What's wierd is it's the same chucka-chucka you hear in Alien when the Nostromo computer receives new orders, and it also pops up in various parts of Brazil, The Black Hole, Logan's Run etc. I think it's an old Bernoulli drive or some kind of dishwasher hard disk. You can hear what we're talking about it on the Amazon.com website, just audition track 1 of the Blade Runner soundtrack.
It has been brought to my attention that people think I cut beeps out of the movie, based on the common English interpretation of the verb 'to cut.' I probably should have made it clear that I cut them "into" the movie, in accordance with the idiomatic Hollywood usage of the phrase. We apologize for the inconvenience. Flame on.
As far as I know, 'cut' only means 'add/create' in movie lingo.
Yeah, oh well. I added them, and then the re-recording mixer tossed out gobs of them, circle of life.
"Cut" means I added it, in the sense that "I found these sounds in the library and then I 'cut' them so that they would sync up with the picture." Something about CGI special effects is that if you used the literal on-set sound of every shot in the movie, 2012 would be about 50% dialogue, 50% render farm fan hum.
The first assistant to the Key Grip, who is the head of the grip department. These are guys that pick up and carry things around, like a film's 24-hour staff moving service -- film equipment, sets, props and photographic equipment are often bulky and unweildy. The best boy grip's main job is to sit at the truck and keep inventory on all of the gear, make sure the grips show up on time, make sure nothing is broken and repairs get done, etc.
The first assistant to the Gaffer, who is the chief electrician on set. A best boy in this case is usually called "best boy electric" and does the same sort of thing the best boy grip does, except with the lighting equipment.
There's some variance throughout the world, but this is the typical doctrine for union US film sets.
Yeah, I can't even hate you for working on it, nor the producers et al for creating it. It's just a movie, after all, so you don't fall into anything like the same class as the people who are promoting the 2012 thing as fact for their own benefit.
I always saw the whole "destruction of the world" as sortof an excuse to have a movie about a "conspiracy to save humanity." The interesting part of the movie isn't necessarily how Los Angeles is destroyed as much as why people in government and in echelons of the super-wealthy keep it a secret. That's what the movie is really about, and it's something that will probably get more examination over time, as the film settles into its place in film history.
When I started on the film last year, the election was still going on and the whole "conspiracy" of 2012 seemed very redolent of the TARP bailout, and of typically American debates about state power and prerogatives in general (note that the film was written and shot long before the October crash, or Lehman Bros. or any of the government responses to the Great Recession). Roland E. is quite liberal, and his way of squaring the circle of the state-individual conflict is by offering altruism as the only way of escaping (1) zero-sum battles for survival on the one hand, as personified by the Yuri character, and (2) state coercion, as personified by Anheuser/Oliver Platt. In the end, the conflict created by the destruction of the Earth becomes a means for the government to become secretive and corrupt, and for the wealthy to settle their personal grudges with people not-so-wealthy; the conspiracy to "contain panic" appears rational from thwe outset, but once it becomes clear it must be implemented, it's revealed to be nakedly inequitable and evil, and a complete abrogation of universal human values.
Yes, I've watched this movie several hundred times now and have had a lot of time to think about it.
Consider seeing it in Dolby Digital:) I don't get any more money either way, but seeing it at the $3 theater is almost worse than seeing it at home. Movies like this don't really work unless you're being actually pummeled by the sound and projection.
You put the beeps in for the same reason the male actors wear makeup, and scenes at night always are in blue light. It's a convention. If you make things blink on a 100 foot projection screen and they don't make a sound, people's get distracted by the absence somehow.
As someone who does this for a living but also is a hobbyist Objective-C/Cocoa/Ruby developer, I do find myself thinking about whether the beeps are triggered by key events, or if they should be emanating from windowserver, and we absolutely put some thought into the design of "Informational" versus "Alert" versus "Fatal" indicator beeps...
He did actually use the word "enhance" in Blade Runner... my first concrete memory of the "what the hell?" photo enhancing was in Sneakers, however that film is beyond any reproach, as far as I'm concerend.
This is the first film I've worked on that caused actual general panic. Grudge 2 scared people, but it's actually a little gratifying to think that work I did is scaring people even AFTER they walked out of the theater. At the time we were making it I knew the whole black president/conspiracy thing was definitely going to push a lot of buttons, just considering the way things are right now, but to be honest, the whole scientific backstory of the film is so thin I never actually considered that people would genuinely fear a cataclysm as depicted in the movie. "Mutating neutrinos"... really?
ps. I was the lead sound effects editor on the show. Along with blowing up Yellowstone and other sundry destructions, I personally cut about 80% of the computer screen beeps. And I cut every one of them just for you guys, because I know you love them so much:D
He made a killing when he sold stock into the biggest stock market bubble in memory, and he expects to be treated like some kind of goddamn business messiah. Typical Randroid: "I'm rich, therefore I'm a talented genius."
I watched "By Any Other Name" last night and they certainly did leave the milky way, crossing the "galactic barrier" in the process. Also they do enter the barrier in "Is there no Truth in Beauty," but by then it's a little more casual and no one gets godlike powers in the process.
Cuz Obama has, um...no power over the Justice Dept, right?
Not really, no, if he wants to keep the next guy from doing it, too. Besides, if it got out that he was forbidding warrants like this, Republicans would scream bloody murder and claim that he was putting the nation at risk to protect the rights of dirty hippies.
If you wanted to ban these warrants for evermore, and you are the president, this is the only way in the US system you can do it; the only other modality is by getting Congress to pass a law, but it's questionable he'd have the votes for it, and he'd put himself at significant political risk.
It's a long shot, but this might be the Obama administration's way of killing these kinds of subpoenas.
If BHO, the Attorney-General and the Secretary of Homeland Security decided to stop issuing these subpoenas, that would last at least 4 years and maybe eight, but that would be it. If Congress passed a law that forbade him from issuing these subpoenas pro se, he might abide by it, but the next guy might not, would be able to tie it up in the courts, and the courts might eventually let the thing pass.
However, if he sends out a subpoena to someone who isn't really doing anything wrong, who is likely to fight the case tooth and nail, and if the admin makes the demands of the subpoena so egregious that no court in their right mind would find it acceptible, he might be able to extract a ruling from the supreme court that says these subpoenas are illegal, or at least get good language for a test on their reasonableness. It's very sneaky but for a lawyerly mind it has a certain elegance. The upshot is that no president can ever again send out these kinds of subpoena, by order of the supreme court, and all the while the administration looks like a zealous investigator.
I HAVE flown with a few UK plugs and adapters as a matter of fact. Considering every piece of gear has a relatively bulky switching power supply, it's really not the most annoying thing you have to carry, particularly since all the UK plugs are right-angle and though they take up wall space they don't generally have a thick wall profile, which ain't generally so of US union plugs.
OTOH, the integrated fuse in every UK plug is just about the height of obnoxiousness.
When reading the article I think the most striking one was Denmark's, mainly because it forms an almost perfect smiley face, a bit like the more "shocked" expression the US jack. Of course the problem with making a power jack looking "friendly" is that it might attract little children's fingers.
UK plugs are quite a bit more sturdy -- you can't bend a prong on a UK mains plug with hand strength. They do take up a bit more wall space though.
The voltage isn't a trivial issue either. More volts to the wall means the house wiring doesn't need to carry as many amps and less fire/electrocution risk.
Think about it this way: would you rather have a patented standard everyone contributes to or have Nokia and Samsung privately decide on something they'll use together and shut everyone else out?
In many cases, as in the whole MP3 mess, the distinction between the two scenarios you provide is only a matter of degree... Nokia and Samsung "privately deciding to do something" and Nokia charging a smartphone OS vendor $12 a handset are indistinguishable, if, for example, you are the author of an open-source smartphone OS.
If Nokia and Samsung had some sort of secret protocol, that would almost be better, because then it would just be a matter of reverse-engineering.
As long as the sound is clean and there is no static, no pops, crackles, or hissing, I could care less what it is encoded at.
Unless the musician put pops, crackles and hissing into his music, or uses a musical instrument that has an unusual non-harmonic timbre, and the compression system removes these because they cannot be coded efficiently or the compression system's psychoacoustic model doesn't think these aspects are 'important' enought to code.
Jesus I'd never seen those. Just for those of you at home, I'm a professional sound designer for films, and I use ethernet cables that I bought at Fry's for a couple bucks a piece.
But seriously, can you make a sweeping statement like "People can't tell 48k audio from 160k"
The issue isn't "can I tell 48kbps from 160kbps" -- the real question should be: can I tell the difference between 48kbps AAC and the original uncompressed recording? AAC can sound "better" or "good" under a lot of situations where it's significantly distorting the original program material. AAC was designed specifically to choose "good sounding" over "accurate" as the bit rates get lower and lower. Also, keep in mind that a side-effect of compressing an audio stream like this is that you'll strip away noise and unusual harmonics from the original, which might cause a lower-rate recording to "sound better," when in fact stuff that the producer actually has in his mix is being removed.
Slashdot Mirror
The virtue of Android, from the carrier's perspective, is that it allows them to create terrible branded user experiences.
What's wierd is it's the same chucka-chucka you hear in Alien when the Nostromo computer receives new orders, and it also pops up in various parts of Brazil, The Black Hole, Logan's Run etc. I think it's an old Bernoulli drive or some kind of dishwasher hard disk. You can hear what we're talking about it on the Amazon.com website, just audition track 1 of the Blade Runner soundtrack.
It has been brought to my attention that people think I cut beeps out of the movie, based on the common English interpretation of the verb 'to cut.' I probably should have made it clear that I cut them "into" the movie, in accordance with the idiomatic Hollywood usage of the phrase. We apologize for the inconvenience. Flame on.
Yeah, oh well. I added them, and then the re-recording mixer tossed out gobs of them, circle of life.
"Cut" means I added it, in the sense that "I found these sounds in the library and then I 'cut' them so that they would sync up with the picture." Something about CGI special effects is that if you used the literal on-set sound of every shot in the movie, 2012 would be about 50% dialogue, 50% render farm fan hum.
Give Hurt Locker a try in that case.
There's some variance throughout the world, but this is the typical doctrine for union US film sets.
I always saw the whole "destruction of the world" as sortof an excuse to have a movie about a "conspiracy to save humanity." The interesting part of the movie isn't necessarily how Los Angeles is destroyed as much as why people in government and in echelons of the super-wealthy keep it a secret. That's what the movie is really about, and it's something that will probably get more examination over time, as the film settles into its place in film history.
When I started on the film last year, the election was still going on and the whole "conspiracy" of 2012 seemed very redolent of the TARP bailout, and of typically American debates about state power and prerogatives in general (note that the film was written and shot long before the October crash, or Lehman Bros. or any of the government responses to the Great Recession). Roland E. is quite liberal, and his way of squaring the circle of the state-individual conflict is by offering altruism as the only way of escaping (1) zero-sum battles for survival on the one hand, as personified by the Yuri character, and (2) state coercion, as personified by Anheuser/Oliver Platt. In the end, the conflict created by the destruction of the Earth becomes a means for the government to become secretive and corrupt, and for the wealthy to settle their personal grudges with people not-so-wealthy; the conspiracy to "contain panic" appears rational from thwe outset, but once it becomes clear it must be implemented, it's revealed to be nakedly inequitable and evil, and a complete abrogation of universal human values.
Yes, I've watched this movie several hundred times now and have had a lot of time to think about it.
Consider seeing it in Dolby Digital :) I don't get any more money either way, but seeing it at the $3 theater is almost worse than seeing it at home. Movies like this don't really work unless you're being actually pummeled by the sound and projection.
You'll love it. Even the progress bars beep!
You put the beeps in for the same reason the male actors wear makeup, and scenes at night always are in blue light. It's a convention. If you make things blink on a 100 foot projection screen and they don't make a sound, people's get distracted by the absence somehow.
As someone who does this for a living but also is a hobbyist Objective-C/Cocoa/Ruby developer, I do find myself thinking about whether the beeps are triggered by key events, or if they should be emanating from windowserver, and we absolutely put some thought into the design of "Informational" versus "Alert" versus "Fatal" indicator beeps...
Also airplane cockpits are a whole other deal!
He did actually use the word "enhance" in Blade Runner... my first concrete memory of the "what the hell?" photo enhancing was in Sneakers, however that film is beyond any reproach, as far as I'm concerend.
This is the first film I've worked on that caused actual general panic. Grudge 2 scared people, but it's actually a little gratifying to think that work I did is scaring people even AFTER they walked out of the theater. At the time we were making it I knew the whole black president/conspiracy thing was definitely going to push a lot of buttons, just considering the way things are right now, but to be honest, the whole scientific backstory of the film is so thin I never actually considered that people would genuinely fear a cataclysm as depicted in the movie. "Mutating neutrinos"... really?
ps. I was the lead sound effects editor on the show. Along with blowing up Yellowstone and other sundry destructions, I personally cut about 80% of the computer screen beeps. And I cut every one of them just for you guys, because I know you love them so much :D
I think the difference between most people and Mark Cuban is most people don't brain dump in public.
He made a killing when he sold stock into the biggest stock market bubble in memory, and he expects to be treated like some kind of goddamn business messiah. Typical Randroid: "I'm rich, therefore I'm a talented genius."
I guess I should file this under Mark Cuban's plan to defeat Barack Obama, Mark Cuban's plan to dominate basketball, Mark Cuban's plan to dominate HD television content, and Mark Cuban's plan to destroy theatrical motion picture distribution.
I watched "By Any Other Name" last night and they certainly did leave the milky way, crossing the "galactic barrier" in the process. Also they do enter the barrier in "Is there no Truth in Beauty," but by then it's a little more casual and no one gets godlike powers in the process.
That's Carla Gugino, famously of Sin City and the mother in the Spy Kids films; also wife of Sebastian Guitierrez, writer of Snakes on a Plane.
Threshold, really? What is it with Brannon Braga and transhuman genetic hybrids?
SNAP! In Ada's case though, the US government is a market unto itself.
Not really, no, if he wants to keep the next guy from doing it, too. Besides, if it got out that he was forbidding warrants like this, Republicans would scream bloody murder and claim that he was putting the nation at risk to protect the rights of dirty hippies.
If you wanted to ban these warrants for evermore, and you are the president, this is the only way in the US system you can do it; the only other modality is by getting Congress to pass a law, but it's questionable he'd have the votes for it, and he'd put himself at significant political risk.
It's a long shot, but this might be the Obama administration's way of killing these kinds of subpoenas.
If BHO, the Attorney-General and the Secretary of Homeland Security decided to stop issuing these subpoenas, that would last at least 4 years and maybe eight, but that would be it. If Congress passed a law that forbade him from issuing these subpoenas pro se, he might abide by it, but the next guy might not, would be able to tie it up in the courts, and the courts might eventually let the thing pass.
However, if he sends out a subpoena to someone who isn't really doing anything wrong, who is likely to fight the case tooth and nail, and if the admin makes the demands of the subpoena so egregious that no court in their right mind would find it acceptible, he might be able to extract a ruling from the supreme court that says these subpoenas are illegal, or at least get good language for a test on their reasonableness. It's very sneaky but for a lawyerly mind it has a certain elegance. The upshot is that no president can ever again send out these kinds of subpoena, by order of the supreme court, and all the while the administration looks like a zealous investigator.
It's a long shot and a conspiracy theory, though.
I HAVE flown with a few UK plugs and adapters as a matter of fact. Considering every piece of gear has a relatively bulky switching power supply, it's really not the most annoying thing you have to carry, particularly since all the UK plugs are right-angle and though they take up wall space they don't generally have a thick wall profile, which ain't generally so of US union plugs.
OTOH, the integrated fuse in every UK plug is just about the height of obnoxiousness.
When reading the article I think the most striking one was Denmark's, mainly because it forms an almost perfect smiley face, a bit like the more "shocked" expression the US jack. Of course the problem with making a power jack looking "friendly" is that it might attract little children's fingers.
UK plugs are quite a bit more sturdy -- you can't bend a prong on a UK mains plug with hand strength. They do take up a bit more wall space though.
The voltage isn't a trivial issue either. More volts to the wall means the house wiring doesn't need to carry as many amps and less fire/electrocution risk.
Think about it this way: would you rather have a patented standard everyone contributes to or have Nokia and Samsung privately decide on something they'll use together and shut everyone else out?
In many cases, as in the whole MP3 mess, the distinction between the two scenarios you provide is only a matter of degree... Nokia and Samsung "privately deciding to do something" and Nokia charging a smartphone OS vendor $12 a handset are indistinguishable, if, for example, you are the author of an open-source smartphone OS.
If Nokia and Samsung had some sort of secret protocol, that would almost be better, because then it would just be a matter of reverse-engineering.
As long as the sound is clean and there is no static, no pops, crackles, or hissing, I could care less what it is encoded at.
Unless the musician put pops, crackles and hissing into his music, or uses a musical instrument that has an unusual non-harmonic timbre, and the compression system removes these because they cannot be coded efficiently or the compression system's psychoacoustic model doesn't think these aspects are 'important' enought to code.
Jesus I'd never seen those. Just for those of you at home, I'm a professional sound designer for films, and I use ethernet cables that I bought at Fry's for a couple bucks a piece.
But seriously, can you make a sweeping statement like "People can't tell 48k audio from 160k"
The issue isn't "can I tell 48kbps from 160kbps" -- the real question should be: can I tell the difference between 48kbps AAC and the original uncompressed recording? AAC can sound "better" or "good" under a lot of situations where it's significantly distorting the original program material. AAC was designed specifically to choose "good sounding" over "accurate" as the bit rates get lower and lower. Also, keep in mind that a side-effect of compressing an audio stream like this is that you'll strip away noise and unusual harmonics from the original, which might cause a lower-rate recording to "sound better," when in fact stuff that the producer actually has in his mix is being removed.