you can't film space battles as if it's a documentary
How else would you film it?
A couple of years ago, Ron Moore published a sort of open letter to the world describing his vision for where a space-based TV show needed to go. (Google didn't find it in the ten seconds I spent looking, but it's out there.) One of the things he said was that God's-eye shots had to go. Impossible camera moves created entirely within the computer break the suspension of disbelief and turn what should be a very dramatic moment into a video game.
Every exterior shot in the show is planned. Where is the cameraman? What kind of lens is he using? What is his motion relative to the other objects in the shot? Is it a gimballed camera (like a Wescam) or is it handheld?
And that's how the shots are made. Objects go in and out of focus. The imaginary cameraman zooms in and out to catch the action. He whip-pans around when the situation calls for it.
Basically, the premise is like this: Exterior shots in "Galactica" are supposed to look just like the producers built a bunch of space ships, flew them around, and shot the whole thing with a bunch of different cameras. Or as much like that as possible.
In the opening scene of the series pilot, Moore sorta threw down the gauntlet in two shots. The first is when the shuttle is approaching Armistice Station. The scene is shot as if a fixed camera were attached to the exterior of the shuttle, complete with camera shake when the thrusters fire. If it had been a God's-eye shot of the shuttle coming in majestically, it might have been prettier, but it would have been less real.
The next shot comes a few minutes later when the cylons arrive to blow up the station. The explosion is shot from a fixed camera orbiting at a distance. At one point, a piece of debris comes right at the camera, collides with it, and sends the camera spinning off into space.
Of course, we know that those shots were all created entirely in a computer using (believe it or not) LightWave. But they don't look like they were. They look like they were shot with real cameras using real lenses.
Your post is right on...except for the "in real life" part. That story, which broke the weekend before the US presidential election, was part exaggeration, part old news and part just plain fiction. It was completely debunked within a couple of days. It's kind of surprising to see that the original story is still up on the Web without a very long correction or a very short retraction.
Dude, have you watched the show? You keep calling attention to stuff that was put there on purpose to serve the story. Hey, the cylons can subvert networked computers. Wonder if that might have anything to do with the theme of the show: "Pride goeth before a fall?" Hey, there are no Marines on Galactica. Did you notice the LONG ASS conversation about how Galactica's Marines have been dispersed throughout the fleet as security forces and crowd control?
Some of your nitpicks, though, are just fucking stupid. Burn hydrogen to get water? Sure. But... um...where's the hydrogen supposed to come from? It's not exactly plentiful in large quantities, you know. We get hydrogen from water, not the other way around. And if you want to just somehow suck it out of deep space, you're talking about grabbing it a few atoms at a time... and we don't have the foggiest idea how to go about doing that. That would be a SERIOUS breach of plausibility. Actual plausibility, not your "The characters should all be omniscient" idea of plausibility.
But, bottom line, it seems to me that you get a bigger kick out of coming up with silly criticisms than you do out of just enjoying a good story. Knock yourself out, man, but don't begrudge the rest of us who find our entertainment in more conventional places.
Ghandi and Luther King are good examples: they didn't need to defend themselves
Sigh. They were murdered. They certainly did need to defend themselves. They just chose not to, and died at the hands of assassins.
Relativism is unavoidable
Heh. An absolutist take on relativism. That's good irony.
What was your point?
That when Noam Chomsky stops talking about the intricate details of linguistic theory and starts talking about actual events, he lies. A lot. He lies in fact, and he lies by omission. My point was that people who are looking for truth or insight should avoid reading anything Chomsky says on the subjects of history or politics.
Unfortunately, for many it's too late. You, for example, have been poisoned. You no longer see the difference between capital punishment and murder. You deny that this distinction even exists. Your mind has been poisoned. You've been perverted into something just slightly less than human.
Um, no...unless you believe you can rip yourself off. The same people --a Santa Monica-based house called Zoic --did the work for both "Firefly" and "Battlestar Galactica." In both cases, the producers went to Zoic specifically because they wanted a handheld, verité look for their productions, and Zoic are the guys who create that look.
It's the open-source MPEG2-video (i.e. DVD) creation package.
Um. That's nice and all, but it sounds from skimming the marketing hoo-hah that it's drastically inferior to products like Compressor and Cleaner. No real-time preview, no support for other codecs, no queueing or batch-processing facilities, no user-friendly interface.
It's a new temporal noise-reduction tool for digital video, that does such a good job of inferring clear images from several noisy examples of them, that it can make a videotape look like it came from a LaserDisc. No kidding.
I'm sure you're not kidding, because Sonic has had that tool for at least seven years now. I first saw it in 1998. And they had a real nice application wrapped around it, too, which is more than I can say for "mjpegtools."
IMO, a proper application can be run interactively, through config files and a command-line, or as an API from another program.
Okay, well... that's obviously false. There are tasks that cannot be done with a command line, period. Interactive visualization, compositing...hell, even games. These cannot be done without a graphical interface.
That's why I say that the command line has been exhausted. All the useful command-line programs have been written. We've moved on to tasks that can't be done on the command line now.
Based on how Slashdot readers have responded to my other comments today, I'm fairly sure I'm going to get some hate mail for this, but here goes anyway.
It seems to me that now, in 2005, all the useful command-line programs have been written. There are no more useful command-line programs out there to write. So why does a book like this even bother discussing the writing of command-line programs? Isn't it a big waste of time?
The way I see it, the useful software that exists right now falls into three broad categories: embedded software, server software and applications. Embedded software is stuff like aircraft avionics. There's no user involved. Server software includes stuff like Oracle and WebObjects. There's a user involved, but not directly. And applications are what we all use on our desktops and laptops.
Nowhere in there is there room for a command-line program that hasn't yet been written. All the basic tools for dealing with files and stuff have already been perfected (at least to the extent that they're going to be).
So why even waste any energy on it? Isn't it kind of like having a chapter at the beginning that discusses the right way to encode your program onto punch-cards?
Seriously, don't you think that alpha-blended PNGs would be used a lot more if MS would make IE support them?
Truthfully, no. Because Web sites that are designed to include graphics with mattes on them are already being produced, using the very simple workaround I described in another comment.
You kind of make it sound like IE can't display PNGs with mattes at all. That's not true. You just need to put in the right attributes to tell IE how to handle your matted images.
It's about time you got your head out of your ass and started using it for something more constructive than trolling.
Sigh. You're the third person in a row on this site who, in the middle of a perfectly find conversation, decided to be a jerk. What's the deal, is there something in the drinking water around here?
IE's poor CSS support is the major obstacle to CSS support. Period.
While I think you have a point, it's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem, isn't it? IE doesn't have support for --let's be honest here --a very few, very specific parts of the vast and damn near impenetrable specification because the demand for them isn't there. You're saying that the demand isn't there because IE doesn't support those far-out parts of the spec. There's no easy answer, I think.
There is no ROI in IE *at all*. None.
That's no really true. Internet Explorer is a value-add on top of Windows, and serves to advance the Windows platform. Microsoft adds those features their customers are asking for, while they skip over features that some people want but that the majority of their customers don't care about.
And I wonder what your problem is too.
?? What happened here, did you just decide at the end of your comment to start being a dickhead?
No argument... except with your first sentence. Both of these features are quite obscure in the grand scheme of things. It's entirely understandable why Microsoft wouldn't want to invest the time to add support for them. It's a return-on-investment, opportunity-cost thing.
Besides, when somebody accuses you of saying that somebody else's product "sucks donkey wab" (c.f. this troll), how motivated are you to acquiesce to his feature request?
Hello? Have you seen who is being interviewed? The man in charge of FUD? Negativity is his job description.
Sigh.
I don't guess it would do any good if I just asked you please not to participate in this thread, huh? There are plenty of places on the Internet where you can yell about how much you hate Microsoft. Do you have to pollute this one particular thread with it, too?
Here's an opportunity for dialogue, and you just piss all over it. Let me guess...American?
Sigh. Again with the loaded questions. This isn't an issue of "industry standards." It's an issue of adding additional support for a seldom-used file format. The support is already there, you just want them to add more support.
Which is an entirely reasonable request. It's just that Microsoft gets lots of entirely reasonable requests, and there are only so many developers to go around.
If you want to make the case that Microsoft needs to go back and implement a fairly obscure feature that's already implemented in a different way, great. Go for it. That's a totally valid opinion. I just don't think this interview is the right platform for trying to do that.
No, it's not, because nobody uses just an operating system. People use applications. If the applications suck -- and believe me when I tell you that I've never seen a Linux application that didn't suck --then the operating system, by definition, isn't superior. Hell, at that point it's not even an alternative.
Has Gimp ever gotten arbitrary-channel support? For example, can you create a tritone in Gimp using two PMS colors plus black, or do you have to create each grayscale channel separately and stuff them into R, G and B?
I think that might be kind of a bad example. The Adobe applications are notorious for having similar-but-not-similar-enough interfaces. In InDesign, for example, the "w" key turns off all guides and frames and the pasteboard and just shows you your page. It's a wonderful feature. But when you go over to Illustrator, not only does the "w" key do something else (it selects a tool), there's not even a comparable feature hidden behind another keystroke or menu selection. That feature just doesn't exist in Illustrator. It's frustrating.
Then again, maybe that's exactly the point you wanted to make.
I also hear how he could download the source code, alter it to be the perfect application, just the way he wants, recompile it, and use that instead. But, you know, that's kind of a lot to expect from some random person.
Particularly when there's absolutely no possibility of making a profit from your work. Thanks a lot, Gnu. Ask me again why people aren't tripping over themselves rushing to contribute to your projects?
There is no need for the interface to be "idiot-proof." It just needs to be good. And there's no task too complex for a good interface.
Consider Final Cut Pro. Editing video is among the more complex tasks people do with computers. Lots of tracks, lots of elements, many transitions, stuff overlapping with other stuff, keys, color corrections, audio effects... it's a lot of stuff.
Final Cut Pro has one of the best user interfaces for its task. Just the basic way windows work is great. Put two windows next to each other: they snap in place. You can grab the edge between them where they meet and drag it: both windows resize. Arrange four windows so they meet at a common corner, and you can drag just the corner point. All four windows resize.
The net result is that you can change the way the windows are arranged to suit your project and your screen, but you can very easily make maximum use of your screen space. No floating palettes or windows at all, so nothing is ever in your way. And the interface works as well at 1280x1024 as it does at 2560x1600, as well for 2.35:1 content as for 4:3 content.
The user-interface code that makes windows work that way is a framework called ProKit. It's compatible with AppKit, so it's incredibly easy to write programs that take advantage of it. If only Apple would release it as a standalone SDK instead of just using it for their internal products.
That's not a reasonable interpretation, and you know it. You a $10 bill in your pocket. You can buy food for your family and pay your mortgage, or you can donate it to the Red Cross. Does the fact that you use that money to buy food and shelter mean you don't care about disaster relief? Of course not. It just means that it's not as on your list of priorities as food and shelter are.
why so many people despise MS
What do you really think is going to be accomplished by turning this interview into a hate-fest? If you dislike Microsoft, don't participate. Take your negativity elsewhere.
But what of the example set by Ghandi and Martin Luther King
Bad example. Both of those men were murdered. If they'd exercised self defense --or had been in a position to do so -- against their would-be assassins, they would have been spared their fates.
but unfortunately we have to ask whose moral context is the one that matters?
Sigh. That's just more valueless relativism. I'm afraid you've missed the point completely.
I think the obvious answer is that Microsoft, like practically all companies, wants to stay as far away from Gnu as possible.
Of course, that doesn't explain why they didn't take the Apple route and adopt truly free software. That might simply be the difference between UNIX and Windows. It might be a heck of a lot more work to port some things from one UNIX (like Linux) to another (like the Mac) than it is to port them from UNIX to Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
you can't film space battles as if it's a documentary
How else would you film it?
A couple of years ago, Ron Moore published a sort of open letter to the world describing his vision for where a space-based TV show needed to go. (Google didn't find it in the ten seconds I spent looking, but it's out there.) One of the things he said was that God's-eye shots had to go. Impossible camera moves created entirely within the computer break the suspension of disbelief and turn what should be a very dramatic moment into a video game.
Every exterior shot in the show is planned. Where is the cameraman? What kind of lens is he using? What is his motion relative to the other objects in the shot? Is it a gimballed camera (like a Wescam) or is it handheld?
And that's how the shots are made. Objects go in and out of focus. The imaginary cameraman zooms in and out to catch the action. He whip-pans around when the situation calls for it.
Basically, the premise is like this: Exterior shots in "Galactica" are supposed to look just like the producers built a bunch of space ships, flew them around, and shot the whole thing with a bunch of different cameras. Or as much like that as possible.
In the opening scene of the series pilot, Moore sorta threw down the gauntlet in two shots. The first is when the shuttle is approaching Armistice Station. The scene is shot as if a fixed camera were attached to the exterior of the shuttle, complete with camera shake when the thrusters fire. If it had been a God's-eye shot of the shuttle coming in majestically, it might have been prettier, but it would have been less real.
The next shot comes a few minutes later when the cylons arrive to blow up the station. The explosion is shot from a fixed camera orbiting at a distance. At one point, a piece of debris comes right at the camera, collides with it, and sends the camera spinning off into space.
Of course, we know that those shots were all created entirely in a computer using (believe it or not) LightWave. But they don't look like they were. They look like they were shot with real cameras using real lenses.
Your post is right on ...except for the "in real life" part. That story, which broke the weekend before the US presidential election, was part exaggeration, part old news and part just plain fiction. It was completely debunked within a couple of days. It's kind of surprising to see that the original story is still up on the Web without a very long correction or a very short retraction.
Dude, have you watched the show? You keep calling attention to stuff that was put there on purpose to serve the story. Hey, the cylons can subvert networked computers. Wonder if that might have anything to do with the theme of the show: "Pride goeth before a fall?" Hey, there are no Marines on Galactica. Did you notice the LONG ASS conversation about how Galactica's Marines have been dispersed throughout the fleet as security forces and crowd control?
... um...where's the hydrogen supposed to come from? It's not exactly plentiful in large quantities, you know. We get hydrogen from water, not the other way around. And if you want to just somehow suck it out of deep space, you're talking about grabbing it a few atoms at a time ... and we don't have the foggiest idea how to go about doing that. That would be a SERIOUS breach of plausibility. Actual plausibility, not your "The characters should all be omniscient" idea of plausibility.
Some of your nitpicks, though, are just fucking stupid. Burn hydrogen to get water? Sure. But
But, bottom line, it seems to me that you get a bigger kick out of coming up with silly criticisms than you do out of just enjoying a good story. Knock yourself out, man, but don't begrudge the rest of us who find our entertainment in more conventional places.
Ghandi and Luther King are good examples: they didn't need to defend themselves
Sigh. They were murdered. They certainly did need to defend themselves. They just chose not to, and died at the hands of assassins.
Relativism is unavoidable
Heh. An absolutist take on relativism. That's good irony.
What was your point?
That when Noam Chomsky stops talking about the intricate details of linguistic theory and starts talking about actual events, he lies. A lot. He lies in fact, and he lies by omission. My point was that people who are looking for truth or insight should avoid reading anything Chomsky says on the subjects of history or politics.
Unfortunately, for many it's too late. You, for example, have been poisoned. You no longer see the difference between capital punishment and murder. You deny that this distinction even exists. Your mind has been poisoned. You've been perverted into something just slightly less than human.
That makes me sad.
Um, no ...unless you believe you can rip yourself off. The same people --a Santa Monica-based house called Zoic --did the work for both "Firefly" and "Battlestar Galactica." In both cases, the producers went to Zoic specifically because they wanted a handheld, verité look for their productions, and Zoic are the guys who create that look.
Yes, because you know every check you send to Sky One goes directly into Rupert's bank account.
Sigh. Do they not teach the theory of capitalism in your country?
The reviewer from the BBC said it was so shocking and brutal it was like watching a murder.
Too many qualifiers.
This is the first $499 Mac ever.
You're either a troll or a dimwit.
Sigh. This is such a friendly place.
It's the open-source MPEG2-video (i.e. DVD) creation package.
Um. That's nice and all, but it sounds from skimming the marketing hoo-hah that it's drastically inferior to products like Compressor and Cleaner. No real-time preview, no support for other codecs, no queueing or batch-processing facilities, no user-friendly interface.
It's a new temporal noise-reduction tool for digital video, that does such a good job of inferring clear images from several noisy examples of them, that it can make a videotape look like it came from a LaserDisc. No kidding.
I'm sure you're not kidding, because Sonic has had that tool for at least seven years now. I first saw it in 1998. And they had a real nice application wrapped around it, too, which is more than I can say for "mjpegtools."
IMO, a proper application can be run interactively, through config files and a command-line, or as an API from another program.
... that's obviously false. There are tasks that cannot be done with a command line, period. Interactive visualization, compositing ...hell, even games. These cannot be done without a graphical interface.
Okay, well
That's why I say that the command line has been exhausted. All the useful command-line programs have been written. We've moved on to tasks that can't be done on the command line now.
Based on how Slashdot readers have responded to my other comments today, I'm fairly sure I'm going to get some hate mail for this, but here goes anyway.
It seems to me that now, in 2005, all the useful command-line programs have been written. There are no more useful command-line programs out there to write. So why does a book like this even bother discussing the writing of command-line programs? Isn't it a big waste of time?
The way I see it, the useful software that exists right now falls into three broad categories: embedded software, server software and applications. Embedded software is stuff like aircraft avionics. There's no user involved. Server software includes stuff like Oracle and WebObjects. There's a user involved, but not directly. And applications are what we all use on our desktops and laptops.
Nowhere in there is there room for a command-line program that hasn't yet been written. All the basic tools for dealing with files and stuff have already been perfected (at least to the extent that they're going to be).
So why even waste any energy on it? Isn't it kind of like having a chapter at the beginning that discusses the right way to encode your program onto punch-cards?
Seriously, don't you think that alpha-blended PNGs would be used a lot more if MS would make IE support them?
Truthfully, no. Because Web sites that are designed to include graphics with mattes on them are already being produced, using the very simple workaround I described in another comment.
You kind of make it sound like IE can't display PNGs with mattes at all. That's not true. You just need to put in the right attributes to tell IE how to handle your matted images.
It's about time you got your head out of your ass and started using it for something more constructive than trolling.
Sigh. You're the third person in a row on this site who, in the middle of a perfectly find conversation, decided to be a jerk. What's the deal, is there something in the drinking water around here?
IE's poor CSS support is the major obstacle to CSS support. Period.
While I think you have a point, it's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem, isn't it? IE doesn't have support for --let's be honest here --a very few, very specific parts of the vast and damn near impenetrable specification because the demand for them isn't there. You're saying that the demand isn't there because IE doesn't support those far-out parts of the spec. There's no easy answer, I think.
There is no ROI in IE *at all*. None.
That's no really true. Internet Explorer is a value-add on top of Windows, and serves to advance the Windows platform. Microsoft adds those features their customers are asking for, while they skip over features that some people want but that the majority of their customers don't care about.
And I wonder what your problem is too.
?? What happened here, did you just decide at the end of your comment to start being a dickhead?
No argument ... except with your first sentence. Both of these features are quite obscure in the grand scheme of things. It's entirely understandable why Microsoft wouldn't want to invest the time to add support for them. It's a return-on-investment, opportunity-cost thing.
Besides, when somebody accuses you of saying that somebody else's product "sucks donkey wab" (c.f. this troll), how motivated are you to acquiesce to his feature request?
Hello? Have you seen who is being interviewed? The man in charge of FUD? Negativity is his job description.
...American?
Sigh.
I don't guess it would do any good if I just asked you please not to participate in this thread, huh? There are plenty of places on the Internet where you can yell about how much you hate Microsoft. Do you have to pollute this one particular thread with it, too?
Here's an opportunity for dialogue, and you just piss all over it. Let me guess
Sigh. Again with the loaded questions. This isn't an issue of "industry standards." It's an issue of adding additional support for a seldom-used file format. The support is already there, you just want them to add more support.
Which is an entirely reasonable request. It's just that Microsoft gets lots of entirely reasonable requests, and there are only so many developers to go around.
If you want to make the case that Microsoft needs to go back and implement a fairly obscure feature that's already implemented in a different way, great. Go for it. That's a totally valid opinion. I just don't think this interview is the right platform for trying to do that.
No, it's not, because nobody uses just an operating system. People use applications. If the applications suck -- and believe me when I tell you that I've never seen a Linux application that didn't suck --then the operating system, by definition, isn't superior. Hell, at that point it's not even an alternative.
3. High bit depth graphics support - 48 bit and floating point (to stay a bit ahead of Apple/Microsoft).
Too late. OpenEXR is already a native file type in Mac OS X Tiger.
Has Gimp ever gotten arbitrary-channel support? For example, can you create a tritone in Gimp using two PMS colors plus black, or do you have to create each grayscale channel separately and stuff them into R, G and B?
I think that might be kind of a bad example. The Adobe applications are notorious for having similar-but-not-similar-enough interfaces. In InDesign, for example, the "w" key turns off all guides and frames and the pasteboard and just shows you your page. It's a wonderful feature. But when you go over to Illustrator, not only does the "w" key do something else (it selects a tool), there's not even a comparable feature hidden behind another keystroke or menu selection. That feature just doesn't exist in Illustrator. It's frustrating.
Then again, maybe that's exactly the point you wanted to make.
I also hear how he could download the source code, alter it to be the perfect application, just the way he wants, recompile it, and use that instead. But, you know, that's kind of a lot to expect from some random person.
Particularly when there's absolutely no possibility of making a profit from your work. Thanks a lot, Gnu. Ask me again why people aren't tripping over themselves rushing to contribute to your projects?
There is no need for the interface to be "idiot-proof." It just needs to be good. And there's no task too complex for a good interface.
... it's a lot of stuff.
Consider Final Cut Pro. Editing video is among the more complex tasks people do with computers. Lots of tracks, lots of elements, many transitions, stuff overlapping with other stuff, keys, color corrections, audio effects
Final Cut Pro has one of the best user interfaces for its task. Just the basic way windows work is great. Put two windows next to each other: they snap in place. You can grab the edge between them where they meet and drag it: both windows resize. Arrange four windows so they meet at a common corner, and you can drag just the corner point. All four windows resize.
The net result is that you can change the way the windows are arranged to suit your project and your screen, but you can very easily make maximum use of your screen space. No floating palettes or windows at all, so nothing is ever in your way. And the interface works as well at 1280x1024 as it does at 2560x1600, as well for 2.35:1 content as for 4:3 content.
The user-interface code that makes windows work that way is a framework called ProKit. It's compatible with AppKit, so it's incredibly easy to write programs that take advantage of it. If only Apple would release it as a standalone SDK instead of just using it for their internal products.
In other words: they don't care.
That's not a reasonable interpretation, and you know it. You a $10 bill in your pocket. You can buy food for your family and pay your mortgage, or you can donate it to the Red Cross. Does the fact that you use that money to buy food and shelter mean you don't care about disaster relief? Of course not. It just means that it's not as on your list of priorities as food and shelter are.
why so many people despise MS
What do you really think is going to be accomplished by turning this interview into a hate-fest? If you dislike Microsoft, don't participate. Take your negativity elsewhere.
But what of the example set by Ghandi and Martin Luther King
Bad example. Both of those men were murdered. If they'd exercised self defense --or had been in a position to do so -- against their would-be assassins, they would have been spared their fates.
but unfortunately we have to ask whose moral context is the one that matters?
Sigh. That's just more valueless relativism. I'm afraid you've missed the point completely.
I think the obvious answer is that Microsoft, like practically all companies, wants to stay as far away from Gnu as possible.
Of course, that doesn't explain why they didn't take the Apple route and adopt truly free software. That might simply be the difference between UNIX and Windows. It might be a heck of a lot more work to port some things from one UNIX (like Linux) to another (like the Mac) than it is to port them from UNIX to Windows.