I think the real driver of shakycam in CGI was in 2004 when After Effects added 4-point matchmove. Before that everything had to be tracked in by hand, or you had to spend A LOT more money on gear and contractors, and it was just too expensive to shoot VFX plates for TV with anything other than a lockdown.
Even if MGM ultimately does go bankrupt, someone will buy the pieces, and films at that stage would represent fairly important assets.
It'll probably end up like when Orion went bankrupt in the 90s, and all of the shows she had in the hopper stalled for a few years and found their way out a few years later through (then Ted Turner's) MGM and Sony, shows like Article 99, RoboCop 3, etc.
They get out eventually, and that's probably why Spyglass was cut in, since they're experts on making movies and can help tell the bondholders what's up and down with the production pipeline. The thing the bondholders really care about though is the MGM library, that hodgepodge of 80s cinema, which has a LOT of material to be mined, either for re-release, like the Orion and PolyGram library, or remake, like the Cannon Films properties.
Because $12.50/ticket for a family of four grosses $50, while a first-run DVD release of a movie will gross $20, tops - and the studios net more from the theaters than the disc release. The trick is getting people to opt for the theatrical release rather than a Netflix rental.
Note that of that $50 gross the distributing studio will only be able to collect about half of it at most, the rest is split contractually with the producers, director, stars, and as the show runs for weeks the share of the house that it splits with the theater goes in the theater's direction. The theaters like the higher ticket price because the distributors are sort of screwing them by pulling the shows out of theaters so quickly and putting them on BR, so better to get the most money as quickly as possible.
The split a distributor gets from DVD/BR/Netflix is actually much more favorable, and they clear much more money from the DVD, Bluray, and television rights: there's no exhibitor to pay and the creatives in production almost never get a cut, so the distro gets to keep almost all of the profit -- ideally they'd release a movie for two weeks, maximize their cut with the theater, and sell/rent the Blu-Ray, and keep the show out of Netflix Instant Queue until they beaten every last dime out of the long tail, at which point it becomes part of the commodity library that Netflix and Hulu and everyone else can run on a subscribing basis, which gets them a much more favorable deal than the old practice of renting old films to UHF stations. The pennies per eyeball is much better and easier to measure.
The appeal of 3D from the distributor's point-of-view is that it gets you more cash up front for a minimal investment -- they don't pay for the movie nominally, that's the producer's job and that's why they're getting half the gross. The theater has to pay for the projector, which is why they make the ticket prices higher -- theater's set ticket prices, not studios or distributors. All the distributor has to do is make enough copies to fill the theaters and ship 'em out, and this can actually be cheaper than a normal 2D film. And then, the studio has a movie to sell on DVD, ann they already have a ready made second run of the movie to sell as soon as there are enough customers with 3D home systems to justify a 3D Bluray run. And for all home exhibition, the distributor keeps all the munny.
The constantly-reframing (though tripod mounted) camera has been accepted as conventional ever since NYPD Blue used it in the late 90s, and they borrowed the effect from UK police procedurals. Straight-up shaky handheld has always been an accepted technique, and was used in a lot of films from the 60s on in order to emulate the feel of a documentary or news footage. The current style, highly dynamic and more shaky than documentaries, is generally attributed to the work of Paul Greengrass and Barry Akroyd, from films like Sunday Bloody Sunday to The Bourne Supremacy and The Hurt Locker.
"Red Dawn" finished up mixing at Todd-AO a few months ago, it's in the can of they can find someone to pick up distribution (which would seem like a slam dunk).
If they've shot principal they generally HAVE to release something eventually -- the bond company will permit nothing less.
All the films you see in the current trend of 3D, the "Real3D" shows, are digital projection off of digital media. No film involved in any part of the process. That's a major reason why Nolan hasn't done a 3D show -- he's really attached to shooting in film and particularly IMAX, and nothing digital really can supplement an IMAX image.
Note that the mix you get from an assistive listening device is awful. It's in mono and its a different balance than the main mix, with louder dialogue and music and effects mixed down. It's the same mix they use on the airlines. But if you have access to the booth it'd be easy enough to get a 5.1 discrete mix or even the AC3 if you have the proper equipment.
It's sort of a category error to talk about "percentages" of ones platform. Planks of a platform are correlated, often complimentary or contingent, often bound together by an ideology. You really can't quantify agreement with a specific proportion of a platform, unless there are supplemental candidates that offer all of the permutations (in which case you'd just vote for the one that aligns with you). Another problem is one like we see with the health care legislation, where polls show that people find 50% of it good, 50% of it bad, but the stuff they don't like is required in order to pay for the 50% they do like.
You really shouldn't vote on issues for this reason, because the issues always change and you probably don't have enough information to know all of the different options available, and even if you do, you can't constrain the representative. Your better of voting for ideological alignment or because you think on candidate is more competent, or can draw on more political capital to accomplish goals you broadly agree with etc.
A government that can't meet is also one that can't pass bills and confiscate people's property.
That's anarchism. A government that can't meet is also one that can't pay the police, thus anyone who can assemble more rifles than you can confiscate your property. And goodbye banking system, reliable capital investment, enforcement of contracts, real estate titles, and on and on.
In practice though this doesn't happen -- everybody in the state relies on the governments services, primarily the cops. The poor want criminal gangs controlled, the wealthy want their capital to be safe, the merchants want their stores to remain open and the businessmen want their operations to continue smoothly, and everyone wants the roads, rails, air traffic control towers, and banks to remain operating, and in the chaos they come to demand a leader that will re-institute the order of before at any price. It happens over and over.
And the problem with THAT is that it creates an illusion of legitimacy for an institution that truly isn't legitimate.
Look, this is the process we have for picking leaders -- if you don't think voting is a valid process then I'm not sure where you fit into a modern liberal republic. OTOH, if you think voting can work, you've gotta propose a different way of doing it, and I'm saying is a destructive vote of no confidence is a really shitty way of fixing this problem. A democracy with thin legitimacy is probably more desirable than a very legitimate dictatorship, and I'm not aware of evidence that any other outcomes are more than unicorns and rainbows.
There are other ways of addressing this, namely requiring that if someone loses their mandate through lack of support, they can only lose their job if the electors can agree on a replacement -- this is the system the German parliament uses, since Hitler came to power on the back of several no confidence votes.
They use the current electoral process to claim legitimacy even when they win less than 25% of the electorate (but 51% of those who actually vote).
If you don't vote you have no claim to pass judgement on the government yea or nay. If you don't like the candidates get involved in primaries and parties. But beware, it will require you to actually talk to people, instead of whining on a forum about why politicians are all teh OMG corrupT!, and it may require you to compromise on somebody you may not like for X and Y but gives you Z and X and Ys voters besides.
Where exactly did I mention anything that exuded racism??
In principle, and according to US law, if you use a particular form of discrimination/qualification/etc. that isn't racism, and even if racism isn't the intent, but has the mere effect of summarily excluding a group of people on the basis of their race, ethnicity, or national origin, it's racism and forbidden. See disparate impact.
The problem with a no-confidence plebiscite is the resolution. Historically, when an election provides the option of returning no winner, like many parliaments have or once implemented, you'd end up with a situation where the body went months or years without a leader, and in the vacuum other institutions (like revolutionary parties) would take over -- eventually if you belong to the group with the most money or guns, it becomes in your interest to spoil the votes because you benefit from the chaos and can claim the body is "do-nothing."
The best way to protect the democratic institution of voting is ensure that it always returns an unambiguous result. If it isn't able to do this all the time, the institution itself will lose legitimacy.
We have DarwinPorts and Fink, that's your APT. The problem with these and APT is they don't have integrated payment, or hosting, and they don't allow developers to sell their software with DRM. If you want to offer your open-source solution OS X has you covered. But if you want to sell your plain-old proprietary app with copy protection and complete outsourced fulfillment and billing nobody really offers this.
These aren't like good things, but they're clearly what independent for-profit developers want. And 30% off the top compared to eSellerate or Kagi is competitive for low volumes. I'm surprised they didn't do a sliding scale.
There's a very active debate on wether or not Microsoft at the present time, or throughout its growth after they finished NT has had simply way too many developers, and if its corporate culture hasn't suffered because of the bureaucratic overhead involved in keeping something like 30,000 programmers merely busy, let alone productive, creative, entrepreneurial and all that other awesome stuff you generally need cutting edge development to be. This is the view taken by Mini-Microsoft and others.
Compare also the opinion of John Sculley when he talked about the Mac unit when him and Jobs were still working together -- the whole division, hardware and software was only a hundred people or so, and only maybe a dozen were OS engineers, with another team of equivalent size writing the bundled applications. Apple presently has about 35,000 employees, but its been mentioned in sources that at least 2/3rds of them are in the retail side of the business, and for all of their OS and application development some people put their actual headcount in the mere hundreds.
The US government is sufficiently large that there isn't a single entity which can be called "the government".
For no purpose is the reduction of "the government" to a single entity useful.
Facebook can be held liable for violating its Terms of Service, and fraud on the basis of saying "we don't do this" when they in fact do (and then profiting from it).
Only if an offended party brings suit, and they'll only do that if they can find evidence. What's being suggested here is recognizing the violation of online privacy as a form of criminality, something that requires remedy even if an offended party refuses to complain, because they've been bought off or they're not cognizant or whatever. The thing with a civil suit is that everything has its price, and a company like Facebook can buy itself into any form of conduct it pleases buy settling for the right number; but if you make the violation of online privacy a crime, it becomes a principle that no violator can buy their way out of and no victim can ignore.
I agree with you completely, but I think this conflict brings into relief the issues behind what a smartphone really is.. If you own an Android phone that can boot into a root console, but you have to pay a significant premium to own it, and no cellular network will allow you to use value-added features, the "open" aspect of the phone has bought you benefited you the individual in no way.
The PC industry is a bit different because at the time the network effects took off, porting was a much higher cost barrier, and software was designed to actually be run on the independent computer and stand-alone productivity applications. In a world where a shop can turn out an iOS, Palm, RIM, and Android app for about the same level of effort, and where all of the apps they turn out are mostly just front-ends to a network service, the sort of product the end users are buying is quite different. The real supplemental product here is access to the network, everything else the phone maker and OS maker provide is complimentary to the network. The Network is the platform, not the OS, so making the OS open source is really of limited benefit.
The problem with open source projects like this is they live in a world where, to paraphrase Huxley, everyone can read the source but nobody wants to, because the source is useless without the platform, the Network being open, and the software actually helps maintain the Network's market incumbents and their rents.
I don't want to harp on this at too much length, but I used the word I used for a reason, I said "entitled" and I meant "entitled."
We don't say that people must learn assembly in order to harness the full benefit of computing -- user-friendly programming languages have put an end to this. The greatest contributions made to computing have been made by people who were able to take something strange and particular to computers and put it in common terms, so that anyone could make use of it. Originally, only geeks with punchcards could use computers to write music, but now we have GUIs that allow allow people who know music on their own terms to use a computer to make it. The idea that people are obliged to understand the full stack of computing technology in order to benefit from computing technology is exclusionary and supercilious.
And so here we have an instance where software is open, but in a sense that benefits will never touch end users. Not open like Firefox, not open like OpenOffice. Open like Darwin.
And I'm not saying Android sucks. I'm just saying that its openness provides no real benefit and shouldn't be regarded as a positive selling point.
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I think the real driver of shakycam in CGI was in 2004 when After Effects added 4-point matchmove. Before that everything had to be tracked in by hand, or you had to spend A LOT more money on gear and contractors, and it was just too expensive to shoot VFX plates for TV with anything other than a lockdown.
As with all things database, it's only as normalized as the meat between the chair and the keyboard wants it to be.
It'll probably end up like when Orion went bankrupt in the 90s, and all of the shows she had in the hopper stalled for a few years and found their way out a few years later through (then Ted Turner's) MGM and Sony, shows like Article 99, RoboCop 3, etc.
They get out eventually, and that's probably why Spyglass was cut in, since they're experts on making movies and can help tell the bondholders what's up and down with the production pipeline. The thing the bondholders really care about though is the MGM library, that hodgepodge of 80s cinema, which has a LOT of material to be mined, either for re-release, like the Orion and PolyGram library, or remake, like the Cannon Films properties.
Note that of that $50 gross the distributing studio will only be able to collect about half of it at most, the rest is split contractually with the producers, director, stars, and as the show runs for weeks the share of the house that it splits with the theater goes in the theater's direction. The theaters like the higher ticket price because the distributors are sort of screwing them by pulling the shows out of theaters so quickly and putting them on BR, so better to get the most money as quickly as possible.
The split a distributor gets from DVD/BR/Netflix is actually much more favorable, and they clear much more money from the DVD, Bluray, and television rights: there's no exhibitor to pay and the creatives in production almost never get a cut, so the distro gets to keep almost all of the profit -- ideally they'd release a movie for two weeks, maximize their cut with the theater, and sell/rent the Blu-Ray, and keep the show out of Netflix Instant Queue until they beaten every last dime out of the long tail, at which point it becomes part of the commodity library that Netflix and Hulu and everyone else can run on a subscribing basis, which gets them a much more favorable deal than the old practice of renting old films to UHF stations. The pennies per eyeball is much better and easier to measure.
The appeal of 3D from the distributor's point-of-view is that it gets you more cash up front for a minimal investment -- they don't pay for the movie nominally, that's the producer's job and that's why they're getting half the gross. The theater has to pay for the projector, which is why they make the ticket prices higher -- theater's set ticket prices, not studios or distributors. All the distributor has to do is make enough copies to fill the theaters and ship 'em out, and this can actually be cheaper than a normal 2D film. And then, the studio has a movie to sell on DVD, ann they already have a ready made second run of the movie to sell as soon as there are enough customers with 3D home systems to justify a 3D Bluray run. And for all home exhibition, the distributor keeps all the munny.
"Fuck it," says Gillette executive, "We're going to five blades."
That's not true, they just throw away one side of the stereo image.
The constantly-reframing (though tripod mounted) camera has been accepted as conventional ever since NYPD Blue used it in the late 90s, and they borrowed the effect from UK police procedurals. Straight-up shaky handheld has always been an accepted technique, and was used in a lot of films from the 60s on in order to emulate the feel of a documentary or news footage. The current style, highly dynamic and more shaky than documentaries, is generally attributed to the work of Paul Greengrass and Barry Akroyd, from films like Sunday Bloody Sunday to The Bourne Supremacy and The Hurt Locker.
If they've shot principal they generally HAVE to release something eventually -- the bond company will permit nothing less.
All the films you see in the current trend of 3D, the "Real3D" shows, are digital projection off of digital media. No film involved in any part of the process. That's a major reason why Nolan hasn't done a 3D show -- he's really attached to shooting in film and particularly IMAX, and nothing digital really can supplement an IMAX image.
Note that the mix you get from an assistive listening device is awful. It's in mono and its a different balance than the main mix, with louder dialogue and music and effects mixed down. It's the same mix they use on the airlines. But if you have access to the booth it'd be easy enough to get a 5.1 discrete mix or even the AC3 if you have the proper equipment.
It's sort of a category error to talk about "percentages" of ones platform. Planks of a platform are correlated, often complimentary or contingent, often bound together by an ideology. You really can't quantify agreement with a specific proportion of a platform, unless there are supplemental candidates that offer all of the permutations (in which case you'd just vote for the one that aligns with you). Another problem is one like we see with the health care legislation, where polls show that people find 50% of it good, 50% of it bad, but the stuff they don't like is required in order to pay for the 50% they do like.
You really shouldn't vote on issues for this reason, because the issues always change and you probably don't have enough information to know all of the different options available, and even if you do, you can't constrain the representative. Your better of voting for ideological alignment or because you think on candidate is more competent, or can draw on more political capital to accomplish goals you broadly agree with etc.
That's anarchism. A government that can't meet is also one that can't pay the police, thus anyone who can assemble more rifles than you can confiscate your property. And goodbye banking system, reliable capital investment, enforcement of contracts, real estate titles, and on and on.
In practice though this doesn't happen -- everybody in the state relies on the governments services, primarily the cops. The poor want criminal gangs controlled, the wealthy want their capital to be safe, the merchants want their stores to remain open and the businessmen want their operations to continue smoothly, and everyone wants the roads, rails, air traffic control towers, and banks to remain operating, and in the chaos they come to demand a leader that will re-institute the order of before at any price. It happens over and over.
Immigrant goes to America,
Many hellos in America;
Nobody knows in America
Puerto Rico's in America!
Look, this is the process we have for picking leaders -- if you don't think voting is a valid process then I'm not sure where you fit into a modern liberal republic. OTOH, if you think voting can work, you've gotta propose a different way of doing it, and I'm saying is a destructive vote of no confidence is a really shitty way of fixing this problem. A democracy with thin legitimacy is probably more desirable than a very legitimate dictatorship, and I'm not aware of evidence that any other outcomes are more than unicorns and rainbows.
There are other ways of addressing this, namely requiring that if someone loses their mandate through lack of support, they can only lose their job if the electors can agree on a replacement -- this is the system the German parliament uses, since Hitler came to power on the back of several no confidence votes.
If you don't vote you have no claim to pass judgement on the government yea or nay. If you don't like the candidates get involved in primaries and parties. But beware, it will require you to actually talk to people, instead of whining on a forum about why politicians are all teh OMG corrupT!, and it may require you to compromise on somebody you may not like for X and Y but gives you Z and X and Ys voters besides.
In principle, and according to US law, if you use a particular form of discrimination/qualification/etc. that isn't racism, and even if racism isn't the intent, but has the mere effect of summarily excluding a group of people on the basis of their race, ethnicity, or national origin, it's racism and forbidden. See disparate impact.
Keep the government out of people's lives. Unless they speak Spanish, in which case, jackboot away!
I'm here legally and I vote, is there a problem with that? Is anyone proposing that someone who is here illegally be entitled to vote?
The problem with a no-confidence plebiscite is the resolution. Historically, when an election provides the option of returning no winner, like many parliaments have or once implemented, you'd end up with a situation where the body went months or years without a leader, and in the vacuum other institutions (like revolutionary parties) would take over -- eventually if you belong to the group with the most money or guns, it becomes in your interest to spoil the votes because you benefit from the chaos and can claim the body is "do-nothing."
The best way to protect the democratic institution of voting is ensure that it always returns an unambiguous result. If it isn't able to do this all the time, the institution itself will lose legitimacy.
We have DarwinPorts and Fink, that's your APT. The problem with these and APT is they don't have integrated payment, or hosting, and they don't allow developers to sell their software with DRM. If you want to offer your open-source solution OS X has you covered. But if you want to sell your plain-old proprietary app with copy protection and complete outsourced fulfillment and billing nobody really offers this.
These aren't like good things, but they're clearly what independent for-profit developers want. And 30% off the top compared to eSellerate or Kagi is competitive for low volumes. I'm surprised they didn't do a sliding scale.
There's a very active debate on wether or not Microsoft at the present time, or throughout its growth after they finished NT has had simply way too many developers, and if its corporate culture hasn't suffered because of the bureaucratic overhead involved in keeping something like 30,000 programmers merely busy, let alone productive, creative, entrepreneurial and all that other awesome stuff you generally need cutting edge development to be. This is the view taken by Mini-Microsoft and others.
Compare also the opinion of John Sculley when he talked about the Mac unit when him and Jobs were still working together -- the whole division, hardware and software was only a hundred people or so, and only maybe a dozen were OS engineers, with another team of equivalent size writing the bundled applications. Apple presently has about 35,000 employees, but its been mentioned in sources that at least 2/3rds of them are in the retail side of the business, and for all of their OS and application development some people put their actual headcount in the mere hundreds.
For no purpose is the reduction of "the government" to a single entity useful.
Only if an offended party brings suit, and they'll only do that if they can find evidence. What's being suggested here is recognizing the violation of online privacy as a form of criminality, something that requires remedy even if an offended party refuses to complain, because they've been bought off or they're not cognizant or whatever. The thing with a civil suit is that everything has its price, and a company like Facebook can buy itself into any form of conduct it pleases buy settling for the right number; but if you make the violation of online privacy a crime, it becomes a principle that no violator can buy their way out of and no victim can ignore.
If gold ever becomes so expensive that mining it from the moon becomes economical, I might take that as a gold sell signal :)
Except competition from Linux and Microsoft... I mean, if people really want a DRM-free platform they'll demand it and flee to it in droves, right?
I agree with you completely, but I think this conflict brings into relief the issues behind what a smartphone really is.. If you own an Android phone that can boot into a root console, but you have to pay a significant premium to own it, and no cellular network will allow you to use value-added features, the "open" aspect of the phone has bought you benefited you the individual in no way.
The PC industry is a bit different because at the time the network effects took off, porting was a much higher cost barrier, and software was designed to actually be run on the independent computer and stand-alone productivity applications. In a world where a shop can turn out an iOS, Palm, RIM, and Android app for about the same level of effort, and where all of the apps they turn out are mostly just front-ends to a network service, the sort of product the end users are buying is quite different. The real supplemental product here is access to the network, everything else the phone maker and OS maker provide is complimentary to the network. The Network is the platform, not the OS, so making the OS open source is really of limited benefit.
The problem with open source projects like this is they live in a world where, to paraphrase Huxley, everyone can read the source but nobody wants to, because the source is useless without the platform, the Network being open, and the software actually helps maintain the Network's market incumbents and their rents.
I don't want to harp on this at too much length, but I used the word I used for a reason, I said "entitled" and I meant "entitled."
We don't say that people must learn assembly in order to harness the full benefit of computing -- user-friendly programming languages have put an end to this. The greatest contributions made to computing have been made by people who were able to take something strange and particular to computers and put it in common terms, so that anyone could make use of it. Originally, only geeks with punchcards could use computers to write music, but now we have GUIs that allow allow people who know music on their own terms to use a computer to make it. The idea that people are obliged to understand the full stack of computing technology in order to benefit from computing technology is exclusionary and supercilious.
And so here we have an instance where software is open, but in a sense that benefits will never touch end users. Not open like Firefox, not open like OpenOffice. Open like Darwin.
And I'm not saying Android sucks. I'm just saying that its openness provides no real benefit and shouldn't be regarded as a positive selling point.