Too bad it's political suicide to ever try to repeal any of those subsidies. Can't you just imagine? "Senator so-and-so HATES Small Family Farmers(tm);, the backbone of the American Heartland(tm)! You don't hate farmers, do you? Well then vote for the other guy!"
Re:Weight loss thru exercise alone is a fallacy
on
Treadmill Workstation
·
· Score: 1
All the fad diets and pills are bullshit and possibly harmful as well.
Not true. Stanford just published the results of a study that compared diets, and measured more subjects over a longer period of time than any previous study. They found that people on Atkins not only lost twice as much weight as the others, but also had bigger improvements in cholesterol and other risk factors than the other subjects.
I've seen Dr. Gardner speak, and he's really big on statistical relevance. This is the most thorough and scientific study of diets to date, and it favors a "fad" diet.
That's because like all Johnny-come-latelys, they have to shit all over everyone who came before them and lie about how things were prior to the time when the world was graced with their shining genius.
Polarized 3-D is probably older than any of the people who work at Real-D, but none of them will ever admit it.
Not only that, but this is not the best possible system. The best way to do it is with dual projectors. Go watch the Terminator 3-D show at Universal Studios in LA and you'll see dual 5-perf 70mm projectors using polarizers to display 3-D images. Both images are displayed at exactly the same time; no temporal seperation at all. Those are still the best 3-D effects I've seen, even after having seen numerous "Real-D" shows.
Heck, even the 3-D showings of Hollywood movies back in the 1950s used polarizers and dual projectors, not that the Real-D guys would ever admit that. I've seen articles with quotes talking about the red-blue 3-D systems, as though no one ever used polarizers or dual projectors in the past. They seem to be the types who have to disparage everything that came before just to try and make themselves look better.
(dang it, here is my comment again, with the correct formatting:)
The article is wrong. The resolution of the eye is not 1/2 the normally accepted value of 1 arcminute, as the article claims, it is the normally accepted value of 1 arcminute. Experiments show that visible structures are still discernable when they are only 1 arcminute apart (see "Vision" by Pierre Buser and Michel Imbert, MIT Press, 1992, p. 120). The pixel spacing should therefore be 1 arcminute, not two.
Let's extrapolate that figure into a real-world situation: theatrical movies. SMPTE standards say you should be 2 screen heights back for an optimal viewing distance. For a 2.35:1 movie, that works out to about 60 degrees. That means given the 1 arcminute spacing rule, there should be 3600 pixels across the width of the screen. Most movies these days have digital intermediate work done at "2K" resolution, or ~2000 pixels across the width. However, some are starting to have their work done at "4K", or ~4000 pixels across the width of the screen. What do you know, in a blind test blind test, people invariably pick out 4K material as looking better (see 4th paragraph of link). That couldn't happen if the figure were 2 arcminutes.
It's really too bad this article made the front page of slashdot. People who don't know any better are going to be linking to it forever, and I'll have to keep copy/pasting this rebuttal.
The article is wrong. The resolution of the eye is not 1/2 the normally accepted value of 1 arcminute, as the article claims, it is the normally accepted value of 1 arcminute. Experiments show that visible structures are still discernable when they are only 1 arcminute apart (see "Vision" by Pierre Buser and Michel Imbert, MIT Press, 1992, p. 120). The pixel spacing should therefore be 1 arcminute, not two.
Let's extrapolate that figure into a real-world situation: theatrical movies. SMPTE standards say you should be 2 screen heights back for an optimal viewing distance. For a 2.35:1 movie, that works out to about 60 degrees. That means given the 1 arcminute spacing rule, there should be 3600 pixels across the width of the screen. Most movies these days have digital intermediate work done at "2K" resolution, or ~2000 pixels across the width. However, some are starting to have their work done at "4K", or ~4000 pixels across the width of the screen. What do you know, in a blind test, people invariably pick out 4K material as looking better (see 4th paragraph of link). That couldn't happen if the figure were 2 arcminutes.
It's really too bad this article made the front page of slashdot. People who don't know any better are going to be linking to it for a long time, and I'll have to keep copy/pasting this rebuttal.
Same producer on both the original BSG and Knight Rider... Glen A. Larson. For some reason he seemed to think of a horizonally scrolling red light as meaning ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LOL
For example, if somebody throws a gun up to a balcony, but misses the balcony - don't throw the film away. Just cut the part after the gun misses the balcony and paste other footage which shows the gun landing on the balcony.
Good lord, do you realize how obvious something like that is?
When I was a kid, I used to make silent Super-8 movies without the ability to edit. Think about that. Not only does the movie has to be shot in sequence, but every shot has to be correct. You get one take, and that's all. If something went wrong during a take, we would have to think on our feet and decide in a split second to either salvage the take or let go of the button and try to pick it up from there somehow. My brother and I got very disciplined very quickly. Our best movies were the ones where we planned ahead and rehearsed each shot before filming it, making sure it would work before actually commiting it to film. We even improvised some pretty slick little action sequences. I should scan that stuff and put it online at some point.
It took us a long time to figure out the difference between what we imagined we were capturing on film and what we actually were getting. Not to mention we had to wait a week before seeing the results, which made us very careful. Later on, we got an 8mm splicer and could do some editing. Then even later we got a portable VHS machine and could buy time on a two-machine editing bay. Also, with video, we had the luxury of instant feedback. Surprisingly, all the luxuries of VHS production didn't make us better filmmakers. I honestly think we made better stuff when we had the most limitations doing silent Super-8 stuff with no editing.
Damn, when I think about how limited we were, and how spoiled some of today's "filmmakers" are who can't even tell a simple story, well... shit.
Did you reply to the wrong post? That guy wasn't asking those questions, the parent post was.
Oh, and:
the guiding light there was Werner von Braun, so you could say that it was Germany
Wow, talk about a stretch. So the Kennedy administration, the Congress and voters who approved and funded it, all the engineers at Boeing, Douglas, NAA, Grumman, and all the astronauts were German too?
Germany may have given birth to Werner von Braun, but it was the USA that gave him, an immigrant, the resources and opportunity to be a part of the Apollo project. The USA most likely could have gone to the moon without von Braun, but it's doubtful von Braun could have gone to the moon without the USA.
The previous post mentioned two things that go way beyond the internet: threatening phone calls and false police reports. I don't know what kind of site he runs, but damn does it sounds like it attracts some serious psychos.
Maxivision is interesting. I even spoke to Deal Goodhill once about it. He's very passionate, but had no idea how to get it off the ground. The high framerate is cool, but it's focused on the 1.85 ratio (he claims it supports 2.39:1, but have they ever actually done a demo of it?). In any case, I think he's missing the point.
After working in film and video for years, I beileve the most important thing to bring a picture to life is contrast, aka dynamic range. (Same thing for audio really.) Resolution is nice, color gamut is nice, but it's the scale between black and white that has to be just plain astronomical to really make the picture seem alive. The digital systems people are installing just don't have it. I'd gladly sacrifice 4K for 2K if it meant we could have the kind of dynamic range we should.
I know you're right, most people aren't aware and don't care much about quality. Wat's worse, the few people who are mostly seem to be interested in "home theater" (which is a bit of an inherent contradiction as far as I'm concerned).
I'm a rare bird in that I actually like film, like theaters, want something better than HDTV, and believe the gold standard of quality is and should be theatrical presentations. I can't help it -- I grew up watching 5-perf 70mm in really well run theaters. People who don't know what film is capable of don't always appreciate it fully.
Stop reading the home theater magazines & forums (which are mostly designed to make you feel good about your purchases) and learn something about audio/visual systems. Digital scanning for IMAX actually starts at 4K and goes up from there.
Find a local IMAX theater that is showing material that was actually shot in IMAX, and watch it. Then watch James Cameron's "Aliens of the Deep" (shot in 1080p and transferred to IMAX). The difference will be night and day.
That's less of a problem. This gives 4096 greyscales. That's plenty to prevent any banding. The problem is maximum contrast. I don't think more levels will help here. 16 bit is usually used to compensate for rounding errors if a lot of filters are used. 12 bit is plenty for a final print.
That's probably true, the scale, and the capability of the output device is what's more important. So far, only DLP and some LCOS projectors have found their way into theaters. The amount of contrast they are capable of is vastly less than that of even a cheap film print, let alone something like Kodak's 2393 print stock. What's needed are better projectors with more dynamic range. Laser projection sounds promising, but it's probably still a ways off.
True. Especially if they feel the need to go up to 6K. They do need a per-frame limit at some point. No idea why they went for such a low value.
6K seems like overkill, unless we're talking about replacement for IMAX, then it should be more like 8K. for a 2.39:1 image, the biggest practical viewing angle is probably about 60 degress (2 screen heights back), which is about where the first row behind the railing is in a typical stadium seating theater. Given the generally accepted value for maximum visual acuity of the human of about 1 arcminute, that means you need about 3600 pixels across the width of the image. 4K would be just about ideal.
Well, actually, any given film print you see at your local film print is much closer to HD resolution (and I'm talking 1280x720) than even 2K, by the time you project that print (which is less than perfect) through improperly calibrated and uncleaned glass onto a dirty, imperfectly reflecting screen. My point is that in multiplex terms, the 2K projection will likely be *better* than a standard film print.
Not true. People always come up with these fudge factors to explain away the advantages of film, but my observations directly contradict this notion. I frequently see jaggies when I go to the movies these days. This is a result of Hollywood mostly standardizing on 2K for digital work. Those few eFilm 4K movies I linked earlier have looked significantly better.
There is nothing special about the theaters I go to either, they are just ordinary neighborhood multiplexes. And yet their film projection is more than good enough to spot flaws in 2K processed images. In practice, multiplexes are already exceeding HD. The DCI 2K standard will be a step down.
You've also not touched on dynamic range -- an area where film has an even bigger advantage over current digital systems.
I don't know where people get this idea. There are somewhere between 30-40 thousand theaters in the US, and about 100 thousand worldwide. 97-98% of them have no digital projection capability at all! And the ones that do, don't even have enough material to be shown on them year-round. Those booths share a 35mm projector, which is what is actually running most of the year.
Several BILLION (yes, with a "b") feet of motion picture print film are printed every year. Even when mass-scale digital conversion really gets going, it will be decades before film goes away. Until then, double inventory (digital and film) will be the name of the game.
Hell, there are theaters out there still that don't even have digital sound yet!
I've seen dye-transfer prints, and while they are very impressive, I also happen to think that a nice, clean, new print using Kodak's 2393 (Vision Premeire) print stock can equal or even beat it.
The problem is, most of today's movies are drained of their color & contrast at the post production stage, near as I can tell merely for "artistic" reasons. Dull, desaturated images are all the rage for some reason. If a movie were to come out that actually tried to deliver as vibrant an image as today's materials are capable of delivering, I think it would blow everyone away, and rival dye transfer. It's time for a neo-Technicolor renaissance!
Yeah, they thought about security. Too bad, they apparently thought of little else.
If you look through the document you linked, the security section is 25 pages long, while only a few pages are dedicated to image and sound. For the image, the system mostly talks about 2K, with some additional modes for 4K, but no requirement to use it, and no inclusion of the higher framerate 48fps mode for 4K. Considering there are already 4K film releases and 2K is already in the home, this does not seem very forward thinking. Home theater freaks have been saying for years what they have at home is better than what's in theaters. For the first time, they will actually be right, if theatrical 2K becomes the de-facto standard (which it already has to some extent, thanks to an overload of crappy 2K digital intermediates).
Another short-sighted mistake is that it defines the image as a constant width format, meaning you get fewer pixels for a scope image vs. non-scope. Does that seem backwards to anyone else? The 2K scope image only has 858 vertical pixels, for crying out loud! (page 14)
Page 14 also specifies: "The bit depth for each code value for a color component shall be 12 bits. This yields 36 bits per pixel." Doesn't say whether it's linear or log (like Cineon). I assume linear, but considering most linear film work is done in a 16-bit space (see the GIMP spin-off "CinePaint), this doesn't seem like enough. All theatrical digital presentations I've seen so far have been severely lacking in dynamic range compared to film. This document totally fails to address that.
There is also a data limitation of just over 1MB per frame, regardless of whether the image is 2K or 4K (page 25). That's just stupid (hopefully I don't have to explain why).
There seems to have been very little consideration given to quality for either the present or the future. Simply slapping a big HDTV into theaters is a bad, short-sighted idea, and will surely be a further nail in the coffin for theatrical presentations. AMC for example has lost money for nine years straight, and now they want to dump money into this shit?
He knew that Apple had a reputation for being secretive and releasing the legal hounds. So he could just say, "Apple threatened me with legal action if I demoed the exploit on their drivers" and voila! He's now a victim of The Evil Corporation!
Actually it was even more slimy than that. "Johnny Cache" said on a mailing list a while back: "Secureworks absolutely insists on being exceedingly responsible and doesn't want to release any details about anything until Apple issues a patch. Whether or not this position was taken after a special ops team of lawyers parachuted in out of a black helicopter is up for speculation."
"Up for speculation" sounds like "we want everyone to think it, but don't want to be held responsible for saying it".
LEDs also look like crap. Incandescent is the only bulb type that gives you a true black box frequency distribution. You can tell so-called "white" LEDs are just two sharp peaks on the spectrum with nothing anywhere else.
Slashdot Mirror
Too bad it's political suicide to ever try to repeal any of those subsidies. Can't you just imagine? "Senator so-and-so HATES Small Family Farmers(tm);, the backbone of the American Heartland(tm)! You don't hate farmers, do you? Well then vote for the other guy!"
Not true. Stanford just published the results of a study that compared diets, and measured more subjects over a longer period of time than any previous study. They found that people on Atkins not only lost twice as much weight as the others, but also had bigger improvements in cholesterol and other risk factors than the other subjects.
http://med.stanford.edu/news_releases/2007/march/d iet.html
I've seen Dr. Gardner speak, and he's really big on statistical relevance. This is the most thorough and scientific study of diets to date, and it favors a "fad" diet.
Free Hans!
Polarized 3-D is probably older than any of the people who work at Real-D, but none of them will ever admit it.
Heck, even the 3-D showings of Hollywood movies back in the 1950s used polarizers and dual projectors, not that the Real-D guys would ever admit that. I've seen articles with quotes talking about the red-blue 3-D systems, as though no one ever used polarizers or dual projectors in the past. They seem to be the types who have to disparage everything that came before just to try and make themselves look better.
Guess some people have never heard the phrase "pray tell".
The article is wrong. The resolution of the eye is not 1/2 the normally accepted value of 1 arcminute, as the article claims, it is the normally accepted value of 1 arcminute. Experiments show that visible structures are still discernable when they are only 1 arcminute apart (see "Vision" by Pierre Buser and Michel Imbert, MIT Press, 1992, p. 120). The pixel spacing should therefore be 1 arcminute, not two.
Let's extrapolate that figure into a real-world situation: theatrical movies. SMPTE standards say you should be 2 screen heights back for an optimal viewing distance. For a 2.35:1 movie, that works out to about 60 degrees. That means given the 1 arcminute spacing rule, there should be 3600 pixels across the width of the screen. Most movies these days have digital intermediate work done at "2K" resolution, or ~2000 pixels across the width. However, some are starting to have their work done at "4K", or ~4000 pixels across the width of the screen. What do you know, in a blind test blind test, people invariably pick out 4K material as looking better (see 4th paragraph of link). That couldn't happen if the figure were 2 arcminutes.
It's really too bad this article made the front page of slashdot. People who don't know any better are going to be linking to it forever, and I'll have to keep copy/pasting this rebuttal.
Let's extrapolate that figure into a real-world situation: theatrical movies. SMPTE standards say you should be 2 screen heights back for an optimal viewing distance. For a 2.35:1 movie, that works out to about 60 degrees. That means given the 1 arcminute spacing rule, there should be 3600 pixels across the width of the screen. Most movies these days have digital intermediate work done at "2K" resolution, or ~2000 pixels across the width. However, some are starting to have their work done at "4K", or ~4000 pixels across the width of the screen. What do you know, in a blind test, people invariably pick out 4K material as looking better (see 4th paragraph of link). That couldn't happen if the figure were 2 arcminutes.
It's really too bad this article made the front page of slashdot. People who don't know any better are going to be linking to it for a long time, and I'll have to keep copy/pasting this rebuttal.
Yes, but their goal is to either preserve the status quo, or actively restrict freedom of the lower classes.
Same producer on both the original BSG and Knight Rider ... Glen A. Larson. For some reason he seemed to think of a horizonally scrolling red light as meaning ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LOL
Good lord, do you realize how obvious something like that is?
When I was a kid, I used to make silent Super-8 movies without the ability to edit. Think about that. Not only does the movie has to be shot in sequence, but every shot has to be correct. You get one take, and that's all. If something went wrong during a take, we would have to think on our feet and decide in a split second to either salvage the take or let go of the button and try to pick it up from there somehow. My brother and I got very disciplined very quickly. Our best movies were the ones where we planned ahead and rehearsed each shot before filming it, making sure it would work before actually commiting it to film. We even improvised some pretty slick little action sequences. I should scan that stuff and put it online at some point.
It took us a long time to figure out the difference between what we imagined we were capturing on film and what we actually were getting. Not to mention we had to wait a week before seeing the results, which made us very careful. Later on, we got an 8mm splicer and could do some editing. Then even later we got a portable VHS machine and could buy time on a two-machine editing bay. Also, with video, we had the luxury of instant feedback. Surprisingly, all the luxuries of VHS production didn't make us better filmmakers. I honestly think we made better stuff when we had the most limitations doing silent Super-8 stuff with no editing.
Damn, when I think about how limited we were, and how spoiled some of today's "filmmakers" are who can't even tell a simple story, well ... shit.
Thank you for what is by far the best post on this story.
Oh, and:
the guiding light there was Werner von Braun, so you could say that it was Germany
Wow, talk about a stretch. So the Kennedy administration, the Congress and voters who approved and funded it, all the engineers at Boeing, Douglas, NAA, Grumman, and all the astronauts were German too?
Germany may have given birth to Werner von Braun, but it was the USA that gave him, an immigrant, the resources and opportunity to be a part of the Apollo project. The USA most likely could have gone to the moon without von Braun, but it's doubtful von Braun could have gone to the moon without the USA.
The previous post mentioned two things that go way beyond the internet: threatening phone calls and false police reports. I don't know what kind of site he runs, but damn does it sounds like it attracts some serious psychos.
After working in film and video for years, I beileve the most important thing to bring a picture to life is contrast, aka dynamic range. (Same thing for audio really.) Resolution is nice, color gamut is nice, but it's the scale between black and white that has to be just plain astronomical to really make the picture seem alive. The digital systems people are installing just don't have it. I'd gladly sacrifice 4K for 2K if it meant we could have the kind of dynamic range we should.
I'm a rare bird in that I actually like film, like theaters, want something better than HDTV, and believe the gold standard of quality is and should be theatrical presentations. I can't help it -- I grew up watching 5-perf 70mm in really well run theaters. People who don't know what film is capable of don't always appreciate it fully.
Find a local IMAX theater that is showing material that was actually shot in IMAX, and watch it. Then watch James Cameron's "Aliens of the Deep" (shot in 1080p and transferred to IMAX). The difference will be night and day.
That's probably true, the scale, and the capability of the output device is what's more important. So far, only DLP and some LCOS projectors have found their way into theaters. The amount of contrast they are capable of is vastly less than that of even a cheap film print, let alone something like Kodak's 2393 print stock. What's needed are better projectors with more dynamic range. Laser projection sounds promising, but it's probably still a ways off.
True. Especially if they feel the need to go up to 6K. They do need a per-frame limit at some point. No idea why they went for such a low value.
6K seems like overkill, unless we're talking about replacement for IMAX, then it should be more like 8K. for a 2.39:1 image, the biggest practical viewing angle is probably about 60 degress (2 screen heights back), which is about where the first row behind the railing is in a typical stadium seating theater. Given the generally accepted value for maximum visual acuity of the human of about 1 arcminute, that means you need about 3600 pixels across the width of the image. 4K would be just about ideal.
Not true. People always come up with these fudge factors to explain away the advantages of film, but my observations directly contradict this notion. I frequently see jaggies when I go to the movies these days. This is a result of Hollywood mostly standardizing on 2K for digital work. Those few eFilm 4K movies I linked earlier have looked significantly better.
There is nothing special about the theaters I go to either, they are just ordinary neighborhood multiplexes. And yet their film projection is more than good enough to spot flaws in 2K processed images. In practice, multiplexes are already exceeding HD. The DCI 2K standard will be a step down.
You've also not touched on dynamic range -- an area where film has an even bigger advantage over current digital systems.
Several BILLION (yes, with a "b") feet of motion picture print film are printed every year. Even when mass-scale digital conversion really gets going, it will be decades before film goes away. Until then, double inventory (digital and film) will be the name of the game.
Hell, there are theaters out there still that don't even have digital sound yet!
The problem is, most of today's movies are drained of their color & contrast at the post production stage, near as I can tell merely for "artistic" reasons. Dull, desaturated images are all the rage for some reason. If a movie were to come out that actually tried to deliver as vibrant an image as today's materials are capable of delivering, I think it would blow everyone away, and rival dye transfer. It's time for a neo-Technicolor renaissance!
You can't get IMAX quality at home, and likely won't for 20 years at least, if ever.
If you look through the document you linked, the security section is 25 pages long, while only a few pages are dedicated to image and sound. For the image, the system mostly talks about 2K, with some additional modes for 4K, but no requirement to use it, and no inclusion of the higher framerate 48fps mode for 4K. Considering there are already 4K film releases and 2K is already in the home, this does not seem very forward thinking. Home theater freaks have been saying for years what they have at home is better than what's in theaters. For the first time, they will actually be right, if theatrical 2K becomes the de-facto standard (which it already has to some extent, thanks to an overload of crappy 2K digital intermediates).
Another short-sighted mistake is that it defines the image as a constant width format, meaning you get fewer pixels for a scope image vs. non-scope. Does that seem backwards to anyone else? The 2K scope image only has 858 vertical pixels, for crying out loud! (page 14)
Page 14 also specifies: "The bit depth for each code value for a color component shall be 12 bits. This yields 36 bits per pixel." Doesn't say whether it's linear or log (like Cineon). I assume linear, but considering most linear film work is done in a 16-bit space (see the GIMP spin-off "CinePaint), this doesn't seem like enough. All theatrical digital presentations I've seen so far have been severely lacking in dynamic range compared to film. This document totally fails to address that.
There is also a data limitation of just over 1MB per frame, regardless of whether the image is 2K or 4K (page 25). That's just stupid (hopefully I don't have to explain why).
There seems to have been very little consideration given to quality for either the present or the future. Simply slapping a big HDTV into theaters is a bad, short-sighted idea, and will surely be a further nail in the coffin for theatrical presentations. AMC for example has lost money for nine years straight, and now they want to dump money into this shit?
Actually it was even more slimy than that. "Johnny Cache" said on a mailing list a while back: "Secureworks absolutely insists on being exceedingly responsible and doesn't want to release any details about anything until Apple issues a patch. Whether or not this position was taken after a special ops team of lawyers parachuted in out of a black helicopter is up for speculation."
"Up for speculation" sounds like "we want everyone to think it, but don't want to be held responsible for saying it".
Also, "exceedingly responsible" ... hahahhahahahahaha ...
LEDs also look like crap. Incandescent is the only bulb type that gives you a true black box frequency distribution. You can tell so-called "white" LEDs are just two sharp peaks on the spectrum with nothing anywhere else.