Wow, they must have really improved it. I only tried it once, and that was a couple of months ago. It screwed things up so badly I had to scratch-install everything all over again. Since then, I've been reluctant to give it another try. Maybe I should try again with the Beta release.
Recall back in 1998 when the industry mouthpieces went around claiming that the need for more Visas was just a temporary thing, and that eventually they would train all the American workers to do the same jobs? What happened to that? Apparently everybody (including our illustrious Congressmen) got amnesia concerning that.
As many people continuously point out, these H1-B workers are essentially indentured labor. They can't switch jobs, they can't ask for more money or more benefits, and they can't complain about working conditions or labor law violations because if they tried to do any of those things, they would be fired and deported instantly, and never be able to come back, since no other company would touch them after an incident like that. Meanwhile, the companies that hire H1-B workers are making out like bandits by paying them less and working them harder than any of their American counterparts, who actually enjoy some bargaining power (being able to swtich jobs, demand better pay and benefits, etc.)
Yes, yes, all the apologists are going to immediately chime in and say that employers are "required" to pay the same rate for H1-B workers as for their American counterparts, but everyone knows that's bullshit. There is basically zero enforcement of that rule. Employers can and do get away with paying far less than they would normally have to for the amount of work they are getting out of these people. And they can't compain either, because (as mentioned before), they are at the mercy of the company that is employing them. They would be fired and sent home immediately if they ever spoke up about the abuses.
This is exploitation, pure and simple. Why do you think companies push so hard for these increases? In American business today, there's a simple rule. If an industry wants something, that means it's going to screw people over. So don't give it to them!
Actually, it works great. One thing Mach is really good at is multi-processor support. (I'm glad there's at least some benefit from using Mach, since its overhead is so bloody high.)
I ran some demos of MacOS X on a dual G4 machine at the Seybold conference in SF about a month ago, and I was able to play a bunch of looped Quicktime movies in the background while juggling about 5 different apps in the foreground. It was very smooth. The CPU meter showed a fairly balanced load between the two processors the whole time. Pretty slick!
If by "over" you mean installing both OSes on the same partition, I wouldn't recommend it, even if you have the latest revision of MacOS 9. There will be many instances of conflicting file and path names. This problem is being worked on for the final release, but for now separate partitions are the way to go.
As long as you install MacOS X n a separate partition, it doesn't really matter which OS is on your older partition. You just have to be able to run the "System Disk" utility (different from the old "Startup Disk" control panel; it's included on the MacOS X CD) in order to switch back and forth between the two OSes. I believe MacOS 8 should be able to run it.
One thing worth noting when it comes to older verions of the MacOS, however, is compatibility with MacOS X's "Classic" environment. Whenever it starts up, it needs a boot volume (i.e., a partition with a traditional MacOS "System Folder"). You can use any MacOS 9 installtion with it, but I wouldn't try using a MacOS 8 system with it. That would probably cause all sorts of problems.
Other than that, MacOS 8 and MacOS X should co-exist happily, as long as they reside on separate partitions.
Apple got more than just the $150 million stock investment from Microsoft, they also got an "undisclosed sum" to go with it. The whole thing was part of a settlement over patent disputes between MS and Apple that had been going on for years. Some people have estimated that the "undisclosed sum" was just huge, perhaps as high as $1 billion or more. Bob Cringely wrote a column speculating about that when the whole deal went down two years ago. I would provide a link here, but it was so long ago that it doesn't even show up in his "old hat" archives.
The Corel deal sounds different. Unlike the Apple deal, there were no ongoing patent disputes and no "undisclosed sum". MS just threw a low 9-figure wad of cash (chump change to them) at Corel to help keep them alive, probably so that they will be able to point to them later and say, "See, we have competitors! We're not a monopoly!"
Yes, but as someone else pointed out, in two-way communication, RSA (or something like it) is still typically used to pass the "session" keys that are used to do the block ciphering. No matter how good your block cipher is, it is still at the mercy of whatever you use to exchange the keys.
Good point. Drawing attention away from Echelon might very well be the true purpose of Carnivore. If so, it seems to be working. Looking back over this story, I see that your post is the only one that actually mentions Echelon. It's like everyone just collectively forgot about it.
The more I think about it, the more I think you're right. Carnivore might have been created to serve several puposes, but one of them is likely to act as a decoy for Echelon.
P.S. "Red herring" is probably a more apt description than "straw man".
...when I was on an H1, I wasn't cheap - and don't forget that we must be paid at least the prevailing wage.
As has been mentioned here before, despite this rule (paying the going rate) being part of the H1 process, there is virtually zero enforcement of it. Employers can put whatever they want on the paperwork, and then change the salary later. There is never any follow-up by regulators to make sure employers pay what they say they are paying.
I'll bet if someone did some serious investigation into this, they'd find that pretty much every company that hires H1 workers is cheating on the pay to some degree.
You're not going to get 4K when the thing is being projected by an unhappy teenager working for $6.85 an hour at the local megaplex or on a run down print. Solid state projection and digital storage will get you that.
How in the world can the manner in which it is projected alter the resolution of what's recorded on the film? An "unhappy teenager" will might make it dimmer, out-of-focus, or misaligned, but they can't reduce the number of grains on the print! The resolution of the film is fixed once it is printed in the lab. Poor projection does not change it.
Digital projectors have lamps and lenses, too, so they are not free from the problems I just mentioned (out-of-focus, underlit). The only problems they free you from are dirt and scratches, and in my experience, those are the problems I encounter the least
when going to the movies. It's the former that comes up most often. Digital will not solve that!
And so far, nobody has even talked about doing 4K digital movies. People seem to have already made up their minds that 2K HDTV resolution is "enough". But I don't want to have to go to a movie theater just to watch HDTV!
It also worries me that people keep making straw man arguments when they compare film vs. digital. They pit the best digital has to offer against the worst film has to offer. Would you replace a high-quality analog audio system with 8-bit/11KHz digital sound? Of course not! Well, the standards that people are proposing for digital "cinema" are that far out of whack as far as I'm concerned. Why are people insiting on aiming their standards so low?! Am I the only person on Earth who cares about high quality images? It sure seems like it. Everyone else just hears the "d" word and shuts their brains off. "If it's digital, it must be perfect!" is what they seem to think.
I agree with your statement about 2K being a replacement for 16mm and television film production, but you're the first person I've heard say that (besides myself). Everyone else seems ready to dump 2K (or worse, 1280x1024!) into theaters and say, "done!"
Just skimming the NYT article about Napster, I noticed that they gave Hillary Rosen a chance to respond to other people like that 17-year-old, Kevin Smith, and Esther Dyson, without giving them the same chance to respond to her.
There is a lengthy Q&A session following, but that hardly makes up for it. As usual, the industry cartel is over-represented.
Well, that's a pretty well-written paper, but I have to say that your statement about film's extra resolution (about 4000 lines) being thrown away during the printing process is flat out wrong.
First off, even with ordinary prints, I can, in many cases, see the individual pixels in computer animation and special effects shots that were done at 2K resolution. Yes, that's right. In a theater with good projection I can notice pixelation and jagged edges, especially whenever there are straight edges any where in the picture. I saw these problems in almost every one of this past summer's blockbusters (and flops). "Space Cowboys" looks especially bad: just look at any supposedly straight lines in the CGI shots and you'll see the jagged edge. "Gone in 60 Seconds" is another: look at the telephone wires in the shot where the camera is craning down at the beginning of a scene and there's a subtitle put in with CGI: more jagged edges. "Dinosaur" and "Titan A.E." had visible pixels all the way through. Now, how could I be seeing that stuff if it weren't for the fact that film retains greater than 2000 lines resolution even after going through all the steps to get to a release print? What more proof do I need? Film holds more than 2000 lines of resolution, even in a release print! And with continued improvements in film stocks and printing processes, it's only going to get better.
Secondly, there is Technicolor's newly revived "dye-transfer" process, which produces incredible resolution and color saturation. It gives you an exact copy of what was on the camera negative. Every last grain of the original film makes its way in to the release print. I've seen these types of prints with my own eyes, and let me tell you, it's incredible. Not since the days of 70mm have I seen film look that good. And the great thing is, Technicolor can run it off at about 5 cents per foot -- same cost as ordinary film prints. I think you'll be seeing a lot more dye-transfer prints showing up in your theaters in the next couple of years, thereby increasing the quality of release prints even further.
When it comes down to it, 2000 lines of resolution just isn't enough to replace film. I fear that people will simply ignore that fact though, and do it anyway, and then we'll be stuck with poor quality images for movies from now on. I can only hope that high standards will prevail, and 4K, not 2K, will become the standard resolution for digital cinema.
Yes, there have been several film systems with greater than 24 frames per second.
Todd-AO was originally 65mm negatives shot at 30fps. "Oklahoma!" was filmed that way, as was "Around the World in 80 Days". The trouble with that system was that in order to have the movie shown in non-30fps equipped theaters, a second take of every scene had to be shot at 24 fps. "Oklahoma!" was essentially two movies done side-by-side. Later, Todd-AO was changed to 24fps for compatability, but kept the larger 65mm negative.
Cinerama used 3 strips of 35mm film running side-by-side at 26 fps. "How the West Was Won" is one movie filmed in that fashion. Compatability was not a problem for Cinerama because in order to show it at all theaters had to install special equipment anyway, so theaters could upgrade to 26 fps at while installing everything else.
Showscan is a 70mm process done at a whopping 60fps and is currently used for motion-simulator rides and such.
Maxivision is new system using 35mm film running at 48 fps that solves the compatability problem that plauged Todd-AO by exactly doubling the normal frame rate, thus allowing every-other-frame prints to be made for normal, 24 fps theaters. It also uses an different sized frame area to get a larger negative (and thus more resolution) than ordinary 35mm. So far, no features have been made in MaxiVision.
I have also heard Sony is working on getting their digital cameras to work at higher frame rates. Personally, I think they should strive for higher resolution and color range first.
What the hell does focus have to do with being digital? Both digital and film projectors have lenses, and they both can be either in or out of focus.
Because this thing was a prototype and they had a lot of money invested in it, they had an army of technicians come by and set it up to make sure all the shows went smoothly. After all, TI has been going around giving these projectors away in order to get publicity for their DLP stuff. They didn't want bad publicity, so they were careful to make sure the equipment was perfectly tuned.
On the other hand, theaters have been through so much cost-cutting and anti-union crap over the past couple of decades that they no longer have any expertise in proper film projection. AMC in particular is very bad about that. "We don't hire 'projectionists' here" is the line you'll get. And they don't train the people they do hire, either. That's why you see shutter-gate error, bad focus, scratches, and dirt. All of these problems can be solved through proper equiment and handling, it's just that the theater chains don't want to spend the money to do it.
So essentially, what you did was compare the best digital projection to the worst film projection. Is that really fair?
The quality problems in movie theaters today are due almost entirely to sloppiness. This will not be fixed by converting to digital projectors. When the same teenagers who don't know or care about quality start running the digital projectors, they will be rife with problems, just like the film projectors. You think just because something's digital that it can't be screwed up? Haven't you ever gone into an electronics store and seen a TV or home theater system that was completely misconfigured and poorly adjusted? Haven't you ever seen a video projector in a conference room or a sports bar that was so out of whack it was unwatchable? I know I have. I don't have any illusions about digital "fixing" the problems with bad movie presentation today.
By the way, I have seen both the film and the "digital" versions of TS2, too, and I was not that impressed. Yes, the digital vesion was nice and bright and steady, but no more so than a properly done (emphasis on properly) film projection. Meanwhile, the resolution was just terrible. Those TI DLP-based projectors have so far been limited to just 1280x1024 resolution. That's simply not enough for a big movie screen. I could see the individual pixels if I sat more than halfway forward in the theater, and it wasn't even that big a theater, either. Film beats that any day.
That said, I think the digital stuff has potential, but I would like to see it improve before it goes into theaters. I also hope that people come to realize that it is not maintainence-free. Theaters will still need projection specialists to check up on things and make sure they are properly calibrated.
Just like audiophiles who bitch about the quality of CDs vs. the "warmth" of vinyl.
Actually, I think the difference between film and video is a lot more obvious than the difference between CDs and vinyl.
Aside from resolution, one of the biggest differences between film and video is in how they capture light. Film has a logarithmic brightness curve, meaning that it takes four times as much light to get twice as much brightness recorded on the film. Video, on the other hand, has a linear, one-to-one brightness response. Now, guess which one more closely responds to the human eye? That's right, it's film!
The difference is so important that when digital effects started to become prevalent in movies, Kodak invented a special file format called Cineon for holding film data that measures the intensity of each color component on a 10-bit logarithmic scale. Many digital effects for movies are done using that format.
Another difference is with blooming. "Blooming" refers to when part of a picture is overexposed, and it bleeds into the surrounding area. On film, this produces a look that is again very similar to what happens in your eye when it sees something that is overwhelmingly bright. Used properly, blooming on film can produce a very pleasing asthetic look. Video, on the other hand, doesn't have blooming. Instead, what happens is that it gets "clamped", or cut off at some maximum value when it gets too bright. There is none of the nice look where the brightness seeps into the surrounding areas, giving video a very clean, sterile look. Sure, some people have come up with post-processing filters to simulate film blooming in digital video, but so far, the results I've seen are unconvincing. It still looks like video.
Those two factors produce such a big difference that right now, I can still instantly recognize video as video and film as film. Maybe someday in the next few years, someone will come up with a video camera that captures light on a logarithmic scale and at 4000x3000 pixel resolution, and then we can throw away the film cameras, but until that day comes, I think movies should continue to be shot on film.
I agree, AMC sucks. Some theater chains are better than others, but the overall quality has gone down over the last 10 years, and AMC started the trend. They purposely avoid hiring anyone who is trained as a projectionist, to avoid having to pay for their skills. That way they save money, while screwing the customer out of quality. Naturally, most of the other theater chains have followed suit.
First of all, while Episode II has been shot with an electronic camera, it will still be projected using ordinary film prints in most places, except for a few specialty venues. The problem is cost. A good film projector costs about $30,000, while digital projectors (so far) cost about $250,000 to $300,000 (no, I'm not kidding!), and they're currently limited to 1280x1024 resolution, which means you won't even get to see everything! (The cameras used for Epsidoe II are 1920x1080, see my other post on this thread for more info.) All of the digital projectors that have been put into theaters so far have been "freebies", that is, prototypes that were given away in hopes of getting publicity. Well, TI seems to have decided they've done enough subsidising, so now they have stopped giving projectors away, and started letting compaines such as Cristie and Kinoton start selling them. So far, I haven't heard of any takers. Given all this, I think most people will end up seeing Episode II on film, which isn't so bad, considering that digital stuff that has been output to film using a laser recorder usually looks pretty good. Plus, you'll be able to see the full resolution instead of just a 1280x1024 approximation.
Secondly, while switching to digital might prevent the problems with film that you describe, it will introduce new problems of its own. For one thing, these new micro-mirror devices from TI have the potential problem of developing "dead" pixels -- that is, pixels that just sit there and don't respond any more. After a few years, a typical projector might expect to have a few of these dead pixels here and there, and they'll be present on every frame of every movie shown using that projector from then on. The only way to fix it will be to replace the entire micro-mirror array, which costs an arm and a leg to begin with. I doubt theaters will go to the trouble. If a digital projector develops a few dead pixels, they'll just say "oh, well" and leave it.
Also, with digital projectors, the resolution is fixed. Once you install it, that's it. If you want more resolution, you'll have to get a whole new machine. With film, every time there is an improvement in film stocks, you automatically get an upgrade in quality, without having to change the projector at all.
Furthermore, many people are (incorrectly) assuming that digital projectors will be maintainence-free, so they will simply not hire projectionists any more, which means that if the projector develops problems, they will not fix it. And don't tell me they won't have problems, I've seen enough screwed up video projectors in meeting rooms and sports bars to know that's bull. Whether it's electronic or mechanical, a projector will still need regular attention from someone who knows what they're doing.
Lastly, the problems you describe with film are solvable. For one thing, if theatersr would start using FilmGuard (you have to click on the "cleaning" link at the bottom of the page I linked to), they would have a lot fewer problems with dirt and scratches than they do now. And if you want to see an example of good film handling, just go to your local IMAX theater. They usually keep their films running great for months and sometimes years without any excessive dirt or scratches. Take "Fantasia 2000". I went to see that just a couple of weeks ago, and the film looked brand-new! And last weekend, I went to a theater that was still showing "Gladiator" after all this time, and it still looked pretty good (hardly and dirt or scratches at all). So, it is possible to keep film looking great throughout its use, it just takes a little care and some proper equipment. I think theaters would do better to invest in those things rather than replace all the projectors with $250,000 video projectors with 1280x1024 resolution, but hey, that's just my opinion.
25-30%?! That's crazy. By far the biggest cost on any production is labor. Sets and locations are the next biggest chunk, followed by post-production and special effects, then marketing and distribution. Film stock is diddly compared to all that other stuff. The percentage of the total budget is probably around 4-5% for a small production, and perhaps 1-2% for a big production. The bigger the budget, the smaller the percentage it accounts for, since it's a cost that remains fairly constant across all production. Besides, they're not doing it to save money, they're doing for the buzzword factor. George has techno-lust. He wants every tool he uses to be new and high-tech. Unfortunately, high-tech does not necessarily mean high-quality.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, Episode II is going to suck in terms of picture quality. Episode I looked bad enough (the whole movie looked soft and fuzzy, due to the use of low resolution computer processing on nearly every shot), but Episode II is just going to look plain awful.
The camera they used is built by Sony (with lenses by Panavision), and captures images at 1920x1080 resolution at a 16:9 aspect ratio, the same aspect ratio as HDTV (basically, it is an HDTV camera). In order to form a 2.35:1 widescreen image, this will be cropped to about 1920x800. Compare that with this resolution chart for 35mm film scanning. 35mm film still has scannable information on it at resolutions up to 4096 x 3112.
Of course, the real resolution of Sony's video camera is effectively only about half of the stated 1920x1080, due to the fact that the images are color sampled in a 4:2:2 fashion, which means that every other pixel is just a black-and-white pixel, with the color sample from the adjacent pixel added in. That's not the same thing as true 1920x1080 resolution. And don't forget that the image data is heavily compressed in-camera 9at about a 7:1 compression ratio) using MPEG-2, just to make it fit onto the tape. Can't wait to see all those nice compression artifacts!
Finally, as you pointed out, there are slow-motion shots to consider. Well, guess what? The Sony camera can only shoot at 24fps! Therefore, the Episode II crew had to keep film cameras around for any shots that required slo-mo. Notice that they've been pretty quiet about that. You won't find any information about that on the official Star Wars website! It's a bit of a dirty little secret.
To be fair, shooting with video does have one advantage -- instant feedback. You don't have to wait for dailies to see if you got the shot right. Of course, with video assist systems on most film cameras these days, you can tell a lot already, even though the video assist playback doesn't exactly show you what the final product is going to look like. But when the video is your final prodcut, you know exactly what you're getting right away.
I know I'll probably sound like a Luddite with this post, but I'm really not opposed to video taking over film. It's just that the quality really isn't there yet. Until the resolution and color range of video is increased to match that of film, it just won't look as good. I think George Lucas is getting ahead of himself in deciding to go with video today. However, I think he's so anxious to be known as an "innovator" that he's decided to just do it anyway, quality be damned. Oh well, that's my take on it anyway.
(Note: Sorry if this comment shows up twice, slash seems to have eaten it the first time, yet it's still complaining about it being a duplicate.)
2) using better tools; it's no surprise that supporting microsoft and other inferior products consumes the bulk of any tech worker's time
You're right about that. And that's why so many corporate IT departments like to "standardize" on M$ products -- it keeps them employed. Once an IS&T infrastructure department gets above a certain size, it just goes into the existance-justifying business. They try to generate as much work and as many service calls as possible, in order to keep their budgets and headcounts up.
There are more than enough programmers in the U.S. to cover all of the available jobs. Companies just don't want to pay them what they are worth. Young Americans fresh out of college may have an easy time getting a job, since companies don't mind paying an entry-level salary, but many programmers over 40 cannot get hired anywhere due to the fact that companies simply refuse to hire someone with experience and actually pay for it.
When CEOs go around complaining that they are "desparate" to find good programmers, what they mean is they are desparate to find cheap programmers who are willing to work 80 to 90 hours a week for a below-industry-average salary. That's like me going around saying, "I have been looking all over for a brand-new Ferrari for under $25,000 -- I'm desparate to find one!"
Of course, I'm not saying anything new. People who actually know what's going on in the computer industry have been saying this for years.
Okay, time for a little good, old-fashioned paranoid conspiracy theorizing. This looks really cool, and I can see it really taking off. However, some people have a vested interest keeping things the way they are.
For example, the coal industry will not like this. Not at all. At the moment, nearly all the electricity in the USA (and the rest of world for that matter) is generated by burning coal. And, that's pretty much the only thing that keeps the coal industry going. Nobody uses coal for anything else. You can bet they will try to put a stop to large-scale home electricity production.
How can they stop it, you might ask? Simple. They'll slip a "rider" into some innocuous bill that will, once it becomes law, force people to pay higher rates for natural gas if it is being used for home electricity generation. If you had to pay two, three, or even four times as much for natural gas if you were using it for one of these GE devices, it would no longer be economically viable.
Who wants to bet that there isn't some lackey for the coal industry out there right now working a draft of their new "Home Electricity Rate Protection Act"?
Unless Joe Sixpack is a really good artist, his altered photos, audio, and video won't fool anybody. No matter how good the software, it still takes skill to fake things convincingly.
Besides, ever since white-out and Xerox machines came along, it's been possible to fake documents, and yet documents are still considered evidence in court in many cases.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have a reference for this, but I recall reading that the head of the USPTO is a former lobbyist. Draw your own conclusions.
Wow, they must have really improved it. I only tried it once, and that was a couple of months ago. It screwed things up so badly I had to scratch-install everything all over again. Since then, I've been reluctant to give it another try. Maybe I should try again with the Beta release.
As many people continuously point out, these H1-B workers are essentially indentured labor. They can't switch jobs, they can't ask for more money or more benefits, and they can't complain about working conditions or labor law violations because if they tried to do any of those things, they would be fired and deported instantly, and never be able to come back, since no other company would touch them after an incident like that. Meanwhile, the companies that hire H1-B workers are making out like bandits by paying them less and working them harder than any of their American counterparts, who actually enjoy some bargaining power (being able to swtich jobs, demand better pay and benefits, etc.)
Yes, yes, all the apologists are going to immediately chime in and say that employers are "required" to pay the same rate for H1-B workers as for their American counterparts, but everyone knows that's bullshit. There is basically zero enforcement of that rule. Employers can and do get away with paying far less than they would normally have to for the amount of work they are getting out of these people. And they can't compain either, because (as mentioned before), they are at the mercy of the company that is employing them. They would be fired and sent home immediately if they ever spoke up about the abuses.
This is exploitation, pure and simple. Why do you think companies push so hard for these increases? In American business today, there's a simple rule. If an industry wants something, that means it's going to screw people over. So don't give it to them!
Heh.
I ran some demos of MacOS X on a dual G4 machine at the Seybold conference in SF about a month ago, and I was able to play a bunch of looped Quicktime movies in the background while juggling about 5 different apps in the foreground. It was very smooth. The CPU meter showed a fairly balanced load between the two processors the whole time. Pretty slick!
As long as you install MacOS X n a separate partition, it doesn't really matter which OS is on your older partition. You just have to be able to run the "System Disk" utility (different from the old "Startup Disk" control panel; it's included on the MacOS X CD) in order to switch back and forth between the two OSes. I believe MacOS 8 should be able to run it.
One thing worth noting when it comes to older verions of the MacOS, however, is compatibility with MacOS X's "Classic" environment. Whenever it starts up, it needs a boot volume (i.e., a partition with a traditional MacOS "System Folder"). You can use any MacOS 9 installtion with it, but I wouldn't try using a MacOS 8 system with it. That would probably cause all sorts of problems.
Other than that, MacOS 8 and MacOS X should co-exist happily, as long as they reside on separate partitions.
The Corel deal sounds different. Unlike the Apple deal, there were no ongoing patent disputes and no "undisclosed sum". MS just threw a low 9-figure wad of cash (chump change to them) at Corel to help keep them alive, probably so that they will be able to point to them later and say, "See, we have competitors! We're not a monopoly!"
Yes, but as someone else pointed out, in two-way communication, RSA (or something like it) is still typically used to pass the "session" keys that are used to do the block ciphering. No matter how good your block cipher is, it is still at the mercy of whatever you use to exchange the keys.
The more I think about it, the more I think you're right. Carnivore might have been created to serve several puposes, but one of them is likely to act as a decoy for Echelon.
P.S. "Red herring" is probably a more apt description than "straw man".
As has been mentioned here before, despite this rule (paying the going rate) being part of the H1 process, there is virtually zero enforcement of it. Employers can put whatever they want on the paperwork, and then change the salary later. There is never any follow-up by regulators to make sure employers pay what they say they are paying.
I'll bet if someone did some serious investigation into this, they'd find that pretty much every company that hires H1 workers is cheating on the pay to some degree.
How in the world can the manner in which it is projected alter the resolution of what's recorded on the film? An "unhappy teenager" will might make it dimmer, out-of-focus, or misaligned, but they can't reduce the number of grains on the print! The resolution of the film is fixed once it is printed in the lab. Poor projection does not change it.
Digital projectors have lamps and lenses, too, so they are not free from the problems I just mentioned (out-of-focus, underlit). The only problems they free you from are dirt and scratches, and in my experience, those are the problems I encounter the least when going to the movies. It's the former that comes up most often. Digital will not solve that!
And so far, nobody has even talked about doing 4K digital movies. People seem to have already made up their minds that 2K HDTV resolution is "enough". But I don't want to have to go to a movie theater just to watch HDTV!
It also worries me that people keep making straw man arguments when they compare film vs. digital. They pit the best digital has to offer against the worst film has to offer. Would you replace a high-quality analog audio system with 8-bit /11KHz digital sound? Of course not! Well, the standards that people are proposing for digital "cinema" are that far out of whack as far as I'm concerned. Why are people insiting on aiming their standards so low?! Am I the only person on Earth who cares about high quality images? It sure seems like it. Everyone else just hears the "d" word and shuts their brains off. "If it's digital, it must be perfect!" is what they seem to think.
I agree with your statement about 2K being a replacement for 16mm and television film production, but you're the first person I've heard say that (besides myself). Everyone else seems ready to dump 2K (or worse, 1280x1024!) into theaters and say, "done!"
There is a lengthy Q&A session following, but that hardly makes up for it. As usual, the industry cartel is over-represented.
Nope, it's still there. It was just a temporary hiccup.
First off, even with ordinary prints, I can, in many cases, see the individual pixels in computer animation and special effects shots that were done at 2K resolution. Yes, that's right. In a theater with good projection I can notice pixelation and jagged edges, especially whenever there are straight edges any where in the picture. I saw these problems in almost every one of this past summer's blockbusters (and flops). "Space Cowboys" looks especially bad: just look at any supposedly straight lines in the CGI shots and you'll see the jagged edge. "Gone in 60 Seconds" is another: look at the telephone wires in the shot where the camera is craning down at the beginning of a scene and there's a subtitle put in with CGI: more jagged edges. "Dinosaur" and "Titan A.E." had visible pixels all the way through. Now, how could I be seeing that stuff if it weren't for the fact that film retains greater than 2000 lines resolution even after going through all the steps to get to a release print? What more proof do I need? Film holds more than 2000 lines of resolution, even in a release print! And with continued improvements in film stocks and printing processes, it's only going to get better.
Secondly, there is Technicolor's newly revived "dye-transfer" process, which produces incredible resolution and color saturation. It gives you an exact copy of what was on the camera negative. Every last grain of the original film makes its way in to the release print. I've seen these types of prints with my own eyes, and let me tell you, it's incredible. Not since the days of 70mm have I seen film look that good. And the great thing is, Technicolor can run it off at about 5 cents per foot -- same cost as ordinary film prints. I think you'll be seeing a lot more dye-transfer prints showing up in your theaters in the next couple of years, thereby increasing the quality of release prints even further.
When it comes down to it, 2000 lines of resolution just isn't enough to replace film. I fear that people will simply ignore that fact though, and do it anyway, and then we'll be stuck with poor quality images for movies from now on. I can only hope that high standards will prevail, and 4K, not 2K, will become the standard resolution for digital cinema.
I have also heard Sony is working on getting their digital cameras to work at higher frame rates. Personally, I think they should strive for higher resolution and color range first.
What the hell does focus have to do with being digital? Both digital and film projectors have lenses, and they both can be either in or out of focus.
Because this thing was a prototype and they had a lot of money invested in it, they had an army of technicians come by and set it up to make sure all the shows went smoothly. After all, TI has been going around giving these projectors away in order to get publicity for their DLP stuff. They didn't want bad publicity, so they were careful to make sure the equipment was perfectly tuned.
On the other hand, theaters have been through so much cost-cutting and anti-union crap over the past couple of decades that they no longer have any expertise in proper film projection. AMC in particular is very bad about that. "We don't hire 'projectionists' here" is the line you'll get. And they don't train the people they do hire, either. That's why you see shutter-gate error, bad focus, scratches, and dirt. All of these problems can be solved through proper equiment and handling, it's just that the theater chains don't want to spend the money to do it.
So essentially, what you did was compare the best digital projection to the worst film projection. Is that really fair?
The quality problems in movie theaters today are due almost entirely to sloppiness. This will not be fixed by converting to digital projectors. When the same teenagers who don't know or care about quality start running the digital projectors, they will be rife with problems, just like the film projectors. You think just because something's digital that it can't be screwed up? Haven't you ever gone into an electronics store and seen a TV or home theater system that was completely misconfigured and poorly adjusted? Haven't you ever seen a video projector in a conference room or a sports bar that was so out of whack it was unwatchable? I know I have. I don't have any illusions about digital "fixing" the problems with bad movie presentation today.
By the way, I have seen both the film and the "digital" versions of TS2, too, and I was not that impressed. Yes, the digital vesion was nice and bright and steady, but no more so than a properly done (emphasis on properly) film projection. Meanwhile, the resolution was just terrible. Those TI DLP-based projectors have so far been limited to just 1280x1024 resolution. That's simply not enough for a big movie screen. I could see the individual pixels if I sat more than halfway forward in the theater, and it wasn't even that big a theater, either. Film beats that any day.
That said, I think the digital stuff has potential, but I would like to see it improve before it goes into theaters. I also hope that people come to realize that it is not maintainence-free. Theaters will still need projection specialists to check up on things and make sure they are properly calibrated.
Actually, I think the difference between film and video is a lot more obvious than the difference between CDs and vinyl.
Aside from resolution, one of the biggest differences between film and video is in how they capture light. Film has a logarithmic brightness curve, meaning that it takes four times as much light to get twice as much brightness recorded on the film. Video, on the other hand, has a linear, one-to-one brightness response. Now, guess which one more closely responds to the human eye? That's right, it's film!
The difference is so important that when digital effects started to become prevalent in movies, Kodak invented a special file format called Cineon for holding film data that measures the intensity of each color component on a 10-bit logarithmic scale. Many digital effects for movies are done using that format.
Another difference is with blooming. "Blooming" refers to when part of a picture is overexposed, and it bleeds into the surrounding area. On film, this produces a look that is again very similar to what happens in your eye when it sees something that is overwhelmingly bright. Used properly, blooming on film can produce a very pleasing asthetic look. Video, on the other hand, doesn't have blooming. Instead, what happens is that it gets "clamped", or cut off at some maximum value when it gets too bright. There is none of the nice look where the brightness seeps into the surrounding areas, giving video a very clean, sterile look. Sure, some people have come up with post-processing filters to simulate film blooming in digital video, but so far, the results I've seen are unconvincing. It still looks like video.
Those two factors produce such a big difference that right now, I can still instantly recognize video as video and film as film. Maybe someday in the next few years, someone will come up with a video camera that captures light on a logarithmic scale and at 4000x3000 pixel resolution, and then we can throw away the film cameras, but until that day comes, I think movies should continue to be shot on film.
I agree, AMC sucks. Some theater chains are better than others, but the overall quality has gone down over the last 10 years, and AMC started the trend. They purposely avoid hiring anyone who is trained as a projectionist, to avoid having to pay for their skills. That way they save money, while screwing the customer out of quality. Naturally, most of the other theater chains have followed suit.
Secondly, while switching to digital might prevent the problems with film that you describe, it will introduce new problems of its own. For one thing, these new micro-mirror devices from TI have the potential problem of developing "dead" pixels -- that is, pixels that just sit there and don't respond any more. After a few years, a typical projector might expect to have a few of these dead pixels here and there, and they'll be present on every frame of every movie shown using that projector from then on. The only way to fix it will be to replace the entire micro-mirror array, which costs an arm and a leg to begin with. I doubt theaters will go to the trouble. If a digital projector develops a few dead pixels, they'll just say "oh, well" and leave it.
Also, with digital projectors, the resolution is fixed. Once you install it, that's it. If you want more resolution, you'll have to get a whole new machine. With film, every time there is an improvement in film stocks, you automatically get an upgrade in quality, without having to change the projector at all.
Furthermore, many people are (incorrectly) assuming that digital projectors will be maintainence-free, so they will simply not hire projectionists any more, which means that if the projector develops problems, they will not fix it. And don't tell me they won't have problems, I've seen enough screwed up video projectors in meeting rooms and sports bars to know that's bull. Whether it's electronic or mechanical, a projector will still need regular attention from someone who knows what they're doing.
Lastly, the problems you describe with film are solvable. For one thing, if theatersr would start using FilmGuard (you have to click on the "cleaning" link at the bottom of the page I linked to), they would have a lot fewer problems with dirt and scratches than they do now. And if you want to see an example of good film handling, just go to your local IMAX theater. They usually keep their films running great for months and sometimes years without any excessive dirt or scratches. Take "Fantasia 2000". I went to see that just a couple of weeks ago, and the film looked brand-new! And last weekend, I went to a theater that was still showing "Gladiator" after all this time, and it still looked pretty good (hardly and dirt or scratches at all). So, it is possible to keep film looking great throughout its use, it just takes a little care and some proper equipment. I think theaters would do better to invest in those things rather than replace all the projectors with $250,000 video projectors with 1280x1024 resolution, but hey, that's just my opinion.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, Episode II is going to suck in terms of picture quality. Episode I looked bad enough (the whole movie looked soft and fuzzy, due to the use of low resolution computer processing on nearly every shot), but Episode II is just going to look plain awful.
The camera they used is built by Sony (with lenses by Panavision), and captures images at 1920x1080 resolution at a 16:9 aspect ratio, the same aspect ratio as HDTV (basically, it is an HDTV camera). In order to form a 2.35:1 widescreen image, this will be cropped to about 1920x800. Compare that with this resolution chart for 35mm film scanning. 35mm film still has scannable information on it at resolutions up to 4096 x 3112.
Of course, the real resolution of Sony's video camera is effectively only about half of the stated 1920x1080, due to the fact that the images are color sampled in a 4:2:2 fashion, which means that every other pixel is just a black-and-white pixel, with the color sample from the adjacent pixel added in. That's not the same thing as true 1920x1080 resolution. And don't forget that the image data is heavily compressed in-camera 9at about a 7:1 compression ratio) using MPEG-2, just to make it fit onto the tape. Can't wait to see all those nice compression artifacts!
Finally, as you pointed out, there are slow-motion shots to consider. Well, guess what? The Sony camera can only shoot at 24fps! Therefore, the Episode II crew had to keep film cameras around for any shots that required slo-mo. Notice that they've been pretty quiet about that. You won't find any information about that on the official Star Wars website! It's a bit of a dirty little secret.
To be fair, shooting with video does have one advantage -- instant feedback. You don't have to wait for dailies to see if you got the shot right. Of course, with video assist systems on most film cameras these days, you can tell a lot already, even though the video assist playback doesn't exactly show you what the final product is going to look like. But when the video is your final prodcut, you know exactly what you're getting right away.
I know I'll probably sound like a Luddite with this post, but I'm really not opposed to video taking over film. It's just that the quality really isn't there yet. Until the resolution and color range of video is increased to match that of film, it just won't look as good. I think George Lucas is getting ahead of himself in deciding to go with video today. However, I think he's so anxious to be known as an "innovator" that he's decided to just do it anyway, quality be damned. Oh well, that's my take on it anyway.
(Note: Sorry if this comment shows up twice, slash seems to have eaten it the first time, yet it's still complaining about it being a duplicate.)
For God's sake! Enough with the "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things" posts!
You're right about that. And that's why so many corporate IT departments like to "standardize" on M$ products -- it keeps them employed. Once an IS&T infrastructure department gets above a certain size, it just goes into the existance-justifying business. They try to generate as much work and as many service calls as possible, in order to keep their budgets and headcounts up.
When CEOs go around complaining that they are "desparate" to find good programmers, what they mean is they are desparate to find cheap programmers who are willing to work 80 to 90 hours a week for a below-industry-average salary. That's like me going around saying, "I have been looking all over for a brand-new Ferrari for under $25,000 -- I'm desparate to find one!"
Of course, I'm not saying anything new. People who actually know what's going on in the computer industry have been saying this for years.
For example, the coal industry will not like this. Not at all. At the moment, nearly all the electricity in the USA (and the rest of world for that matter) is generated by burning coal. And, that's pretty much the only thing that keeps the coal industry going. Nobody uses coal for anything else. You can bet they will try to put a stop to large-scale home electricity production.
How can they stop it, you might ask? Simple. They'll slip a "rider" into some innocuous bill that will, once it becomes law, force people to pay higher rates for natural gas if it is being used for home electricity generation. If you had to pay two, three, or even four times as much for natural gas if you were using it for one of these GE devices, it would no longer be economically viable.
Who wants to bet that there isn't some lackey for the coal industry out there right now working a draft of their new "Home Electricity Rate Protection Act"?
Besides, ever since white-out and Xerox machines came along, it's been possible to fake documents, and yet documents are still considered evidence in court in many cases.