Actually it is censorship. That doesn't make it evil, neccessarily. It doesn't matter who (or what) is doing the censoring, it's still censorship. If I cross out all of the pictures of ducks from my child's books, that's still censorship.
So, in this case, it doesn't matter what justification there is for what google is doing, or even if it is automated. It is still correct to refer to what happened as censorship.
It will render what you want just fine as long as you put in the right DTD. (I just tried it). If you don't know what you are doing, then just don't use the strict DTD. Anyway, the standard isn't really that hard to understand, and documentation is freely available -- you should try reading it sometime.
Um, care to post a link on some info about one of these machines? The only typesetters I've ever dealt with (or heard of) are all bitmapped (albiet at very high resolution: 2400dpi or slightly higher).
Well, you are very confused. Laser printers do use pixels. While the individual characters (if you're using PostScript fonts) are defined by vectors, they are rendered by the PS RIP as just lots of little dots at whatever resolution the printer is. The same thing is happening on your screen (if you're using non-antialiased font rendering), just at much lower resolution.
720p goes at 60fps, not 30. And there's a bunch of extra lines in all of these formats (I don't have my reference book here so I can't tell you the exact numbers), but suffice it to say that the bandwidth used between 1080i and 720p is exactly the same.
NTSC content is 720x480 (not counting blanking lines), not 640x480.
1080i is, as you said, 1920x1080. 720p is 1280x720, but progressive (obviously). Once the blanking lines are added in, 720p and 1080i use exactly the same bandwidth, which is very close to 6x that of NTSC.
I have to disagree with your video-chasing-audio proposal. While it would be simpler so code something like that (ignoring issues of monitor sync), in real life this approach wouldn't work. In a real post-production environment video has to be very rigidly clocked, and when working with digital audio interfaces the audio has to be rigidly clocked as well. The video (in NTSC land) goes at 59.94 fps (fields-per-second) and audio generally is at 48K/sec. There really isn't any way of resampling the video, which means that you have to slave your video signal to your sync generator or generate your own sync and then resample the audio (if necessary) to get the proper 48K samples/second. There are a myriad of reasons why you can't do this in reverse, most of which should be fairly obvious (just try resampling the video in real time, and it's a lot easier to pass around a 59.94Hz sync pulse than a 48KHz one).
While it claims to be about choice, the only choice that the most obnoxious proponents (like the OP) offer is no choice at all.
But you do have choice. You have the choice of not contributing (or using) the code at all. There is nothing being rammed down your throat. You are not mandated to do anything. You are merely required to abide by the license if you redistribute the code. Don't like it? Fine. Nobody will put a gun to your head -- just don't redistribute modified code.
First of all, I think there may be a generational difference in terms of what looks better. To me, compression artifacts and regular pixels are much more objectionable than film grain. Because film grain is never in the same place twice, it allows you to have more apparent resolution than you can actually have in one individual frame. Also, I didn't grow up watching digital video (or even TV for that matter), so it just looks unnatural to me.
In response to a couple of particular points, though: I actually think that digital projection is the future, eventually. It's not quite there yet, but it will be. The big problem is economic. The TI projectors are ungodly expensive, and will be obsolete in less than 2 years. For less than half the price you can buy a top-of-the-line 35mm projector that will last at least 20. Since there is no increased revenue for the theater owner by going digital, it is a sure recipe for bankruptcy now.
Second: While digital projection is pretty good, digital acquisition has a long, long, long way to go before it catches up to film. Even the manufacturers will tell you that. CCD's are simply not capable of producing the dynamic range that film does. Video formats are not currently capable of reproducing the range that film does. In projection this is not a big issue, because there is enough range to look good. But in production this is a huge issue. There are many scenes that simply cannot be captured pleasantly on video (daylight exteriors are the hardest) because there is simply too much of a brightness difference between the subject (that you want correctly exposed) and the brightest elements in the frame (like the sky). This is a problem that will take a long time to overcome. For this reason I think that the most viable chain in the medium-term future will be to shoot on film, transfer to digital (files -- not HD-video -- HD is too limited both in terms of resolution and color gamut), and do digital post. Film prints will still have to be made for many years until virtually all cinemas are digital. Even then prints will have to be made for various overseas markets. By the way, my company sells HD cameras and DLP projectors (in addition to film cameras), so I'm not completely biased here. I think that HD cameras are very cool, and definitely have a place (particularly in documentary production). But I also love going to the movies and I don't want that experience to be degraded.
3: Maxivision is actually very cool. It gets you a huge inprovement in quality for a very modest cost. It actually only uses 50% more film, not double because each frame takes up 3 perfs instead of 4. There is only minimal modification of equipment needed (many cameras can already shoot 3-perf, and you don't need a new projector -- just modify your existing one). I suppose it's unlikely this will actually get widely adopted, but it's too bad because it would be nice to actually see a dramatic improvement in quality. (There's a lot to it besides just the frame-rate change -- there are modifications to improve screen brightness, registration and focus consistency as well).
If a civilian gets killed then that really sux but I'd prefer a civilian than one of our soldiers.
That's a pretty fucked up attitude, if you ask me. The military is supposed to be protecting the civilian population, and soldiers have accepted the risk as part of their job -- civilians have not.
Well, notice that I said that good DLP projection is better than bad film projection. I'd be willing to bet that you haven't seen really good film projection. There just isn't anything that can come close to producing either the resolution or the dynamic range as film currently.
That said, it is much more important to originate on film than it is to project on film -- it's at the front end that you really really need all the latitude that you can get. There's at least 7 or 8 more stops of latitude available on film than on video (HD included). It would be much easier to show you why that is important than to try to explain, but suffice it to say that you have to be very precise about what tiny slice of image you want to capture (in terms of luminosity) and hope that you made the right decision about what information you are throwing out, whereas on film you can delay that decision till post production when it is no longer a destructive one.
Well, it can certainly look decent, especially if you have a DVD player that does a reverse 2-3 pulldown to generate a progressive scan output. The compression artifacts are still somewhat disturbing though (varies a lot depending on a lot of factors: quality of telecine, compression ratios, video noise, film grain, etc.). Real HD looks a lot better, though, on a good, big screen. Of course, the compression there still bugs the hell out of me -- I'm spoiled by working in the industry and getting to watch some of this stuff uncompressed on high-end monitors (the kind that cost >$30,000) and good projectors (3 chip DLPs).
Of course, I'd still rather watch it on film, though a good DLP setup looks better than bad film projection.
Apple isn't misleading customers. They don't claim anywhere that you can copy your own DVDs (as if they would even dare). Their ads are crystal clear as to the purpose of the drive. Anyway, there doesn't exist a drive that can copy a DVD, so calling this drive "mickie mouse" is kind of silly -- I mean compared to what? Would you call a 120GB hard drive "mickie mouse" because you can't store 3 hours of uncompressed HD video on it? Someday todays drives will be obsolete, but for now the superdrive is state of the art.
I bought a cheap ($400) blowout IBM PC from Egghead to play around with. It was really flat, so in order to get full height PCI cards into it, I had to cut two long slots into the case. About 2 days later it died completely. Called IBM, they sent a technician over. Anyone else would have seen the holes in the case and gone home. But this guy tried some stuff, determined it was a bad CPU and had me a new one in two days. Frankly I was amazed. On a $340 PC no less.
Referrer tells you who's following the links
on
Emergence
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· Score: 5, Informative
not that the links actually exist. A link is, in fact, one directional. If no one follows a link, there is no way to know that it exists. Practically, looking at the referrers (or should I say 'referers' to use the official but wrong spelling) of your HTTP requests will tell you pretty much the same thing, but there's a conceptual difference between that and actually having some sort of "reverse-link". Kind of like asking everyone who comes into your store where they heard about you as opposed to hearing first hand from the people making the recommendations.
I can play Sorenson content in any old QuickTime program without having to "associate a dedcoder" (whatever that means). Of course, I have to have the Sorenson codec installed on my machine, but there's nothing special about the QuickTime player.
The QuickTime player is the only one that can open a file format that is commonly referred to by the QuickTime name, which is actually utilizing a Sorenson format which no one except Apple can use.
Actually, you are wrong. I could erase the QuickTime player from my computer and still view Sorenson-encoded movies in any other application that can play Quicktime files.
I think that you're really wrong about this. First of all, you seem to be under the impression that Quicktime is a viewer. This is wrong. Quicktime really isn't analagous to Realvideo or WMP. Quicktime is an architecture for dealing with any kind of media that changes over time, whether it be animation, video, audio, etc. There happens to be a player that ships with Quicktime that may leave a lot to be desired, but the application itself isn't quicktime, merely an application that uses Quicktime.
To me, it makes a lot of sense to have a plugin architecture for video. I am a professional in the film industry and do a fair amount of editing using Final Cut Pro. In the past I used to use an Avid. I really really like that FCP is based on Quicktime (Avid isn't). With Final Cut, I can edit anything as long as it's quicktime. That means out of the box I can use a little DV camera and edit everything at 29.97fps using the DV codec. If I want to add a professional video board like a Targa card or something, I can, and because the codec for the Targa card is just a quicktime plugin, I can use it in any program that uses quicktime, including FCP. If I want I can add a board that does uncompressed High Definition Video, and as long as my RAID array has high enough bandwidth I can edit that format. If I want to edit something for the web at 15fps and half-resolution, I can do that too because I have codecs that can handle that.
If we were to do things the way you propose, we'd be stuck using either a few standardized but completely outdated codecs for everything (for distribution), or a seperate editing application for every format and/or vendor (for production -- this is the way it used to be).
And Quicktime works perfectly fine with industry standard codecs (unlike RealPlayer), so I really don't know what you're talking about.
Well, it's hard to say exactly what the resolution of film is, because there are many variables:
1) The film stock used makes a huge difference. Kodak has made incredible strides with their stocks (as has Fuji, for that matter). Their 800ASA stock has less grain than their 500ASA stocks of a few years ago. That said, there's a big difference between shooting 5245 which is a 50ASA stock and, say, 5279 which is a 320ASA stock -- the 45 is virtually grainless.
2) The format used makes a difference. There are many different ways of shooting 35mm film, all of which use different portions of the negative. Basically, the more neg you use, the less grain and the more resolution (because the less magnification you have to make to get it on the screen).
3) The exact post-production chain makes a difference as well. The more optical steps you have to go through, the more apparent the grain will be.
I believe that T2 was mostly scanned at 4K actually, which is higher resolution than most films done today. Pleasantville was done at 2K. However, the technology for printing digital files back to film has improved greatly since then, so it could definitely be done better now. Hopefully more films will be done at 4K in the future as hard-drive space gets cheaper (a big concern since film compositing is typically done uncompressed and with at least 10 and up to 16 bits per color channel per pixel, which means that even at 2K each minute of film is at least 11GB.)
A complete digital chain does indeed get rid of film grain. There are digital techniques that are just becoming available to eliminate grain on film originated material as well.
However, digital projection will, at least in the near term, bring about its own artifacts from compression, the lack of resolution, and some other things that are particular to the current technology (DLP can produce some strange flickering in certain colors due to the way it works). (All this is being worked on, of course).
Speaking as someone in the industry (and who sells DLP projectors) let me clarify. The actual DLP resolution is 1280x1024. This gets you almost the full vertical resolution of 1080 HD, but considerably less than the full horizontal resolution (1920 pixels).
Most film editing systems still run at NTSC resolution (720x486). Perhaps you meant most film compositing systems. Many of them do, in fact, work at 4K, and it is getting more economical to work at that resolution (and it will get considerably more so when the Spirit 2 comes out next year -- it does 2K in real time and 4K at 4fps). And a 35mm film frame definitely has more resolution than will fit in a 2K scan -- anyone who says otherwise obviously doesn't work in the business. Remember that you have more apparent resolution in motion-picture film because of the non-grid layout of the film grains. A scan of one frame may not appear all that sharp, but run them by at 24 fps and watch it sharpen up!
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Actually it is censorship. That doesn't make it evil, neccessarily. It doesn't matter who (or what) is doing the censoring, it's still censorship. If I cross out all of the pictures of ducks from my child's books, that's still censorship.
So, in this case, it doesn't matter what justification there is for what google is doing, or even if it is automated. It is still correct to refer to what happened as censorship.
It will render what you want just fine as long as you put in the right DTD. (I just tried it). If you don't know what you are doing, then just don't use the strict DTD. Anyway, the standard isn't really that hard to understand, and documentation is freely available -- you should try reading it sometime.
Um, care to post a link on some info about one of these machines? The only typesetters I've ever dealt with (or heard of) are all bitmapped (albiet at very high resolution: 2400dpi or slightly higher).
Well, you are very confused. Laser printers do use pixels. While the individual characters (if you're using PostScript fonts) are defined by vectors, they are rendered by the PS RIP as just lots of little dots at whatever resolution the printer is. The same thing is happening on your screen (if you're using non-antialiased font rendering), just at much lower resolution.
720p goes at 60fps, not 30. And there's a bunch of extra lines in all of these formats (I don't have my reference book here so I can't tell you the exact numbers), but suffice it to say that the bandwidth used between 1080i and 720p is exactly the same.
NTSC content is 720x480 (not counting blanking lines), not 640x480.
1080i is, as you said, 1920x1080. 720p is 1280x720, but progressive (obviously). Once the blanking lines are added in, 720p and 1080i use exactly the same bandwidth, which is very close to 6x that of NTSC.
I have to disagree with your video-chasing-audio proposal. While it would be simpler so code something like that (ignoring issues of monitor sync), in real life this approach wouldn't work. In a real post-production environment video has to be very rigidly clocked, and when working with digital audio interfaces the audio has to be rigidly clocked as well. The video (in NTSC land) goes at 59.94 fps (fields-per-second) and audio generally is at 48K/sec. There really isn't any way of resampling the video, which means that you have to slave your video signal to your sync generator or generate your own sync and then resample the audio (if necessary) to get the proper 48K samples/second. There are a myriad of reasons why you can't do this in reverse, most of which should be fairly obvious (just try resampling the video in real time, and it's a lot easier to pass around a 59.94Hz sync pulse than a 48KHz one).
So... What was it?
But you do have choice. You have the choice of not contributing (or using) the code at all. There is nothing being rammed down your throat. You are not mandated to do anything. You are merely required to abide by the license if you redistribute the code. Don't like it? Fine. Nobody will put a gun to your head -- just don't redistribute modified code.
First of all, I think there may be a generational difference in terms of what looks better. To me, compression artifacts and regular pixels are much more objectionable than film grain. Because film grain is never in the same place twice, it allows you to have more apparent resolution than you can actually have in one individual frame. Also, I didn't grow up watching digital video (or even TV for that matter), so it just looks unnatural to me.
In response to a couple of particular points, though: I actually think that digital projection is the future, eventually. It's not quite there yet, but it will be. The big problem is economic. The TI projectors are ungodly expensive, and will be obsolete in less than 2 years. For less than half the price you can buy a top-of-the-line 35mm projector that will last at least 20. Since there is no increased revenue for the theater owner by going digital, it is a sure recipe for bankruptcy now.
Second: While digital projection is pretty good, digital acquisition has a long, long, long way to go before it catches up to film. Even the manufacturers will tell you that. CCD's are simply not capable of producing the dynamic range that film does. Video formats are not currently capable of reproducing the range that film does. In projection this is not a big issue, because there is enough range to look good. But in production this is a huge issue. There are many scenes that simply cannot be captured pleasantly on video (daylight exteriors are the hardest) because there is simply too much of a brightness difference between the subject (that you want correctly exposed) and the brightest elements in the frame (like the sky). This is a problem that will take a long time to overcome. For this reason I think that the most viable chain in the medium-term future will be to shoot on film, transfer to digital (files -- not HD-video -- HD is too limited both in terms of resolution and color gamut), and do digital post. Film prints will still have to be made for many years until virtually all cinemas are digital. Even then prints will have to be made for various overseas markets. By the way, my company sells HD cameras and DLP projectors (in addition to film cameras), so I'm not completely biased here. I think that HD cameras are very cool, and definitely have a place (particularly in documentary production). But I also love going to the movies and I don't want that experience to be degraded.
3: Maxivision is actually very cool. It gets you a huge inprovement in quality for a very modest cost. It actually only uses 50% more film, not double because each frame takes up 3 perfs instead of 4. There is only minimal modification of equipment needed (many cameras can already shoot 3-perf, and you don't need a new projector -- just modify your existing one). I suppose it's unlikely this will actually get widely adopted, but it's too bad because it would be nice to actually see a dramatic improvement in quality. (There's a lot to it besides just the frame-rate change -- there are modifications to improve screen brightness, registration and focus consistency as well).
That's a pretty fucked up attitude, if you ask me. The military is supposed to be protecting the civilian population, and soldiers have accepted the risk as part of their job -- civilians have not.
I thought it was 5050.
:-(
Well, notice that I said that good DLP projection is better than bad film projection. I'd be willing to bet that you haven't seen really good film projection. There just isn't anything that can come close to producing either the resolution or the dynamic range as film currently.
That said, it is much more important to originate on film than it is to project on film -- it's at the front end that you really really need all the latitude that you can get. There's at least 7 or 8 more stops of latitude available on film than on video (HD included). It would be much easier to show you why that is important than to try to explain, but suffice it to say that you have to be very precise about what tiny slice of image you want to capture (in terms of luminosity) and hope that you made the right decision about what information you are throwing out, whereas on film you can delay that decision till post production when it is no longer a destructive one.
Well, it can certainly look decent, especially if you have a DVD player that does a reverse 2-3 pulldown to generate a progressive scan output. The compression artifacts are still somewhat disturbing though (varies a lot depending on a lot of factors: quality of telecine, compression ratios, video noise, film grain, etc.). Real HD looks a lot better, though, on a good, big screen. Of course, the compression there still bugs the hell out of me -- I'm spoiled by working in the industry and getting to watch some of this stuff uncompressed on high-end monitors (the kind that cost >$30,000) and good projectors (3 chip DLPs).
Of course, I'd still rather watch it on film, though a good DLP setup looks better than bad film projection.
they don't get scratched.
Apple isn't misleading customers. They don't claim anywhere that you can copy your own DVDs (as if they would even dare). Their ads are crystal clear as to the purpose of the drive. Anyway, there doesn't exist a drive that can copy a DVD, so calling this drive "mickie mouse" is kind of silly -- I mean compared to what? Would you call a 120GB hard drive "mickie mouse" because you can't store 3 hours of uncompressed HD video on it? Someday todays drives will be obsolete, but for now the superdrive is state of the art.
Care to elaborate?
I bought a cheap ($400) blowout IBM PC from Egghead to play around with. It was really flat, so in order to get full height PCI cards into it, I had to cut two long slots into the case. About 2 days later it died completely. Called IBM, they sent a technician over. Anyone else would have seen the holes in the case and gone home. But this guy tried some stuff, determined it was a bad CPU and had me a new one in two days. Frankly I was amazed. On a $340 PC no less.
not that the links actually exist. A link is, in fact, one directional. If no one follows a link, there is no way to know that it exists. Practically, looking at the referrers (or should I say 'referers' to use the official but wrong spelling) of your HTTP requests will tell you pretty much the same thing, but there's a conceptual difference between that and actually having some sort of "reverse-link". Kind of like asking everyone who comes into your store where they heard about you as opposed to hearing first hand from the people making the recommendations.
I can play Sorenson content in any old QuickTime program without having to "associate a dedcoder" (whatever that means). Of course, I have to have the Sorenson codec installed on my machine, but there's nothing special about the QuickTime player.
Actually, you are wrong. I could erase the QuickTime player from my computer and still view Sorenson-encoded movies in any other application that can play Quicktime files.
I think that you're really wrong about this. First of all, you seem to be under the impression that Quicktime is a viewer. This is wrong. Quicktime really isn't analagous to Realvideo or WMP. Quicktime is an architecture for dealing with any kind of media that changes over time, whether it be animation, video, audio, etc. There happens to be a player that ships with Quicktime that may leave a lot to be desired, but the application itself isn't quicktime, merely an application that uses Quicktime.
To me, it makes a lot of sense to have a plugin architecture for video. I am a professional in the film industry and do a fair amount of editing using Final Cut Pro. In the past I used to use an Avid. I really really like that FCP is based on Quicktime (Avid isn't). With Final Cut, I can edit anything as long as it's quicktime. That means out of the box I can use a little DV camera and edit everything at 29.97fps using the DV codec. If I want to add a professional video board like a Targa card or something, I can, and because the codec for the Targa card is just a quicktime plugin, I can use it in any program that uses quicktime, including FCP. If I want I can add a board that does uncompressed High Definition Video, and as long as my RAID array has high enough bandwidth I can edit that format. If I want to edit something for the web at 15fps and half-resolution, I can do that too because I have codecs that can handle that.
If we were to do things the way you propose, we'd be stuck using either a few standardized but completely outdated codecs for everything (for distribution), or a seperate editing application for every format and/or vendor (for production -- this is the way it used to be).
And Quicktime works perfectly fine with industry standard codecs (unlike RealPlayer), so I really don't know what you're talking about.
Well, it's hard to say exactly what the resolution of film is, because there are many variables:
1) The film stock used makes a huge difference. Kodak has made incredible strides with their stocks (as has Fuji, for that matter). Their 800ASA stock has less grain than their 500ASA stocks of a few years ago. That said, there's a big difference between shooting 5245 which is a 50ASA stock and, say, 5279 which is a 320ASA stock -- the 45 is virtually grainless.
2) The format used makes a difference. There are many different ways of shooting 35mm film, all of which use different portions of the negative. Basically, the more neg you use, the less grain and the more resolution (because the less magnification you have to make to get it on the screen).
3) The exact post-production chain makes a difference as well. The more optical steps you have to go through, the more apparent the grain will be.
I believe that T2 was mostly scanned at 4K actually, which is higher resolution than most films done today. Pleasantville was done at 2K. However, the technology for printing digital files back to film has improved greatly since then, so it could definitely be done better now. Hopefully more films will be done at 4K in the future as hard-drive space gets cheaper (a big concern since film compositing is typically done uncompressed and with at least 10 and up to 16 bits per color channel per pixel, which means that even at 2K each minute of film is at least 11GB.)
A complete digital chain does indeed get rid of film grain. There are digital techniques that are just becoming available to eliminate grain on film originated material as well.
However, digital projection will, at least in the near term, bring about its own artifacts from compression, the lack of resolution, and some other things that are particular to the current technology (DLP can produce some strange flickering in certain colors due to the way it works). (All this is being worked on, of course).
Speaking as someone in the industry (and who sells DLP projectors) let me clarify. The actual DLP resolution is 1280x1024. This gets you almost the full vertical resolution of 1080 HD, but considerably less than the full horizontal resolution (1920 pixels).
Most film editing systems still run at NTSC resolution (720x486). Perhaps you meant most film compositing systems. Many of them do, in fact, work at 4K, and it is getting more economical to work at that resolution (and it will get considerably more so when the Spirit 2 comes out next year -- it does 2K in real time and 4K at 4fps). And a 35mm film frame definitely has more resolution than will fit in a 2K scan -- anyone who says otherwise obviously doesn't work in the business. Remember that you have more apparent resolution in motion-picture film because of the non-grid layout of the film grains. A scan of one frame may not appear all that sharp, but run them by at 24 fps and watch it sharpen up!
Actually, they have a patent on that as well!
(ducks...)