You can tell any story you like, but the only one that gets made will be the one the studio will bankroll. If you don't factor in that sieve, you don't understand the movie business.
You need to educate yourself about how movie accounting works.
You pay $10 to watch a movie. This is the GROSS.
The exhibitor (eg Cineplex Odeon) take 50% $5 and pass the rest up the chain.
The distributor (eg Lions Gate, Miramax, Gold Circle) take 50% ($2.50) and pass the rest up the chain.
The remaining $2.50 is the PRODUCER'S GROSS.
The A-list actors who have a % of gross take their cut. Say 20%. That leaves $2.
Now that $2 is used to pay off the cost of production ('negative cost') and give the investors a return on their capital. This includes things that have already been paid like producer's fees, actors' fees, writing fees, all the crew costs, etc. The studios usually get a big cut of this because the movie uses their facilities, which they charge out at exhorbitant fees.
Once the negative cost has been recouped (if ever), what's left is PRODUCER'S NET, which is what most people in the movies mean by profit.
As a writer, I usually get 5% of this, sometimes known as 'five monkey points' because only monkeys think they mean anything.
But anyway, the logic of all this is that a movie must make AT LEAST 4x it's negative cost to go into profit. So a $200m movie must gross $800m+ to go into profit.
Comforting as it may be to lay off blame to someone else, in business the only mistakes are your own. Strategically, relying on Microsoft's DRM was a huge mistake, as lots of people realized at the time. Moreover, laying off on Microsoft allows them to conveniently ignore the fact that subscription-based music services are a fundamentally b0rked idea while iTunes (and indeed AllOfMp3.com) remains up and running ('why rent when you can buy?' at its simplest). Napster's business model either ignored those factors or figured it was a risk worth taking. They had lots of choices. They made the wrong ones.
A clone of iTunes which doesn't interoperate with the iTunes store, play any of my DRM'd music, work on a Mac or under Linux, or interface with my iPod. Its only selling point being vaporware plugins.
The betterlight back is $7000 ON TOP of the cost of the 4x5 camera, and you end up carrying at least a 33 pound pack. It has to be used tethered to a laptop. Good luck with that in snow/rain. It's a scanning back with all the issues that entails.
The 'compromise' of a digital MF doesn't approach LF in quality.
The worst thing of all is the built in obsolescence of the digi stuff. My Fujis are 20 years old, my Linhof 30 years old, my Rollei about 40 and my crown graphic about 50. They all still work and you can get film for all of them.
The point is you have to keep the batteries charged. I keep all my film cameras in my truck which means I can photograph without worrying if the batteries are charged. Most rechargables for pro digis slowly lose charge. When I had the 1Ds, half the time I wanted to use it the batteries were almost dead. Obviously the answer is battery management, but it doesn't suit the way I work. Also, the pro batteries for cameras like the 1Ds are extremely heavy.
4x5 digital backs are astoundingly, ASTOUNDINGLY, expensive and require lots of power and are generally used tethered. They do not like precipitation. Try backpacking on snowshoes into a forest with one.
I've done a huge amount of stitching with pano software (PTMac, PTGui, Hugin etc) and although the results are great you cannot frame with them as you can with a regular camera and the work required to stitch the pictures is very large (despite some automated techniques). I typically shoot around 80-100 6x9 images on the average shooting day. To get equivalent resolution with panos would require massive amounts of storage and processing time, and you'd still not be able to frame up properly. And the stitched images almost always have flaws of one kind or another (eg the light changes between frames, you have moving subects, the wind is blowing foliage, and so on).
All your points are points made by someone who has not actually tried to do any of this stuff.
I guess I'm the opposite to you on almost all counts. I'm lucky enough to be able to afford Leica stuff if I want it, although I recently sold everything but a body and a lens because it wasn't being used. I take pictures for serious purposes, print big, with the intention of selling/showing. I have the scanners and the lab is five minutes away. So film works well for me. I was an early digital adopter and have written a lot about digital on the web, but it's not the same for me.
Even if Moore's law applied, it applies weirdly. To double the width of the photo you can print, you need 4x as many pixels. Each doubling of the pixel count only increased the print size by a factor of about 1.4.
I spent two years trying to take those pictures with the digi and failed.
Also bear in mind the 1Ds will blow up to about 20x16 absolute max, and then not at great quality. The MF will go to about 30x20 and the 4x5 stuff will go to 50x40. My stuff is designed to be printed big and the digi won't get there.
I don't think Scheimpflug is that hard. The diagrams always make it seem way harder than it is. Most of the time you are simply rotating the lens plane towards the plane of focus to increase the DOF. It's easy to check that on the ground glass. I do it all the time, very informally. Unless you are shooting wide open you can hide your Scheimpflug errors in the DOF.
I recently sold my (mind buggeringly expensive) Canon 1Ds and went back to all-manual film cameras. Not 35mm, though. In larger formats film still has huge advantages over digital in terms of quality and enlargability. The lack of battery dependence is also incredibly liberating. It is horribly expensive though. With the exception of my Panasonic LX1 digi, I now don't own a camera which isn't completely manual... a Linhof 4x5, a pair of Fuji 6x9 rangefinders, a Rollei SL66, a Noblex 6x12 and a Leica M4-P. The Leica is the only one that doesn't get used on a weekly basis... but the last time we had a huge power outage I was enormously grateful for it.
There are plenty of 25-year old's I'd be happy to play with (I'm 41 and have been playing online games since the first UT). In fact, there are plenty of 13 year olds. There are also a bunch of 25+ jerks and your Doodi comes across as less mature than lots of the kids I play against daily. Hmph.
The point of all this bullshit is simply to create a web of laws which can be used to ensnare anybody.
The next time some wingnut retard says 'so long as you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to fear', point this out (and tell them how annoying they are).
If only there were OTHER ways of posting pictures of yourself on the internet with the spots photoshopped out in the hope that some girl in Kansas will think you're hot and add her to her friends list while discussing with your bedroom-bound peer group the latest netvid of some jerk wiping out on his BMX and straddling his nuts on the crossbar while simultaneously downloading pirated copies of godawful corporate-fabricated whine rock.
Oh, the humanity! Won't somebody think of the children?
Bullshit. They both redistribute exactly the same amount of energy as this does, just in different ways. There's no way to remove energy from any part of the ecosphere without having a local effect. The only question is whether the local effect matters or not. And by 'matters' I mean matters, not 'matters to the Green Taliban'.
It's flippin' ridiculous that email still doesn't have any form of simple sender verification, which would eliminate not just phishing but about 90% of spam.
Slashdot Mirror
If I was them I'd tell the guys who work the popcorn stand that too.
The whole point of movie accounting is that everyone gets to make a lot of money, but the movie never goes into profit. It's set up that way.
The distributors also take a risk since they pay upfront for the rights to distribute a movie, and may also have an equity position in the movie.
I'm assuming you don't know any writers.
You can tell any story you like, but the only one that gets made will be the one the studio will bankroll. If you don't factor in that sieve, you don't understand the movie business.
You need to educate yourself about how movie accounting works.
You pay $10 to watch a movie. This is the GROSS.
The exhibitor (eg Cineplex Odeon) take 50% $5 and pass the rest up the chain.
The distributor (eg Lions Gate, Miramax, Gold Circle) take 50% ($2.50) and pass the rest up the chain.
The remaining $2.50 is the PRODUCER'S GROSS.
The A-list actors who have a % of gross take their cut. Say 20%. That leaves $2.
Now that $2 is used to pay off the cost of production ('negative cost') and give the investors a return on their capital. This includes things that have already been paid like producer's fees, actors' fees, writing fees, all the crew costs, etc. The studios usually get a big cut of this because the movie uses their facilities, which they charge out at exhorbitant fees.
Once the negative cost has been recouped (if ever), what's left is PRODUCER'S NET, which is what most people in the movies mean by profit.
As a writer, I usually get 5% of this, sometimes known as 'five monkey points' because only monkeys think they mean anything.
But anyway, the logic of all this is that a movie must make AT LEAST 4x it's negative cost to go into profit. So a $200m movie must gross $800m+ to go into profit.
Comforting as it may be to lay off blame to someone else, in business the only mistakes are your own. Strategically, relying on Microsoft's DRM was a huge mistake, as lots of people realized at the time. Moreover, laying off on Microsoft allows them to conveniently ignore the fact that subscription-based music services are a fundamentally b0rked idea while iTunes (and indeed AllOfMp3.com) remains up and running ('why rent when you can buy?' at its simplest). Napster's business model either ignored those factors or figured it was a risk worth taking. They had lots of choices. They made the wrong ones.
Just because you build it doesn't mean the consumer will come.
Investing billions of dollars in technology which nobody buys costs you a FUCK of a lot more than piracy.
I think a big dose of reality is headed towards The Man pretty soon.
One of the reasons iTunes works is that the DRM is reasonably non-intrusive. One billion songs. Count 'em, RIAA, count 'em.
A clone of iTunes which doesn't interoperate with the iTunes store, play any of my DRM'd music, work on a Mac or under Linux, or interface with my iPod. Its only selling point being vaporware plugins.
Bzzt! Next!
nah, he's only 1336.
I've no idea what your point is. You argue like Eliza. Bye.
The betterlight back is $7000 ON TOP of the cost of the 4x5 camera, and you end up carrying at least a 33 pound pack. It has to be used tethered to a laptop. Good luck with that in snow/rain. It's a scanning back with all the issues that entails.
The 'compromise' of a digital MF doesn't approach LF in quality.
The worst thing of all is the built in obsolescence of the digi stuff. My Fujis are 20 years old, my Linhof 30 years old, my Rollei about 40 and my crown graphic about 50. They all still work and you can get film for all of them.
The point is you have to keep the batteries charged. I keep all my film cameras in my truck which means I can photograph without worrying if the batteries are charged. Most rechargables for pro digis slowly lose charge. When I had the 1Ds, half the time I wanted to use it the batteries were almost dead. Obviously the answer is battery management, but it doesn't suit the way I work. Also, the pro batteries for cameras like the 1Ds are extremely heavy.
4x5 digital backs are astoundingly, ASTOUNDINGLY, expensive and require lots of power and are generally used tethered. They do not like precipitation. Try backpacking on snowshoes into a forest with one.
I've done a huge amount of stitching with pano software (PTMac, PTGui, Hugin etc) and although the results are great you cannot frame with them as you can with a regular camera and the work required to stitch the pictures is very large (despite some automated techniques). I typically shoot around 80-100 6x9 images on the average shooting day. To get equivalent resolution with panos would require massive amounts of storage and processing time, and you'd still not be able to frame up properly. And the stitched images almost always have flaws of one kind or another (eg the light changes between frames, you have moving subects, the wind is blowing foliage, and so on).
All your points are points made by someone who has not actually tried to do any of this stuff.
I guess I'm the opposite to you on almost all counts. I'm lucky enough to be able to afford Leica stuff if I want it, although I recently sold everything but a body and a lens because it wasn't being used. I take pictures for serious purposes, print big, with the intention of selling/showing. I have the scanners and the lab is five minutes away. So film works well for me. I was an early digital adopter and have written a lot about digital on the web, but it's not the same for me.
You don't know what you're talking about. Go and look at some big 4x5 enlargements and then come back.
I've used both kinds of cameras. Have you?
Even if Moore's law applied, it applies weirdly. To double the width of the photo you can print, you need 4x as many pixels. Each doubling of the pixel count only increased the print size by a factor of about 1.4.
I spent two years trying to take those pictures with the digi and failed.
Also bear in mind the 1Ds will blow up to about 20x16 absolute max, and then not at great quality. The MF will go to about 30x20 and the 4x5 stuff will go to 50x40. My stuff is designed to be printed big and the digi won't get there.
I don't think Scheimpflug is that hard. The diagrams always make it seem way harder than it is. Most of the time you are simply rotating the lens plane towards the plane of focus to increase the DOF. It's easy to check that on the ground glass. I do it all the time, very informally. Unless you are shooting wide open you can hide your Scheimpflug errors in the DOF.
I recently sold my (mind buggeringly expensive) Canon 1Ds and went back to all-manual film cameras. Not 35mm, though. In larger formats film still has huge advantages over digital in terms of quality and enlargability. The lack of battery dependence is also incredibly liberating. It is horribly expensive though. With the exception of my Panasonic LX1 digi, I now don't own a camera which isn't completely manual... a Linhof 4x5, a pair of Fuji 6x9 rangefinders, a Rollei SL66, a Noblex 6x12 and a Leica M4-P. The Leica is the only one that doesn't get used on a weekly basis... but the last time we had a huge power outage I was enormously grateful for it.
Pix here, here and here if anyone's interested.
There are plenty of 25-year old's I'd be happy to play with (I'm 41 and have been playing online games since the first UT). In fact, there are plenty of 13 year olds. There are also a bunch of 25+ jerks and your Doodi comes across as less mature than lots of the kids I play against daily. Hmph.
The point of all this bullshit is simply to create a web of laws which can be used to ensnare anybody.
The next time some wingnut retard says 'so long as you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to fear', point this out (and tell them how annoying they are).
If only there were OTHER ways of posting pictures of yourself on the internet with the spots photoshopped out in the hope that some girl in Kansas will think you're hot and add her to her friends list while discussing with your bedroom-bound peer group the latest netvid of some jerk wiping out on his BMX and straddling his nuts on the crossbar while simultaneously downloading pirated copies of godawful corporate-fabricated whine rock.
Oh, the humanity! Won't somebody think of the children?
Oh, hang on...
Bullshit. They both redistribute exactly the same amount of energy as this does, just in different ways. There's no way to remove energy from any part of the ecosphere without having a local effect. The only question is whether the local effect matters or not. And by 'matters' I mean matters, not 'matters to the Green Taliban'.
It's flippin' ridiculous that email still doesn't have any form of simple sender verification, which would eliminate not just phishing but about 90% of spam.