Man, it's so easy to get around the "DRM bullshit" it's laughable. Get off your high horse. This is a decent service. Not perfect, but better than anything anyone else has yet offered.
Yeah, it's gonna be a little while before the indie stuff starts popping up, but it will. I saw no Les Claypool or Primus. No Critters Buggin, Kultur Shock, Maktub, Voivod, King Crimson, Trey Gunn, Robert Fripp or any of the stuff that I'm really into, but it will come eventually... and luckily i already own this stuff!
The indie labels are definitely going to want a piece of this action and they will get it. I can't wait to see some of my Seattle musician buddies listed in my copy of iTunes!
This will be coming to the Wintel world by year's end. You can burn your stuff to as many CD's as you'd like... just change your playlist every ten burns.
Burn 'em to CD re-rip as whatever freaking format you'd like... hell, run it off to tape if you want! Copy all of your music over to a data DVD, back it up to DAT or DLT. You have a ton of options with all of this. You aren't roped into the Apple proprietary system.
This will all be coming to Windows soon enough. Be patient. We Mac users have to be patient all the time, so now it's your turn to wait!
p.s. Several readers have posted that they have downloaded a song a second time and have not been charged.
Aw man. Not this again. Come on. This isn't a matter of Apple zealotry.
This is very very reasonable DRM. You can burn as many CD's as you want with the material. People are reporting that if you download a song a second time you don't get charged for it. Once you burn your songs to a CD, you can rip 'em to MP3 and use 'em however you want. The only HUGE limitation is that iTunes will only let you burn a certain playlist to CD 10 times before requesting you to change the playlist. Is this really all that restrictive?
This is online music sales done intelligently and intuitively. 30 second previews. $9.99 albums. It's a bargain compared to what I normally pay for CD's and now I don't have to get the crap I don't want. I can get the one good track off the latest Chili Peppers album and not pay for all their new ballady stuff I hate. I love the Chili Peppers and want to support them, btu I don't want the stuff of theirs that I can't stand. This is a great solution! I could buy the ONE DECENT AUDIOSLAVE song and forget the rest of that crap album.
This is a reasonable service that was set up intelligently for consumers, the artists and the labels. It will only get better when it's available for Windows as well. Once that massive demographic starts using the service, the labels will be itching to get more music on the service. Then we all win.
Stop your whining and just get back to your music theft. No matter what system is put in place,k as long as it costs money, some people are just never going to be satisfied.
Wah wah wah. Well, at least you have a physical backup already made. You'd probably be pretty pissed when your hard drive crashed and you hadn't made a backup. It's quite sensible actually.
Because some of us actually want to reward the artists for their hard work. How would you feel if your employer just stopped paying you? Would you feel appreciated and want to continue with your work? Are you that much of a samaritan?
On the other hand, the un-heralded feature of iTunes 4 is that it allows you (sometimes) to share over a network, if millions of Windows users started doing this, we could get a pretty good P2P file-trading network going.
Actually, it just lets you view the playlists and play them. I'm almost certain you can't swap the files.
I just did a search for Slayer and only got their most recent album. I mayactually purchase it from this service, but I really wanted to Seasons in the Abyss and South of Heaven listed. Guess I'd better wait and see.
The Sony vs. Canon debate reminds me a lot og the Kodak vs Fuji debate among photographers. Personally, I prefer the image quality of the PD150, but the ability to use 35mm motion picture lenses with the XL1s gives it a definite advantage. I worked on a short that shot on an XL1s with 35mm Zeiss prime lenses and a flicker adapter and the image looked just awesome. Definitely not video, but also definitely not film. It was somewhere in between.
In a straight shootout with stock parts though, i prefer the image quality of the PD150. Too bad you can't put good lenses on the thing though. Try doing a rack focus and you'll want to pull your head off.
Re:Great Leap forward but still falsl short
on
First HDTV Camcorder
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· Score: 1
Being a recent film school graduate...
Personally, I'd rather shoot Super16 at 16:9, do an HD telecine with a bumpdown to MiniDV for offline editing in Final Cut Pro, generate an EDL, bring back to the lab for an online edit, output to 35mm (if I have the funds) or encode to MPEG-2 for DVD output.
And just where are you getting this insanely inexpensive telecine rate. At the post houses here in Seattle, you're looking at $200/hr for telecine on one of their older machines.
For the scope and budgets of my projects now, there's no way I could afford 35mm for capture. Output to 35 is a different story, but paying for the color timing is just so outrageous.That's why we shoot Super16. All told, getting it through telecine is about 25% the cost of capturing on 35mm.
640x480 at 30fps is crap... pure and simple. That's not even big enough to fill an NTSC television. MiniDV with Firewire out is the way to go with consumer level video camcorders. The next step up is obviously capturing straight to disk, but no camera assistant wants to lug around that hard drive just so you can have uncompressed footage to play with. Check out the film russian Ark. One take! Shot on HD straight to disk. 90 minutes of carrying a multi terrabyte hard drive around must be torture!
Transfering from tape has advantages if you're an editor. It forces you to watch the film and make very decisive choices of what footage to capture and use. It forces a level of economy into the project. Just shooting on digital is already creating a new generation of lazy videographers and directors who just shoot and shoot and shoot because they can. Most videographers coming out today couldn't light their way out of a paper bag and frequently forego lighting altogether because you can get an exposure in low light on video.
Basically, anyone who's shooting video or plans to should go take a course in basic three point lighting for film.
Re:Film is not dead/"resolution" is not everything
on
First HDTV Camcorder
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· Score: 1
This looks interesting, but until CCD's can reproduce the same exposure latitude as film without dropping shadow to complete black and blowing out highlights, film will still be king. It still has about 4-6 stops of exposure lattitude to go.
Also, digital still just looks too sharp. The digital projection of Attack of the Clones looked pretty good, but the actual film projection looked even better. You could see further into the shadows and the highlights didn't blow out as much. If you watch the DVD which is taken directly from the digital source, you'll see just how sharp and harsh lines are. Much harsher than in real life.
That said, it's good to see digital video advancing at the rate it is. the prices are dropping and postproduction costs are finally starting to drop making it more and more affordable to shoot HD 24p and release on film. In fact, I'm going through this right now with a feature I'm working on. We're actually shooting on the Panasonic DVX1000 at 24p (MiniDV), hopefully doing an HD uprez and color correction and then outputting it to film.... if we get into any festivals. If not, we'll simply do the uprez and color correction and manufacture DVD's to distribute.
Essentially, for about $15k you can be a pretty damn complete psot house now!
Just because you record in HD doesn't necessarily mean you're going to output back to it. The image quality on these HD cameras is going to be noticeably higher than the Canon XL1s and the Sony PD150. Once you deinterlace the image after editing it, it's going to look amazing even in 720i.
Run your footage through Magic Bullet and you'll be amazed at the image quality. When the 3CCD puppies hit the market at the same price point as the XL1s and the PD150, MiniDV and DVCam will be the format for people to whom image quality isn't necessarily as important as just capturing the moment. The irony is that you'll be capturing HD footage on MiniDV and DVCam tapes.
I totally thought that Quartz Extreme required a 32MB card and was about to put up a scating post, but decided to research my scathing post a bit first... glad I did!
Whoa! You seem to have had a very serious disconnect! My mom, an experienced surfer of the net, Excel and email user has been using OS 9.x (and previous) for over 15 years. She is not a power user in any sense of the word. Her computer worldview is very firmly entrenched in the Classic Mac OS.
Other than having to teach her cmd+shift+n to make a new folder, she was up and running and loving OS X in about half an hour. She took to the Dock and Column View folder listings like flies to honey. She loves it and she's a bit of a luddite.
Hell, even she knows that right clicking or control clicking activates contextual menus!
Did you have your daily caffeine fix before confronting OS X for the first time?
It took me a little while to get used to the new eccentricities of OS X, but now I have hard time working in OS 9. OS X has actually allowed me to be more productive! I can't imagine going back now.
I'd ignore you as well if you reported it as a bug. "click to focus" has been the standard on the mac for almost 20 years. I'm a very experienced computer user and "focus follows mouse" drives me absolutely batty. That's just my preference and the preference of the vast majority of computer users.
That said... maybe if you put it in as a feature request that could be activated as a system preference... well then you might just get somewhere. If you're not snide about these things, you just might find that they'll take you a bit more seriously.
And yes, i realize this was probably intended to be a humorous post, but even as a joke, there are probably people who seriously take such stupidly non-diplomatic approaches to dealing with Apple or any other software developer.
I really am getting sick of people popularizing "specialized freedoms". The Bill of Rights is completely under attack. this is no time to start classifying freedoms. Digital, sexual, dietary, etc. Freedoms are freedoms and they are guaranteed to us by the Constitution. From now on, if a new DMCA law violates an ammendment let's call a spade a spade and not start breaking down these freedoms into subgroups like "digital or sexual". Just take a stand for freedom or the Republicans will continue laughing at the "left" who want to ensure that these freedoms continue to exist.
http://www.thestranger.com/current/city5.html
An article by Sherman Alexie in the The Stranger... a seattle weekly alternative rag. It discusses just this sort of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who willingly purchases Celine Dion, April Wine, Shania Twain or Bryan Adams should be put on a "watched" list.
Man, it's so easy to get around the "DRM bullshit" it's laughable. Get off your high horse. This is a decent service. Not perfect, but better than anything anyone else has yet offered.
Yeah, it's gonna be a little while before the indie stuff starts popping up, but it will. I saw no Les Claypool or Primus. No Critters Buggin, Kultur Shock, Maktub, Voivod, King Crimson, Trey Gunn, Robert Fripp or any of the stuff that I'm really into, but it will come eventually... and luckily i already own this stuff!
The indie labels are definitely going to want a piece of this action and they will get it. I can't wait to see some of my Seattle musician buddies listed in my copy of iTunes!
nope nope nope nope nope
This will be coming to the Wintel world by year's end. You can burn your stuff to as many CD's as you'd like... just change your playlist every ten burns.
Burn 'em to CD re-rip as whatever freaking format you'd like... hell, run it off to tape if you want! Copy all of your music over to a data DVD, back it up to DAT or DLT. You have a ton of options with all of this. You aren't roped into the Apple proprietary system.
This will all be coming to Windows soon enough. Be patient. We Mac users have to be patient all the time, so now it's your turn to wait!
p.s. Several readers have posted that they have downloaded a song a second time and have not been charged.
Aw man. Not this again. Come on. This isn't a matter of Apple zealotry.
This is very very reasonable DRM. You can burn as many CD's as you want with the material. People are reporting that if you download a song a second time you don't get charged for it. Once you burn your songs to a CD, you can rip 'em to MP3 and use 'em however you want. The only HUGE limitation is that iTunes will only let you burn a certain playlist to CD 10 times before requesting you to change the playlist. Is this really all that restrictive?
This is online music sales done intelligently and intuitively. 30 second previews. $9.99 albums. It's a bargain compared to what I normally pay for CD's and now I don't have to get the crap I don't want. I can get the one good track off the latest Chili Peppers album and not pay for all their new ballady stuff I hate. I love the Chili Peppers and want to support them, btu I don't want the stuff of theirs that I can't stand. This is a great solution! I could buy the ONE DECENT AUDIOSLAVE song and forget the rest of that crap album.
This is a reasonable service that was set up intelligently for consumers, the artists and the labels. It will only get better when it's available for Windows as well. Once that massive demographic starts using the service, the labels will be itching to get more music on the service. Then we all win.
Stop your whining and just get back to your music theft. No matter what system is put in place,k as long as it costs money, some people are just never going to be satisfied.
Wah wah wah. Well, at least you have a physical backup already made. You'd probably be pretty pissed when your hard drive crashed and you hadn't made a backup. It's quite sensible actually.
Because some of us actually want to reward the artists for their hard work. How would you feel if your employer just stopped paying you? Would you feel appreciated and want to continue with your work? Are you that much of a samaritan?
I didn't think so.
Or, you burn a CD of the music you purchase... the disc is a normal CD and you rip the music to MP3. Pretty simple actually.
Stop using a computer while you're at it, Abe Simpson!
Dude, it's free on a Mac. Why would they make Windows users pay for it? That would be the stupidest thing that they could possibly do.
On the other hand, the un-heralded feature of iTunes 4 is that it allows you (sometimes) to share over a network, if millions of Windows users started doing this, we could get a pretty good P2P file-trading network going.
Actually, it just lets you view the playlists and play them. I'm almost certain you can't swap the files.
Well, since the playlists are actually just XML files, I wouldn't be surprised if someone hacks this together fairly quickly.
I just did a search for Slayer and only got their most recent album. I mayactually purchase it from this service, but I really wanted to Seasons in the Abyss and South of Heaven listed. Guess I'd better wait and see.
The Sony vs. Canon debate reminds me a lot og the Kodak vs Fuji debate among photographers. Personally, I prefer the image quality of the PD150, but the ability to use 35mm motion picture lenses with the XL1s gives it a definite advantage. I worked on a short that shot on an XL1s with 35mm Zeiss prime lenses and a flicker adapter and the image looked just awesome. Definitely not video, but also definitely not film. It was somewhere in between.
In a straight shootout with stock parts though, i prefer the image quality of the PD150. Too bad you can't put good lenses on the thing though. Try doing a rack focus and you'll want to pull your head off.
Being a recent film school graduate...
Personally, I'd rather shoot Super16 at 16:9, do an HD telecine with a bumpdown to MiniDV for offline editing in Final Cut Pro, generate an EDL, bring back to the lab for an online edit, output to 35mm (if I have the funds) or encode to MPEG-2 for DVD output.
And just where are you getting this insanely inexpensive telecine rate. At the post houses here in Seattle, you're looking at $200/hr for telecine on one of their older machines.
For the scope and budgets of my projects now, there's no way I could afford 35mm for capture. Output to 35 is a different story, but paying for the color timing is just so outrageous.That's why we shoot Super16. All told, getting it through telecine is about 25% the cost of capturing on 35mm.
640x480 at 30fps is crap... pure and simple. That's not even big enough to fill an NTSC television. MiniDV with Firewire out is the way to go with consumer level video camcorders. The next step up is obviously capturing straight to disk, but no camera assistant wants to lug around that hard drive just so you can have uncompressed footage to play with. Check out the film russian Ark. One take! Shot on HD straight to disk. 90 minutes of carrying a multi terrabyte hard drive around must be torture!
Transfering from tape has advantages if you're an editor. It forces you to watch the film and make very decisive choices of what footage to capture and use. It forces a level of economy into the project. Just shooting on digital is already creating a new generation of lazy videographers and directors who just shoot and shoot and shoot because they can. Most videographers coming out today couldn't light their way out of a paper bag and frequently forego lighting altogether because you can get an exposure in low light on video.
Basically, anyone who's shooting video or plans to should go take a course in basic three point lighting for film.
This looks interesting, but until CCD's can reproduce the same exposure latitude as film without dropping shadow to complete black and blowing out highlights, film will still be king. It still has about 4-6 stops of exposure lattitude to go.
Also, digital still just looks too sharp. The digital projection of Attack of the Clones looked pretty good, but the actual film projection looked even better. You could see further into the shadows and the highlights didn't blow out as much. If you watch the DVD which is taken directly from the digital source, you'll see just how sharp and harsh lines are. Much harsher than in real life.
That said, it's good to see digital video advancing at the rate it is. the prices are dropping and postproduction costs are finally starting to drop making it more and more affordable to shoot HD 24p and release on film. In fact, I'm going through this right now with a feature I'm working on. We're actually shooting on the Panasonic DVX1000 at 24p (MiniDV), hopefully doing an HD uprez and color correction and then outputting it to film.... if we get into any festivals. If not, we'll simply do the uprez and color correction and manufacture DVD's to distribute.
Essentially, for about $15k you can be a pretty damn complete psot house now!
Just because you record in HD doesn't necessarily mean you're going to output back to it. The image quality on these HD cameras is going to be noticeably higher than the Canon XL1s and the Sony PD150. Once you deinterlace the image after editing it, it's going to look amazing even in 720i.
Run your footage through Magic Bullet and you'll be amazed at the image quality. When the 3CCD puppies hit the market at the same price point as the XL1s and the PD150, MiniDV and DVCam will be the format for people to whom image quality isn't necessarily as important as just capturing the moment. The irony is that you'll be capturing HD footage on MiniDV and DVCam tapes.
And upon what do you base this? Any links to documentation you'd care to provide?
I totally thought that Quartz Extreme required a 32MB card and was about to put up a scating post, but decided to research my scathing post a bit first... glad I did!
h tml
http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/quartzextreme.
Now I just need to get a PCI Nvidia card so I can take advantage of it on my old B&W G3. I have a PCI Radeon, but they're not supported! Grrrrr!
Whoa! You seem to have had a very serious disconnect! My mom, an experienced surfer of the net, Excel and email user has been using OS 9.x (and previous) for over 15 years. She is not a power user in any sense of the word. Her computer worldview is very firmly entrenched in the Classic Mac OS.
Other than having to teach her cmd+shift+n to make a new folder, she was up and running and loving OS X in about half an hour. She took to the Dock and Column View folder listings like flies to honey. She loves it and she's a bit of a luddite.
Hell, even she knows that right clicking or control clicking activates contextual menus!
Did you have your daily caffeine fix before confronting OS X for the first time?
It took me a little while to get used to the new eccentricities of OS X, but now I have hard time working in OS 9. OS X has actually allowed me to be more productive! I can't imagine going back now.
I'd ignore you as well if you reported it as a bug. "click to focus" has been the standard on the mac for almost 20 years. I'm a very experienced computer user and "focus follows mouse" drives me absolutely batty. That's just my preference and the preference of the vast majority of computer users.
That said... maybe if you put it in as a feature request that could be activated as a system preference... well then you might just get somewhere. If you're not snide about these things, you just might find that they'll take you a bit more seriously.
And yes, i realize this was probably intended to be a humorous post, but even as a joke, there are probably people who seriously take such stupidly non-diplomatic approaches to dealing with Apple or any other software developer.
Who modded this up? Ridiculous. It's about on par with saying, "Windows is insecure and costs too much". Really insightful for sure!
I wish their was a "freaking obvious" moderation score.
I really am getting sick of people popularizing "specialized freedoms". The Bill of Rights is completely under attack. this is no time to start classifying freedoms. Digital, sexual, dietary, etc. Freedoms are freedoms and they are guaranteed to us by the Constitution. From now on, if a new DMCA law violates an ammendment let's call a spade a spade and not start breaking down these freedoms into subgroups like "digital or sexual". Just take a stand for freedom or the Republicans will continue laughing at the "left" who want to ensure that these freedoms continue to exist.
http://www.thestranger.com/current/city5.html
An article by Sherman Alexie in the The Stranger... a seattle weekly alternative rag. It discusses just this sort of thing.
Gotta work on it, man. It definitely didn't come across that way. Good try though!