Film is 24fps, NTSC is 23.976fps
Film can go higher in some formats. HDTV can be a variety of frame rates.
NTSC is essentially 30 Hz. Intentionally chosen so 60Hz line noise will be stationary on the screen.
This is somewhat true, but talking of "frames" here is slightly misleading.
Traditional interlaced NTSC video isn't transmitted as complete "frames", but as "fields"- the odd-numbered lines are recorded/transmitted/displayed first, then the even-numbered ones. That is, 60 half-"frames" per second.
This sounds like it should give the same result as 30 frames per second, but it doesn't exactly, at least not when dealing with purely video-sourced material. Reason is that inbetween the odd-numbered lines being scanned and their adjacent even-numbered ones being scanned 1/60s later, the object being videoed could have moved.
The end result is that NTSC has temporal resolution of 60Hz, not 30; that is, much more "fluid" motion. (*) Not at full 525-line spatial resolution, admittedly, but you're less likely to notice this on a fast-moving object.
This is one of the major reasons that traditional video "looks" different to film- video has a much higher temporal resolution. (Other reasons being lighting, colour response, grain structure, etc.)
Material originally shot on film doesn't exhibit this. That's because it was still originally shot at 24fps. In the case of PAL (which operates at 25/50Hz instead of NTSC's 30/60Hz), 24fps films are speeded up slightly to 25fps, and each frame is recorded twice, once for the odd fields, once for the even ones. Of course, it's the same frame- the contents haven't moved between times- so in this case it gives the same result as 25 frames per second.
I mention PAL because film transfer to NTSC is more complicated, requiring "2:3 pulldown" (due to 24 frames not being easily converted to 30). But that was irrelevant to the example and my point- on both NTSC and PAL, "true" analogue video looks different to film in part because the temporal resolution (field rate) is much higher than with film.
And the massive irony is that people "prefer" the look of film to the look of video for drama and the like. It could be because subconsciously film has more "professional" associations, but it may also be because film looks more "detached" (**) which aids in suspension of disbelief.
(*) I'd say "look at a pan on a movie and notice how 'steppy' it is when you pay attention". This is fine if you live in a country that uses PAL, but in NTSC countries additional judder may also be caused by the 2:3 pulldown.
(**) It's very hard to explain this- you'll either get it or you won't. I remember watching a kids' TV programme when I was fairly young and it looking oddly different. In retrospect I realise it's because it's the kind of thing that would normally have been shot on video, but in that case had been done in film instead.
The reason NTSC is not quiet 30 fps is due to the non-video data that it contains (CC, Vertical blanking interval, etc)
According to Wikipedia, the reason is that "to reduce the visibility of interference between the chrominance signal and FM sound carrier required a slight reduction of the frame rate from 30 frames per second to approximately 29.97 frames per second, and changing the line frequency from 15,750 Hz to 15,734.26 Hz."
I would have been a customer for this device, but after this I will not now or ever buy anything under the Fusion Garage brand.
For some reason, the link where Fusion Garage gives their side of the story is missing in my browser. Can you provide me with it? I know you must have it, because only an idiot would make a kneejerk response like that based on having heard only one side of a story like this.
(And no, if Arrington turns out to be the one in the right here, you're still an idiot for jumping to conclusions without having heard all the evidence first).
Exactly how Time Life operate. Nothing new, move along.
In the sense that it's a recurring negative-option offer where the first one is cheap? Bzzt, wrong.
The problem here is that this guy is quite deliberately hides what is being charged and the recurring nature of the promotion. Time Life are- I assume- being reasonably clear about what the deal is before you come to order, even if that's not the selling point. This guy isn't.
Some Slashdotters don't read the story properly? Nothing new, move along.
It takes an uncommon mind to associate the word "just" with "$289.95"
It's all relative- it would be cheap for a car- but in this case, yeah. I've noticed that quite a lot- companies sticking "just" in front of a price when it's not cheap for what it is at all, like it'll fool people into automatically thinking that it *is* cheap.
It's like you are angry because you are a Texan and somebody from Taiwan calls you an American. "Oh, wait, dude, I'm not American, I'm Texan!" - now that's plainly strange:)
Actually, a lot of Texans wouldn't find that strange at all. But I digress...
What'd *really* annoy the Texans is the fact that, outside the US, "yanks" or "yankees" generally refers to all Americans, them included.:-)
And you wonder why Apple users start to get an attitude? It's because we've been suffering dolt-ish comments like this for so long.
Love the way your whining reeks of seeing yourself as a member of a persecuted minority group instead of someone who bought a damn computer made by a particular company. The attitude of over-important, self-consciously "minority" tosspots like you is as much a part of perpetuating the "dolt-ish comments", regardless of who started them.
I will, for example, choose Avast over Norton for antivirus on Windows machines, because, ethically, I'd rather have something that's legitimately being given away than steal something that isn't.
Isn't the fact that Norton is generally held to be bloated crap, regardless of its price, also a factor in your decision?
I thought the white headphones were okay for earbuds. Not a pad on my large padded headphones I have at home, but passable.
I actually dislike the white headphones because of their appearance. Firstly because it makes me look like a wannabe-fashionable tosser buying Apple to look cool. (*) Secondly, because I'm more worried about it making me a target for a thief/mugger on dark winter evenings.
I have a pair of really cheap black ones that don't seem to give as much sound output with my EU-volume-limited iPod at max stength- a problem with outside noise. So I'm still using the white ones... though I'll probably buy another pair, and when I do, they won't be white.
(*) I say "wannabe" because IMHO they could have the opposite effect. Since I don't normally dress or look that sharp, simply having an iPod isn't going to make me a fashion god. I don't think that, and I doubt most people do- but wearing the white headphones they might think that *I'm* under that impression... which would make me a wannabe loser. Personally, I dislike the damn white headphones because I don't like Apple's image- the electronics equivalent of Gap ten years ago- and the damn things are so ubiquitous (every man and his dog has an iPod) that they aren't that cool anyway- again, Gap ten years ago.
The most unusual was from a VP who brought it back with shit all over the keyboard. His claim was that he was working while defecating, and it fell into the toilet. We believed him up until we had to transfer the data off, and found several pictures of people in fecal acts.
Is this for real? Are you seriously telling us that this VP- who we can assume earns a good salary- brought back the computer and asked you to recover the data even though he knew it had this material on it and you'd possibly find out- risking embarrassment at best and major career sabotage at worst?
This isn't true. Modern processors are highly RISCy -- they just have front-ends that translate from CISC ISAs. The last genuinely CISC processor was, I believe, the Pentium (non-pro edition).
As far as I'm aware, that's correct. (For those not familiar with the Pentium Pro, it formed the basis of the more affordable- and successful- Pentium II. Both were, as the AC says, totally different to the original Pentium and its predecessors).
One point I'll make is that having once posted on Slashdot pretty much what you said, someone else replied out that this (supposedly) RISC core of modern "x86" isn't actually *that* RISCy.
Having said *that*, when I think about it, we're assuming that the same or similar core architecture for x86-compatible chips has been in use since the Pentium-Pro/Pentium II, which might well not be the case. So long as they don't expose the internal implementation to end-user use (*), there's no reason they couldn't change it completely, as long as it does the job and comes with a suitable translation layer.
(*) And that's why you don't necessarily let people access the internal workings of your chip; if it's 100% black-box, you can totally change the internal workings, and so long as the translation layer does its work, no-one knows or cares. Whereas letting people access the "native" instructions means that some people *will*, forcing the chipmakers to support support them in every successive generation for compatibility reasons- either having to retain that architecture, or adding it to translation-layer baggage and pointlessly complicating the instruction set.
the film that they used is higher resolution than HD.
That's true, but people forget that the production values will have been made with television in mind- and 1960s televisions at that. In other words, at high enough resolution you might (for example) be able to see the obvious limitations and crudeness of props that would have been less apparent at ordinary TV resolution.
Just because the source material was recorded at a high enough resolution, doesn't mean it was filmed with that in mind. Given the budgets of TV shows, they wouldn't have wasted money on extra detail that wouldn't have shown up on televisions of the time; but the lack of it will show if scanned at high enough resolution and shown on modern HD sets.
No, some people ham-fist addressesd. You'll be tpying laong and hit teh wring button or forget if it was an underscore or a dash. THen where will you go? You don't know, and that's what a lot of scammers have been making money witj for a long tim.
Thankyou for posting to slahsdot.org, the fan site for dots and slashes!
He just said "pirate DVD movies", which you can easily do via DVD-R-to-DVD-R copies once a single person has removed the protection on the first generation copy. There are still people out there selling pirated DVDs, no downloading necessary.
That's the sort of thing I meant by legal weaselling. I suspect that your argument might have held water if MS had been clear about this upfront, and explicitly spelled the situation out when the account (or rather box/account) was cancelled.
But to do that they'd have had to bring it to people's attention, which apparently hasn't happened. My gut reaction is that under a consumer-friendly legislature this would seriously count against them. Simply including something in the terms doesn't always make it binding if it's vague, unclear or obscure.
Very carefully, though, they still keep your xbox live account active and charge you the subscription fee.
That's interesting. I wonder what the legal position is with them doing that.
Disclaimer; IANAL. They might get away with it in the US, but if it came to court within the EU, I suspect that they'd lose due to the stronger consumer laws. Regardless of any legal weaselling over how they defined words, and what they said in the contract, in effect what they've done is to cancel the service that is being paid for (and done it *themselves*). Any reasonable person would assume that they are no longer being charged for a service that is no longer being supplied.
Why would they want to sell more 360s? Don't they still lose money on each one?
That might or might not have been true when the 360 launched, but things have moved on now. I suspect that costs have come down and that they won't be losing money any more if they ever were.
Did Microsoft really think this through? The people who mod Xboxes are their best customers. They are the enthusiasts who care enough to learn more about the console.
Got news for you. The console manufacturers- not just MS- are in this for the money, and enthusiasm for the console doesn't really do that. Matter of fact, they probably don't want people finding out too much about the console anyway, because that opens the way to homebrew and/or piracy, regardless of the intention of the original hackers. (Even if it wasn't used for piracy, MS and its gaming rivals would rather you could only use your console via their official channels, which likely make them more money).
Nothing new here; 25 to 30 years ago, Atari tried to suppress information about their VCS console and 400/800 computers to stop other people making their own games and reducing Atari's slice of the pie. (They did, however, and their efforts beat the heck out of Atari's third-rate offerings).
In short, MS et al don't care about enthusiasm. Their "best customers" are the ones who spend lots of money on games through official channels.
(BTW, though I disagreed with the above comment, I didn't consider it "flamebait".)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC [wikipedia.org]
Effectively, it's the EU.
You linked to the European Commission page (which is what the article means).
FWIW, I (a European) misinterpreted it as meaning "European Community"- albeit assuming that Slashdot was using it slightly inaccurately as an anachronistic synonym for the EU. Mainly because that was its primary meaning in day-to-day usage around 15+ years ago.
(The EC was effectively the predecessor to the EU, as it was the largest and most important organisation that went up to create the latter. Much like the EC was in turn the original EEC (European Economic Community) and some other stuff, I guess.
I'd say that most people view EEC -> EC -> EU as changing names for the same "European" project, albeit with a significant expansion in powers over the years. Which though slightly oversimplified, isn't too far off the mark AFAICT.)
Slashdot Mirror
You must be new here.
Compared to you, yeah. I've only been here for 7 1/2 years, and I have a lousy six-digit ID. (^_^)
;-)
'Course, this means I still get to look down my nose at the people with circa 1.5m seven-digit IDs
Film is 24fps, NTSC is 23.976fps Film can go higher in some formats. HDTV can be a variety of frame rates.
NTSC is essentially 30 Hz. Intentionally chosen so 60Hz line noise will be stationary on the screen.
This is somewhat true, but talking of "frames" here is slightly misleading.
Traditional interlaced NTSC video isn't transmitted as complete "frames", but as "fields"- the odd-numbered lines are recorded/transmitted/displayed first, then the even-numbered ones. That is, 60 half-"frames" per second.
This sounds like it should give the same result as 30 frames per second, but it doesn't exactly, at least not when dealing with purely video-sourced material. Reason is that inbetween the odd-numbered lines being scanned and their adjacent even-numbered ones being scanned 1/60s later, the object being videoed could have moved.
The end result is that NTSC has temporal resolution of 60Hz, not 30; that is, much more "fluid" motion. (*) Not at full 525-line spatial resolution, admittedly, but you're less likely to notice this on a fast-moving object.
This is one of the major reasons that traditional video "looks" different to film- video has a much higher temporal resolution. (Other reasons being lighting, colour response, grain structure, etc.)
Material originally shot on film doesn't exhibit this. That's because it was still originally shot at 24fps. In the case of PAL (which operates at 25/50Hz instead of NTSC's 30/60Hz), 24fps films are speeded up slightly to 25fps, and each frame is recorded twice, once for the odd fields, once for the even ones. Of course, it's the same frame- the contents haven't moved between times- so in this case it gives the same result as 25 frames per second.
I mention PAL because film transfer to NTSC is more complicated, requiring "2:3 pulldown" (due to 24 frames not being easily converted to 30). But that was irrelevant to the example and my point- on both NTSC and PAL, "true" analogue video looks different to film in part because the temporal resolution (field rate) is much higher than with film.
And the massive irony is that people "prefer" the look of film to the look of video for drama and the like. It could be because subconsciously film has more "professional" associations, but it may also be because film looks more "detached" (**) which aids in suspension of disbelief.
(*) I'd say "look at a pan on a movie and notice how 'steppy' it is when you pay attention". This is fine if you live in a country that uses PAL, but in NTSC countries additional judder may also be caused by the 2:3 pulldown.
(**) It's very hard to explain this- you'll either get it or you won't. I remember watching a kids' TV programme when I was fairly young and it looking oddly different. In retrospect I realise it's because it's the kind of thing that would normally have been shot on video, but in that case had been done in film instead.
The reason NTSC is not quiet 30 fps is due to the non-video data that it contains (CC, Vertical blanking interval, etc)
According to Wikipedia, the reason is that "to reduce the visibility of interference between the chrominance signal and FM sound carrier required a slight reduction of the frame rate from 30 frames per second to approximately 29.97 frames per second, and changing the line frequency from 15,750 Hz to 15,734.26 Hz."
I would have been a customer for this device, but after this I will not now or ever buy anything under the Fusion Garage brand.
For some reason, the link where Fusion Garage gives their side of the story is missing in my browser. Can you provide me with it? I know you must have it, because only an idiot would make a kneejerk response like that based on having heard only one side of a story like this.
(And no, if Arrington turns out to be the one in the right here, you're still an idiot for jumping to conclusions without having heard all the evidence first).
Exactly how Time Life operate. Nothing new, move along.
In the sense that it's a recurring negative-option offer where the first one is cheap? Bzzt, wrong.
The problem here is that this guy is quite deliberately hides what is being charged and the recurring nature of the promotion. Time Life are- I assume- being reasonably clear about what the deal is before you come to order, even if that's not the selling point. This guy isn't.
Some Slashdotters don't read the story properly? Nothing new, move along.
Or, let me Google that for you. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=professor+video
Google this :-P
It takes an uncommon mind to associate the word "just" with "$289.95"
It's all relative- it would be cheap for a car- but in this case, yeah. I've noticed that quite a lot- companies sticking "just" in front of a price when it's not cheap for what it is at all, like it'll fool people into automatically thinking that it *is* cheap.
It's like you are angry because you are a Texan and somebody from Taiwan calls you an American. "Oh, wait, dude, I'm not American, I'm Texan!" - now that's plainly strange :)
Actually, a lot of Texans wouldn't find that strange at all. But I digress...
What'd *really* annoy the Texans is the fact that, outside the US, "yanks" or "yankees" generally refers to all Americans, them included. :-)
And you wonder why Apple users start to get an attitude? It's because we've been suffering dolt-ish comments like this for so long.
Love the way your whining reeks of seeing yourself as a member of a persecuted minority group instead of someone who bought a damn computer made by a particular company. The attitude of over-important, self-consciously "minority" tosspots like you is as much a part of perpetuating the "dolt-ish comments", regardless of who started them.
I will, for example, choose Avast over Norton for antivirus on Windows machines, because, ethically, I'd rather have something that's legitimately being given away than steal something that isn't.
Isn't the fact that Norton is generally held to be bloated crap, regardless of its price, also a factor in your decision?
Incidentally, the white headphones are terrible.
I thought the white headphones were okay for earbuds. Not a pad on my large padded headphones I have at home, but passable.
I actually dislike the white headphones because of their appearance. Firstly because it makes me look like a wannabe-fashionable tosser buying Apple to look cool. (*) Secondly, because I'm more worried about it making me a target for a thief/mugger on dark winter evenings.
I have a pair of really cheap black ones that don't seem to give as much sound output with my EU-volume-limited iPod at max stength- a problem with outside noise. So I'm still using the white ones... though I'll probably buy another pair, and when I do, they won't be white.
(*) I say "wannabe" because IMHO they could have the opposite effect. Since I don't normally dress or look that sharp, simply having an iPod isn't going to make me a fashion god. I don't think that, and I doubt most people do- but wearing the white headphones they might think that *I'm* under that impression... which would make me a wannabe loser. Personally, I dislike the damn white headphones because I don't like Apple's image- the electronics equivalent of Gap ten years ago- and the damn things are so ubiquitous (every man and his dog has an iPod) that they aren't that cool anyway- again, Gap ten years ago.
The most unusual was from a VP who brought it back with shit all over the keyboard. His claim was that he was working while defecating, and it fell into the toilet. We believed him up until we had to transfer the data off, and found several pictures of people in fecal acts.
Is this for real? Are you seriously telling us that this VP- who we can assume earns a good salary- brought back the computer and asked you to recover the data even though he knew it had this material on it and you'd possibly find out- risking embarrassment at best and major career sabotage at worst?
This isn't true. Modern processors are highly RISCy -- they just have front-ends that translate from CISC ISAs. The last genuinely CISC processor was, I believe, the Pentium (non-pro edition).
As far as I'm aware, that's correct. (For those not familiar with the Pentium Pro, it formed the basis of the more affordable- and successful- Pentium II. Both were, as the AC says, totally different to the original Pentium and its predecessors).
One point I'll make is that having once posted on Slashdot pretty much what you said, someone else replied out that this (supposedly) RISC core of modern "x86" isn't actually *that* RISCy.
Having said *that*, when I think about it, we're assuming that the same or similar core architecture for x86-compatible chips has been in use since the Pentium-Pro/Pentium II, which might well not be the case. So long as they don't expose the internal implementation to end-user use (*), there's no reason they couldn't change it completely, as long as it does the job and comes with a suitable translation layer.
(*) And that's why you don't necessarily let people access the internal workings of your chip; if it's 100% black-box, you can totally change the internal workings, and so long as the translation layer does its work, no-one knows or cares. Whereas letting people access the "native" instructions means that some people *will*, forcing the chipmakers to support support them in every successive generation for compatibility reasons- either having to retain that architecture, or adding it to translation-layer baggage and pointlessly complicating the instruction set.
the film that they used is higher resolution than HD.
That's true, but people forget that the production values will have been made with television in mind- and 1960s televisions at that. In other words, at high enough resolution you might (for example) be able to see the obvious limitations and crudeness of props that would have been less apparent at ordinary TV resolution.
Just because the source material was recorded at a high enough resolution, doesn't mean it was filmed with that in mind. Given the budgets of TV shows, they wouldn't have wasted money on extra detail that wouldn't have shown up on televisions of the time; but the lack of it will show if scanned at high enough resolution and shown on modern HD sets.
No, some people ham-fist addressesd. You'll be tpying laong and hit teh wring button or forget if it was an underscore or a dash. THen where will you go? You don't know, and that's what a lot of scammers have been making money witj for a long tim.
Thankyou for posting to slahsdot.org, the fan site for dots and slashes!
Slahsdot.org - What You Need, When You Need It.
...Oh My God! Does this mean Bernie Madoff was a robot?
He just said "pirate DVD movies", which you can easily do via DVD-R-to-DVD-R copies once a single person has removed the protection on the first generation copy. There are still people out there selling pirated DVDs, no downloading necessary.
In short, MS et al don't care about enthusiasm. Their "best customers" are the ones who spend lots of money on games through official channels.
So what's wrong with that?
I didn't say that there was. I said that it's not what big companies are in it for. They're in it for the money- your views may be different.
That's the sort of thing I meant by legal weaselling. I suspect that your argument might have held water if MS had been clear about this upfront, and explicitly spelled the situation out when the account (or rather box/account) was cancelled.
But to do that they'd have had to bring it to people's attention, which apparently hasn't happened. My gut reaction is that under a consumer-friendly legislature this would seriously count against them. Simply including something in the terms doesn't always make it binding if it's vague, unclear or obscure.
Very carefully, though, they still keep your xbox live account active and charge you the subscription fee.
That's interesting. I wonder what the legal position is with them doing that.
Disclaimer; IANAL. They might get away with it in the US, but if it came to court within the EU, I suspect that they'd lose due to the stronger consumer laws. Regardless of any legal weaselling over how they defined words, and what they said in the contract, in effect what they've done is to cancel the service that is being paid for (and done it *themselves*). Any reasonable person would assume that they are no longer being charged for a service that is no longer being supplied.
Why would they want to sell more 360s? Don't they still lose money on each one?
That might or might not have been true when the 360 launched, but things have moved on now. I suspect that costs have come down and that they won't be losing money any more if they ever were.
Did Microsoft really think this through? The people who mod Xboxes are their best customers. They are the enthusiasts who care enough to learn more about the console.
Got news for you. The console manufacturers- not just MS- are in this for the money, and enthusiasm for the console doesn't really do that. Matter of fact, they probably don't want people finding out too much about the console anyway, because that opens the way to homebrew and/or piracy, regardless of the intention of the original hackers. (Even if it wasn't used for piracy, MS and its gaming rivals would rather you could only use your console via their official channels, which likely make them more money).
Nothing new here; 25 to 30 years ago, Atari tried to suppress information about their VCS console and 400/800 computers to stop other people making their own games and reducing Atari's slice of the pie. (They did, however, and their efforts beat the heck out of Atari's third-rate offerings).
In short, MS et al don't care about enthusiasm. Their "best customers" are the ones who spend lots of money on games through official channels.
(BTW, though I disagreed with the above comment, I didn't consider it "flamebait".)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC [wikipedia.org] Effectively, it's the EU.
You linked to the European Commission page (which is what the article means).
FWIW, I (a European) misinterpreted it as meaning "European Community"- albeit assuming that Slashdot was using it slightly inaccurately as an anachronistic synonym for the EU. Mainly because that was its primary meaning in day-to-day usage around 15+ years ago.
(The EC was effectively the predecessor to the EU, as it was the largest and most important organisation that went up to create the latter. Much like the EC was in turn the original EEC (European Economic Community) and some other stuff, I guess.
I'd say that most people view EEC -> EC -> EU as changing names for the same "European" project, albeit with a significant expansion in powers over the years. Which though slightly oversimplified, isn't too far off the mark AFAICT.)
That dinner, how do you think its ingredients are harvested, and possible, with what it is cooked?
You forgot about the fertiliser used to grow it itself- probably made from oil derivatives as well.
That and the fact that the Queen is a symbolic figurehead who doesn't actually rule Britain anyway.