Are you people DAFT? BluRay looks far better than DVD. That goes for "old movies" too.
In fact it goes quadruple for "Old TV shows." Pull out your copy of Star Trek Remastered. See, the original series was shot in 35mm film.
Now have a good look. Go on, look at the DVD release, look at the remastered DVD (which also looks better than the original DVD and the original broadcasts!) and look at the BluRay.
The remastered DVD looks better, well because its remastered. There is this little process called "color correction" which I am in fact supposed to be doing instead of posting to/. that can work absolute wonders with imagery. The new CG effects are a mixed bag, sometimes they are better, sometimes they make no difference, sometimes they make it worse, so screw them. Just look at the live action parts.
Now a true classic of cinematography, like Apocalypse Now or Cleopatra... those get a new life to them. They most assuredly didn't look that good in their original theatrical release because of the limitations of printmaking and color timing... we are just NOW for the first time seeing what the film makers saw back then as they made and edited the picture.
You don't want to buy BluRay? Fine. There are valid reasons for that. I know my BluRay collection is destined to be smaller than my DVD collection.
Please get a clue though: BluRay looks way better than DVD, and yes it looks much better than the 720p rips of HD material you find on download- official or otherwise.
Look, first off its actual two camera 3D, not the rejiggered post only 3D, which I abhor.
(And a big thank you to Mr. Lucas for bringing post-3D to Star Wars films. The only good that can come of that is that perhaps everyone will finally get the idea that it just can't be done well- if ILM and Lucas can't pull it off it can't be done. Of course, I am always willing to be surprised.)
In any case what you call "Fake3D" works very much like your eyes do during photography.
Holography may be the way of the future, but it will be a rather distant future. Further... holography, whenever it does come to pass, will benefit dramatically from the experiences of film makers today learning the new "grammar" of 3D film making.
As the movie appearing dim.... merely shooting in 48fps will address some of that. See, 24fps film is actually projected at 48fps with a shutter splitting the exposure.
48fps digital will be projected at 48fps without a shutter. Net effects it appears brighter to begin with.
Finally, about motion blur.... 48fps on Hobbit is being shot with the same shutter speed as is typically used on 24fps film 1/48th of a second. (In film we refer to the shutter speed using "shutter angles" instead of a fraction of a second. Standard 24fps shutter as 180 degrees, but Lesnie is using a 360 degree shutter on 48fps acquisition... the net result is the same motion blur.)
Both Andrew Lesnie and Peter Jackson have written glowingly about the results of this particular choice, which is one I have been arguing for myself.
And YES, I am a credited cinematographer and colorist.
RED has shipped its first two production EPIC-M cameras which has a feature called HDRx, which allows up to 18 stops of DR in a single exposure for every motion picture frame. It doesn't require a beam splitter or any other gadgetry.
Peter Jackson has a number of them he's using for the Hobbit. I think the latest Spiderman is shooting with it too.
It does that at 5K, which is 5120x2880 resolution.
As to comments that HDR is better than 3D, or that you don't need lighting... they are unfounded. You still need lighting to create the precise mood you want. The advantage is that you can now create that mood more easily in more lighting conditions. This is especially important in conditions that the film maker can not control. The first RED demo was a shot from inside a barn out the barndoor into the Arizona desert. The camera held detail in the shadows inside the barn and in the sky and on white surfaces in direct sunlight.
The normal solution to that lighting situation is to pour about a hundred thousand watts of lighting into the inside of the barn, hope nothing catches on fire and that you are close enough to the sun
I was director of photography for Star Trek Phase 2 for 3 episodes, and worked there on a total of six episodes, mostly in the camera department, but also in visual effects.
I also directed photography on Cawley Entertainments Buck Rogers pilot.
I worked on Starship Farragut, and Starship Polaris, which is an independent indie pilot.
TV requires an immense budget.
Phase 2, and any other show that claims "no budget" is really depending on donations of time, equipment and money from dozens if not hundreds of participants. Looking at Phase 2, the typical crew member not only gives two weeks of volunteer work, of 12+ hour days. During that time they also pay for their food, lodging and travel. Even after every effort has been made the typical crew member spends over $1000 just to be on set.
Some crew members, like myself, offer equipment. I usually provided $10-20000 of equipment per shoot. On one occasion I was able to bring a RED camera, on that shoot I had $65000 of gear on set.
I have all that to offer because I am a professional film/video maker.
I would NOT offer any of that to most productions. Phase 2 got special treatment because its "Star Trek."
Looking at Polaris, I shot that with a Canon 7D DSLR. The total camera rig was over $6000, and would have rented for $2500 for our shoot to date. Add to that lighting rentals. We spent $5000 for our week of studio shooting for grip and electric. (including a low end dolly.) We've shot about 12 days so far, and we have to shoot another 4 days or so.
I want to point out that these are camera, grip and electric department EQUIPMENT costs only. That's all money heading OUT. Not a single soul involved in the film profits one cent from any of that. It also doesn't account for set construction materials, studio rental, electricity, food, wardrobe, props, permits, insurance or anything else.
This is very low budget film making, but it still costs a huge amount.
Coming back to labor, let me talk about a point a producer brought up here. I worked on a series of visual effects shots for Star Trek Phase 2. I had to rotoscope an actor from a series of shots, and then reconstruct the set (Enterprise bridge) behind him. Naturally the reconstructed set had to match the actual standing set where it was shot. If I was working on a "real" show that shot would have been finished in 2-3 days. A week at the absolute max. In fact the shot took 3 months of me working on it whenever I happened to have a bit of time.
If you need the work done faster, you need to be paying professionals to do it. You also can't honestly expect to pay minimum wage. On average I'd expect to have to pay out $6000 per day for a crew of 30. That only works out to an average salary of $50000 per year, which is low given the skill sets required. It comes to $90000 per episode with a 3 week shooting schedule per episode.
This depends on keeping the unions OUT of the production, which is hard.
For comparison, the union minimum rate for my job, director of photography, on a film is $1200 per day. Using minimum staffing, each camera requires a DP/Operator, a 1st assistant. Each unit requires a second assistant camera and digital imaging technician. That minimum staffing requires 4 people, with a union minimum salary of $2600 per day- and that does not include any equipment.
This doesn't count post production crew, or allow for pre-production on an episode. It also doesn't include all the actors that go in front of the camera.
In order to produce a show the caliber of Phase 2 caliber on a timely basis (i.e. one episode every three weeks) we would need a minimum of $200000 per episode. I expect it to run $350000 per episode.
So... if you want independently produced TV you must come up with that kind of money. $3.6 million per year. Nobody is going to get rich on those sort of numbers.
Realistically, if you want to attract good qualified people and give them all the gear they need, then you should double that figure for a 13 episode series. If you want a 20 episode season, there are more economies to be had so figure 10 million or so.
3D, in its current form, is just another way to get the viewer involved in the space of a film. Its just a technique... and like any technique can be badly misused or carefully applied. Just like the transition from black an white to color photography, it takes time for people to learn how to use it to tell stories effectively.
What I abhor as a film maker is the desire by studios to convert films shot in 2D, with no regard to "into the plane" or "out of the plane" effects into 3D films. Its true that 3D is just a gimmick when implemented this way- and it can lead to a very unpleasant viewing experience.
One of the key elements to be reconsidered when shooting 3D is the amount of camera movement to use as well as the level of backlighting. Both of these techniques are used to enhance the sense of space in the film... by separating subjects from the background and by taking viewers on a tour of the environment. I believe that directors and cinematographers need to focus on showing the environment more simply with wider shots. Its almost required to turn back the clock in terms of cinematic motion. We need to use less movement and make that movement more subtle. This flies in the face of the MTV inspired cinema trends of wild dutch angles and whipsaw motion, as seen in Abrams Star Trek film. The use of backlighting is still a question up in the air for me. I think we still need it, but we can turn down the levels a bit.
Also to be reconsidered is the use of selective focus. (Typically done by using shallow depth of field.) We do this in order to help viewers know what we want them to pay attention to in the frame, for example racking back and forth between two speakers in a two shot. The problem is that in the real world the viewer always chooses when to look at whom, whereas in film the director, cinematographer, 1st camera assistant (or focus puller) and editor make these choices. We've learned to just follow along in 2D film as we percieve 2D to be an abstraction. 3D comes closer to a real world experience, and we expect more of the freedoms we are used to in the real world. We want to look where we want to look. So, if we look at the "wrong" persons face we are subtly frustrated as viewers.
Furthermore, how our eyes and brain react to out of focus areas is different in 2D and 3D. In 2D we accept that what we are looking at is blurry, and our eyes just slide over to the more interesting in focus areas. In 3D we tend to believe that the out of focus areas have sharp detail, and we start to attempt to bring them into focus rather than simply looking away. This is a subtle but important fact, and it can be a major source of eyestrain in current 3D film viewing.
Finally, I am not a huge fan of "out of the plane" effects, like an axe being thrown into the audience. (From the trailer to the upcoming Resident Evil movie). They are only appropriate very occasionally- and usually in the same places where you would have an object move directly towards the camera lens in 2D film making. More often, the 3D space should be treated as a window into another world we are looking into- and most of the 3D effect should be "into the plane," showing depth and perspective. We should use wider angle lenses to emphasize that perspective, and give viewers more time to absorb the scene before moving into it.
If you compare Avatar to other films you'll see that Cameron and Mauro Fiore (the cinematographer) followed my advice... they moved the camera more circumspectly and they used cameras and lighting to allow much deeper focus than normal. The story was paced so as to allow you to "go sightseeing" on Pandora (the fictional setting of the film, if you have not seen it) and even the fast action scenes used a more distant camera with a broader view than has become typical in order to let the viewer follow the action they chose to show us, rather than just wrenching your attention around like the Bourne films might.
3D can be done well, and it allows film makers to tell good stories. I can not wait to d
Adobe products on Windows don't give the same level of critical color performance as Adobe products on OS X.
If you are a creative, Macs really are the very best computing solution in the market right now.
You can't solve every user problem with a $500 Dell. That's why Dell makes more expensive machines.
That said- one way to really increase availability of those Macs running creative applications is to sit a Windows machine in the same cubicle to handle "routine" business email web etc. I'm actually setting that up in my home studio today. I'm actually using a 2GHz Pentium 4. I think thats more than enough for office, mail and web browsing. (Although I am thinking about increasing RAM to 1GB from 512 for that machine... and eventually replacing it with Mac Mini/iMac and an iPad. I expect to replace my Powe Mac G5 with a Mac Pro and a Macbook Pro by the same token.)
Clearly Spy Handler was referring to the DRM not the inherent quality of the media.
I think that for any DRM to be protected by laws like DMCA or, for media that uses DRM, basic copyright, it must be handed over in its entirety to the Library of Congress and the NSA. This ensures that we can play that media back when its outlived its technological lifetime.
Done well it could even follow through the "original" 9 features Lucas envisioned.
New director and writers though.
Heck, I'll do it. I'd be happy to. I'd like to see 3D IMAX happen too. These movies can be absolutely huge again, and there is a good story thread throughout the saga- including the parts we haven't seen yet after the fall of the emperor.
There are a lot of posts talking about how flawed this survey is.
They are all at least partly correct.
In pointing this out they all miss the point completely. This is an interesting survey, and it came up with an interesting result.
No- you shouldn't just believe it. Its merely a first pointer at an idea which is interesting enough to merit further research conducted more rigorously. Hopefully some researcher more qualified than this person will be intrigued and look into the question more thoroughly.
Despite being a bad survey, this, to the best of my knowledge, is the best survey and analysis regarding this topic available. There may be others, and I'd love to have them pointed out. Until there is better evidence, it may be worthwhile to keep this in mind as an interesting statistical correlation, form hypothesis about why the correlation might exist, and consider possible impacts of various hypothesis in the real world.
As pointed out, several times in this post and elsewhere, you should be on the look out for better research. You should guard against making this a part of your world view.
So, in summary its interesting. Keep it in mind. Maybe someone should take a closer look at the question. Not the study, the actual question.
Just checked the Specs... there appears to be no SDI option, so this is going to limit how some people can use these monitors.
The component inputs can be used in a pinch, but they really just don't cut it for many professional uses (particularly in HD broadcast or film post.)
Of course near this price point the broadcast video market is filled with 24 bit 4:2:2 color displays, like the Sony LMD-2450. (The 2450WHD model shown in the sidebar includes the SDI i/o option board.)
This is probably most useful for 3D artists and digital compositors (You know the people Dreamworks has plenty of), as opposed to editors and color correction folks. Those people need to see things in the right color spaces- but they don't deal directly with output, so the images can be adjusted if needed down the line, most likely in finishing or DI.
A lot of those color spaces are for video and film post production applications.
There are plenty of devices that output that data type, including HDMI 1.3 and some DVI display cards, but I expect that most of the output devices that people will want to use are going to want to use dual link SDI connectors. Knowing the industry, that is probably an expensive add on option.
Here is the Sony BVM L230,type of device it is competing against
Bzzzt! Wrong! Of course you can't. You don't need 25 or 50G to encode, but you can not encode an HD movie onto a standard DVD with any known or theoretically envisioned codec. 90 minutes of video encoded at 15Mb/s would not fit on a dual layer DVD and 15Mb/s would yield a very poor quality HD result. Good quality HD requires 20-25Mb/s bitrate, which would require media storing 15G or more.
Please enlighten us oh-wise-one, what encoders would that be, and how would they encode three times better than H.264 or VC-1? Also, if they existed, how would players decode them in real time without adding massively more expensive hardware to the mix?
Actually you are comically wrong.
You ask what encoder? How about h.264?
You really ought to head over to the Apple Movie Trailer site and check out their 1080p contents. They look fantastic. In most home theater set ups the quality is indistinguishable from Blue-Ray/HD-DVD until you hit pause and do a comparison.
Even in a 10bit studio setup with production monitors (I evaluated using Sony BVM-L230) or projectors the 9Mbit H.264's look good. The problems become apparent, but frankly the data format itself rivals many theaters projection quality. The main issue is excessive banding, then again the higher bitrate h.264 on Blue Ray et al. also exhibit this. They'd have to move to 10bit encoding and much higher data rates to eliminate it. (50Mbit/s at least, but I am guessing 100Mbit/s)
Here are the trailers for Batman: The Dark Night. Trailer 3 is 10.83Mbits/s at 1920x816 24 frames progressive. Trailer 2 is 10.48Mbit/s. There are plenty of other trailers ranging from 8Mbit/s to about 11Mbit/s
for example, I have faith that the person who put together the periodic table of elements in my chemistry class did so correctly. We wouldn't get very far if we didn't have faith of that sort, because it's beyond any of us to build our entire knowledge base from the ground up.
Well, I have trouble with this part of your statement. You see, if you learned the lessons of your high school chemistry class properly, then you should be able to construct the periodic table on your own. At least a good portion of the table. I don't recall at this moment if high school chemistry covers enough material for you to understand how to arrange the lanthanides and actinides... but I digress.
I don't care if you remember the periodic table. I care that you understand electron configuration and the concept of the valence shell. If you get that, which is a large chunk of the course material of an introduction to chemistry, then you can reconstruct the bulk of the periodic table, including entries for elements you can't remember or have no exposure to. In fact, you can construct your own alternative periodic table if you so wish to emphasize different aspects of the elemental properties.
My main point is that even such a simple pronouncement as "here is the periodic table," should be understandable and re-creatable by the student of science. That's why so many proofs in math are left as an exercise for the reader/student. It is important that you be able to carry through the reasoning yourself, important that you draw your own conclusions.
Do whatever you like, so long as you are prepared to work at it. I left full time IT after 14 years back in 2000. I still do IT stuff, but it short term contracts and consulting.
What I chose was film and video production. My IT experience had some relevance. In fact it has increasing relevance. Still, after 7 years this pays only a fraction of what I made in IT. Part of that is my fault, because I am taking it "easier" than I should be.
I am MUCH happier however.
The point is to put some serious thought into what you like to do, and try and do that professionally. Some people like fixing cars. Other folks like hockey. (I did that too, but never full time despite trying to become full time.) Whatever.
Before you make any changes, study your new area. Gain some expertise. Do it as a hobby for a bit to make sure you like it enough to try it as a profession.
This may sound familiar to you, because its how I, and probably a lot of folk here, got into computers.
military communications security. It might not be useful for troops in the field, but it might work well between bases and ships at sea. Might even be tenable for laser communications in aircraft.
Of course... this all assumes that you only need the metal ring(s) at the end points as portrayed in the article picture. That much wasn't clear to me from the summary.
Speaking to those of you who have expressed distasteful feelings here, try to remember that there is such a thing as "winning gracefully," "being a good sport" or whatever you wish to call it.
I don't like Valenti on the balance. He did some good things, but his last actions in life were, in my opinion, bad. This isn't the time to debate them.
One of the great measures of a person throughout our history is how they treat their fallen enemies. Take care how you treat yours now. Don't debase yourself, the community or "the cause" with your immature comments.
I am not sure if this is really about making the "best possible" OS X browser, but rather that Firefox uptake on the Mac is not as high as it is on Windows?
The reason is simple: Safari doesn't suck. I find IE unbearable for a thousand tiny reasons, so I pretty much have to install Firefox straight away on Windows. I don't have the same unbearable need to change on OS X. Despite having both installed I just go ahead and use Safari.
So, what were my reasons for sticking to Safari last time I checked out Firefox?
Safari has a neat feature where you can right click on the bookmark bar folders and read all my RSS articles. The bookmarks bar is constantly updated with counts of new RSS articles for each folder. This is a trivial feature and I am sure there must be a plug in for FF that accomplishes the same thing. It should be in the core though.
Bonjour integration is nice in Safari, although in practice it rarely gets used.
Firefox should integrate better with the included OS X applications. (Address Book, iCal, Mail etc.)
Improve the integrated as you type spell checker. Of importance- just freaking use the OS X dictionary. Apple updates and maintains that nicely, so use it. Don't re invent the wheel. At least make this a config option.
You should be able to configure Firefox to utilize Safari Keychain entries. Changing back and forth between these apps should be utterly painless.
Firefox should have an option to synchronize its bookmarks in a couple more ways- out of the box without plug-ins 1) There should be a transparent sync mode that makes sure Safari and Firefox both have the same bookmarks and history all the time. If I make a new bookmark in Safari, then swith over to a FF window that bookmark should appear in FF in the correct place live, as if I had added it directly in FF. This feature needs to be bi-directional. 2) You should be able to use Apple Sync services with Firefox. I think if you accomplish #1 above you should effectively get this for free.
Some of these features may be in FF, or they may be in Camino now. I haven't looked seriously in at least a year, and it is entirely possible I just gave up too quick when I did check. If so please reply with more accurate information.
For what its worth, adding similar features to the Windows version couldn't hurt.
Uh... all your earth bound experience may have to be carefully reconsidered for a space based application.
Considering that this is a "sheild emitter" the logical place for it is outside the hull of the vehicle, sort of between the vehicle and the dangerous stuff you want to keep away from the vehicle.
I don't think you'll need the big, heavy cryostats full of liquified gases. I hear it is very cold in space. So the simple solution is to put the superconductors where you can take advantage of that. You know, like outside the hull.
Point three is a little more problematic, until you put the apparatus out in the high vacuum of space attached to an accelerating vehicle. You know, like outside the hull. Then all the little bits of lint your co-workers might leave behind won't be around the big EM field for long... so we will get less potential causes for arcing.
So, to sum up: Putting the shield generator in the logical place eliminates or seriously ameliorates your points 1-3.
Point four still holds of course, but it is very clear that there are ways around this. Like modulating the shield polarity. Yes that sounds very Star Trek, but it is also one clear, simple (and admittedly possibly wrong) solution.
Its a deflector, so we don't care where the particles go, so long as they go away from the ship. You start early and deflect the course of incoming positive particles so they miss, then you invert the field and deflect negative particles. Thanks to the handy dandy r^2 term in Maxwell's eq's, this stands a good chance of working as our shields will be far more powerful as particles approach.
Even in the worst case scenario though you reduce particle impacts by about half. The obvious drawback is that we have to build a system that can safely deflect particles at a distance, then switch polarity and deflect again. This can be accomplished by increasing power to the shields... which will consume fuel, and thus mass. Everything is a trade-off.
Just make sure you--and anyone else who chooses to boycott Sony products--e-mail them and tell them that the reason you won't be purchasing any more of their products is their copyright protection schemes. Otherwise, they're libel to blame decreasing sales on piracy and up the ante even further.
Wrong.
There is nothing you can do to the anti information freedom crowd at Sony et al. that will make them take a more reasonable stance other than f*#k with their money.
To this end, you have to boycott, and explain the reason why. It is certainly appropriate and polite to inform Sony directly of your choices. Just don't expect it to have any impact done that way.
Instead you need to get organized. Collect a list of fellow boycotters. Make sure that the fact that you are boycotting- and why of course- is brought to the attention of as many people as possible with two goals in mind.
1st you want to inform the general public about the situation in easy to understand terms in order to generate more boycotters.
2nd you want to reach investors with the fact that a huge, and hopefully growing, block of consumers will not be buying from a publicly traded company.
The end goal is to drive sales and stocks of your target way down into the toilet. That will make shareholders want to hold the board accountable, and eliminate funds for any performance based bonuses and generally get executives making these decisions fired.
To accomplish these tasks you have to control the media outflow from your organization. You have to generate press releases, and put them in the hands of sympathetic reporters. You have to create "news" out of what is literally a non-event.
A secondary objective can be met by effectively managing media reporting of the situation: You can take the media initiative from Sony, or whomever your target may be. If you do this well, you don't have to worry about how Sony will characterize these "losses", because you will have already characterized them. The target's PR department will start off in damage control mode. You will be free to use your media efforts to amp up the pressure rather than countering the target's self serving lies.
Once these guys have to do without their six and seven figure bonuses and see their friends getting fired... only then will things really start changing.
When talking about 10bit it is going to be 10bit per channel (R, G, B) so a total of 30bit. I would expect a claim of 18bit to be a misleading description of 6bit per channel colour depth.
Well, to be nitpicky, that's YUV color space not RGB. Almost all LCD panels can display 8 bit per channel color, and of course they do so using RGB natively... so you have conversion issues when looking at video signals. (Computer signals are RGB to begin with so the conversion doesn't matter there.)
Professional monitors offer more color depth, but ITU Recommendation 709 (Rec 709) states that 8 bits per channel, non-linearly coded, is sufficient for broadcast applications. So, the standard LCD panel isn't that far off the mark as a reciever for HDTV broadcast.
By contrast Rec 709 suggests 14 bits linear per channel for smooth shading across the entire contrast range. For most production applications a 9 bit non-linear coding will suffice.
There is a lot of complaining that this will make the suits harder to bend and a number of other non-sense.
The point is that a lot of energy is already wasted by normal movement. It goes into things like crushing your shirt sleeves, friction, sound etc.
You have to make the space suits out of something... it may as well be something that can recapture energy normally wasted in motion.
Some have brought up the notion that these types of devices use more energy to make than they can capture. If it costs more energy to make the suits than they can generate... well that is irrelevant. The energy would be expended on Earth, so the mission gains some energy efficiency for "free." This becomes a consideration only if the suit has to be manufactured during the mission... perhaps as a replacement.
Don't get me wrong... this is far from the primary way to get energy. Take the example from the article of using this to generate energy from the Martian wind. Instead we might use this "wind mill" technology. However, if you have wind buffeting a static structure, it makes some sense to capture some of that energy if (and that's a huge IF) you can do so just by changing the materials used on the exterior. It may make more sense to coat the windmills with this stuff, and build the shelters underground.
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Your local cinematographer and director again ...
Are you people DAFT? BluRay looks far better than DVD. That goes for "old movies" too.
In fact it goes quadruple for "Old TV shows." Pull out your copy of Star Trek Remastered. See, the original series was shot in 35mm film.
Now have a good look. Go on, look at the DVD release, look at the remastered DVD (which also looks better than the original DVD and the original broadcasts!) and look at the BluRay.
The remastered DVD looks better, well because its remastered. There is this little process called "color correction" which I am in fact supposed to be doing instead of posting to /. that can work absolute wonders with imagery. The new CG effects are a mixed bag, sometimes they are better, sometimes they make no difference, sometimes they make it worse, so screw them. Just look at the live action parts.
Now a true classic of cinematography, like Apocalypse Now or Cleopatra ... those get a new life to them. They most assuredly didn't look that good in their original theatrical release because of the limitations of printmaking and color timing ... we are just NOW for the first time seeing what the film makers saw back then as they made and edited the picture.
You don't want to buy BluRay? Fine. There are valid reasons for that. I know my BluRay collection is destined to be smaller than my DVD collection.
Please get a clue though: BluRay looks way better than DVD, and yes it looks much better than the 720p rips of HD material you find on download- official or otherwise.
/sigh/
Look, first off its actual two camera 3D, not the rejiggered post only 3D, which I abhor.
(And a big thank you to Mr. Lucas for bringing post-3D to Star Wars films. The only good that can come of that is that perhaps everyone will finally get the idea that it just can't be done well- if ILM and Lucas can't pull it off it can't be done. Of course, I am always willing to be surprised.)
In any case what you call "Fake3D" works very much like your eyes do during photography.
Holography may be the way of the future, but it will be a rather distant future. Further ... holography, whenever it does come to pass, will benefit dramatically from the experiences of film makers today learning the new "grammar" of 3D film making.
As the movie appearing dim .... merely shooting in 48fps will address some of that. See, 24fps film is actually projected at 48fps with a shutter splitting the exposure.
48fps digital will be projected at 48fps without a shutter. Net effects it appears brighter to begin with.
Finally, about motion blur .... 48fps on Hobbit is being shot with the same shutter speed as is typically used on 24fps film 1/48th of a second. (In film we refer to the shutter speed using "shutter angles" instead of a fraction of a second. Standard 24fps shutter as 180 degrees, but Lesnie is using a 360 degree shutter on 48fps acquisition ... the net result is the same motion blur.)
Both Andrew Lesnie and Peter Jackson have written glowingly about the results of this particular choice, which is one I have been arguing for myself.
And YES, I am a credited cinematographer and colorist.
RED has shipped its first two production EPIC-M cameras which has a feature called HDRx, which allows up to 18 stops of DR in a single exposure for every motion picture frame. It doesn't require a beam splitter or any other gadgetry.
Peter Jackson has a number of them he's using for the Hobbit. I think the latest Spiderman is shooting with it too.
It does that at 5K, which is 5120x2880 resolution.
As to comments that HDR is better than 3D, or that you don't need lighting... they are unfounded. You still need lighting to create the precise mood you want. The advantage is that you can now create that mood more easily in more lighting conditions. This is especially important in conditions that the film maker can not control. The first RED demo was a shot from inside a barn out the barndoor into the Arizona desert. The camera held detail in the shadows inside the barn and in the sky and on white surfaces in direct sunlight.
The normal solution to that lighting situation is to pour about a hundred thousand watts of lighting into the inside of the barn, hope nothing catches on fire and that you are close enough to the sun
I was director of photography for Star Trek Phase 2 for 3 episodes, and worked there on a total of six episodes, mostly in the camera department, but also in visual effects.
I also directed photography on Cawley Entertainments Buck Rogers pilot.
I worked on Starship Farragut, and Starship Polaris, which is an independent indie pilot.
TV requires an immense budget.
Phase 2, and any other show that claims "no budget" is really depending on donations of time, equipment and money from dozens if not hundreds of participants. Looking at Phase 2, the typical crew member not only gives two weeks of volunteer work, of 12+ hour days. During that time they also pay for their food, lodging and travel. Even after every effort has been made the typical crew member spends over $1000 just to be on set.
Some crew members, like myself, offer equipment. I usually provided $10-20000 of equipment per shoot. On one occasion I was able to bring a RED camera, on that shoot I had $65000 of gear on set.
I have all that to offer because I am a professional film/video maker.
I would NOT offer any of that to most productions. Phase 2 got special treatment because its "Star Trek."
Looking at Polaris, I shot that with a Canon 7D DSLR. The total camera rig was over $6000, and would have rented for $2500 for our shoot to date. Add to that lighting rentals. We spent $5000 for our week of studio shooting for grip and electric. (including a low end dolly.) We've shot about 12 days so far, and we have to shoot another 4 days or so.
I want to point out that these are camera, grip and electric department EQUIPMENT costs only. That's all money heading OUT. Not a single soul involved in the film profits one cent from any of that. It also doesn't account for set construction materials, studio rental, electricity, food, wardrobe, props, permits, insurance or anything else.
This is very low budget film making, but it still costs a huge amount.
Coming back to labor, let me talk about a point a producer brought up here. I worked on a series of visual effects shots for Star Trek Phase 2. I had to rotoscope an actor from a series of shots, and then reconstruct the set (Enterprise bridge) behind him. Naturally the reconstructed set had to match the actual standing set where it was shot. If I was working on a "real" show that shot would have been finished in 2-3 days. A week at the absolute max. In fact the shot took 3 months of me working on it whenever I happened to have a bit of time.
If you need the work done faster, you need to be paying professionals to do it. You also can't honestly expect to pay minimum wage. On average I'd expect to have to pay out $6000 per day for a crew of 30. That only works out to an average salary of $50000 per year, which is low given the skill sets required. It comes to $90000 per episode with a 3 week shooting schedule per episode.
This depends on keeping the unions OUT of the production, which is hard.
For comparison, the union minimum rate for my job, director of photography, on a film is $1200 per day. Using minimum staffing, each camera requires a DP/Operator, a 1st assistant. Each unit requires a second assistant camera and digital imaging technician. That minimum staffing requires 4 people, with a union minimum salary of $2600 per day- and that does not include any equipment.
This doesn't count post production crew, or allow for pre-production on an episode. It also doesn't include all the actors that go in front of the camera.
In order to produce a show the caliber of Phase 2 caliber on a timely basis (i.e. one episode every three weeks) we would need a minimum of $200000 per episode. I expect it to run $350000 per episode.
So... if you want independently produced TV you must come up with that kind of money. $3.6 million per year. Nobody is going to get rich on those sort of numbers.
Realistically, if you want to attract good qualified people and give them all the gear they need, then you should double that figure for a 13 episode series. If you want a 20 episode season, there are more economies to be had so figure 10 million or so.
I guess you never know who you'll run into on the Internets
3D, in its current form, is just another way to get the viewer involved in the space of a film. Its just a technique... and like any technique can be badly misused or carefully applied. Just like the transition from black an white to color photography, it takes time for people to learn how to use it to tell stories effectively.
What I abhor as a film maker is the desire by studios to convert films shot in 2D, with no regard to "into the plane" or "out of the plane" effects into 3D films. Its true that 3D is just a gimmick when implemented this way- and it can lead to a very unpleasant viewing experience.
One of the key elements to be reconsidered when shooting 3D is the amount of camera movement to use as well as the level of backlighting. Both of these techniques are used to enhance the sense of space in the film... by separating subjects from the background and by taking viewers on a tour of the environment. I believe that directors and cinematographers need to focus on showing the environment more simply with wider shots. Its almost required to turn back the clock in terms of cinematic motion. We need to use less movement and make that movement more subtle. This flies in the face of the MTV inspired cinema trends of wild dutch angles and whipsaw motion, as seen in Abrams Star Trek film. The use of backlighting is still a question up in the air for me. I think we still need it, but we can turn down the levels a bit.
Also to be reconsidered is the use of selective focus. (Typically done by using shallow depth of field.) We do this in order to help viewers know what we want them to pay attention to in the frame, for example racking back and forth between two speakers in a two shot. The problem is that in the real world the viewer always chooses when to look at whom, whereas in film the director, cinematographer, 1st camera assistant (or focus puller) and editor make these choices. We've learned to just follow along in 2D film as we percieve 2D to be an abstraction. 3D comes closer to a real world experience, and we expect more of the freedoms we are used to in the real world. We want to look where we want to look. So, if we look at the "wrong" persons face we are subtly frustrated as viewers.
Furthermore, how our eyes and brain react to out of focus areas is different in 2D and 3D. In 2D we accept that what we are looking at is blurry, and our eyes just slide over to the more interesting in focus areas. In 3D we tend to believe that the out of focus areas have sharp detail, and we start to attempt to bring them into focus rather than simply looking away. This is a subtle but important fact, and it can be a major source of eyestrain in current 3D film viewing.
Finally, I am not a huge fan of "out of the plane" effects, like an axe being thrown into the audience. (From the trailer to the upcoming Resident Evil movie). They are only appropriate very occasionally- and usually in the same places where you would have an object move directly towards the camera lens in 2D film making. More often, the 3D space should be treated as a window into another world we are looking into- and most of the 3D effect should be "into the plane," showing depth and perspective. We should use wider angle lenses to emphasize that perspective, and give viewers more time to absorb the scene before moving into it.
If you compare Avatar to other films you'll see that Cameron and Mauro Fiore (the cinematographer) followed my advice... they moved the camera more circumspectly and they used cameras and lighting to allow much deeper focus than normal. The story was paced so as to allow you to "go sightseeing" on Pandora (the fictional setting of the film, if you have not seen it) and even the fast action scenes used a more distant camera with a broader view than has become typical in order to let the viewer follow the action they chose to show us, rather than just wrenching your attention around like the Bourne films might.
3D can be done well, and it allows film makers to tell good stories. I can not wait to d
Adobe products on Windows don't give the same level of critical color performance as Adobe products on OS X.
If you are a creative, Macs really are the very best computing solution in the market right now.
You can't solve every user problem with a $500 Dell. That's why Dell makes more expensive machines.
That said- one way to really increase availability of those Macs running creative applications is to sit a Windows machine in the same cubicle to handle "routine" business email web etc. I'm actually setting that up in my home studio today. I'm actually using a 2GHz Pentium 4. I think thats more than enough for office, mail and web browsing. (Although I am thinking about increasing RAM to 1GB from 512 for that machine... and eventually replacing it with Mac Mini/iMac and an iPad. I expect to replace my Powe Mac G5 with a Mac Pro and a Macbook Pro by the same token.)
Clearly Spy Handler was referring to the DRM not the inherent quality of the media.
I think that for any DRM to be protected by laws like DMCA or, for media that uses DRM, basic copyright, it must be handed over in its entirety to the Library of Congress and the NSA. This ensures that we can play that media back when its outlived its technological lifetime.
They really could use serious re-imagining.
Done well it could even follow through the "original" 9 features Lucas envisioned.
New director and writers though.
Heck, I'll do it. I'd be happy to. I'd like to see 3D IMAX happen too. These movies can be absolutely huge again, and there is a good story thread throughout the saga- including the parts we haven't seen yet after the fall of the emperor.
There are a lot of posts talking about how flawed this survey is.
They are all at least partly correct.
In pointing this out they all miss the point completely. This is an interesting survey, and it came up with an interesting result.
No- you shouldn't just believe it. Its merely a first pointer at an idea which is interesting enough to merit further research conducted more rigorously. Hopefully some researcher more qualified than this person will be intrigued and look into the question more thoroughly.
Despite being a bad survey, this, to the best of my knowledge, is the best survey and analysis regarding this topic available. There may be others, and I'd love to have them pointed out. Until there is better evidence, it may be worthwhile to keep this in mind as an interesting statistical correlation, form hypothesis about why the correlation might exist, and consider possible impacts of various hypothesis in the real world.
As pointed out, several times in this post and elsewhere, you should be on the look out for better research. You should guard against making this a part of your world view.
So, in summary its interesting. Keep it in mind. Maybe someone should take a closer look at the question. Not the study, the actual question.
More importantly, why didn't you include the link?
Just checked the Specs... there appears to be no SDI option, so this is going to limit how some people can use these monitors.
The component inputs can be used in a pinch, but they really just don't cut it for many professional uses (particularly in HD broadcast or film post.)
Of course near this price point the broadcast video market is filled with 24 bit 4:2:2 color displays, like the Sony LMD-2450. (The 2450WHD model shown in the sidebar includes the SDI i/o option board.)
This is probably most useful for 3D artists and digital compositors (You know the people Dreamworks has plenty of), as opposed to editors and color correction folks. Those people need to see things in the right color spaces- but they don't deal directly with output, so the images can be adjusted if needed down the line, most likely in finishing or DI.
A lot of those color spaces are for video and film post production applications.
There are plenty of devices that output that data type, including HDMI 1.3 and some DVI display cards, but I expect that most of the output devices that people will want to use are going to want to use dual link SDI connectors. Knowing the industry, that is probably an expensive add on option.
Here is the Sony BVM L230,type of device it is competing against
Actually you are comically wrong.
You ask what encoder? How about h.264?
You really ought to head over to the Apple Movie Trailer site and check out their 1080p contents. They look fantastic. In most home theater set ups the quality is indistinguishable from Blue-Ray/HD-DVD until you hit pause and do a comparison.
Even in a 10bit studio setup with production monitors (I evaluated using Sony BVM-L230) or projectors the 9Mbit H.264's look good. The problems become apparent, but frankly the data format itself rivals many theaters projection quality. The main issue is excessive banding, then again the higher bitrate h.264 on Blue Ray et al. also exhibit this. They'd have to move to 10bit encoding and much higher data rates to eliminate it. (50Mbit/s at least, but I am guessing 100Mbit/s)
Here are the trailers for Batman: The Dark Night. Trailer 3 is 10.83Mbits/s at 1920x816 24 frames progressive. Trailer 2 is 10.48Mbit/s. There are plenty of other trailers ranging from 8Mbit/s to about 11Mbit/s
Judge for yourself.
We don't put bullseyes on the redshirts anymore.
Guys care.
After all when your woman "gets you" to watch one of those the only ameliorating element is the (usually) hot female love interest.
You might as well see her clearly.
This same reasoning leads to an understanding of the high definition release of certain films. (Into the Blue, I'm looking at you.)
for example, I have faith that the person who put together the periodic table of elements in my chemistry class did so correctly. We wouldn't get very far if we didn't have faith of that sort, because it's beyond any of us to build our entire knowledge base from the ground up.
Well, I have trouble with this part of your statement. You see, if you learned the lessons of your high school chemistry class properly, then you should be able to construct the periodic table on your own. At least a good portion of the table. I don't recall at this moment if high school chemistry covers enough material for you to understand how to arrange the lanthanides and actinides... but I digress.
I don't care if you remember the periodic table. I care that you understand electron configuration and the concept of the valence shell. If you get that, which is a large chunk of the course material of an introduction to chemistry, then you can reconstruct the bulk of the periodic table, including entries for elements you can't remember or have no exposure to. In fact, you can construct your own alternative periodic table if you so wish to emphasize different aspects of the elemental properties.
My main point is that even such a simple pronouncement as "here is the periodic table," should be understandable and re-creatable by the student of science. That's why so many proofs in math are left as an exercise for the reader/student. It is important that you be able to carry through the reasoning yourself, important that you draw your own conclusions.
This is how science differs from faith.
Do whatever you like, so long as you are prepared to work at it. I left full time IT after 14 years back in 2000. I still do IT stuff, but it short term contracts and consulting.
What I chose was film and video production. My IT experience had some relevance. In fact it has increasing relevance. Still, after 7 years this pays only a fraction of what I made in IT. Part of that is my fault, because I am taking it "easier" than I should be.
I am MUCH happier however.
The point is to put some serious thought into what you like to do, and try and do that professionally. Some people like fixing cars. Other folks like hockey. (I did that too, but never full time despite trying to become full time.) Whatever.
Before you make any changes, study your new area. Gain some expertise. Do it as a hobby for a bit to make sure you like it enough to try it as a profession.
This may sound familiar to you, because its how I, and probably a lot of folk here, got into computers.
military communications security. It might not be useful for troops in the field, but it might work well between bases and ships at sea. Might even be tenable for laser communications in aircraft.
Of course... this all assumes that you only need the metal ring(s) at the end points as portrayed in the article picture. That much wasn't clear to me from the summary.
I wish his family solace at this time.
Speaking to those of you who have expressed distasteful feelings here, try to remember that there is such a thing as "winning gracefully," "being a good sport" or whatever you wish to call it.
I don't like Valenti on the balance. He did some good things, but his last actions in life were, in my opinion, bad. This isn't the time to debate them.
One of the great measures of a person throughout our history is how they treat their fallen enemies. Take care how you treat yours now. Don't debase yourself, the community or "the cause" with your immature comments.
I am not sure if this is really about making the "best possible" OS X browser, but rather that Firefox uptake on the Mac is not as high as it is on Windows?
The reason is simple: Safari doesn't suck. I find IE unbearable for a thousand tiny reasons, so I pretty much have to install Firefox straight away on Windows. I don't have the same unbearable need to change on OS X. Despite having both installed I just go ahead and use Safari.
So, what were my reasons for sticking to Safari last time I checked out Firefox?
Safari has a neat feature where you can right click on the bookmark bar folders and read all my RSS articles. The bookmarks bar is constantly updated with counts of new RSS articles for each folder. This is a trivial feature and I am sure there must be a plug in for FF that accomplishes the same thing. It should be in the core though.
Bonjour integration is nice in Safari, although in practice it rarely gets used.
Firefox should integrate better with the included OS X applications. (Address Book, iCal, Mail etc.)
Improve the integrated as you type spell checker. Of importance- just freaking use the OS X dictionary. Apple updates and maintains that nicely, so use it. Don't re invent the wheel. At least make this a config option.
You should be able to configure Firefox to utilize Safari Keychain entries. Changing back and forth between these apps should be utterly painless.
Firefox should have an option to synchronize its bookmarks in a couple more ways- out of the box without plug-ins
1) There should be a transparent sync mode that makes sure Safari and Firefox both have the same bookmarks and history all the time. If I make a new bookmark in Safari, then swith over to a FF window that bookmark should appear in FF in the correct place live, as if I had added it directly in FF. This feature needs to be bi-directional.
2) You should be able to use Apple Sync services with Firefox. I think if you accomplish #1 above you should effectively get this for free.
Some of these features may be in FF, or they may be in Camino now. I haven't looked seriously in at least a year, and it is entirely possible I just gave up too quick when I did check. If so please reply with more accurate information.
For what its worth, adding similar features to the Windows version couldn't hurt.
Uh... all your earth bound experience may have to be carefully reconsidered for a space based application.
Considering that this is a "sheild emitter" the logical place for it is outside the hull of the vehicle, sort of between the vehicle and the dangerous stuff you want to keep away from the vehicle.
I don't think you'll need the big, heavy cryostats full of liquified gases. I hear it is very cold in space. So the simple solution is to put the superconductors where you can take advantage of that. You know, like outside the hull.
Point three is a little more problematic, until you put the apparatus out in the high vacuum of space attached to an accelerating vehicle. You know, like outside the hull. Then all the little bits of lint your co-workers might leave behind won't be around the big EM field for long... so we will get less potential causes for arcing.
So, to sum up: Putting the shield generator in the logical place eliminates or seriously ameliorates your points 1-3.
Point four still holds of course, but it is very clear that there are ways around this. Like modulating the shield polarity. Yes that sounds very Star Trek, but it is also one clear, simple (and admittedly possibly wrong) solution.
Its a deflector, so we don't care where the particles go, so long as they go away from the ship. You start early and deflect the course of incoming positive particles so they miss, then you invert the field and deflect negative particles. Thanks to the handy dandy r^2 term in Maxwell's eq's, this stands a good chance of working as our shields will be far more powerful as particles approach.
Even in the worst case scenario though you reduce particle impacts by about half. The obvious drawback is that we have to build a system that can safely deflect particles at a distance, then switch polarity and deflect again. This can be accomplished by increasing power to the shields... which will consume fuel, and thus mass. Everything is a trade-off.
Just make sure you--and anyone else who chooses to boycott Sony products--e-mail them and tell them that the reason you won't be purchasing any more of their products is their copyright protection schemes. Otherwise, they're libel to blame decreasing sales on piracy and up the ante even further.
Wrong.
There is nothing you can do to the anti information freedom crowd at Sony et al. that will make them take a more reasonable stance other than f*#k with their money.
To this end, you have to boycott, and explain the reason why. It is certainly appropriate and polite to inform Sony directly of your choices. Just don't expect it to have any impact done that way.
Instead you need to get organized. Collect a list of fellow boycotters. Make sure that the fact that you are boycotting- and why of course- is brought to the attention of as many people as possible with two goals in mind.
1st you want to inform the general public about the situation in easy to understand terms in order to generate more boycotters.
2nd you want to reach investors with the fact that a huge, and hopefully growing, block of consumers will not be buying from a publicly traded company.
The end goal is to drive sales and stocks of your target way down into the toilet. That will make shareholders want to hold the board accountable, and eliminate funds for any performance based bonuses and generally get executives making these decisions fired.
To accomplish these tasks you have to control the media outflow from your organization. You have to generate press releases, and put them in the hands of sympathetic reporters. You have to create "news" out of what is literally a non-event.
A secondary objective can be met by effectively managing media reporting of the situation: You can take the media initiative from Sony, or whomever your target may be. If you do this well, you don't have to worry about how Sony will characterize these "losses", because you will have already characterized them. The target's PR department will start off in damage control mode. You will be free to use your media efforts to amp up the pressure rather than countering the target's self serving lies.
Once these guys have to do without their six and seven figure bonuses and see their friends getting fired... only then will things really start changing.
When talking about 10bit it is going to be 10bit per channel (R, G, B) so a total of 30bit. I would expect a claim of 18bit to be a misleading description of 6bit per channel colour depth.
Well, to be nitpicky, that's YUV color space not RGB. Almost all LCD panels can display 8 bit per channel color, and of course they do so using RGB natively... so you have conversion issues when looking at video signals. (Computer signals are RGB to begin with so the conversion doesn't matter there.)
Professional monitors offer more color depth, but ITU Recommendation 709 (Rec 709) states that 8 bits per channel, non-linearly coded, is sufficient for broadcast applications. So, the standard LCD panel isn't that far off the mark as a reciever for HDTV broadcast.
By contrast Rec 709 suggests 14 bits linear per channel for smooth shading across the entire contrast range. For most production applications a 9 bit non-linear coding will suffice.
There is a lot of complaining that this will make the suits harder to bend and a number of other non-sense.
The point is that a lot of energy is already wasted by normal movement. It goes into things like crushing your shirt sleeves, friction, sound etc.
You have to make the space suits out of something... it may as well be something that can recapture energy normally wasted in motion.
Some have brought up the notion that these types of devices use more energy to make than they can capture. If it costs more energy to make the suits than they can generate... well that is irrelevant. The energy would be expended on Earth, so the mission gains some energy efficiency for "free." This becomes a consideration only if the suit has to be manufactured during the mission... perhaps as a replacement.
Don't get me wrong... this is far from the primary way to get energy. Take the example from the article of using this to generate energy from the Martian wind. Instead we might use this "wind mill" technology. However, if you have wind buffeting a static structure, it makes some sense to capture some of that energy if (and that's a huge IF) you can do so just by changing the materials used on the exterior. It may make more sense to coat the windmills with this stuff, and build the shelters underground.