I'm not surprised they do this, but I am surprised at how foolishly they go about it.
They allow one company to control all the boards. They know people manipulate the boards, but trust them anyway. From the sound of it, they use them as their sole source of information in many cases.
Not smart. Not smart at all.
I'd submit that this was always going to happen. Give a group of terrified, insecure, vain people like these access to the internet of course they are going to congregate into a closed environment. One that's intrinsically self-affirming where there are no dissenting opinions, and they can always be assured of making the "right" desicion. It's a matter of lore that the job of "studio exec" carries with it the professional life-expectancy of a Spinal Tap drummer. What these people want most after the blowjobs, drugs and money is to be constantly told they are great & doing the right thing.
In fact the emergance of this closed circle-jerk system may explain why the synopsis for a lot of recent hollywood films sound like a parody from the Simpsons starring "Troy McClure". I mean c'mon, a movie about a sassy kangaroo that steals a hundred grand of mob money?
Thanks to the corporate bloat of the studios, taking on layer after layer of usesless management incapable of independant thought, films are being made these days from ideas that would have gotten you laughed out of a pitch meeting a decade ago. What's really depressing is that people are actually going to see them...
[poster asks why bother searching for killer asteroids if we can't stop them]
Because if we can detect one early enough, say a few years out from impact we might be able to do something about it.
Remember, way back in the 60's we put men on the moon , thus jump-starting the next 50 years of technological development basically just to make an idealogical point.
Imagine what we could do if the whole ball of wax was at stake, and where it would take us after we'd saved ourselves. It took a decade to get from simple flights just outside the atmosphere to playing golf on the moon. Given a decade to stop a dinosaur-killer from hitting us we'd probably develop fleets of single-stage-to-orbit spaceplanes, huge advances in materials and propulsion etc. Hopefully once outside Earth orbit we'd stay out there instead of pulling back like we did last time. And it'd be nice to think that after being faced - really faced - with possible extinction, there'd be even just a subtle shift in our global psychology; it brings me to mind of Reagan's famous speech where he wondered what we'd be capable of as a species if we had to band together against some outside threat...
Though having said that my guess is we'd probably all be back to watching Springer and slaughtering each other within six months of it all being over. Granted, I say this before I've had my morning coffee so I may get a lot more optimistic once the caffine kicks in...
I saved the pic to my HD then used photoshop to check it out and sure enough it has multiple layers
I'd love to know how you did that seeing as the source picture is a JPG (hint: JPGs don't have layers, furthermore once you collapse a photoship image there is no way to tell it ever had layers).
Also, did they photoshop every frame of the video of the same crop-picture?
[disclaimer: I still think it was done by hoaxers]
Re:Wouldn't it be easier to...
on
Lab-Grown Steak
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· Score: 2
Well no, they'd have to wait for the animals to grow up before they can eat them, then there's all the extra feed they'd have to haul to Mars just to feed the livestock, then there's the extra space they'd take up, life support, power to keep them warm, the risk of them getting sick and dying, what if the embryos aren't viable (remember the radiation the ship will be subjected to during the voyage) etc etc.
Much easier, efficient and inexpensive to simply grow the meat in trays, especially since they'll only be staying for a year initially...
Interesting? Is that the best you can do? Did you even watch "War Stories?"
Zoe: Hold it, Jayne. This is something the captain's gotta do for himself.
Mal: (fighting, muffled) No, it's not!
Zoe: Oh. (everybody opens fire)
I *love* this show - the exact moment I fell in love was at the end of the first episode, when Mal kicked the bad-guy into the engines - my eyes bugged out and I literally nearly spat coke over the screen.
Firefly has excellent production values (look at 'Ariel' - that episode looks like a feature film for chrissakes), the VFX are exquisite, and I say that with all due jealousy and admiration:-)
I'm constantly delighted and surprised by every episode and have yet to see one I haven't enjoyed (and I *hate* westerns)
Well, we wrap work on the VFX for episode 422 this week, and once that's done we're archiving everything to DLT and going our seperate ways... as far as I know it's still over.
I was at Animal Logic last week and asked our producer if she'd heard anything different from Andrew (one of the exec producers) - nada. It's all winding down - on Thursday we hit a local pub for the VFX wrap party then that's it:-(
When chosing renderers there's a lot of FUD about "this or that package has a crap renderer" etc, but a good render is a function of good composition, modelling, lighting and texturing. Bad 3D will look bad no matter what you render it with!
In terms of final output these days, a good artist can use any of the Major packages out there and get similar results (a renderer does not a good artist make). Maya has a rep as a high-end package, and if you are good with it you're not going to have any problems finding work. Given that you are on a Mac I'd lean towards Lightwave, it's got a great renderer built in and it's a LOT easier to learn than Maya. And for what you need it for; rendering occasional design elements and fooling around it's perfect. Lightwave is a great package that easily competes with Maya for the quality of work produced with it.
If you were on the PC I'd reccomend 3DS Max with Brazil for rendering, I've been using it since 3DS DOS v2 and although I often freelance for a shop that's mostly Softimage and Maya I've never felt the need to learn anything else. We used it for over a thousand shots a year for three years on Farscape and it's been fantastic. I'll never switch packages as long as Discreet still develop it.
Man, I doubt it... These are generally pretty blue and they don't bleep them:-) Things like D'Argo threatening to f**k a peacekeeper squad to death and Scorpious resonded commanding them to line up and fellat the Luxan, that was last year. This year the funniest was again something D'Argo said that I'd maybe only repeat on alt.tasteless. In involved babies. They're also full of in-jokes, whenever a cellphone ruins a take the guilty party has to buy a slab of beer - one year there was great one of Pilot talking when it happened, he raised himself up and yelled in a very Aussie accent "aaaaaand *another* slab for Jacko!" (or whatever the guy's name was. Season one GMD, the old FX house did a great shot of the Digital Rygel singing Sinatra. We did our own CG Rygel and I always wanted do do something involving him and some Hynerian slave girls, or a "Star Wars" shot of a command carrier going by to reveal a bumper sticker like "I break for Fat Chicks" or "Hows my driving, call 1-800-eat-shit" etc... but I never got the time... never will now:-(
A bit woozy, so bear with me...
I worked on Farscape since the beginning of season 2 in the VFX department, I left at the beginning of
season 4 but continued to freelance on the show.
Tonight I was checking Fark.com literally as I was about to go out the door and saw that we'd been cancelled... my jaw just *dropped*. I couldn't believe it, the show was literally our lives for the last three years...
The mood at the party was pretty good, a lot of sadness - I mean sci-fi broke the news the DAY before the wrap party, everyone was still reeling. We'd all known that season 5 was an on-paper "lock" but we knew there was a chance it might not happen. But overall people were in a cool state of mind, nothing like this had ever been done in Sydney before and it's been a hell of a ride. Everyone involved with the show is so happy to have been a part of it, for me it was my first job in the industry after quitting the IT world, and even when it got tough I'm so grateful to have gotten the opportunity, and I've made a lot of good friends to boot.
Brain Henson explained that it had almost made it to at least 13 eps for season 5 but in the end he just couldn't sell it. Man, I'm numb (of course that could be the after effects of the party) It turned out to be a damn good party though, the gag reel had been hastily re-cut to include some nice moments in light of the news, but it went down well - Anthony Simcoe as D'Argo and Wayne Pygram as Scorpious bring the house down every year with their totally in-character bloopers, this year was no expection. I know the show was not to everyone's taste, hell sometimes I didn't go to the screenings myself, but it's a great offbeat show, and if you liked it enough; as Ben Browder, David Kemper and Richard Manning explained in the chat, send (polite!) letters to sci-fi, or call, and let them know.
Ok drunken ramble mod/off going to go watch the sun come up:-)
First time I loaded it I got this vertigo rush, I started to get a little queasy, but... wow. Once you get the hang of it it's like sky-diving through the alphabet. As you're spelling you just pick the next letter and let yourself 'fall' towards it, it's really kind of relaxing if you have an empty stomach:)
Great idea, but how about instead of having it at your desk to let you know you've got mail, mount it in the rear window of your car for those times when the horn just isn't enough:-)
I have long suspected (half jokingly), as I am sure have many here, that the big car companies who have developed hybrid/alternate energy cars have deliberately made them look incredibly ugly to prevent anyone actually wanting to buy one.
This reminds me of the novel Stainless Steel Rat for President by Harry Harrison. In it Slippery Jim DiGriz is rigging an election, and at one point cuts into the local news broadcast and replaces the newsreader with a digital version that reads the results he wants. It was written 10, 20 years ago? Seem almost prescient considering what happened in Florida in 2000:-)
Another, more benign use of the tech could be in entertainment. There was that episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine where they integrated the actors in with footage from the classic ep, Trouble With Tribbles. Great fun, but they were limited to using footage that exisited from the original series for intereacting with Kirk, Spock et al. Imagine being able to track Shatner's 60's face onto an actor and use this tech to lipsync 21st century Shatner's dialog. Best. Time Travel. Episode. Ever.
This is a repost of mine from December, but it's kind of relevent.
--start--
I bought a Hauppauge WIN-TV PVR (PCI) card for video capture. It has a hardware MPEG-2 encoder with many settings for quality from 2mb/sec to the ridiculously high 12mb/sec with the option of constant or variable bitrate.
After testing I settled on 4mbit/sec VBR which looks great - sometimes it's easy to forget I'm not watching a live broadcast. Importantly it also has a "pause" feature just like a commercial PVR which is great for dealing with the amount of calls I get from clients at all hours. Output to the TV is via S-VHS from an old GeForce 1 card that has TV-out built in. Initially I wanted to use the MPEG decoder card from my DVD kit for output but after testing, the output from the geforce is so close in quality I just use it, plus then I get to use the PC even while it's recording (the hardware encoder means no dropped frames ever).
The box is just a celeron 900 with a half gig of ram running win2k - there is a linux driver available for the Hauppauge on sourceforge but the PC is part of my render farm (I'm a 3D animator by trade) and 3dsmax only runs on windows (for now).
The software that ships with the Hauppauge is, well, shitty. It works fine but the interface sucks, especially when you've used showshifter (www.showshifter.com) though from reading showshifter's forums apparently it will soon support the WintTV PVR board. In the meantime I have simply "frontended" the Hauppage software using scripting in Automate from Unisyn. I've bound all the major features to the cute rubber buttons on the internet keyboard on my coffee table and I've even been able to do things like have the scroll-lock light flash when recording (for when we're not watching TV via the PC). For scheduling I go to the Aussie TV guide at sofcom.com.au to pick out my weeks viewing - the lounge box has winvnc on it so I can program it from my office or even start recording if I see something good and don't have time to run out to the lounge. I use PowerDVD for mpeg playback, mainly cause you can fast forward and rewind using the scroll wheel on the mouse - trez chic
For the future I just ordered a Redrat2 IR controller from www.redrat.co.uk to give the box control over my satellite decoder, and I plan to add functionality like being able to email the box to program it etc.
--end--
Well it's been nearly five months now since I set up my PVR system, a good indication of how it's going is that about two months ago I finally took my VCR out of the TV cabinet and replaced it with the PC. Still using 4mb/sec CBR D1 Pal to record, the end result is indistinguishable from 'live' TV.
My viewing habits have changed; every Sunday I go through the online TV guide and update my record-list (late night shows like Enterprise tend to run at different times some weeks - not that I've been able to sit through a single episode of it yet.), and I almost never watch live TV anymore. Every time I check the/record fileshare there's something new to watch, sometimes I'll hit the weekend and have a week's worth of stuff to sift through at my leasure (mainly simpsons - they show it a LOT here in.au)
I stopped using PowerDVD for playback as for day to day use there were some rough edges that caused annoyance, and reverted to using media player version 6 (I dislike version 7 intensely). A simple alt-enter and it goes full screen, and the spacebar pauses. I've also gotten very good at gaugeing the length of commercial breaks - the show I'm watching goes to commercial I alt enter to get the playback bar and click where I think the break's gonna end - most times these days I'm bang on:-)
The RedRat controller is great, I've yet to find a remote it can't learn, and it's liberating being able to code my own IR app. I'm off VHS for good, no more crappy tapes for me! I've used the Hauppauge to make high quality (6mb/sec) archives of precious VHS tapes such as a friend's wedding and a ten year old recording of a family xmas which had footage of our great grandfather enjoying the day with us just hours before he passed away.
Re:This will revolutionize color keying.
on
Video with Depth
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· Score: 1
damn. I hit 'post' then I think of something else to say... the depth info may not be good enough to generate a nice detailed mesh of an actor or a set etc, but lets say it can give at least a coarse mesh for each frame of a shot, you could use the low res 3D info for things like shadow passes for CG elements (you comp in a flying robot going past your real actor, you use the depthcam generated mesh info for those frames to have the robot's shadow slide over the actor's body correctly. If the actor's costume had reflective surfaces like goggles you can use the 3D info to have the robot reflected in them - it may sound subtle but it's the subtle things that tie a shot together)
Re:This will revolutionize color keying.
on
Video with Depth
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· Score: 3, Informative
especially after you consider how easily it would be to generate a virtual stunt double from the 3d mesh (film the actor from a few angles, and merge the resulting 3d wireframe. Voila, perfect model down to the wrinkles in the skin)
Uh, no... I wish it were that easy - but scanned 3D meshes of that quality are still in the domain of laser scanning. There's just so much detail that even the best scanners can't pick up, major wrinkles and folds yes but pores and fine lines have to be simulated with displacement/bump and colour maps derived from the scan data (basically as it scans, the device takes a big long photo of the object to wrap around it later). Once you have the point-cloud from the scan (raw data) there is a LOT of cleaning up to do to get a parametric mesh with correct UVs (texture mapping co-ordinates) for use in production.
For more info, check these guys out - we've used em recently on a couple of film and tv projects and their output is damn nice, but the price tag reflects the complexity and difficulty of the task.
Visual Effects work
on
Video with Depth
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I posted a comment a while ago that explained the uses in visual effects work for depth-cameras, and some of the problems with existing methods of pulling a matte off of live action plates...
We were actually talking about this at work the other day; mainly wondering how well it would deal with things like fine hair, smoke, transparent objects and stuff like film grain/video artifacts/lens artifacts etc...
... it's terrible. Even allowing for the early 80's BBC sci-fi show "look", ie; shot on betacam under lighting that looks like it was lifted from a bus station.
The sum total of Ed Bye's "direction" seems to have been to just stick the camera in the middle of the set and make the actors run through long scenes in one (often awkward and badly timed) take. It's like watching a stageplay that hasn't been rehearsed, only a stageplay wouldn't have been lit with 40,000 flourescent tubes. Even worse is that they changed Trillian from a no-nonsense scientist type into a squeaking brainless gangster-moll. I'm not sure who was behind that decision but her performence alone is bad enough to make you want to shove a fork in your eye. There's a few points that are kinda ok, like the sequence on the Vogon ship, but overall it's a mess.
I grew up with and love the radio series and the books. I really want to see this as a show/movie done right, and I only hope that DA's death won't derail the plans for the movie.
Aardman have produced a couple of CG shorts recently; the first I saw on last year's SIGGRAPH reel featured two posers in a nightclub trying to pick up the same girl, the second is three little plasticene-looking monsters explaining to the camera why they don't have their short film ready in time, and ends with them singing a song dressed as flowers in a desperate attempt to fill time. The later one is VERY hard to tell it's not claymation. They've also used it a fair bit in their TVC work as well as for certain effects in Chicken Run.
I get where people come from when they decry the use of computers in animation these days - sometime I see the quality of 3D kids shows like Beast Wars or Max Steel and I feel like burning my computer in disgust - but the extreme crappiness of a lot of 3D animation is nothing to do with the tools, just a lack of creativity on the part of the production
companies. CGI can be used to create stunning
imagery and animations,
it's just a shame that as yet most of the stuff the general public sees on TV is
just so bad...
I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere in the boardrooms of the world there are people who would like nothing better than to have the internet regulated to the point where you need to be licensed
to operate a website... The Australian government looked at doing this to anyone
in Australia who wanted to stream video over the net but then backed
down - for now, anyway.
I don't believe it will ever happen, I don't think anyone would ever even
suggest it publicly; but the biggest thorn in these companies sides seem to be
the public's unwillingness to stay in the officially sanctioned "walled
gardens" they have set-up, and you can be sure that somewhere there's a few
rich old white men who daydream about walling off the whole damn thing and
turning the entire internet into a kind of SuperAOL...
Slashdot Mirror
ObSimpsons ADD reference:
"hey! That kid has bosoms!"
"Don't chase me! I'm full of chocolate!"
etc etc...
I'd submit that this was always going to happen. Give a group of terrified, insecure, vain people like these access to the internet of course they are going to congregate into a closed environment. One that's intrinsically self-affirming where there are no dissenting opinions, and they can always be assured of making the "right" desicion. It's a matter of lore that the job of "studio exec" carries with it the professional life-expectancy of a Spinal Tap drummer. What these people want most after the blowjobs, drugs and money is to be constantly told they are great & doing the right thing.
In fact the emergance of this closed circle-jerk system may explain why the synopsis for a lot of recent hollywood films sound like a parody from the Simpsons starring "Troy McClure". I mean c'mon, a movie about a sassy kangaroo that steals a hundred grand of mob money?
Thanks to the corporate bloat of the studios, taking on layer after layer of usesless management incapable of independant thought, films are being made these days from ideas that would have gotten you laughed out of a pitch meeting a decade ago. What's really depressing is that people are actually going to see them...
Because if we can detect one early enough, say a few years out from impact we might be able to do something about it.
Remember, way back in the 60's we put men on the moon , thus jump-starting the next 50 years of technological development basically just to make an idealogical point.
Imagine what we could do if the whole ball of wax was at stake, and where it would take us after we'd saved ourselves. It took a decade to get from simple flights just outside the atmosphere to playing golf on the moon. Given a decade to stop a dinosaur-killer from hitting us we'd probably develop fleets of single-stage-to-orbit spaceplanes, huge advances in materials and propulsion etc. Hopefully once outside Earth orbit we'd stay out there instead of pulling back like we did last time. And it'd be nice to think that after being faced - really faced - with possible extinction, there'd be even just a subtle shift in our global psychology; it brings me to mind of Reagan's famous speech where he wondered what we'd be capable of as a species if we had to band together against some outside threat...
Though having said that my guess is we'd probably all be back to watching Springer and slaughtering each other within six months of it all being over. Granted, I say this before I've had my morning coffee so I may get a lot more optimistic once the caffine kicks in...
I'd love to know how you did that seeing as the source picture is a JPG (hint: JPGs don't have layers, furthermore once you collapse a photoship image there is no way to tell it ever had layers).
Also, did they photoshop every frame of the video of the same crop-picture?
[disclaimer: I still think it was done by hoaxers]
Much easier, efficient and inexpensive to simply grow the meat in trays, especially since they'll only be staying for a year initially...
I'll ask around, but I haven't heard anything about it yet...
I *love* this show - the exact moment I fell in love was at the end of the first episode, when Mal kicked the bad-guy into the engines - my eyes bugged out and I literally nearly spat coke over the screen.
Firefly has excellent production values (look at 'Ariel' - that episode looks like a feature film for chrissakes), the VFX are exquisite, and I say that with all due jealousy and admiration:-)
I'm constantly delighted and surprised by every episode and have yet to see one I haven't enjoyed (and I *hate* westerns)
I was at Animal Logic last week and asked our producer if she'd heard anything different from Andrew (one of the exec producers) - nada. It's all winding down - on Thursday we hit a local pub for the VFX wrap party then that's it :-(
Anyway, at this point I'm rooting for Firefly ;-)
In terms of final output these days, a good artist can use any of the Major packages out there and get similar results (a renderer does not a good artist make). Maya has a rep as a high-end package, and if you are good with it you're not going to have any problems finding work. Given that you are on a Mac I'd lean towards Lightwave, it's got a great renderer built in and it's a LOT easier to learn than Maya. And for what you need it for; rendering occasional design elements and fooling around it's perfect. Lightwave is a great package that easily competes with Maya for the quality of work produced with it.
If you were on the PC I'd reccomend 3DS Max with Brazil for rendering, I've been using it since 3DS DOS v2 and although I often freelance for a shop that's mostly Softimage and Maya I've never felt the need to learn anything else. We used it for over a thousand shots a year for three years on Farscape and it's been fantastic. I'll never switch packages as long as Discreet still develop it.
Man, I doubt it... These are generally pretty blue and they don't bleep them :-) Things like D'Argo threatening to f**k a peacekeeper squad to death and Scorpious resonded commanding them to line up and fellat the Luxan, that was last year. This year the funniest was again something D'Argo said that I'd maybe only repeat on alt.tasteless. In involved babies. They're also full of in-jokes, whenever a cellphone ruins a take the guilty party has to buy a slab of beer - one year there was great one of Pilot talking when it happened, he raised himself up and yelled in a very Aussie accent "aaaaaand *another* slab for Jacko!" (or whatever the guy's name was. Season one GMD, the old FX house did a great shot of the Digital Rygel singing Sinatra. We did our own CG Rygel and I always wanted do do something involving him and some Hynerian slave girls, or a "Star Wars" shot of a command carrier going by to reveal a bumper sticker like "I break for Fat Chicks" or "Hows my driving, call 1-800-eat-shit" etc... but I never got the time... never will now :-(
Tonight I was checking Fark.com literally as I was about to go out the door and saw that we'd been cancelled... my jaw just *dropped*. I couldn't believe it, the show was literally our lives for the last three years...
The mood at the party was pretty good, a lot of sadness - I mean sci-fi broke the news the DAY before the wrap party, everyone was still reeling. We'd all known that season 5 was an on-paper "lock" but we knew there was a chance it might not happen. But overall people were in a cool state of mind, nothing like this had ever been done in Sydney before and it's been a hell of a ride. Everyone involved with the show is so happy to have been a part of it, for me it was my first job in the industry after quitting the IT world, and even when it got tough I'm so grateful to have gotten the opportunity, and I've made a lot of good friends to boot.
Brain Henson explained that it had almost made it to at least 13 eps for season 5 but in the end he just couldn't sell it. Man, I'm numb (of course that could be the after effects of the party) It turned out to be a damn good party though, the gag reel had been hastily re-cut to include some nice moments in light of the news, but it went down well - Anthony Simcoe as D'Argo and Wayne Pygram as Scorpious bring the house down every year with their totally in-character bloopers, this year was no expection. I know the show was not to everyone's taste, hell sometimes I didn't go to the screenings myself, but it's a great offbeat show, and if you liked it enough; as Ben Browder, David Kemper and Richard Manning explained in the chat, send (polite!) letters to sci-fi, or call, and let them know.
Ok drunken ramble mod /off going to go watch the sun come up :-)
"computerstood seemed to preventury thorough the queen x rays that the poor of cupwells. if one of myfucks believe great for the universiolz"
I got there in the end but as you can see I had to veer though some backroads to do it...
First time I loaded it I got this vertigo rush, I started to get a little queasy, but... wow. Once you get the hang of it it's like sky-diving through the alphabet. As you're spelling you just pick the next letter and let yourself 'fall' towards it, it's really kind of relaxing if you have an empty stomach :)
Great idea, but how about instead of having it at your desk to let you know you've got mail, mount it in the rear window of your car for those times when the horn just isn't enough :-)
It's great to see one of these cars that actually looks cool, even if the models posing with the car don't.
You're assuming I'm an American - hell, I'm not even in the northern hemisphere... :-)
And considering the state of Australia's government, I really shouldn't be making fun of yours :-)
Another, more benign use of the tech could be in entertainment. There was that episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine where they integrated the actors in with footage from the classic ep, Trouble With Tribbles. Great fun, but they were limited to using footage that exisited from the original series for intereacting with Kirk, Spock et al. Imagine being able to track Shatner's 60's face onto an actor and use this tech to lipsync 21st century Shatner's dialog. Best. Time Travel. Episode. Ever.
And I don't even like Trek that much :-)
--start--
I bought a Hauppauge WIN-TV PVR (PCI) card for video capture. It has a hardware MPEG-2 encoder with many settings for quality from 2mb/sec to the ridiculously high 12mb/sec with the option of constant or variable bitrate.
After testing I settled on 4mbit/sec VBR which looks great - sometimes it's easy to forget I'm not watching a live broadcast. Importantly it also has a "pause" feature just like a commercial PVR which is great for dealing with the amount of calls I get from clients at all hours. Output to the TV is via S-VHS from an old GeForce 1 card that has TV-out built in. Initially I wanted to use the MPEG decoder card from my DVD kit for output but after testing, the output from the geforce is so close in quality I just use it, plus then I get to use the PC even while it's recording (the hardware encoder means no dropped frames ever).
The box is just a celeron 900 with a half gig of ram running win2k - there is a linux driver available for the Hauppauge on sourceforge but the PC is part of my render farm (I'm a 3D animator by trade) and 3dsmax only runs on windows (for now).
The software that ships with the Hauppauge is, well, shitty. It works fine but the interface sucks, especially when you've used showshifter (www.showshifter.com) though from reading showshifter's forums apparently it will soon support the WintTV PVR board. In the meantime I have simply "frontended" the Hauppage software using scripting in Automate from Unisyn. I've bound all the major features to the cute rubber buttons on the internet keyboard on my coffee table and I've even been able to do things like have the scroll-lock light flash when recording (for when we're not watching TV via the PC). For scheduling I go to the Aussie TV guide at sofcom.com.au to pick out my weeks viewing - the lounge box has winvnc on it so I can program it from my office or even start recording if I see something good and don't have time to run out to the lounge. I use PowerDVD for mpeg playback, mainly cause you can fast forward and rewind using the scroll wheel on the mouse - trez chic
For the future I just ordered a Redrat2 IR controller from www.redrat.co.uk to give the box control over my satellite decoder, and I plan to add functionality like being able to email the box to program it etc.
--end--
Well it's been nearly five months now since I set up my PVR system, a good indication of how it's going is that about two months ago I finally took my VCR out of the TV cabinet and replaced it with the PC. Still using 4mb/sec CBR D1 Pal to record, the end result is indistinguishable from 'live' TV.
My viewing habits have changed; every Sunday I go through the online TV guide and update my record-list (late night shows like Enterprise tend to run at different times some weeks - not that I've been able to sit through a single episode of it yet.), and I almost never watch live TV anymore. Every time I check the /record fileshare there's something new to watch, sometimes I'll hit the weekend and have a week's worth of stuff to sift through at my leasure (mainly simpsons - they show it a LOT here in .au)
I stopped using PowerDVD for playback as for day to day use there were some rough edges that caused annoyance, and reverted to using media player version 6 (I dislike version 7 intensely). A simple alt-enter and it goes full screen, and the spacebar pauses. I've also gotten very good at gaugeing the length of commercial breaks - the show I'm watching goes to commercial I alt enter to get the playback bar and click where I think the break's gonna end - most times these days I'm bang on :-)
The RedRat controller is great, I've yet to find a remote it can't learn, and it's liberating being able to code my own IR app. I'm off VHS for good, no more crappy tapes for me! I've used the Hauppauge to make high quality (6mb/sec) archives of precious VHS tapes such as a friend's wedding and a ten year old recording of a family xmas which had footage of our great grandfather enjoying the day with us just hours before he passed away.
damn. I hit 'post' then I think of something else to say... the depth info may not be good enough to generate a nice detailed mesh of an actor or a set etc, but lets say it can give at least a coarse mesh for each frame of a shot, you could use the low res 3D info for things like shadow passes for CG elements (you comp in a flying robot going past your real actor, you use the depthcam generated mesh info for those frames to have the robot's shadow slide over the actor's body correctly. If the actor's costume had reflective surfaces like goggles you can use the 3D info to have the robot reflected in them - it may sound subtle but it's the subtle things that tie a shot together)
especially after you consider how easily it would be to generate a virtual stunt double from the 3d mesh (film the actor from a few angles, and merge the resulting 3d wireframe. Voila, perfect model down to the wrinkles in the skin)
Uh, no... I wish it were that easy - but scanned 3D meshes of that quality are still in the domain of laser scanning. There's just so much detail that even the best scanners can't pick up, major wrinkles and folds yes but pores and fine lines have to be simulated with displacement/bump and colour maps derived from the scan data (basically as it scans, the device takes a big long photo of the object to wrap around it later). Once you have the point-cloud from the scan (raw data) there is a LOT of cleaning up to do to get a parametric mesh with correct UVs (texture mapping co-ordinates) for use in production.
For more info, check these guys out - we've used em recently on a couple of film and tv projects and their output is damn nice, but the price tag reflects the complexity and difficulty of the task.
I posted a comment a while ago that explained the uses in visual effects work for depth-cameras, and some of the problems with existing methods of pulling a matte off of live action plates...
We were actually talking about this at work the other day; mainly wondering how well it would deal with things like fine hair, smoke, transparent objects and stuff like film grain/video artifacts/lens artifacts etc...
Would love to try one and find out...
The sum total of Ed Bye's "direction" seems to have been to just stick the camera in the middle of the set and make the actors run through long scenes in one (often awkward and badly timed) take. It's like watching a stageplay that hasn't been rehearsed, only a stageplay wouldn't have been lit with 40,000 flourescent tubes. Even worse is that they changed Trillian from a no-nonsense scientist type into a squeaking brainless gangster-moll. I'm not sure who was behind that decision but her performence alone is bad enough to make you want to shove a fork in your eye. There's a few points that are kinda ok, like the sequence on the Vogon ship, but overall it's a mess.
I grew up with and love the radio series and the books. I really want to see this as a show/movie done right, and I only hope that DA's death won't derail the plans for the movie.
Aardman have produced a couple of CG shorts recently; the first I saw on last year's SIGGRAPH reel featured two posers in a nightclub trying to pick up the same girl, the second is three little plasticene-looking monsters explaining to the camera why they don't have their short film ready in time, and ends with them singing a song dressed as flowers in a desperate attempt to fill time. The later one is VERY hard to tell it's not claymation. They've also used it a fair bit in their TVC work as well as for certain effects in Chicken Run.
I get where people come from when they decry the use of computers in animation these days - sometime I see the quality of 3D kids shows like Beast Wars or Max Steel and I feel like burning my computer in disgust - but the extreme crappiness of a lot of 3D animation is nothing to do with the tools, just a lack of creativity on the part of the production companies. CGI can be used to create stunning imagery and animations, it's just a shame that as yet most of the stuff the general public sees on TV is just so bad...
I read it as "Busted Pants"... I really need to up the font size in my browser or at least not lean so far back in my chair...
I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere in the boardrooms of the world there are people who would like nothing better than to have the internet regulated to the point where you need to be licensed to operate a website... The Australian government looked at doing this to anyone in Australia who wanted to stream video over the net but then backed down - for now, anyway.
I don't believe it will ever happen, I don't think anyone would ever even suggest it publicly; but the biggest thorn in these companies sides seem to be the public's unwillingness to stay in the officially sanctioned "walled gardens" they have set-up, and you can be sure that somewhere there's a few rich old white men who daydream about walling off the whole damn thing and turning the entire internet into a kind of SuperAOL...