only a device that "has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent protection" is a violation. In addition, the "reverse engineering" paragraph may also apply.
Last, it's worth the fight since Sony can get nothing out of this lawsuit but an injunction to stop distributing the "device" (which is meaningless in the Internet world) plus $25,000 in statutory damages (since it's only one act of circumvention), plus millions of dollars of bad PR.
Wrong. I'm quite happy to have the status bar gone/relocated.
But, if they left the status bar in place, or gave the user an option for where the status bar should be, that would make you unhappy?
See, the problem is that Firefox has always been the browser that was easiest for the user to configure for "their way", but more and more it's becoming like IE, where the developers make descisions that remove end user choice.
It appears if you want all the other FF 4 goodness (faster Javascript, etc.), you have to live with some questionable changes to the UI.
Would it have been so hard for the Mozilla developers to just add a config option to pick where the status bar display goes? Pretty much everybody would be happy then.
This is a repeat of the FF 3 "Awesome Bar" disaster, which also could have been averted with a choice for the user in the form of an easy-to-find config option.
You make whoever you present it to sign an NDA, which you get notarized before you ever speak to them.
So, then if the person you talk to likes your idea, he can't speak with anyone else in his company to champion it. That doesn't seem like a good way to sell an idea.
Basically, it's not possible to present an idea to anyone without giving them the chance to "steal" it. Since ideas are cheap and it's all about the execution, anyway, you really shouldn't worry too much.
Similarly, Blurry disks use AAC (MPEG 4 audio) as opposed to either of the above.
Assuming you are snidely referring to Blu-Ray, you're wrong.
Blu-Ray players must support AC-3, DTS, and linear PCM, with the more advanced Dolby Digital and DTS codecs as options. MPEG-4 audio isn't mentioned as even being optional.
I'm never going to buy a BD drive because of the DRM crap
I don't believe that BD-ROM drives have the same kind of DRM hardware as DVD drives.
You can read every file on an AACS-encrypted Blu-Ray movie and copy it to your hard drive with no special software. It's still encrypted, so you can't see the movie without decryption software, but you can copy it. DVD-ROM drives actively prevent the copy of a CSS-encrypted disc.
I have a BD-ROM writer on my PC so that I can read discs and write an offsite backup that is larger than 8GB. I could use hard drives, but a $1/disc, 25GB BD-ROM discs are almost disposable. Add in decryption software, and I can also rip my Blu-Ray movies to my media server.
So while Hotz didn't directly contribute to piracy or even came out against it, the opening up of the console has allowed it.
One thing that might have Sony worried is that the PS3 is technically a software Blu-Ray player, and having this key might make it possible to hack that functionality to allow more widespread copying of movies, too.
Maybe, but the "has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent protection" requirement probably makes this OK. Plus, even if it's a technical violation, he can always fall back on fair use:
17 USC 1201 (c) Other Rights, Etc., Not Affected.-(1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.
Because it might turn out that "ghosts" are merely the observable actions of the Higgs boson.
In other words, it doesn't matter what the "ghost" really is...if you use the scientific method, you'll find out what is causing the observed phenomena, and maybe it will be important.
As far as overclocking goes, anyone who spends money on a non-stock cooler isn't saving anything. A stock cooler and going for the next step up CPU is always a better option.
$30 for an aftermarket cooler that keeps my 3.2GHz (overclocked from 2.66GHz) i7-920 less than 60C after a few hours of Prime95 or $200 more for the i7-960 with its 3.2GHz stock clock and cooler tells me you are very wrong.
For the Sandy Bridge processors, it's even easier to overclock...30% overclocks with the stock cooler are common and 50% with sub-$50 aftermarket coolers.
Except that the CPU can't hold anywhere near enough memory for video decoding on it's own, and accessing main memory would largely defeat the purpose. No, I think you are half-way there, but to complete it you need to take hardware video decoding into account as well. Then the graphics processor can take the encrypted stream in, decrypt it, decode it, and output to HDMI... all without unencrypted video ever leaving the graphics hardware.
The Sandy Bridge processors have the GPU in the same package as the CPU, and have hardware decoding for MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 (both H.263 and H.264). I don't know how much of the decoding can be done completely within the confines of the chip with no need for main memory.
You definitely have to use main memory to do things like DirectShow filters, though, so it's really not possible to keep all decrypted content within the chip.
not to mention that if you rip them to your NAS, the industry has now just DOSd your storage system with extra data bits that you can't even see or resolve on the tv and definitely 100% guaranteed that your audio system isn't up to 'linear track 24bit' standards. ie, they force you to take 40-50gb for a movie when its just not reasonable.
Although it's definitely true that the encodes on Blu-Ray are very poor in their usage of the overall bitpool, you can usually do a complete movie-only rip in about 20GB. It's then trivially easy to re-compress the movie using a much lower average bitrate but still retain every bit of the quality, and end up at about 12GB. For the vast improvement in both picture and sound quality, it is definitely worth about double the space of a DVD.
Or, you could reduce the resolution to 720p, drop the lossless audio tracks, and every movie (including things like the director's cut of the LotR movies) will then fit in less than 8GB, with most less than 4GB.
uprez'd dvd on a widescreen is very nearly the same with none of the down-sides of BD
You really haven't watched HD material on a good large HDTV much, have you? The quality jump from DVD to even 720p is enormous. Not to mention that some Blu-Ray releases have cleaned up the film for the transfer (nothing new, just better quality). For me, the most striking has been the movie "Stargate". The Blu-Ray has correct color, no edge enhancement, and makes the DVD look pretty much like VHS.
I've noticed a fair few movies lately in multiple formats - you get the DVD, BD and a digital copy on the disk.
The whole point of the phrase "digital copy" is to convince you that you don't have any fair use rights for the digital versions that are on every Blu-Ray and DVD.
I prefer to use the high resolution source already on the disk when I make a "digital copy" for my own use, because I know that copyright law says I am allowed to do this, as long as I don't distribute the copies I make to other people.
Yes, that scene is a significant change from the original version of that scene (since it was completely new), but it doesn't represent a significant change overall to the movie.
As others have noted, it makes Jabba a bit of a joke. In addition, it is a complete waste of time, as every bit of the dialog was a repeat from the Han/Greedo scene. Luckily, it's trivial to remove, so it doesn't really bother me. With it gone, except for Greedo shooting, the SE of "Star Wars" does seem to be generally improved (although I could also live without the use of the Praxis effect for both the Alderaan and the Death Star).
A few years ago they released dvds with the original *unedited* and the remastered versions, and they originals look very fuzzy and kind of cheesy by comparison.
The originals look so bad because they were telecined for laserdisc, and that analog telecine was then digitized at 720x356 for the DVD. Meanwhile, the "special editions" were telecined direct to digital at high resolution, then reduced to 720x480.
So, the original versions of the movie have an extra generational loss, plus 25% less vertical resolution. It's no wonder they look "fuzzy",
Also, color correction was applied to the special editions, and what's on the DVD has as close to the original film color as can be done on that medium, while the original versions suffer from lossy color conversions.
Part of the scientific method is to give up after a while.
Where, exactly, in "observations, hypotheses, predictions, and experiments" does it say "give up"? Until a phenomena is explained, you aren't following the method if you give up.
There has not once, ever, been a scientifically valid positive result from a single test for ghosts. Further research in the area, after this much overwhelming evidence, is useless.
See, this is where you don't understand "scientific method". The hypothesis in this case comes from the poster's family:
There is supernatural phenomena ocurring in that house.
This was based on observations. What the poster wants to do now is predict and experiment. The iteration of these processes is called "the scientific method".
There may or may not be anything supernatural happening in the house, but without following the steps, no one will ever know exactly what is happening in the house (if anything). In particular, if the observers are not delusional, then something is happening in the house. Whether it is supernatural or not can only be determined by (drumroll, please)...the scientific method.
We need to be a little militant with n00bs and fools to get the message across. Breed a generation of people who will actually RTFM and learn how to ask questions intelligently.
Having just been through reading a 1200-post thread on Cinavia audio watermarking, your post perfectly summarizes that thread.
About half of the 1200 were completely useless, with about 50 useful and informative posts, and only about 10 that had information that would really be part of the development effort. I can understand how a small developer might decide to ignore a forum about their product, simply because the SNR is so low that reading the forum wouldn't leave time for actually writing code.
Slashdot Mirror
If someone botches a line or flubs a song or whatever, you reshoot it. In effect, when making a movie, you can substitute time for talent, making even a relatively bad actor seem respectable through careful editing of multiple takes with good use of cutaways to mask edits.
Since this is exactly how the "pros" do it as well, this certainly will work.
There are many stories about "good" actors who are that way simply because of good editing. As you note, the ones that do more live theater are more likely to actually be truly good actors.
Let me know when the film Song of the South or an English dub of the series Alegrijes y Rebujos comes to Netflix.
And, if those are too obscure, how about an HD version of True Lies?
The master has already been made for the D-Theater release, but no Blu-Ray is available. Also, both the laserdisc and the D-Theater release had DTS sound, but all the DVD releases have only Dolby Digital. I want to purchase this, but movie studios have forced me to "infringe" copyright by copying the D-Theater tape to hard disk, and then building my own Blu-Ray.
I don't download *any* copyrighted material unless I've been given express permission to do so by the copyright holder, either by CC, or in the form of a letter.
You seriously need a paper letter?
So, no downloading of movie trailers, promo songs, etc., even though the website offering it is something like "www.sony.com" (i.e., obviously authorized)?
You'd be surprised how easy it is to respect copyright when you have a subscription to a service like Netflix, and can get what you want on demand.
Except that I can't put a copy of the movie onto a portable media player for viewing when I don't have connectivity. For this, the studio wants you to pay again. I'd rather pay for the DVD or Blu-Ray (usually used or bargain bin), then "infringe" copyright by breaking the copy protection so I can use the copy the way I want. The "use the way I want" has been upheld in court, so it's only the bought-and-paid-for congresscritters who are causing me to "infringe" copyright when I do this.
the number of R-Rated movies being produced is a fraction of what it was back in the "Back to the Future" days.
That's because the PG-13 rating had just been invented when BttF came out.
Since then, many movies that would have gotten an R rating back then get PG-13. In particular, nudity without sex (like bare breasts) and violence without gore will generally get you only a PG-13 even if there is quite a bit of it, but that would likely have landed an R back in the early 80s.
The fact that two movies by a very big name (Spielberg) got a PG instead of an R are what led to the creation of PG-13, and also show one of the flaws in the system. Because the ratings and appeals board are beholden to movies making money to keep things going, a "big name movie" might get some slack (like LotR).
ASCAP has to get money to pay the talent somehow.
+1 Funny
You do realize that ASCAP and related collection agencies are about a billion dollars and 15 years behind on the payments to artists. Their excuse was often "we couldn't find the artist", even for names like Bruce Springsteen and U2.
Fair use is a defense to copyright infringement, not to circumvention.
Apparently you didn't read the paragraph of the law I posted.
That is part of the section that is commonly called "the DMCA", and specifically refers to that section. In addition, if you read the section in detail, it only concerns bypassing protection for the purpose of copyright infringement.
The actual wording of the DMCA is designed to punish people who create devices/software/etc. with the primary purpose of infringing copyright, even if the creator of the devices/software/etc. does not perform the infringement themselves. Basically, without infringement, there is no DMCA violation, and even if there is infringement, only a device that "has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent protection" is a violation. In addition, the "reverse engineering" paragraph may also apply.
Last, it's worth the fight since Sony can get nothing out of this lawsuit but an injunction to stop distributing the "device" (which is meaningless in the Internet world) plus $25,000 in statutory damages (since it's only one act of circumvention), plus millions of dollars of bad PR.
Stupid and pointless?
Yes.
All of the changes are for the most efficient use of vertical space, which is even more critical given that all screens are moving to a 16:9 ratio.
So, use the current option to turn off the display of those elements that you don't use, but let me turn them on if I want to.
That's what this issue is about...not the lack of a status bar, but the fact that it's an option on FF3, while it's a mandate on FF4.
Wrong. I'm quite happy to have the status bar gone/relocated.
But, if they left the status bar in place, or gave the user an option for where the status bar should be, that would make you unhappy?
See, the problem is that Firefox has always been the browser that was easiest for the user to configure for "their way", but more and more it's becoming like IE, where the developers make descisions that remove end user choice.
It appears if you want all the other FF 4 goodness (faster Javascript, etc.), you have to live with some questionable changes to the UI.
Would it have been so hard for the Mozilla developers to just add a config option to pick where the status bar display goes? Pretty much everybody would be happy then.
This is a repeat of the FF 3 "Awesome Bar" disaster, which also could have been averted with a choice for the user in the form of an easy-to-find config option.
You make whoever you present it to sign an NDA, which you get notarized before you ever speak to them.
So, then if the person you talk to likes your idea, he can't speak with anyone else in his company to champion it. That doesn't seem like a good way to sell an idea.
Basically, it's not possible to present an idea to anyone without giving them the chance to "steal" it. Since ideas are cheap and it's all about the execution, anyway, you really shouldn't worry too much.
H.264 is supported by your HDTV.
Most HDTVs do not natively decode H.264 (or even H.263), but instead just display raw video that has been decoded by some other device.
HDTVs with built-in tuners do natively decode MPEG-2, and there are a few that decode MPEG-4 of some flavor, but they are in the minority.
Since AC3 is "significantly better" than MP3, it was used for DVDs.
AC-3 was actually chosen because it supported more than two channels and was easy to port the soundtrack from the theatrical version.
For two-channel audio, MP3 and AC-3 are about the same at the same bitrate.
Similarly, Blurry disks use AAC (MPEG 4 audio) as opposed to either of the above.
Assuming you are snidely referring to Blu-Ray, you're wrong.
Blu-Ray players must support AC-3, DTS, and linear PCM, with the more advanced Dolby Digital and DTS codecs as options. MPEG-4 audio isn't mentioned as even being optional.
I'm never going to buy a BD drive because of the DRM crap
I don't believe that BD-ROM drives have the same kind of DRM hardware as DVD drives.
You can read every file on an AACS-encrypted Blu-Ray movie and copy it to your hard drive with no special software. It's still encrypted, so you can't see the movie without decryption software, but you can copy it. DVD-ROM drives actively prevent the copy of a CSS-encrypted disc.
I have a BD-ROM writer on my PC so that I can read discs and write an offsite backup that is larger than 8GB. I could use hard drives, but a $1/disc, 25GB BD-ROM discs are almost disposable. Add in decryption software, and I can also rip my Blu-Ray movies to my media server.
So while Hotz didn't directly contribute to piracy or even came out against it, the opening up of the console has allowed it.
One thing that might have Sony worried is that the PS3 is technically a software Blu-Ray player, and having this key might make it possible to hack that functionality to allow more widespread copying of movies, too.
That's quite likely sufficient under the DMCA.
Maybe, but the "has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent protection" requirement probably makes this OK. Plus, even if it's a technical violation, he can always fall back on fair use:
Why should a scientist go looking for ghosts?
Because it might turn out that "ghosts" are merely the observable actions of the Higgs boson.
In other words, it doesn't matter what the "ghost" really is...if you use the scientific method, you'll find out what is causing the observed phenomena, and maybe it will be important.
As far as overclocking goes, anyone who spends money on a non-stock cooler isn't saving anything. A stock cooler and going for the next step up CPU is always a better option.
$30 for an aftermarket cooler that keeps my 3.2GHz (overclocked from 2.66GHz) i7-920 less than 60C after a few hours of Prime95 or $200 more for the i7-960 with its 3.2GHz stock clock and cooler tells me you are very wrong.
For the Sandy Bridge processors, it's even easier to overclock...30% overclocks with the stock cooler are common and 50% with sub-$50 aftermarket coolers.
Except that the CPU can't hold anywhere near enough memory for video decoding on it's own, and accessing main memory would largely defeat the purpose. No, I think you are half-way there, but to complete it you need to take hardware video decoding into account as well. Then the graphics processor can take the encrypted stream in, decrypt it, decode it, and output to HDMI... all without unencrypted video ever leaving the graphics hardware.
The Sandy Bridge processors have the GPU in the same package as the CPU, and have hardware decoding for MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 (both H.263 and H.264). I don't know how much of the decoding can be done completely within the confines of the chip with no need for main memory.
You definitely have to use main memory to do things like DirectShow filters, though, so it's really not possible to keep all decrypted content within the chip.
not to mention that if you rip them to your NAS, the industry has now just DOSd your storage system with extra data bits that you can't even see or resolve on the tv and definitely 100% guaranteed that your audio system isn't up to 'linear track 24bit' standards. ie, they force you to take 40-50gb for a movie when its just not reasonable.
Although it's definitely true that the encodes on Blu-Ray are very poor in their usage of the overall bitpool, you can usually do a complete movie-only rip in about 20GB. It's then trivially easy to re-compress the movie using a much lower average bitrate but still retain every bit of the quality, and end up at about 12GB. For the vast improvement in both picture and sound quality, it is definitely worth about double the space of a DVD.
Or, you could reduce the resolution to 720p, drop the lossless audio tracks, and every movie (including things like the director's cut of the LotR movies) will then fit in less than 8GB, with most less than 4GB.
uprez'd dvd on a widescreen is very nearly the same with none of the down-sides of BD
You really haven't watched HD material on a good large HDTV much, have you? The quality jump from DVD to even 720p is enormous. Not to mention that some Blu-Ray releases have cleaned up the film for the transfer (nothing new, just better quality). For me, the most striking has been the movie "Stargate". The Blu-Ray has correct color, no edge enhancement, and makes the DVD look pretty much like VHS.
I've noticed a fair few movies lately in multiple formats - you get the DVD, BD and a digital copy on the disk.
The whole point of the phrase "digital copy" is to convince you that you don't have any fair use rights for the digital versions that are on every Blu-Ray and DVD.
I prefer to use the high resolution source already on the disk when I make a "digital copy" for my own use, because I know that copyright law says I am allowed to do this, as long as I don't distribute the copies I make to other people.
Yes, that scene is a significant change from the original version of that scene (since it was completely new), but it doesn't represent a significant change overall to the movie.
As others have noted, it makes Jabba a bit of a joke. In addition, it is a complete waste of time, as every bit of the dialog was a repeat from the Han/Greedo scene. Luckily, it's trivial to remove, so it doesn't really bother me. With it gone, except for Greedo shooting, the SE of "Star Wars" does seem to be generally improved (although I could also live without the use of the Praxis effect for both the Alderaan and the Death Star).
A few years ago they released dvds with the original *unedited* and the remastered versions, and they originals look very fuzzy and kind of cheesy by comparison.
The originals look so bad because they were telecined for laserdisc, and that analog telecine was then digitized at 720x356 for the DVD. Meanwhile, the "special editions" were telecined direct to digital at high resolution, then reduced to 720x480.
So, the original versions of the movie have an extra generational loss, plus 25% less vertical resolution. It's no wonder they look "fuzzy",
Also, color correction was applied to the special editions, and what's on the DVD has as close to the original film color as can be done on that medium, while the original versions suffer from lossy color conversions.
Part of the scientific method is to give up after a while.
Where, exactly, in "observations, hypotheses, predictions, and experiments" does it say "give up"? Until a phenomena is explained, you aren't following the method if you give up.
There has not once, ever, been a scientifically valid positive result from a single test for ghosts. Further research in the area, after this much overwhelming evidence, is useless.
See, this is where you don't understand "scientific method". The hypothesis in this case comes from the poster's family:
This was based on observations. What the poster wants to do now is predict and experiment. The iteration of these processes is called "the scientific method".
There may or may not be anything supernatural happening in the house, but without following the steps, no one will ever know exactly what is happening in the house (if anything). In particular, if the observers are not delusional, then something is happening in the house. Whether it is supernatural or not can only be determined by (drumroll, please)...the scientific method.
We need to be a little militant with n00bs and fools to get the message across. Breed a generation of people who will actually RTFM and learn how to ask questions intelligently.
Having just been through reading a 1200-post thread on Cinavia audio watermarking, your post perfectly summarizes that thread.
About half of the 1200 were completely useless, with about 50 useful and informative posts, and only about 10 that had information that would really be part of the development effort. I can understand how a small developer might decide to ignore a forum about their product, simply because the SNR is so low that reading the forum wouldn't leave time for actually writing code.