"It is at the point wheree going higher resolution is moot, but on a screen that is movie theater size, you'll want that resolution. IIRC, movie frames are often rendered in 4k pixel resolution."
Actually most movie frames are rendered at 2048x1556 (2K) resolution. 4K is reserved for specific cases when the extra resolution is warranted. The data infrastructure requirements to do everything at 4K is just too much. And, at least in VFX, one might rather work on 2K than 4K, because more pixels == more work. Period.
-K
Panasonic doesn't have an HD DV camcorder. They have the one that does 24fps 480p (AG-DVX100A), but that's still standard def, not high def. The only miniDV HD camcorder out there is from JVC (the GR-HD1 IIRC). That camera records 1280p, 30fps using MPEG2 compression to fit the HD video on the tiny miniDV tapes.
DVCPro HD, I read somewhere uses a variant of the DV codec, but at 4x the data rate, does not record to miniDV tape.
-K
Final Cut Pro has been supporting uncompressed HD for a long time, just not natively over firewire. Uncompressed HD requires more bandwidth than firewire currently offers. As you can see on the apple web site.(http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/), for uncompressed HD you need to have a 3rd party PCI card. Panasonic's flavor of HD is highly compressed, so it fits over firewire just fine.
For 3D this can be true.
However, for 2D rendering (like from Shake for instance), the network can quickly become a huge bottleneck when using large renderfarms as all the nodes are pulling hundreds of elements across the network to be put into a single composite, then writing the final out to disk. You can easily end up with CPU's waiting for elements to load as the network gets jammed.
-K
I remember an article on Steve Wozniak, where he had acquired a long-time goal of 888-8888 as his cell phone number.
The problem with having that as your phone number was all the calls from little kids who would pick up a phone and hit the number 8 many times. It was bad enough that he was fored to abandon the phone number.
I can't find the original article, but I'm pretty sure it was in Wired.
-K
First off, IANAL, so this is just based on my own understanding.
Just because some other case ruled on the matter doesn't mean anything. Copyright cases are decided on a case by case basis, and as such the Judge involved can disagree with a case that has precedent. Copyright cases are not that predictable. I think this is where a lot of people run into trouble with copyright.
And, while a museum or a web site may not be able to hold a copyright on a piece of art, they can control access to it and make you agree to terms or payment in order to gain the access you want. Thus, it might as well be a copyright, even if the original item is in the public domain.
If you look at the print edition of that WIRED tidbit, you can look closely at the picture to see that it's actually shelves of DLT or more likely SuperDLT tapes with bar codes on them, part of their reported.5 petabytes of tape backup.
The article says "Meet the real star of Lord of the Rings - a 1,600-box server farm." but they dont' have a single picture of the actual boxes. If you want to see a brief glimpse at some of the renderfarm, you can see it at the beginning of the VFX section on disc 4 of the Two Towers extended edition.
I'm really curious if Wired thinks they actually rendered the movies using shelves of DLT tapes. Do they have 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports on them???
On that subject the stats seem to imply also that they have 10gigabit ethernet everywhere, which is a retarded waste of money if that were in fact the case. I imagine that interconnects between their core switches would be 10 gigabit ethernet, but anything beyond gig-E to each node would have a hard time being utilized.
The strategy is not necessarily for small government now, this term, but for a down-the-road approach. Spend spend spend, tax cut tax cut tax cut. Then, when the "oh it doesn't really matter" defecit gets to be so big and so out of control a few years down the line, SOMETHING will have to be cut, and what do you think that is going to be? Social programs, exactly the part of gov that they can't stand. By then it will be politically impossible for anyone, especially spineless democrats, to raise taxes to keep them. And we wouldn't want to take away from our spending on homeland security would we? That would be un-patriotic.
It's all part of a long-term trend that is very disturbing, unless that is part of your agenda.
One of the protections for the creator of a work which is built-in to copyright law is the right to control what are called derivative works. If I change something from an original work, whether it is taking something out like CleanFlicks or incorporating one work in another, I'm creating something new -- a new derivative work as it is called. Creating a derivative work without the permission of the original copyright holder is an infringement of their rights as guaranteed in copyright law. I think that while its current implementation leaves some things to be desired, copyright is a good thing as an idea -- it is set up in the U.S. Constitution after all, and you should be able to sell your book that you wrote without someone else selling it with their name on it. We want to encourage people to make new things and copyright was meant to protect those people's ability to profit from their own work.
If I look into the history of Cinema, there is one thing I see case after case after case of: censorship, either by the government or self-censorship under pressure from religious and community groups. This is the reason why we have ratings. Films with language and sexual content get "worse" ratings than those that do not. The ratings system has an incredible amount of power over the creation of movies in the first place, and this is tantamount to having CleanFlicks come in during pre-production and saying "no don't include that." There is a reason why a studio will do almost anything to make sure a film does not get an NC-17 kiss of death. The ratings system is designed so that you can say "look that movie has nudity and violence, and I don't want to see that" --- and so you go see another film or whatever suits your fancy. Does owning a copy of a film on DVD or whatever give me the right to change it as I see fit? No. Can I copy portions of it for my own personal non-commercial or educational purposes? Probably. Fair use is not an absolute right set up in any particular law. Fair use is a defense when you are sued for copyright infringement, and it has tests that are all decided on a case-by-case basis. What would be nice is if there was some legislation that outlined exactly what fair use is.
Movies as shown on network TV are edited, yes. They are edited often for time and for content. I think it is terrible to do so. In this case, however, the owners of the copyright have consented to the changes ( $ is a powerful motivator ) in order to show the movie on TV. I wish movies were not edited when they were shown, period, but I guess I'm in the minority.
I think if you don't want to watch a movie with violence, sex, or whatever, you should look at our built-in mechanism for self-censorship, the ratings, and decide what to watch based on that. That's what it is there for.
That doesn't suprise me at all. I don't want to pay for bandwidth so people can run P2P prorgrams to their hearts content. Napster and its siblings have been the worst thing to ever happen to the network here. Each time they have increased the pipe, the use would easily match it, so that the residence halls (where all the p2p crap mostly is) is pegged at full capacity most but not all of the time. What did't make sense to me what the fact that ping times would sometimes be great when the bandwidth chart indicated the line was full, but other times when people were not using the network nearly as much the ping times were equally horrid.
When IU banned Napster, I knew plenty of students who were not happy. I thought it was a good thing.
I simply wanted to know what caused the latency issue - since it seemed so random. I've always known what caused the bandwidth use.
Maybe more like capacity. I'm a student at Indiana University (Bloomington campus) and we have had some of the most horrendous ping times I've ever seen. As net capacity here has gone up, ping times have gone down. I once enjoyed Quake 3 ping times of around 30ms for most sites I played at. Now, I'm really lucky if I could get under 100ms. Four years ago, IU had a couple of T1's for the entire network (residence halls and the academic part of campus.) Now, we have dual T3's: one for academia and one for the residence halls. I've tracked the latency problems by periodically pinging Yahoo from the command line (which seemed as good a guage as any, since it was never previously more than about 60ms.) Well, depending on the time of day and the orbit of the planets, etc. I might get a ping time for Yahoo anywhere between 45ms and 550ms. Yes, 550ms. It's like someone added a component to the network that adds lag. The best part about the increase in lag is that it slowly fluctuates throughout the day and universally adds to any non-campus (and non-internet2) site or server. So, last year I gave up online gaming all together because I just couldn't get ping times that were acceptable anymore. And to top it off, the graphs of internet use did not correspond to the times when the lag was greatest. It made no sense, and the IT people here didn't know what to tell me when I asked them about this. Oh well. It's probably a good thing I gave up gaming.
Hopefully this goes a step in the direction of good ping times again.
Arnold Schwarzenegger got $75,000 to do the audio commentary for the Total Recall "Special Limited Edition" DVD. That kind of exploitation is going to run into a wall sooner or later where the studio is just going to say no. To me, that's a rediculously expensive extra feature. Personally, I don't care much about commentary except by the director.
I for one think that this phenomenon is opening new possibilities for the filmmakers to tell their story. A director might be able to include on a DVD the version he or she wanted to create but could not do so within the confines of the major studios. The final cut is no longer the final cut.
However, I don't think that having the ability to "interactively" select a film rating is a good idea. The ratings system has already done much to stifle films tackling serious subjects. The NC-17 rating is a financial kiss of death. (perhaps not that extreme, but close). I fear that people would self-censor themselves in some kind of denial that serious subjects and issues and violence exist. Whenever I see a movie that has been censored, time compressed, cropped and edited for the masses on a television I am saddened that I am not seeing the whole movie the way it was supposed to be, and thus may not be getting the messages at all that the film was meant to convey but did not due to the cuts.
As high quality digital tools become available at lower and lower prices, the democratization of the filmmaking process will be interesting to watch to see what happens. DVD at least offers a way for the stories to be retold or restored to the way they were intended. I hope that trend will continue. Please no more censorship, we have enough already.
With a Final Cut Pro setup, it's not $4000 for the whole setup to be equivilant to the Avid Film Composer.
I think most Telecine machines cost about a million dollars, so you would probably pay for someone else to do that instead of buying your own. So, you'd be working with some kind of video transfer of your film. Once you capture the footage into Final Cut Pro, you would use the Cinema Tools to undo the 24-->29.97FPS conversion so that you are back to the original framerate.
Then you would edit your film in FCP at 24fps and then use Cinema Tools to generate a supposedly accurate edit decision list that you would use to cut the original camera negative to cut your movie.
Could you do that with FCP+Cinema Tools cheaper than Avid Film Composer? You bet, but it's not a $4000 matter unless you are given a DV transfer and happen to have a DV deck, etc. Don't forget about good pro video monitors either.
If you're not using a DV transfer of film, then you'll need a capture card if you are coming from some analog or any non-DV source. That could be from $600 to $10,000+
If you think you're going to do HD resolution final editing with a FCP system for $4000 you're in for a shock. You'd need a LOT more than $30k.
When you just need an EDL, why would you pay all that money for extra hardware you don't need?
-K
Hopefully this will solve some of the issues that have existed with Film Logic negative cut lists. I've been wondering for a long time what was going to come out of that purchase.
Now, it will be very interesting to see what happens with Nothing Real. They are working on an OSX port of Shake. Maybe we'll see a $8000 price drop in that program? Look out After Effects.
I think Final Cut is a fantastic program. One of the major differences between Avid and Final Cut Pro is scalability. If I buy Final Cut Pro and decide to go from DV to HD, I can add in a hardware card and some fast storage and presto - HD editing with Final Cut Pro. If you look at Avid (remember XPress DV 3 is also for OSX) I cannot upgrade from XPress DV to say, the full version of XPress without considerably more expense in from Avid.
Personally, I'm more than happy to see more film oriented products coming out. I'm happy to have the option of FCP for film now rather than looking at and then running away from the price of a Film Composer setup.
-K
I've watched the X-Files since season 3, and in that time seen enough re-runs to have watched it all up until this season. The show has been declining ever since they decided to throw away the entire story they were building up over the last several seasons. They have never recovered since. David Duchovny saw the decline and left the show. It's just too bad they could not have brought the show to a respectable end at the show's height instead of letting it whither away while they tried to sqeeze that last few dollars out of it.
Sigh.
Slashdot Mirror
"It is at the point wheree going higher resolution is moot, but on a screen that is movie theater size, you'll want that resolution. IIRC, movie frames are often rendered in 4k pixel resolution." Actually most movie frames are rendered at 2048x1556 (2K) resolution. 4K is reserved for specific cases when the extra resolution is warranted. The data infrastructure requirements to do everything at 4K is just too much. And, at least in VFX, one might rather work on 2K than 4K, because more pixels == more work. Period. -K
Panasonic doesn't have an HD DV camcorder. They have the one that does 24fps 480p (AG-DVX100A), but that's still standard def, not high def. The only miniDV HD camcorder out there is from JVC (the GR-HD1 IIRC). That camera records 1280p, 30fps using MPEG2 compression to fit the HD video on the tiny miniDV tapes. DVCPro HD, I read somewhere uses a variant of the DV codec, but at 4x the data rate, does not record to miniDV tape. -K
Final Cut Pro has been supporting uncompressed HD for a long time, just not natively over firewire. Uncompressed HD requires more bandwidth than firewire currently offers. As you can see on the apple web site.(http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/), for uncompressed HD you need to have a 3rd party PCI card. Panasonic's flavor of HD is highly compressed, so it fits over firewire just fine.
For 3D this can be true. However, for 2D rendering (like from Shake for instance), the network can quickly become a huge bottleneck when using large renderfarms as all the nodes are pulling hundreds of elements across the network to be put into a single composite, then writing the final out to disk. You can easily end up with CPU's waiting for elements to load as the network gets jammed. -K
I remember an article on Steve Wozniak, where he had acquired a long-time goal of 888-8888 as his cell phone number. The problem with having that as your phone number was all the calls from little kids who would pick up a phone and hit the number 8 many times. It was bad enough that he was fored to abandon the phone number. I can't find the original article, but I'm pretty sure it was in Wired. -K
First off, IANAL, so this is just based on my own understanding. Just because some other case ruled on the matter doesn't mean anything. Copyright cases are decided on a case by case basis, and as such the Judge involved can disagree with a case that has precedent. Copyright cases are not that predictable. I think this is where a lot of people run into trouble with copyright. And, while a museum or a web site may not be able to hold a copyright on a piece of art, they can control access to it and make you agree to terms or payment in order to gain the access you want. Thus, it might as well be a copyright, even if the original item is in the public domain.
Usually film frames is rendered to 2048x1556, as a 10-bit log cineon file (about 12.1MB per frame).
-K
If you look at the print edition of that WIRED tidbit, you can look closely at the picture to see that it's actually shelves of DLT or more likely SuperDLT tapes with bar codes on them, part of their reported .5 petabytes of tape backup.
The article says "Meet the real star of Lord of the Rings - a 1,600-box server farm." but they dont' have a single picture of the actual boxes. If you want to see a brief glimpse at some of the renderfarm, you can see it at the beginning of the VFX section on disc 4 of the Two Towers extended edition.
I'm really curious if Wired thinks they actually rendered the movies using shelves of DLT tapes. Do they have 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports on them???
On that subject the stats seem to imply also that they have 10gigabit ethernet everywhere, which is a retarded waste of money if that were in fact the case. I imagine that interconnects between their core switches would be 10 gigabit ethernet, but anything beyond gig-E to each node would have a hard time being utilized.
-K
The strategy is not necessarily for small government now, this term, but for a down-the-road approach. Spend spend spend, tax cut tax cut tax cut. Then, when the "oh it doesn't really matter" defecit gets to be so big and so out of control a few years down the line, SOMETHING will have to be cut, and what do you think that is going to be? Social programs, exactly the part of gov that they can't stand. By then it will be politically impossible for anyone, especially spineless democrats, to raise taxes to keep them. And we wouldn't want to take away from our spending on homeland security would we? That would be un-patriotic.
It's all part of a long-term trend that is very disturbing, unless that is part of your agenda.
One of the protections for the creator of a work which is built-in to copyright law is the right to control what are called derivative works. If I change something from an original work, whether it is taking something out like CleanFlicks or incorporating one work in another, I'm creating something new -- a new derivative work as it is called. Creating a derivative work without the permission of the original copyright holder is an infringement of their rights as guaranteed in copyright law. I think that while its current implementation leaves some things to be desired, copyright is a good thing as an idea -- it is set up in the U.S. Constitution after all, and you should be able to sell your book that you wrote without someone else selling it with their name on it. We want to encourage people to make new things and copyright was meant to protect those people's ability to profit from their own work.
If I look into the history of Cinema, there is one thing I see case after case after case of: censorship, either by the government or self-censorship under pressure from religious and community groups. This is the reason why we have ratings. Films with language and sexual content get "worse" ratings than those that do not. The ratings system has an incredible amount of power over the creation of movies in the first place, and this is tantamount to having CleanFlicks come in during pre-production and saying "no don't include that." There is a reason why a studio will do almost anything to make sure a film does not get an NC-17 kiss of death. The ratings system is designed so that you can say "look that movie has nudity and violence, and I don't want to see that" --- and so you go see another film or whatever suits your fancy. Does owning a copy of a film on DVD or whatever give me the right to change it as I see fit? No. Can I copy portions of it for my own personal non-commercial or educational purposes? Probably. Fair use is not an absolute right set up in any particular law. Fair use is a defense when you are sued for copyright infringement, and it has tests that are all decided on a case-by-case basis. What would be nice is if there was some legislation that outlined exactly what fair use is.
Movies as shown on network TV are edited, yes. They are edited often for time and for content. I think it is terrible to do so. In this case, however, the owners of the copyright have consented to the changes ( $ is a powerful motivator ) in order to show the movie on TV. I wish movies were not edited when they were shown, period, but I guess I'm in the minority.
I think if you don't want to watch a movie with violence, sex, or whatever, you should look at our built-in mechanism for self-censorship, the ratings, and decide what to watch based on that. That's what it is there for.
-K
That doesn't suprise me at all. I don't want to pay for bandwidth so people can run P2P prorgrams to their hearts content. Napster and its siblings have been the worst thing to ever happen to the network here. Each time they have increased the pipe, the use would easily match it, so that the residence halls (where all the p2p crap mostly is) is pegged at full capacity most but not all of the time. What did't make sense to me what the fact that ping times would sometimes be great when the bandwidth chart indicated the line was full, but other times when people were not using the network nearly as much the ping times were equally horrid.
When IU banned Napster, I knew plenty of students who were not happy. I thought it was a good thing.
I simply wanted to know what caused the latency issue - since it seemed so random. I've always known what caused the bandwidth use.
-K
Maybe more like capacity. I'm a student at Indiana University (Bloomington campus) and we have had some of the most horrendous ping times I've ever seen. As net capacity here has gone up, ping times have gone down. I once enjoyed Quake 3 ping times of around 30ms for most sites I played at. Now, I'm really lucky if I could get under 100ms. Four years ago, IU had a couple of T1's for the entire network (residence halls and the academic part of campus.) Now, we have dual T3's: one for academia and one for the residence halls. I've tracked the latency problems by periodically pinging Yahoo from the command line (which seemed as good a guage as any, since it was never previously more than about 60ms.) Well, depending on the time of day and the orbit of the planets, etc. I might get a ping time for Yahoo anywhere between 45ms and 550ms. Yes, 550ms. It's like someone added a component to the network that adds lag. The best part about the increase in lag is that it slowly fluctuates throughout the day and universally adds to any non-campus (and non-internet2) site or server. So, last year I gave up online gaming all together because I just couldn't get ping times that were acceptable anymore. And to top it off, the graphs of internet use did not correspond to the times when the lag was greatest. It made no sense, and the IT people here didn't know what to tell me when I asked them about this. Oh well. It's probably a good thing I gave up gaming.
Hopefully this goes a step in the direction of good ping times again.
Oh well.
-K
Arnold Schwarzenegger got $75,000 to do the audio commentary for the Total Recall "Special Limited Edition" DVD. That kind of exploitation is going to run into a wall sooner or later where the studio is just going to say no. To me, that's a rediculously expensive extra feature. Personally, I don't care much about commentary except by the director.
I for one think that this phenomenon is opening new possibilities for the filmmakers to tell their story. A director might be able to include on a DVD the version he or she wanted to create but could not do so within the confines of the major studios. The final cut is no longer the final cut.
However, I don't think that having the ability to "interactively" select a film rating is a good idea. The ratings system has already done much to stifle films tackling serious subjects. The NC-17 rating is a financial kiss of death. (perhaps not that extreme, but close). I fear that people would self-censor themselves in some kind of denial that serious subjects and issues and violence exist. Whenever I see a movie that has been censored, time compressed, cropped and edited for the masses on a television I am saddened that I am not seeing the whole movie the way it was supposed to be, and thus may not be getting the messages at all that the film was meant to convey but did not due to the cuts.
As high quality digital tools become available at lower and lower prices, the democratization of the filmmaking process will be interesting to watch to see what happens. DVD at least offers a way for the stories to be retold or restored to the way they were intended. I hope that trend will continue. Please no more censorship, we have enough already.
With a Final Cut Pro setup, it's not $4000 for the whole setup to be equivilant to the Avid Film Composer. I think most Telecine machines cost about a million dollars, so you would probably pay for someone else to do that instead of buying your own. So, you'd be working with some kind of video transfer of your film. Once you capture the footage into Final Cut Pro, you would use the Cinema Tools to undo the 24-->29.97FPS conversion so that you are back to the original framerate. Then you would edit your film in FCP at 24fps and then use Cinema Tools to generate a supposedly accurate edit decision list that you would use to cut the original camera negative to cut your movie. Could you do that with FCP+Cinema Tools cheaper than Avid Film Composer? You bet, but it's not a $4000 matter unless you are given a DV transfer and happen to have a DV deck, etc. Don't forget about good pro video monitors either. If you're not using a DV transfer of film, then you'll need a capture card if you are coming from some analog or any non-DV source. That could be from $600 to $10,000+ If you think you're going to do HD resolution final editing with a FCP system for $4000 you're in for a shock. You'd need a LOT more than $30k. When you just need an EDL, why would you pay all that money for extra hardware you don't need? -K
Hopefully this will solve some of the issues that have existed with Film Logic negative cut lists. I've been wondering for a long time what was going to come out of that purchase. Now, it will be very interesting to see what happens with Nothing Real. They are working on an OSX port of Shake. Maybe we'll see a $8000 price drop in that program? Look out After Effects. I think Final Cut is a fantastic program. One of the major differences between Avid and Final Cut Pro is scalability. If I buy Final Cut Pro and decide to go from DV to HD, I can add in a hardware card and some fast storage and presto - HD editing with Final Cut Pro. If you look at Avid (remember XPress DV 3 is also for OSX) I cannot upgrade from XPress DV to say, the full version of XPress without considerably more expense in from Avid. Personally, I'm more than happy to see more film oriented products coming out. I'm happy to have the option of FCP for film now rather than looking at and then running away from the price of a Film Composer setup. -K
I've watched the X-Files since season 3, and in that time seen enough re-runs to have watched it all up until this season. The show has been declining ever since they decided to throw away the entire story they were building up over the last several seasons. They have never recovered since. David Duchovny saw the decline and left the show. It's just too bad they could not have brought the show to a respectable end at the show's height instead of letting it whither away while they tried to sqeeze that last few dollars out of it.
Sigh.