Actually, it's usually just poor integration into the scene. If anything, they aren't rendered and composited at a high enough resolution.
Compositing, getting the lighting to match, and using "natural" camera moves/framing/etc. (don't use a static shot, frame it like you normally would instead of leaving a little bit of leeway for the CG guys, etc.) can often make or break a combination CG/live action shot.
And before it starts, that wasn't a "Linux is so stable that it runs longer than Windows" post. Rather, just a comment on the fact that the longer your system is on, the more likely you are to experience a crash.
I my experience people who turn their system on, use it for a while, and then turn it off immediately have fewer crashes than people who (like me) leave their system on 24/7. Of course, the people who turn their system on and off a lot wear their HDs out faster >:)
I didn't say that Linux was perfect. Hell, the kernel that ships with RedHat 8 (2.4.18-7 I think) would freeze during heavy IDE activity unless I disabled DMA (by passing the kernel the ide=nodma parameter), which is why I upgraded it to 2.4.21-pre5-ac2.
Obviously all OSes are going to have bugs. The question is, how severe are those bugs? How frequent do they manifest themselves? KDE hasn't crashed on me in a very long time, and Linux hasn't crashed since I upgraded to 2.4.21-pre5-ac2 (and prior to "upgrading" to RedHat 8 in March, back when I ran RH 7.2 I think the OS crashed maybe once).
My experiences running Win2k on the same system haven't been nearly as good.
A Linux distro probably does include more than 50 million loc, but that is for EVERYTHING.
When you install a Microsoft OS on a new machine, what do you get? You get the underlying OS, a pretty but braindead GUI, IIS, and a few toy apps (like Wordpad and MS Paint).
When you install a Linux distro, you get the OS (kernel and GNU tools), a less pretty but less braindead GUI (only if you want it), Apache (again, only if you want it), and a boatload of useful programs (GCC, CVS, The GIMP, OpenOffice, etc., and only if you want them).
The 50 million lines of code in Windows is for the OS. Linux, even if you include the code for the base GNU stuff (cp, ls, bash, glibc, etc.) in all likelyhood has much less.
I run the following system: Pentium III @ 1ghz 256MB RAM GeForce2 MX RedHat 8, upgraded to the 2.4.21-pre5-ac2 kernel KDE 3.0.3-8 RedHat
And I almost never have problems with KDE. I use Kate for almost all my programming, and I can count the number of times it's crashed on one hand with fingers left over.
You know that you can adjust how much CPU time KDE uses, right? I don't know about other distros, but for RedHat 8 it's under Extras - Preferences - Desktop Settings Wizard.
Some who cling to the nostalgia will always do things that way.
It has nothing to do with nostalgia. Have you ever been on a movie shoot? It's a very different experience to direct a live action film than a CG film.
I don't really expect the/. crowd to understand, but live action films aren't going away.
Really? Then why did The Matrix: Reloaded come out 2 weeks after X-Men 2? Why did George Lucas release Attack of the Clones 2 weeks after Spider-Man came out? Oh, wait, right, because the MPAA doesn't schedule the films' release...
The studios used to try to give the other studio's big films a wide berth from fear of it crushing their own films, but now it seems that this has gone out the window.
Actually, no. The 90/10 deal is only for big films.
For others, it's usually 50/50 or even 43/57.
In the end, it usually works out to around 50/50.
Like you, I have also worked in a movie theater. And any idiot knows that only a fraction of a theater's operating costs are recovered through ticket sales.
So why are all movies the same price at the theater? Surely this is not a free market solution.
Because the individual theaters don't decide the ticket price. The theater owners and the distributors have agreed to charge X amount of dollars in each area. Certain people, like George Lucas, have enough clout to get the theater owners to charge more ("If you don't raise your ticket price by $0.50, you can't show my movie.").
That's nonsense. All it would mean is that studios would actually have to be budget conscious for once. It doesn't take anywhere near $100mil today to produce a good movie--even one loaded with special effects. For example, there is absolutely no reason why any celebrity actor/actress should be paid megabucks to shoot one flick. Nor does all the glitz and glamour (and sleeze) surrounding the industry need to exist. And then you take into account how many absolutely worthless movies are produced. There is plenty of money in an efficient and free market version of Hollywood.
That's nonsense. The Matrix: Reloaded cost something like $120 million. Even independent films are expensive to make. For example, the indie film Greasewood Flat cost around $700 thousand, and had it been shot in California it would have been vastly more expensive. It's obvious to me that you've never made a film: movie producers are extremely budget conscious. Why do you think that so many films are shot in Vancouver? Because it's cheaper to make a movie in Canada than it is in LA (fewer unions, mostly). Of course, California (LA in particular) and New York are probably the 2 most expensive places to shoot a film in the country, possibly the world.
As far as actors, I've always felt that, in any industry, you make what you can get. If somebody is willing to pay you $20 million to do a movie, get it while you can.
When it comes to "worthless" movies, all I can say is that movies are hard to make. There are countless numbers of things that can go wrong and ruin what would have otherwise been a good film.
And if by an "efficient" version of Hollywood you mean the old, 1930s-1960s studio system, no thanks.
Fortunately, in a direct parallel to the changing music industry, technology will, in the relatively near future, make Hollywood entirely obsolete anyhow. If the studios can do photo-real human characters and sets today (ex. Matrix Reloaded), it'll only be 10-15 years at most before the same capability is available to every home PC user, likely even near real-time. At the same time, advances in user interfaces and perhaps even an element of AI will replace the need for hundreds of animation artists. So much for production costs!
Not everyone wants to sit at their computer all day. For most filmmakers, most of the enjoyment comes from actually being on the set.
And you seem to forget that as computing power increases, so do the demands for greater detail and realism. The CG humans in The Matrix: Reloaded looked horridly fake, BTW.
As far as AI goes, that's too ridiculous for me to comment on.
Yes, but you won't even see many of those, and they'll be of much lower quality.
And you can forget about the epics. No LotR trilogy.
The fact of it is, all the tools in the filmmakers toolbox can be a good thing when used with some thought, discretion, and skill, and that includes CG. But the lower the budget, the fewer of those tools you can afford, and therefor the types of films you can make are more limited.
I don't know how it is in the UK, but in America that isn't allowed.
It used to be that all the major studios owned a theater chain, but after people realized that doing so bordered on having a monopoly, the gov't forced the studios to spin off their theater chains.
Which resulted in the National Association of Theater Owners, and they're constantly arguing with the MPAA member studios over something.
They wouldn't do it out of fear that the idea would catch on among American theaters. So they'd just not distribute films in the UK (at least for a while), to make a point.
I don't know how things are over there, but here in the US people seem perfectly willing to pay $8.50 for a ticket. As an example, The Matrix: Reloaded made $134 million during opening weekend.
When it comes to concessions, I wasn't just talking about easyCinema, but rather to theaters in general.
But as others have said, you shouldn't expect anyone looking to use the airline industry's business model to turn large profits.
Except that, with this scheme, you would no longer see expensive films like Spider-Man, Harry Potter, Titanic, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, any of The Matrix films, etc.
This is because the studios get their money from ticket sales. The lower the price is on tickets, the less money the studios make. And at $0.33 per ticket, the studios are going to make almost no money at all.
The only possible way this could work is if the studios were like, "Ok. We're charging you (the theater) $X per ticket. If you want to charge more, and keep the difference, fine. But no matter what, we're getting $X per ticket sold." Basically, this would make it similar to retail (where the manufacturer charges a certain, fixed price (wholesale), and the retailer usually doubles that and keeps the difference). But that's not the way it is right now: studios get a percentage of the total ticket sales (usually 90% for the first few weeks and if it's a big movie, then 50% after that), whether that's $0.33 per ticket or $8.50 per ticket.
That's Buena Vista. Owned by everyone's other favorite Evil Empire, Disney.
But the MPA and the MPAA have nothing to do with distribution.
It's doubtful that they'd be ruled a monopoly, since Buena Vista (via their parent corporation, Disney), only makes a handful of films. The rest, and the conditions under which they can be distributed, are determined by the company that actually makes the film.
Except that no matter how little you charge, there are always going to be empty seats during the day, during the week, and for films that have been out for a while.
Ticket prices vary from area to area. It has nothing to do with what the theater wants or what the market will support, at least not directly. It's very rare that the individual theaters get to decide what they charge. Rather, the corporate suits are the ones who decide. There is constant arguing/negotiating between the MPAA members and the NATO members (no, not the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but the National Association of Theater Owners) over how much to charge for each area.
And the matinee prices don't really matter, since relatively few people see a movie during matinee hours.
Don't bitch about $8. In New York the prices are something like $10. Here in Phoenix, AZ they're $8.50.
I have a hard time believing that there exists a decent theater in a decent-sized town that still only charges $4 for a non-senior/child, non-matinee ticket.
Except that the MPA and the MPAA aren't monopolies. They can't be, because they make no actual product, nor do they have anything to do with the distribution terms of individual films.
It's the MPAA member studios that make the films, and it's up to those studios and their distributors to negotiate the distribution terms for their films. The MPAA has nothing to do with it. What's more, the studios compete with each other, eliminating any chance of there being a monopoly.
Except you forget that the movie's makers get their money from ticket sales, at least they do here in the US.
Even if easyCinema offered to make up for the difference in ticket price (which they aren't; they're just saying they'll pay the same amount for the right to show the film as the other theaters, which is very small compared to the film's actual budget), easyCinema's price for everything else (candy, drinks, etc.) would skyrocket (why do you think theaters charge so much already? When you only get 50% of the ticket price, you've got to make your money elsewhere).
Typically here in the US, the distributor gets 50%, and the theater gets the other 50%. The distributor then takes their 50% and divides it up amongst all remaining parties according to their contract(s) with said remaining parties.
And the MPAA isn't a monopoly. It doesn't make movies, it doesn't distribute them, and it doesn't advertise them, therefor it can't be a monopoly. The whole point of the MPAA originally was to be a non-governmental regulatory force (here in the States, it's the MPAA that gives the movies their (voluntary) rating; it was also the MPAA that decided the dispute between New Line Cinema and MGM over the name of Austin Powers: Goldmember), but its purpose has been extended a bit since then.
What's more, the member studios compete against each other, and none of them are monopolies.
If ordered that since they allow other theaters to exhibit their films they must also allow easyCinema to, it could be very likely that the major Hollywood studios would simply not distribute their films in theaters at all, since they don't make much money in the UK anyway (even non-fluff, non-action films make only a few million in the UK).
Ultimately, I think that this will hurt everybody: the big Hollywood studios, the UK studios, and the independents, since 50% of a 33 cent ticket price is only 16.5 cents. At that rate, even if everyone in the United States (population is approx. 280 million) saw a film, it would only pull in 46.2 million. And since the percentage of any country's population that see a particular film is incredibly small, films would make far less.
But how would this hurt the moviegoing public? Simple: far fewer films will get made (if any), they will be much shorter, and of far lower quality.
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Actually, it's usually just poor integration into the scene. If anything, they aren't rendered and composited at a high enough resolution.
Compositing, getting the lighting to match, and using "natural" camera moves/framing/etc. (don't use a static shot, frame it like you normally would instead of leaving a little bit of leeway for the CG guys, etc.) can often make or break a combination CG/live action shot.
Likewise, e-mailing the pictures to s _ r i d e n o u r (AT) k e w l p c (DOT) o r g would be greatly appreciated.
Here I stand, goin' peein',
Lettin' out my inner Tennessean.
And before it starts, that wasn't a "Linux is so stable that it runs longer than Windows" post. Rather, just a comment on the fact that the longer your system is on, the more likely you are to experience a crash.
I my experience people who turn their system on, use it for a while, and then turn it off immediately have fewer crashes than people who (like me) leave their system on 24/7. Of course, the people who turn their system on and off a lot wear their HDs out faster >:)
Oh, and one more thing: this system is on 24/7, for weeks (and sometimes months) at a time.
How long do you leave your laptop on?
I didn't say that Linux was perfect. Hell, the kernel that ships with RedHat 8 (2.4.18-7 I think) would freeze during heavy IDE activity unless I disabled DMA (by passing the kernel the ide=nodma parameter), which is why I upgraded it to 2.4.21-pre5-ac2.
Obviously all OSes are going to have bugs. The question is, how severe are those bugs? How frequent do they manifest themselves? KDE hasn't crashed on me in a very long time, and Linux hasn't crashed since I upgraded to 2.4.21-pre5-ac2 (and prior to "upgrading" to RedHat 8 in March, back when I ran RH 7.2 I think the OS crashed maybe once).
My experiences running Win2k on the same system haven't been nearly as good.
A Linux distro probably does include more than 50 million loc, but that is for EVERYTHING.
When you install a Microsoft OS on a new machine, what do you get? You get the underlying OS, a pretty but braindead GUI, IIS, and a few toy apps (like Wordpad and MS Paint).
When you install a Linux distro, you get the OS (kernel and GNU tools), a less pretty but less braindead GUI (only if you want it), Apache (again, only if you want it), and a boatload of useful programs (GCC, CVS, The GIMP, OpenOffice, etc., and only if you want them).
The 50 million lines of code in Windows is for the OS. Linux, even if you include the code for the base GNU stuff (cp, ls, bash, glibc, etc.) in all likelyhood has much less.
I run the following system:
Pentium III @ 1ghz
256MB RAM
GeForce2 MX
RedHat 8, upgraded to the 2.4.21-pre5-ac2 kernel
KDE 3.0.3-8 RedHat
And I almost never have problems with KDE. I use Kate for almost all my programming, and I can count the number of times it's crashed on one hand with fingers left over.
You know that you can adjust how much CPU time KDE uses, right? I don't know about other distros, but for RedHat 8 it's under Extras - Preferences - Desktop Settings Wizard.
More than that, these vertebrates would need a similar biology to ours.
Some who cling to the nostalgia will always do things that way.
/. crowd to understand, but live action films aren't going away.
It has nothing to do with nostalgia. Have you ever been on a movie shoot? It's a very different experience to direct a live action film than a CG film.
I don't really expect the
Really? Then why did The Matrix: Reloaded come out 2 weeks after X-Men 2? Why did George Lucas release Attack of the Clones 2 weeks after Spider-Man came out? Oh, wait, right, because the MPAA doesn't schedule the films' release...
The studios used to try to give the other studio's big films a wide berth from fear of it crushing their own films, but now it seems that this has gone out the window.
Actually, no. The 90/10 deal is only for big films.
For others, it's usually 50/50 or even 43/57.
In the end, it usually works out to around 50/50.
Like you, I have also worked in a movie theater. And any idiot knows that only a fraction of a theater's operating costs are recovered through ticket sales.
So why are all movies the same price at the theater? Surely this is not a free market solution.
Because the individual theaters don't decide the ticket price. The theater owners and the distributors have agreed to charge X amount of dollars in each area. Certain people, like George Lucas, have enough clout to get the theater owners to charge more ("If you don't raise your ticket price by $0.50, you can't show my movie.").
That's nonsense. All it would mean is that studios would actually have to be budget conscious for once. It doesn't take anywhere near $100mil today to produce a good movie--even one loaded with special effects. For example, there is absolutely no reason why any celebrity actor/actress should be paid megabucks to shoot one flick. Nor does all the glitz and glamour (and sleeze) surrounding the industry need to exist. And then you take into account how many absolutely worthless movies are produced. There is plenty of money in an efficient and free market version of Hollywood.
That's nonsense. The Matrix: Reloaded cost something like $120 million. Even independent films are expensive to make. For example, the indie film Greasewood Flat cost around $700 thousand, and had it been shot in California it would have been vastly more expensive. It's obvious to me that you've never made a film: movie producers are extremely budget conscious. Why do you think that so many films are shot in Vancouver? Because it's cheaper to make a movie in Canada than it is in LA (fewer unions, mostly). Of course, California (LA in particular) and New York are probably the 2 most expensive places to shoot a film in the country, possibly the world.
As far as actors, I've always felt that, in any industry, you make what you can get. If somebody is willing to pay you $20 million to do a movie, get it while you can.
When it comes to "worthless" movies, all I can say is that movies are hard to make. There are countless numbers of things that can go wrong and ruin what would have otherwise been a good film.
And if by an "efficient" version of Hollywood you mean the old, 1930s-1960s studio system, no thanks.
Fortunately, in a direct parallel to the changing music industry, technology will, in the relatively near future, make Hollywood entirely obsolete anyhow. If the studios can do photo-real human characters and sets today (ex. Matrix Reloaded), it'll only be 10-15 years at most before the same capability is available to every home PC user, likely even near real-time. At the same time, advances in user interfaces and perhaps even an element of AI will replace the need for hundreds of animation artists. So much for production costs!
Not everyone wants to sit at their computer all day. For most filmmakers, most of the enjoyment comes from actually being on the set.
And you seem to forget that as computing power increases, so do the demands for greater detail and realism. The CG humans in The Matrix: Reloaded looked horridly fake, BTW.
As far as AI goes, that's too ridiculous for me to comment on.
Yes, but you won't even see many of those, and they'll be of much lower quality.
And you can forget about the epics. No LotR trilogy.
The fact of it is, all the tools in the filmmakers toolbox can be a good thing when used with some thought, discretion, and skill, and that includes CG. But the lower the budget, the fewer of those tools you can afford, and therefor the types of films you can make are more limited.
I don't know how it is in the UK, but in America that isn't allowed.
It used to be that all the major studios owned a theater chain, but after people realized that doing so bordered on having a monopoly, the gov't forced the studios to spin off their theater chains.
Which resulted in the National Association of Theater Owners, and they're constantly arguing with the MPAA member studios over something.
In New York, ticket prices are (at least) $10.
Here in Phoenix, Arizona, tickets cost something like $8.50.
Except that, as I said, the movie studios are competing. Competing for theaters, competing for ticket sales, etc.
They wouldn't do it out of fear that the idea would catch on among American theaters. So they'd just not distribute films in the UK (at least for a while), to make a point.
I don't know how things are over there, but here in the US people seem perfectly willing to pay $8.50 for a ticket. As an example, The Matrix: Reloaded made $134 million during opening weekend.
When it comes to concessions, I wasn't just talking about easyCinema, but rather to theaters in general.
But as others have said, you shouldn't expect anyone looking to use the airline industry's business model to turn large profits.
Except that, with this scheme, you would no longer see expensive films like Spider-Man, Harry Potter, Titanic, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, any of The Matrix films, etc.
This is because the studios get their money from ticket sales. The lower the price is on tickets, the less money the studios make. And at $0.33 per ticket, the studios are going to make almost no money at all.
The only possible way this could work is if the studios were like, "Ok. We're charging you (the theater) $X per ticket. If you want to charge more, and keep the difference, fine. But no matter what, we're getting $X per ticket sold." Basically, this would make it similar to retail (where the manufacturer charges a certain, fixed price (wholesale), and the retailer usually doubles that and keeps the difference). But that's not the way it is right now: studios get a percentage of the total ticket sales (usually 90% for the first few weeks and if it's a big movie, then 50% after that), whether that's $0.33 per ticket or $8.50 per ticket.
That's Buena Vista. Owned by everyone's other favorite Evil Empire, Disney.
But the MPA and the MPAA have nothing to do with distribution.
It's doubtful that they'd be ruled a monopoly, since Buena Vista (via their parent corporation, Disney), only makes a handful of films. The rest, and the conditions under which they can be distributed, are determined by the company that actually makes the film.
Except that no matter how little you charge, there are always going to be empty seats during the day, during the week, and for films that have been out for a while.
Ticket prices vary from area to area. It has nothing to do with what the theater wants or what the market will support, at least not directly. It's very rare that the individual theaters get to decide what they charge. Rather, the corporate suits are the ones who decide. There is constant arguing/negotiating between the MPAA members and the NATO members (no, not the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but the National Association of Theater Owners) over how much to charge for each area.
And the matinee prices don't really matter, since relatively few people see a movie during matinee hours.
Don't bitch about $8. In New York the prices are something like $10. Here in Phoenix, AZ they're $8.50.
I have a hard time believing that there exists a decent theater in a decent-sized town that still only charges $4 for a non-senior/child, non-matinee ticket.
Except that the MPA and the MPAA aren't monopolies. They can't be, because they make no actual product, nor do they have anything to do with the distribution terms of individual films.
It's the MPAA member studios that make the films, and it's up to those studios and their distributors to negotiate the distribution terms for their films. The MPAA has nothing to do with it. What's more, the studios compete with each other, eliminating any chance of there being a monopoly.
Except you forget that the movie's makers get their money from ticket sales, at least they do here in the US.
Even if easyCinema offered to make up for the difference in ticket price (which they aren't; they're just saying they'll pay the same amount for the right to show the film as the other theaters, which is very small compared to the film's actual budget), easyCinema's price for everything else (candy, drinks, etc.) would skyrocket (why do you think theaters charge so much already? When you only get 50% of the ticket price, you've got to make your money elsewhere).
Typically here in the US, the distributor gets 50%, and the theater gets the other 50%. The distributor then takes their 50% and divides it up amongst all remaining parties according to their contract(s) with said remaining parties.
And the MPAA isn't a monopoly. It doesn't make movies, it doesn't distribute them, and it doesn't advertise them, therefor it can't be a monopoly. The whole point of the MPAA originally was to be a non-governmental regulatory force (here in the States, it's the MPAA that gives the movies their (voluntary) rating; it was also the MPAA that decided the dispute between New Line Cinema and MGM over the name of Austin Powers: Goldmember), but its purpose has been extended a bit since then.
What's more, the member studios compete against each other, and none of them are monopolies.
If ordered that since they allow other theaters to exhibit their films they must also allow easyCinema to, it could be very likely that the major Hollywood studios would simply not distribute their films in theaters at all, since they don't make much money in the UK anyway (even non-fluff, non-action films make only a few million in the UK).
Ultimately, I think that this will hurt everybody: the big Hollywood studios, the UK studios, and the independents, since 50% of a 33 cent ticket price is only 16.5 cents. At that rate, even if everyone in the United States (population is approx. 280 million) saw a film, it would only pull in 46.2 million. And since the percentage of any country's population that see a particular film is incredibly small, films would make far less.
But how would this hurt the moviegoing public? Simple: far fewer films will get made (if any), they will be much shorter, and of far lower quality.
Hate to tell you this, but a Betta != Blowfish.