NTSC television to the bitter end was 29.97. Many hidef television broadcasts are actually at 23.976 fps, and most feature films shot on digital equipment are at this rate as well, because it converts to 29.97 with fewer artifacts.w
I dunno:) Congress grants the FCC the power to levy fines and penalties against people that break "the rules," and then it grants the FCC the right to define "the rules," because congressmen don't want to spend time deciding if setup level should be 0 or 7.5 IREs.
More interesting is that by accepting Dolby's standard, the FCC has in fact incorporated a proprietary, black-box technical procedure into US "law."
A "compressor" just takes the signal, attenuates it if it exceeds a fixed amplitude. It then cranks everything up.
It doesn't actually make things louder, it's just that many films and TV shows are mixed so that dialogue hits speakers in the middle range of the loudness, so the LOUD parts of the movie can actually be louder than the dialogue. Since laptop speakers are tiny, and only just audible at their maximum level, the compressor cranks up all the middle-loudness dialogue stuff, but when you get to a LOUD part, it's only as loud as the talking before it.
The trend of everybody watching everything on shitty computer speakers has started a new loudness war on Youtube videos and the "home theater" mixes of trailers, which don't have to abide by industry loudness standards. We end up cranking everything up and flattening the dynamic range so you can hear the words. I recently mixed a short that played on vimeo, the mix for vimeo have to get a full 10 dB of gain before it was comfortable to watch on a laptop, and this had the effect of making the loud scenes, which are exciting on the big screen, boring and flat. It sounds like the airline mix of a movie.
I had a directing teacher in college who used to direct the old Bosom Buddies TV show -- he went on to do this silly movie about a woman and her big fat Greek wedding. Strange guy. ANYHOO, he brought in a bunch of episodes that he'd done to show us, and the went on forever, and there were like two commercial breaks, each having maybe two commercial, tops. It was amazing how much time you had in a half-hour block back in 1980.
It was cool, but I grant that show felt flabby and slow, I'm sure it didn't at the time, but nowadays people don't necessarily expect less TV show, but they do expect the show to get to the point faster. And the style of shooting and editing lets that happen in a way an audience in the 70s might not have accepted. I'll bet if you showed "Big Bang Theory" or "Modern Family" to an audience of "Alice" or "It's a Living" it'd seem strange and avant-garde, setting aside the content issues.
ITU-R BS.1770-1 or -3 are measurement standards, they don't prescribe any limits. It gives a way of measuring the subjective "loudness" of a program based on a psychoacoustic model but it presumes total control over the speaker system (which TV doesn't provide), and it doesn't say "how loud."
EBU R128 gives a single standard, and you use it with ITU-R BS.1770. The problem is that it treats a dialogue-heavy program the same as a musical program; a musical program has a lot more signal, over a half hour average, than a dialogue one, so a musical performance will tend to sound quieter when put next to a dialogue heavy one, given they're mixed with the same level normalization scheme.
The CALM Act is actually based on Dolby Laboratories technical definitions and the dialnorm subcode metadata in an ATSC bitstream actually has to be decoded and properly enforced. It's not actually LAW but it's an adopted FCC federal regulation. Dolby's standard is to measure the average dialogue level in the program, and only the dialogue, and to use that to derive the normalization level -- EBU R128 uses the entire program mixed together, dialogue, music and sound effects. I think Dolby's approach is superior but more technically demanding, since it requires the person encoding the AC3 bitstream to have access to the dialogue mix-minus, but on professional productions this isn't an issue.
The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 didn't delete the previously existing laws, it merely made them impossible to enforce by forbidding state governments from investigating warrantless surveillance, and authorizing the Federal government to destroy any records of the surveillance. It also specifically granted immunity from prosecution to participating telcos, but the government had to specifically certify them, and the certification was revokable either by a federal court or the government.
The criminal act never disappears, and the gov can always make their immunity disappear with the stroke of a pen, a state of being quite different from non-culpability.
First of all, it never questions the reasons of the war.
Why must a film question the war? I've seen films that question the war, and frankly they're polemical and insulting, even when I agreed with them.
From the very beginning it pushes the audience towards sympathy for the American soldier,
Why is it wrong to feel sympathy for the American soldier? How does that mitigate the conduct of the Iraq war? Is the American soldier not in a sympathetic situation? Remarque had sympathy for the German soldiers in All Quiet on the Western Front, was he justifying the Wehrmacht?
the audience is pushed to stand on the hunter side instead of the hunted, to worry about the danger that Baghdad's alleys pose for the soldiers instead of the danger that the soldiers pose for anyone else around them
Were the dangers in Baghdad's alleys imaginary? Granting they weren't, why would you feel such a fact makes a positive argument for the Iraq War? Just because an insurgent in Sadr City kidnaps Our Boys does not imply that it's okay to shoot up the neighborhood, nor does it justify or even quality in moral terms the invasion of Iraq. Quite the opposite.
Did you want some scene where Renner starts crying and shouts into the sky "Damn you George Bush! Why are we here!" I think what you wanted was an escape clause to avoid having to accept moral culpability, a way of being able to tell yourself that the Iraq war was SOMEONE ELSE'S problem and your SUPERIOR moral sense would never lead you to do what Renner or Anthony Mackie's character do, despite the fact that good, smart people, doing everything in their power to save their own lives and do right by their God and their fellow man, still commit atrocities.
Yeah of course you identify with the guys in the situation, and yeah the guys are Americans. But the war is bigger than anything they might experience and the good guys and bad guys in that film, like in Renoir, all have their reasons. I think you make the error of assuming that Renner's character is meant to be a positive role model, when the film never really affirms that reading, and in many circumstances undercuts it. Yes, he knows how to defuse bombs and he's hardcore about it, but I don't think that makes him or his POV privileged with regard to the text -- IMHO the film is extremely careful on that point.
Truffaut once said that all war movies are pro-war, and that's true in one way: they make soldiering look bad-ass. But there's a lot more to a war than soldiering.
Ask yourself: do you remember the name of a single Iraqi character in the movie?
Professor Nabib. The soccer ball kid called himself "Beckham." The translators had no names. (You're asking someone who, despite having not watched it in a year, has probably seen the movie probably more than 200 times, in various states of completion.)
A factor is that if you commit a crime, the laws in effect at the time of the illegal act are the laws under which you may be prosecuted. At least that's how federal laws work in the US. You can't do something, and then, ex post facto, the legislature changes the laws to make the act legal or illegal -- they can make something legal, but that doesn't relieve your liability, though in criminal cases you'd usually get a pardon...
However, "It sucks" isn't a persuasive argument. Congratulations on the "waste of electricity" crack, you must be Really Smart, but that doesn't make your case either.
It's almost as if people don't even want to talk about the movie, they just want to use an opinion of it to signal their peer group inclusion or something. NAH, that can't be it.
with a very apologetic view on that unholy mess that the Iraqi War still is. leaving middle-class, Democrat-prone audience with a reassuring feeling that "we did not screw up THAT much in the end...".
What makes you say that? How did you feel the film mitigated the cause or conduct of the war?
I hate how the "new cinema" makes movies and things that have no plot and bash anyone that doesn't "get it" as being the one with the problem.
It's not very new, the structure of the film is what you'd call episodic or maybe picaresque. It's certainly attested in Kubrick (viz. Barry Lyndon, and the 250 year old book it's based on), and even earlier works like Sullivan's Travels or many, many C. B. DeMille spectacle films. Also, using some perceived slight from a bunch of film critics as an excuse for not liking a film is pathetic. Remember, film critics are usually the ones who tell you you "don't get it," not filmmakers.
Your criticism is a recurring one but I think the real problem is that people find the Renner character to be inaccessible. Not a cypher -- he's clearly smart and motivated -- but some audiences have difficulty accepting that what motivates him is sorta closed-off, and I think a big part of "getting" the movie is the process you go through trying to figure him out. He's a true chaotic neutral and that seems to rub people the wrong way, they really would prefer a typical protagonist who either comes with a clear motivation or leaves with one.
You can read Renner's character, in this way, as symbolic or analogous to America's motivation in the Iraq war in general - I like this reading, but I in no way represent it as Kathryn's intent. For that, a place you might start is by reading the quote she uses at the beginning, and then reading the book it comes from, War is a Force the Gives Us Meaning.
JJ Abrams is doing nothing that wasn't done 2500 years ago in Greece.
With all due respect, Aristophanes wasn't ruining the Kirk/Spock/McCoy relationship in the service of creating shallow popcorn movies.
To be honest, the Rotten Tomatoes reviewer sounds like the sort of convention-bound scold that's been ruining movies for a decade now with corporate focus-group storylines dumbed down for a room-temperature IQ audience.
Fair Disclosure: I was a sound effects editor on Hurt Locker and my supervisor won two Oscars.
"We try pretty hard to make our users be available as widely as we can to our adwords partners. That's our philosophy. I think sometimes we're allowed to do that. Sometimes we're not."
Apple doesn't need to sue, they just need to add a few Core* frameworks every year like they always do. GnuStep replicates the OSX/iOS Foundation and AppKit libraries. That's really good, but their API hasn't kept up with Apple's block/closure idioms or libdispatch, almost all new code being written on the Mac today uses these. Also, while they've done the lord's work with their own CoreData, just about every new application these days links against at least AddressBook.framework and CoreAnimation -- it's hard to find even an FTP client on the Mac that doesn't use animated transitions.
Apple's never used DRM on their OS, they've just kept the upgrades coming and make sure developers start using them -- in exchange Apple aggressively markets its OS upgrades to its userbase, so developers don't lose their users becuase they don't upgrade. That's where MS failed in the end, people fell off the upgrade carousel, developers stopped chasing new Win APIs... This was Joel Spolsky's point when he argued that MS had failed as a platform company.
Slashdot Mirror
Arm toddlers.
"Altar of Principle, accept these sacrifices."
NTSC television to the bitter end was 29.97. Many hidef television broadcasts are actually at 23.976 fps, and most feature films shot on digital equipment are at this rate as well, because it converts to 29.97 with fewer artifacts.w
Counting or not counting the Twelve Colonies of Kobol?
I dunno :) Congress grants the FCC the power to levy fines and penalties against people that break "the rules," and then it grants the FCC the right to define "the rules," because congressmen don't want to spend time deciding if setup level should be 0 or 7.5 IREs.
More interesting is that by accepting Dolby's standard, the FCC has in fact incorporated a proprietary, black-box technical procedure into US "law."
HiFi VHSs only have maybe 50 dB of S/N ratio, tops. DVDs have 70dB and then 20dB of headroom.
We make these, they're what play on the Assistive Listening Devices in the theater, and on airline flights.
A "compressor" just takes the signal, attenuates it if it exceeds a fixed amplitude. It then cranks everything up.
It doesn't actually make things louder, it's just that many films and TV shows are mixed so that dialogue hits speakers in the middle range of the loudness, so the LOUD parts of the movie can actually be louder than the dialogue. Since laptop speakers are tiny, and only just audible at their maximum level, the compressor cranks up all the middle-loudness dialogue stuff, but when you get to a LOUD part, it's only as loud as the talking before it.
The trend of everybody watching everything on shitty computer speakers has started a new loudness war on Youtube videos and the "home theater" mixes of trailers, which don't have to abide by industry loudness standards. We end up cranking everything up and flattening the dynamic range so you can hear the words. I recently mixed a short that played on vimeo, the mix for vimeo have to get a full 10 dB of gain before it was comfortable to watch on a laptop, and this had the effect of making the loud scenes, which are exciting on the big screen, boring and flat. It sounds like the airline mix of a movie.
I had a directing teacher in college who used to direct the old Bosom Buddies TV show -- he went on to do this silly movie about a woman and her big fat Greek wedding. Strange guy. ANYHOO, he brought in a bunch of episodes that he'd done to show us, and the went on forever, and there were like two commercial breaks, each having maybe two commercial, tops. It was amazing how much time you had in a half-hour block back in 1980.
It was cool, but I grant that show felt flabby and slow, I'm sure it didn't at the time, but nowadays people don't necessarily expect less TV show, but they do expect the show to get to the point faster. And the style of shooting and editing lets that happen in a way an audience in the 70s might not have accepted. I'll bet if you showed "Big Bang Theory" or "Modern Family" to an audience of "Alice" or "It's a Living" it'd seem strange and avant-garde, setting aside the content issues.
ITU-R BS.1770-1 or -3 are measurement standards, they don't prescribe any limits. It gives a way of measuring the subjective "loudness" of a program based on a psychoacoustic model but it presumes total control over the speaker system (which TV doesn't provide), and it doesn't say "how loud."
EBU R128 gives a single standard, and you use it with ITU-R BS.1770. The problem is that it treats a dialogue-heavy program the same as a musical program; a musical program has a lot more signal, over a half hour average, than a dialogue one, so a musical performance will tend to sound quieter when put next to a dialogue heavy one, given they're mixed with the same level normalization scheme.
The CALM Act is actually based on Dolby Laboratories technical definitions and the dialnorm subcode metadata in an ATSC bitstream actually has to be decoded and properly enforced. It's not actually LAW but it's an adopted FCC federal regulation. Dolby's standard is to measure the average dialogue level in the program, and only the dialogue, and to use that to derive the normalization level -- EBU R128 uses the entire program mixed together, dialogue, music and sound effects. I think Dolby's approach is superior but more technically demanding, since it requires the person encoding the AC3 bitstream to have access to the dialogue mix-minus, but on professional productions this isn't an issue.
A progressive income tax is just as simple mathematically and creates much less deadweight loss on the economy.
The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 didn't delete the previously existing laws, it merely made them impossible to enforce by forbidding state governments from investigating warrantless surveillance, and authorizing the Federal government to destroy any records of the surveillance. It also specifically granted immunity from prosecution to participating telcos, but the government had to specifically certify them, and the certification was revokable either by a federal court or the government.
The criminal act never disappears, and the gov can always make their immunity disappear with the stroke of a pen, a state of being quite different from non-culpability.
In MY day, Anonymous Cowards read posts.
Why must a film question the war? I've seen films that question the war, and frankly they're polemical and insulting, even when I agreed with them.
Why is it wrong to feel sympathy for the American soldier? How does that mitigate the conduct of the Iraq war? Is the American soldier not in a sympathetic situation? Remarque had sympathy for the German soldiers in All Quiet on the Western Front, was he justifying the Wehrmacht?
Were the dangers in Baghdad's alleys imaginary? Granting they weren't, why would you feel such a fact makes a positive argument for the Iraq War? Just because an insurgent in Sadr City kidnaps Our Boys does not imply that it's okay to shoot up the neighborhood, nor does it justify or even quality in moral terms the invasion of Iraq. Quite the opposite.
Did you want some scene where Renner starts crying and shouts into the sky "Damn you George Bush! Why are we here!" I think what you wanted was an escape clause to avoid having to accept moral culpability, a way of being able to tell yourself that the Iraq war was SOMEONE ELSE'S problem and your SUPERIOR moral sense would never lead you to do what Renner or Anthony Mackie's character do, despite the fact that good, smart people, doing everything in their power to save their own lives and do right by their God and their fellow man, still commit atrocities.
Yeah of course you identify with the guys in the situation, and yeah the guys are Americans. But the war is bigger than anything they might experience and the good guys and bad guys in that film, like in Renoir, all have their reasons. I think you make the error of assuming that Renner's character is meant to be a positive role model, when the film never really affirms that reading, and in many circumstances undercuts it. Yes, he knows how to defuse bombs and he's hardcore about it, but I don't think that makes him or his POV privileged with regard to the text -- IMHO the film is extremely careful on that point.
Truffaut once said that all war movies are pro-war, and that's true in one way: they make soldiering look bad-ass. But there's a lot more to a war than soldiering.
Professor Nabib. The soccer ball kid called himself "Beckham." The translators had no names. (You're asking someone who, despite having not watched it in a year, has probably seen the movie probably more than 200 times, in various states of completion.)
A factor is that if you commit a crime, the laws in effect at the time of the illegal act are the laws under which you may be prosecuted. At least that's how federal laws work in the US. You can't do something, and then, ex post facto, the legislature changes the laws to make the act legal or illegal -- they can make something legal, but that doesn't relieve your liability, though in criminal cases you'd usually get a pardon...
I believe this is called the Tinkerbell Effect.
You're totally entitled to your opinion.
However, "It sucks" isn't a persuasive argument. Congratulations on the "waste of electricity" crack, you must be Really Smart, but that doesn't make your case either.
It's almost as if people don't even want to talk about the movie, they just want to use an opinion of it to signal their peer group inclusion or something. NAH, that can't be it.
Yeah but I've been reading people dig on HL for weeks now leading up to ZD30's release, I'm fed up! :)
What makes you say that? How did you feel the film mitigated the cause or conduct of the war?
It's not very new, the structure of the film is what you'd call episodic or maybe picaresque. It's certainly attested in Kubrick (viz. Barry Lyndon, and the 250 year old book it's based on), and even earlier works like Sullivan's Travels or many, many C. B. DeMille spectacle films. Also, using some perceived slight from a bunch of film critics as an excuse for not liking a film is pathetic. Remember, film critics are usually the ones who tell you you "don't get it," not filmmakers.
Your criticism is a recurring one but I think the real problem is that people find the Renner character to be inaccessible. Not a cypher -- he's clearly smart and motivated -- but some audiences have difficulty accepting that what motivates him is sorta closed-off, and I think a big part of "getting" the movie is the process you go through trying to figure him out. He's a true chaotic neutral and that seems to rub people the wrong way, they really would prefer a typical protagonist who either comes with a clear motivation or leaves with one.
You can read Renner's character, in this way, as symbolic or analogous to America's motivation in the Iraq war in general - I like this reading, but I in no way represent it as Kathryn's intent. For that, a place you might start is by reading the quote she uses at the beginning, and then reading the book it comes from, War is a Force the Gives Us Meaning.
With all due respect, Aristophanes wasn't ruining the Kirk/Spock/McCoy relationship in the service of creating shallow popcorn movies.
To be honest, the Rotten Tomatoes reviewer sounds like the sort of convention-bound scold that's been ruining movies for a decade now with corporate focus-group storylines dumbed down for a room-temperature IQ audience.
Fair Disclosure: I was a sound effects editor on Hurt Locker and my supervisor won two Oscars.
"We try pretty hard to make our users be available as widely as we can to our adwords partners. That's our philosophy. I think sometimes we're allowed to do that. Sometimes we're not."
A good reason not to use any cell phone for navigation in this instance.
Protip: Your map isn't on the phone.
Oooh you've got the lost verse of Monty Python's Philosopher's Song
Oh what Nietzsche couldn't teach'ya 'bout the raising of the wrists! Socrates Himself was Permanently Pissed!
Apple doesn't need to sue, they just need to add a few Core* frameworks every year like they always do. GnuStep replicates the OSX/iOS Foundation and AppKit libraries. That's really good, but their API hasn't kept up with Apple's block/closure idioms or libdispatch, almost all new code being written on the Mac today uses these. Also, while they've done the lord's work with their own CoreData, just about every new application these days links against at least AddressBook.framework and CoreAnimation -- it's hard to find even an FTP client on the Mac that doesn't use animated transitions.
Apple's never used DRM on their OS, they've just kept the upgrades coming and make sure developers start using them -- in exchange Apple aggressively markets its OS upgrades to its userbase, so developers don't lose their users becuase they don't upgrade. That's where MS failed in the end, people fell off the upgrade carousel, developers stopped chasing new Win APIs... This was Joel Spolsky's point when he argued that MS had failed as a platform company.