This is weird. I distinctly remember that when the very first DVD players were introduced to the market, the studios advertised this exact feature - the ability to see the same movie "as intended for grown-ups", then for example "as intended for 16-years-old" and the for a small child. The whole page in the Sony DVD brochure was dedicated to nice colorful schematics of scenes/parts of soundtrack being edited out "on the fly" at different points of the movie based on the selected "maturity level"... I thought this sounded rather interesting (from the technical standpoint) and also had a potential to be a lot of fun, and I was sad that none of the released DVDs actually supported this.
Yes, you are right! Most times the dubbing versions are "crippled" and/or watermarked etc., sorry I am not allowed to talk about details... But I thought that from the beginning we are talking about "unfinished version of LOTR2". I very much doubt that "finished version" currently exists anywhere in the world, including Peter Jackson's closet. Finished version of "Attack of the Clones" was done about 2 weeks before the premiere, which is 2 weeks AFTER the dubbing had to be finished...
"How about sending just the script instead of the actual movie to translators, for a start . . . idiots . .."
First of all, the __SCRIPT___ would be completely useless for any sort of translation because the dialogue in the resulting movie almost NEVER corresponds with the script. Movie translators are getting special "DIALOGUE LISTS" that are made AFTER the movie is completed (which is sometimes too late).
When you are translating for the dubbing, the Dialogue List is needed but not sufficient for doing the translation, because you have to see which actor's mouth is visible in which shot and consequently decide how much the dialogue must phonetically match the original dialogue. Not to mention that you have to get the timing right, i.e. the translation must not be shorter or longer than the original. I'm not talking about number of characters but about the time it takes to say the dialogue which you cannot know from the Dialogue list.
I'm just saying that if the movie will be dubbed, it must be sent to the respective country at least 2 months in advance, but usually it's more. I cannot answer your question specifically because a) I don't know if it will be dubbed or subtitled in China (subtitling takes much less time) and b) I don't know for sure what is LOTR2 release date for China.
The kind of security you are talking about is just not possible. Consider that if there are dubbed versions to be made (as i the case with LOTR2), several dozen countries all over the world have to receive the movie several months in advance. Of course, it's probably not with finished special effects and music but I presume this is the case with LOTR2 - I think it's not yet finished. The videotape is sitting in the dubbing studio where anyone from dozen employees can copy it. Multiply this by the number of countries and you have hundreds of people, most of which are movie fans and many of which have internet access.
I translated Episodes I and II for local release and I had them on tape several months before the U.S. release. Imagine the pressure when you cannot tell anyone.:)
Computer games with social commentary are hardly new. I remember U.K. games for ZX Spectrum computer from the 80s. One of them, MONTY MOLE was about a miner mole and contained unflattering lyrics about Mrs. Thatcher and the British miners' strike. I also remember beat-em-up starring current (at the time) political figures (Mrs. Thatcher, Gorbachev, Pope, Ghaddafi...) and a game called FLUNKY where you played the butler for the British royal family whose members were portrayed as a very unflattering caricatures. There were probably much more, after all it was 20 years ago...
By the way, all of these were professional, commercially sold games!
Re:May take a little wile longer than May next yea
on
Sen To, X-Men 2
·
· Score: 1
In Czech Republic, it's currently scheduled for March 2003 release. And release dates over here are usually quite behind the rest of Europe.
I bought "Spirited Away" a few weeks ago in Tokyo on DVD (it has English subtitles!). It's absolutely splendid, easily one of my all-time TOP 10.
P.P.S: Article headline mentions "Sen To", which means "Sen and". They should at least use "Sen To Chihiro"...
In February, Czech underground group TRI SESTRY ("Three Sisters") has published on its website (http://www.trisestry.cz) detailed instructions on how to bypass this CD protection. Not only the "black marker" method but also several others. This was because Sony used CD protection on Tri Sestry's album even after Tri Sestry specifically demanded that their CD is NOT copy-protected. The CD sleeve actually contains the text: "This CD is copy protected against our wishes. Please visit our website to find out how to bypass this protection."
I translated the relevant paragraphs from their website and submitted it to Slashdot along with detailed explanation on FEBRUARY, three months ago. Guess what? It was rejected...
I was told by native English speaker that my name should be phonetically written as "Fran-tjee-shek Foo-kah" (the pronounciation of FUKA is the same as in Japanese (where FUKA is rather common name), but I was not, am not and will not be Japanese). Anyhow, as long as you don't pronounce it "Fucka", anything is OK.:)
I used to work for games magazine and it was quite usual for full review to be done based on different platform (e.g. N64 review based on playing PC version of the game), reviewing from pirated (Warez) CDs, reviewers being told in advance how many stars they should give to the game and reviewers going abroad to visit the developers, playing the unfinished game there for 2-3 hours, then coming back and writing their "full review" based on that. As far as I remember, this didn't seem weird to anyone involved...
Gamespot writes that the first real-time strategy ever was Herzog Zwei for Sega Genesis (1989), and first computer RTS was Dune 2 (1992). This is both wrong. There was a game called STONKERS for Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer (called Timex Sinclair in the U.S.) by Imagine Software, which was released in 1983 (!!!). It clearly falls under the definition of "Real-time strategy" (it features different units, map with various terrain, reinforcements, even zoomable map)! It was less than 40 KB long. You can play Stonkers online using Java Spectrum emulator here.
Next time anyone asks you for "Word document" or "DOC file", just write an Ascii text document, change its extension to ".DOC" and send it to him. When Windows user opens it, it will be automatically opened in Word without any problems and vast majority of Windows users will be perfectly happy, not even noticing that the font is somehow different from what they are used to... And you are doing exactly what they wanted. It's definitely "DOC file" and because the Word can handle it, it's also a "Word file".
If you are running Windows the solution is quite elegant. Go to http://www.flaaten.dk/prox/ and download PROXOMITRON. It's totally configurable proxy which already contains filters for many existing ad systems. If it doesn't contain the filter for this kind of ads, you can definitely create it yourself if you are familiar with regular expressions. Just create the filter that identifies the ad page and replaces it with simple page that immediately loads the article page (whose URL will be extracted from the ad page). It's really one of the simplest things that you can do with Proxomitron...
Actually, a brilliant idea!
on
The New Zelda
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· Score: 1
I think this new direction in Zelda franchise is very refreshing and actually very clever. (My only complain is that Link looks very much like some retard from "Parappa the Rappa" game but maybe that'll change.) If you are interested in videogames, you must know that we already have real-time rendering of very realistic humans on PC and PS2 ("Onimusha: Warlords" cutscenes, some parts of "Shadow of Destiny" [aka "Shadow of Memories"]). But it's motion-capture graphics without much interaction. I still haven't seen any game in which the human character is fully interactive and at the same time realistically animated. Stringing two or three realistic movements into one sequence doesnt necessarily create realistic animation and anyway, it's not something that I'd call "fully interactive" (this problem can be even traced back to the original "Prince of Persia").
I think the next "big thing" in videogames" will be someone coming up with algorithms to calculate realistic human movement in real-time. Maybe I'm wrong, I didn't see all the games in existence (especially on PC), but I definitely didn't see anything like this on PS2 or N64 (where I saw 95% of existing games). Until that time, the best idea is to use cartoons, whose movements can be calculated in real-time much more easily. If you don't want to wait for Zelda on GameCube and want to seesimilar technique in action, check out some cartoon games from RARE on N64: "Banjo Kazooie" I and II or "Donkey Kong 64". The movement is perfectly fluid and realistic (in the "cartoon" sense) and yet the characters are fully interactive and you really have the feeling that you fully control them.
Sorry about my English, I am not a native English speaker but I'm a little disturbed by worsening quality of grammar of Slashdot posts in the last months. Peaking != peeking, then != than, etc, etc...
The article IS true and such CDs are being sold in Czech Republic for at least 3 months. Here is one of them available in online shop. (It says the release date is 2000 but I think that's a mistake.) Dan Barta is very high profile singer/musician and the album sells very well (it's still at #11 in the charts). Note that it's in fact released by Sony Music. The CD cannot be played in any PC CD-ROM and - in fact - is not recognized as CD at all. The players/rippers act as if there was nothing in the CD drive. It cannot even be read with low level sector-read, the program simply says "there is no CD in drive". Believe me, I tried very hard with various ripping software... What is very interesting is that if you look at the CD, there are visible gaps about 1mm wide between the tracks, as on LP. The CD has a sticker with crossed-out cartoon computer looking sad and smoking, with the words "NELZE PREHRAT V PC" ("CANNOT BE PLAYED IN PC").
Go see "Series 7" (www.series7movie.com), recently released in U.S. (I think) in selected cinemas. It's a mock "documentary" about reality gameshow called "Contender", whose contestants are chosen at random from U.S. population and they have to kill the other contestants. The last one alive wins. All of them are taped by camera crew 24/7. The movie is presented as "best of" of this gameshow, with advertisement, recaps and "coming after the break" summaries which seem to be pretty realistic. Rather interesting movie, very surreal and probably not very funny when you think about it. It was screened for the press in my country (Czech Republic) and most of the reviewers thought it was very funny because they never heard about "Big Brother" or "Survivor"...
Similar audio CD protection system was already tested over here in Czech Republic several months ago and I must warn you that it's not a simple matter to crack it. The main problem is that your CD-ROM does not recognize it as CD (data nor audio) at all. The effect is the same as if your CD ROM tray contained empty (unburned) CD. So you cannot even play the CD in your computer, much less grab it. Special CD copying software (CdrWin) identified that there's SOMETHING on the CD, but failed miserably when trying to copy anything from it (not even raw sectors), presenting the error "CD Drive returned invalid status code" or something like that. In my standard CD player the CD worked without any problems. What's most interesting, if you look at the CD itself, there are visible gaps between the tracks (like on vinyl LPs)!
What are you talking about? Only about 5% of movies released over here are dubbed, the rest is subtitled! I'm talking about theatrical releases, of course, everything is dubbed when it's released on video...
Also, nothing like the "technique" you are describing was never used. It's the other way around. After the Czech dialogue is recorded, you can then slightly manipulate (stretch/compress) this dialogue digitally to better fit the original mouth movement. But you definitely cannot insert/remove frames from the movie!
P.S: I finished the Czech subtitles for Pearl Harbor today and my head hurts.....
By the way, I saw about 15 minutes of FINISHED Final Fantasy footage and the voice synchronization was not perfect. Certainly better than with Kung Fu movies but not an example of "Great dubbing job". Whis is shame, because AFAIK the mouths were animated after the dialogue was recorded.
I'm somehow perplexed by the article. Why should the mouths/faces be reanimated? I make my living translating movies from English for Czech release for almost 10 years now (I saw Episode 1 several months before the U.S. release, worship me!), for both dubbing and subtitling, and the "art of dubbing" always was about coming up with the translation that captures the essence of the original dialogue AND matches the original character's lip movements IF the lips are distinguishable in the current shot. You'd be surprised by percentage of average movie in which this is non-issue because the actor's mouth is not visible or is not prominently displayed. Movies are being dubbed for several decades and no one ever thought about re-animating the actors' lips. If, for you, "typical example of dubbing" equals "Kung Fu movies", that's your problem.
Copy-protected audio CD was already released over here (Czech Republic) several weeks ago. (It was a new album by Dan Barta, local artist.) Not that I listen to Dan Barta but I was intrigued when my friend told me that it cannot be ripped/copied. What I found out:
First of all: Visible gaps could be seen on the CD! (probably gaps between tracks)
The album had sticker saying "NOT COMPATIBLE WITH PCs" and this seems to be true. The CD is not recognized as audio CD at all and cannot be played in PC.
Then I tried analyzing/grabbing the CD data using various applications such as CloneCD, CDRWin, Blind Read, NTI CD-Maker etc with various settings. All of this without any success. Not only did I get various contradictory and theoretically impossible error messages but several of the programs crashed spectacularly and/or produced scary noises through the CDROM drive! The best success I achieved was displaying some sort of Table of Contents which contained very strange numbers (negative data lengths, 99 sessions on the disk etc...)
Then I tried all of this with 3 different drives (AOpen CDRW, AOpen DVD ROM and Creative DVD ROM) and the results varied wildly. The best success I has was capturing 650 MB file which contained 2 seconds of the first track and then zeroes.
I tried playing the CD in two different CD players (Aiwa and Sony) and it worked without any problems. Track numbers and lenghts were ok, everything looked fine.
So, it seems that these CDs really cannot be ripped/copied using standard CD ROMs. Of course: 1) You can send the music from the CD player with digital output to PC soundcard with digital input and create perfect "deprotected" CD.
2) If this copyprotection gains any notoriety, CD drive makers will immediately update their firmware to allow "dumbing down" the drive and "really RAW" grabbing of the audio data.
Well, you are pissed off because of this one movie. But remember that outside U.S.A. this is actually reversed and we can enjoy non-local movies (i.e. 95% of released movies) only if someone translates them well! Which is not always the case (look here). How pissed off you would be if you couldn't get the jokes in Aliens or Star Wars?
Slashdot Mirror
This is weird. I distinctly remember that when the very first DVD players were introduced to the market, the studios advertised this exact feature - the ability to see the same movie "as intended for grown-ups", then for example "as intended for 16-years-old" and the for a small child. The whole page in the Sony DVD brochure was dedicated to nice colorful schematics of scenes/parts of soundtrack being edited out "on the fly" at different points of the movie based on the selected "maturity level"... I thought this sounded rather interesting (from the technical standpoint) and also had a potential to be a lot of fun, and I was sad that none of the released DVDs actually supported this.
Yes, you are right! Most times the dubbing versions are "crippled" and/or watermarked etc., sorry I am not allowed to talk about details... But I thought that from the beginning we are talking about "unfinished version of LOTR2". I very much doubt that "finished version" currently exists anywhere in the world, including Peter Jackson's closet. Finished version of "Attack of the Clones" was done about 2 weeks before the premiere, which is 2 weeks AFTER the dubbing had to be finished...
First of all, the __SCRIPT___ would be completely useless for any sort of translation because the dialogue in the resulting movie almost NEVER corresponds with the script. Movie translators are getting special "DIALOGUE LISTS" that are made AFTER the movie is completed (which is sometimes too late).
When you are translating for the dubbing, the Dialogue List is needed but not sufficient for doing the translation, because you have to see which actor's mouth is visible in which shot and consequently decide how much the dialogue must phonetically match the original dialogue. Not to mention that you have to get the timing right, i.e. the translation must not be shorter or longer than the original. I'm not talking about number of characters but about the time it takes to say the dialogue which you cannot know from the Dialogue list.
Warned who about what??? I am not working on LOTR2.
I'm just saying that if the movie will be dubbed, it must be sent to the respective country at least 2 months in advance, but usually it's more. I cannot answer your question specifically because a) I don't know if it will be dubbed or subtitled in China (subtitling takes much less time) and b) I don't know for sure what is LOTR2 release date for China.
I translated Episodes I and II for local release and I had them on tape several months before the U.S. release. Imagine the pressure when you cannot tell anyone. :)
By the way, all of these were professional, commercially sold games!
I bought "Spirited Away" a few weeks ago in Tokyo on DVD (it has English subtitles!). It's absolutely splendid, easily one of my all-time TOP 10.
P.P.S: Article headline mentions "Sen To", which means "Sen and". They should at least use "Sen To Chihiro"...
I translated the relevant paragraphs from their website and submitted it to Slashdot along with detailed explanation on FEBRUARY, three months ago. Guess what? It was rejected...
I was told by native English speaker that my name should be phonetically written as "Fran-tjee-shek Foo-kah" (the pronounciation of FUKA is the same as in Japanese (where FUKA is rather common name), but I was not, am not and will not be Japanese). Anyhow, as long as you don't pronounce it "Fucka", anything is OK. :)
I used to work for games magazine and it was quite usual for full review to be done based on different platform (e.g. N64 review based on playing PC version of the game), reviewing from pirated (Warez) CDs, reviewers being told in advance how many stars they should give to the game and reviewers going abroad to visit the developers, playing the unfinished game there for 2-3 hours, then coming back and writing their "full review" based on that. As far as I remember, this didn't seem weird to anyone involved...
Gamespot writes that the first real-time strategy ever was Herzog Zwei for Sega Genesis (1989), and first computer RTS was Dune 2 (1992). This is both wrong. There was a game called STONKERS for Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer (called Timex Sinclair in the U.S.) by Imagine Software, which was released in 1983 (!!!). It clearly falls under the definition of "Real-time strategy" (it features different units, map with various terrain, reinforcements, even zoomable map)! It was less than 40 KB long. You can play Stonkers online using Java Spectrum emulator here.
Next time anyone asks you for "Word document" or "DOC file", just write an Ascii text document, change its extension to ".DOC" and send it to him. When Windows user opens it, it will be automatically opened in Word without any problems and vast majority of Windows users will be perfectly happy, not even noticing that the font is somehow different from what they are used to... And you are doing exactly what they wanted. It's definitely "DOC file" and because the Word can handle it, it's also a "Word file".
If you are running Windows the solution is quite elegant. Go to http://www.flaaten.dk/prox/ and download PROXOMITRON. It's totally configurable proxy which already contains filters for many existing ad systems. If it doesn't contain the filter for this kind of ads, you can definitely create it yourself if you are familiar with regular expressions. Just create the filter that identifies the ad page and replaces it with simple page that immediately loads the article page (whose URL will be extracted from the ad page). It's really one of the simplest things that you can do with Proxomitron...
I think the next "big thing" in videogames" will be someone coming up with algorithms to calculate realistic human movement in real-time. Maybe I'm wrong, I didn't see all the games in existence (especially on PC), but I definitely didn't see anything like this on PS2 or N64 (where I saw 95% of existing games). Until that time, the best idea is to use cartoons, whose movements can be calculated in real-time much more easily. If you don't want to wait for Zelda on GameCube and want to seesimilar technique in action, check out some cartoon games from RARE on N64: "Banjo Kazooie" I and II or "Donkey Kong 64". The movement is perfectly fluid and realistic (in the "cartoon" sense) and yet the characters are fully interactive and you really have the feeling that you fully control them.
Sorry about my English, I am not a native English speaker but I'm a little disturbed by worsening quality of grammar of Slashdot posts in the last months. Peaking != peeking, then != than, etc, etc...
The article IS true and such CDs are being sold in Czech Republic for at least 3 months. Here is one of them available in online shop. (It says the release date is 2000 but I think that's a mistake.) Dan Barta is very high profile singer/musician and the album sells very well (it's still at #11 in the charts). Note that it's in fact released by Sony Music. The CD cannot be played in any PC CD-ROM and - in fact - is not recognized as CD at all. The players/rippers act as if there was nothing in the CD drive. It cannot even be read with low level sector-read, the program simply says "there is no CD in drive". Believe me, I tried very hard with various ripping software... What is very interesting is that if you look at the CD, there are visible gaps about 1mm wide between the tracks, as on LP. The CD has a sticker with crossed-out cartoon computer looking sad and smoking, with the words "NELZE PREHRAT V PC" ("CANNOT BE PLAYED IN PC").
Go see "Series 7" (www.series7movie.com), recently released in U.S. (I think) in selected cinemas. It's a mock "documentary" about reality gameshow called "Contender", whose contestants are chosen at random from U.S. population and they have to kill the other contestants. The last one alive wins. All of them are taped by camera crew 24/7. The movie is presented as "best of" of this gameshow, with advertisement, recaps and "coming after the break" summaries which seem to be pretty realistic. Rather interesting movie, very surreal and probably not very funny when you think about it. It was screened for the press in my country (Czech Republic) and most of the reviewers thought it was very funny because they never heard about "Big Brother" or "Survivor"...
Similar audio CD protection system was already tested over here in Czech Republic several months ago and I must warn you that it's not a simple matter to crack it. The main problem is that your CD-ROM does not recognize it as CD (data nor audio) at all. The effect is the same as if your CD ROM tray contained empty (unburned) CD. So you cannot even play the CD in your computer, much less grab it. Special CD copying software (CdrWin) identified that there's SOMETHING on the CD, but failed miserably when trying to copy anything from it (not even raw sectors), presenting the error "CD Drive returned invalid status code" or something like that. In my standard CD player the CD worked without any problems. What's most interesting, if you look at the CD itself, there are visible gaps between the tracks (like on vinyl LPs)!
Also, nothing like the "technique" you are describing was never used. It's the other way around. After the Czech dialogue is recorded, you can then slightly manipulate (stretch/compress) this dialogue digitally to better fit the original mouth movement. But you definitely cannot insert/remove frames from the movie!
P.S: I finished the Czech subtitles for Pearl Harbor today and my head hurts.....
By the way, I saw about 15 minutes of FINISHED Final Fantasy footage and the voice synchronization was not perfect. Certainly better than with Kung Fu movies but not an example of "Great dubbing job". Whis is shame, because AFAIK the mouths were animated after the dialogue was recorded.
I'm somehow perplexed by the article. Why should the mouths/faces be reanimated? I make my living translating movies from English for Czech release for almost 10 years now (I saw Episode 1 several months before the U.S. release, worship me!), for both dubbing and subtitling, and the "art of dubbing" always was about coming up with the translation that captures the essence of the original dialogue AND matches the original character's lip movements IF the lips are distinguishable in the current shot. You'd be surprised by percentage of average movie in which this is non-issue because the actor's mouth is not visible or is not prominently displayed. Movies are being dubbed for several decades and no one ever thought about re-animating the actors' lips. If, for you, "typical example of dubbing" equals "Kung Fu movies", that's your problem.
That's not exactly true. Updated ripping software won't help you, you need updated firmware specifically for your CD ROM.
First of all: Visible gaps could be seen on the CD! (probably gaps between tracks)
The album had sticker saying "NOT COMPATIBLE WITH PCs" and this seems to be true. The CD is not recognized as audio CD at all and cannot be played in PC.
Then I tried analyzing/grabbing the CD data using various applications such as CloneCD, CDRWin, Blind Read, NTI CD-Maker etc with various settings. All of this without any success. Not only did I get various contradictory and theoretically impossible error messages but several of the programs crashed spectacularly and/or produced scary noises through the CDROM drive! The best success I achieved was displaying some sort of Table of Contents which contained very strange numbers (negative data lengths, 99 sessions on the disk etc...)
Then I tried all of this with 3 different drives (AOpen CDRW, AOpen DVD ROM and Creative DVD ROM) and the results varied wildly. The best success I has was capturing 650 MB file which contained 2 seconds of the first track and then zeroes.
I tried playing the CD in two different CD players (Aiwa and Sony) and it worked without any problems. Track numbers and lenghts were ok, everything looked fine.
So, it seems that these CDs really cannot be ripped/copied using standard CD ROMs. Of course:
1) You can send the music from the CD player with digital output to PC soundcard with digital input and create perfect "deprotected" CD.
2) If this copyprotection gains any notoriety, CD drive makers will immediately update their firmware to allow "dumbing down" the drive and "really RAW" grabbing of the audio data.
Well, you are pissed off because of this one movie. But remember that outside U.S.A. this is actually reversed and we can enjoy non-local movies (i.e. 95% of released movies) only if someone translates them well! Which is not always the case (look here). How pissed off you would be if you couldn't get the jokes in Aliens or Star Wars?