Well that's a failure of imagination. I'll admit technically speaking it often is *somewhat* compressed, - eg. 422 Subsampled chroma at least. But there is a massive difference between a delivery codec and a signal you're still working with. To start with H264 and their ilk are computationally expensive to do anything with. A single frame of 1080p is a pretty big dataset, and it's painful enough doing basic matrix transforms, but adding a bunch of higher level computations on top of that?... For example just cutting between two feeds of an inter frame compressed codec requires that the processor decompress the GOP and recreate the missing frames. Several of orders of magnitude more complicated than stopping one feed and starting another.
And generally speaking the uncompressed feed you have in broadcast situation you're doing *something* oo. Switching, mixing, adding graphics, etc. But the biggest question is one of generation loss. Even one round trip through one of those codecs results in a massive drop in quality (as you rightly point out). You don't want to be compressing footage out of the cameras any more than you can, because you KNOW that you're going to be rescaling, retiming, wiping, fading, keying etc etc etc...
Your point is very well taken and for the most part I have to agree with you - AS far as communicating specific, for example technical, ideas are concerned. But as for communicating more subtle more nuanced things about the interviewee - especially things the interviewee doesn't specifically set out to communicate - video has it over the written word every time. You can't always tell if someone is lying over video - but you almost NEVER can when you're reading the written word.
I concur. An even better solution would be to engage a local freelancer or stringer to do it. That way they'd actually have a decent camera, decent audio gear (people so often overlook this) and might actually know something about lighting, sound, scene etc. Doesn't have to be expensive maybe a couple of hundred dollars for an hour long interview. You can still do the interview over voip, just get a million times better picture. Have a point of difference.
Speaking as an Australian I would love to pay only $60 for a AAA title. WHY is it that in this day and age with pretty much 1:1 parity with the US dollar, am I being asked for $85-110 for a new release. WTF is WITH that?
My local pub has a setup like this. I imagine it was fairly expensive to setup as it's 6-7 projectors, each with their own slave computer controlled by a server running a bit of software called watchout,( by dataton). It doesn't use cameras to calibrate, it was done manually (or so I'm told), but since the projectors have been installed for at least 5-6 years the time spent calibrating them isn't such a big deal. And the software allows for making minor adjustments (via sliders) in case you bump one of them.
Mod parent up. Here in Australia we already have this legislation and it's *completely* pointless. Same deal, some ninny in parliament with no real understanding of the technology involved wrote some *bs* legislation:
The problem is coming up with an "objective" comparison of the loudness between two bits of programming. As the parent says it's more a question of compression and dynamic range than actual volume. (by compression I mean audio compression, not data compression). If you run a peak search on even the most mild mannered jane austen bbc tv program, you'll get the same reading as you do an a sham-wow commercial. It's just that the sham-wow tvc dude is trying to cram so much information in the 30 seconds that he'll run everything at -3db. Where as in the Jane Austen thing will only reach that point once or twice in 10 minute section.
But an even bigger problem is that the people making the ads have no idea what they're actually going to be screening with. How are you going to match the apparent loudness of your ad with the tv program, if you've got no idea what that program is anyway? It's retarded.
Consequently in Australia we have a vaguely written set of "guidelines" and a requirement that any tvc submitted to a network be "OP48" compliant and say as such on the slate. The result, everyone writes OP48 compliant on their slate and that's about it....
Hrmm.. Yes I want to buy a 1TB drive because I'm about to capture 3 hours of HD footage for a project I'm working on. In fact I want to buy several. Most of the files going on to a disk like that are going to be tens of gigabytes, write once, read many. Incremental backup is so far from my mind it doesn't even register. Besides, the operating system supplies those tools anyway.(rsync rdiff - or even just "time machine").
To be honest in almost every other post production or graphic design studio that I've been in in the last 3 years has used laCie drives almost exclusively. I don't know why (maybe because they're pretty?), but if it's their target market then it seems they can get away without offering incremental backup software, just fine. And charge a premium for it. Note: this is not an endorsement of laCie products - just an observation.
my 2c.
Furthermore, the technical, financial and freedom of expression (as upheld through our constitution) issues are well documented and those in themselves should be more than enough to kill any further life in this poorly planned, poorly executed and poorly though-out plan.
Constitution fail. There is no such protection under the Australian Constitution. We have no bill of rights. This is not the Almighty US of A. Are you sure you're a politician? If so, that's a bit scary... though not surprising.
A little off topic perhaps... but it make's me think of a story a friend told me once:
Hungry Jacks (Australian version of Burger King) once had a promotion going where if you asked for "Two for One" they gave you two Whoppers (a kind of inedible burger) for the price of one. The only catch was that someone at the marketing company forgot to assign an end date to the promo on all the advertising material. Consequently even now - many years later, Hungry Jacks' still has to honor the "Two for One" deal.
Me and a friend called BS on his story, and he was quite insistent that it was real. We were just on our way from one bar to another at the time (a little inebriated perhaps) so we went into a Hungry Jacks store to test his theory. He ordered a Whopper as a "Two for One", and sure enough they gave it to him!
Mind you by the time he got to the front of the queue he had 16 drunk football (australian rules) players chanting "Two for one" so perhaps they just gave it to him to make us leave....
But if it was *genuine* makes you think that maybe us australians are pretty serious about keeping companies honest about their marketing.
Decoding.264 isn't really such a big deal. The ability to do low-cost multi-pass 1080 h.264 encoding at greater than real-time is something that would be EXTREMELY welcome for my company. We're a video post production house and we burn *LOTS* of CPU cycles encoding video for delivery to clients. A sub $500 card that greatly streamlined that process would be VERY welcome. Especially if it's something you could do as a background process that effectively didn't interfere with the operation of the edit suite.
You have a point. My first reaction to the image based thing is that the cost of creating that database of images (with suitably accurate meta-data) has to be considerable. And even then if the entire image database was compromised (e.g. disgruntled / suitably compensated employee) you'd have to start all over again.
However if you were altering each image on the fly then the processing overhead to do image matching has got to be pretty gnarly.
I guess, gnarly enough that it would be working deterrant.... for a year or two... and then you're back at the same point we are with conventional captcha..
And all it takes is for someone to leak that library and you've got to start all over again... I don't think you what you're suggesting is really that big of an improvement.
But you know, if I was a the kind of Christian (and I'm not ANY kind of christian - sorry) that took the whole, "God made Us through Evolution" thing seriously, then you already had to consider the possibility that we aren't God's end game. After all, maybe we are only 75% evolved to His master vision.
But to take that the next logical step... perhaps it was Intended that we create our own replacements...
Hrm, IAAVFXA (I am a VFX artist) and I was lead on a similar project in november last year. We did a number of crowd scenes and got principal photography out of the way in two days with a cast and crew of 9 - 10. However it would be extremely disingenuous to claim that 10 people made those shots in two days. A LOT of pre-production planning was done that probably all told equals about 2 months work for 1 person. AND more to the point those shots are still in post production (i'm avoiding working on one of them right now) and that's 4 operators working for about 6 weeks so far.
Yes the cameras are cheaper. Yes the software costs practically nothing. No, 4 amateurs could not pull that off in 4 days. Those guys are obviously talented compositors and spent a LOT of time sorting out the post production.
I don't know what the situation is in NTSC land. But here in Australian PAL land, (mu hah hah that's 576i or p for us), SD or standard definition is used pretty much interchangeably between EITHER 4:3 or 16:9 anamorphic.
Our SD digital transmission is anamorphic and our analogue broadcast is good old fashioned 4:3.
The parent poster is quite correct in that there is no standard resolution that defines HD content. It's a mess.
Seriously. You should try post producing a show that has been shot at 720p 29.97fps, but tagged as 50fps (over cranked), offlined at 576i / 50 (DV), and then conformed and onlined at 1080i / 50. It's enough to make you're head explode.
To be honest, it's just one of the reasons why us post production guys still have so much "love" in the "love/hate" relationship we have with film.
And yes you are correct. I'm completely off topic. But hey it's been a long day.
Slashdot Mirror
Well that's a failure of imagination. I'll admit technically speaking it often is *somewhat* compressed, - eg. 422 Subsampled chroma at least. But there is a massive difference between a delivery codec and a signal you're still working with. To start with H264 and their ilk are computationally expensive to do anything with. A single frame of 1080p is a pretty big dataset, and it's painful enough doing basic matrix transforms, but adding a bunch of higher level computations on top of that?... For example just cutting between two feeds of an inter frame compressed codec requires that the processor decompress the GOP and recreate the missing frames. Several of orders of magnitude more complicated than stopping one feed and starting another. And generally speaking the uncompressed feed you have in broadcast situation you're doing *something* oo. Switching, mixing, adding graphics, etc. But the biggest question is one of generation loss. Even one round trip through one of those codecs results in a massive drop in quality (as you rightly point out). You don't want to be compressing footage out of the cameras any more than you can, because you KNOW that you're going to be rescaling, retiming, wiping, fading, keying etc etc etc...
Your point is very well taken and for the most part I have to agree with you - AS far as communicating specific, for example technical, ideas are concerned. But as for communicating more subtle more nuanced things about the interviewee - especially things the interviewee doesn't specifically set out to communicate - video has it over the written word every time. You can't always tell if someone is lying over video - but you almost NEVER can when you're reading the written word.
I concur. An even better solution would be to engage a local freelancer or stringer to do it. That way they'd actually have a decent camera, decent audio gear (people so often overlook this) and might actually know something about lighting, sound, scene etc. Doesn't have to be expensive maybe a couple of hundred dollars for an hour long interview. You can still do the interview over voip, just get a million times better picture. Have a point of difference.
Speaking as an Australian I would love to pay only $60 for a AAA title. WHY is it that in this day and age with pretty much 1:1 parity with the US dollar, am I being asked for $85-110 for a new release. WTF is WITH that?
My understanding of turkish is shaky, but my ears, that consonant always sounded closer to half way between ch in branch and the G in Gem.
Unless or Until there is a early intervention/prevention treatment, finding these children early seems expensive and not that helpful.
Of course there is a chicken and egg type problem there. How do you design effective treatments without reliable diagnosis...?
This'll really put the whole "sharks can't get cancer" thing to the test.
Who's surprised the word for "something to hide behind" is french?
/ducks
Anyway this is the bar: http://www.horsebazaar.com.au/
The effect is quite cool, it's one long video wall that wraps around the pub. Shame they don't have any decent photos of it.
Mod parent up. Here in Australia we already have this legislation and it's *completely* pointless. Same deal, some ninny in parliament with no real understanding of the technology involved wrote some *bs* legislation:
http://www.freetv.com.au/Content_Common/pg-Loudness-in-Advertisements.seo
The problem is coming up with an "objective" comparison of the loudness between two bits of programming. As the parent says it's more a question of compression and dynamic range than actual volume. (by compression I mean audio compression, not data compression). If you run a peak search on even the most mild mannered jane austen bbc tv program, you'll get the same reading as you do an a sham-wow commercial. It's just that the sham-wow tvc dude is trying to cram so much information in the 30 seconds that he'll run everything at -3db. Where as in the Jane Austen thing will only reach that point once or twice in 10 minute section.
But an even bigger problem is that the people making the ads have no idea what they're actually going to be screening with. How are you going to match the apparent loudness of your ad with the tv program, if you've got no idea what that program is anyway? It's retarded.
Consequently in Australia we have a vaguely written set of "guidelines" and a requirement that any tvc submitted to a network be "OP48" compliant and say as such on the slate. The result, everyone writes OP48 compliant on their slate and that's about it....
Hrmm.. Yes I want to buy a 1TB drive because I'm about to capture 3 hours of HD footage for a project I'm working on. In fact I want to buy several. Most of the files going on to a disk like that are going to be tens of gigabytes, write once, read many. Incremental backup is so far from my mind it doesn't even register. Besides, the operating system supplies those tools anyway.(rsync rdiff - or even just "time machine"). To be honest in almost every other post production or graphic design studio that I've been in in the last 3 years has used laCie drives almost exclusively. I don't know why (maybe because they're pretty?), but if it's their target market then it seems they can get away without offering incremental backup software, just fine. And charge a premium for it. Note: this is not an endorsement of laCie products - just an observation. my 2c.
NO2ID has launched a Facebook group to challenge this threat to data protection.
Oh.... the ironing!
Furthermore, the technical, financial and freedom of expression (as upheld through our constitution) issues are well documented and those in themselves should be more than enough to kill any further life in this poorly planned, poorly executed and poorly though-out plan.
Constitution fail. There is no such protection under the Australian Constitution. We have no bill of rights. This is not the Almighty US of A. Are you sure you're a politician? If so, that's a bit scary... though not surprising.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_constitution#Protection_of_rights
There's also the sense of body position, whose name escapes me, but that's not an external sense.
Proprioception
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception
Me and a friend called BS on his story, and he was quite insistent that it was real. We were just on our way from one bar to another at the time (a little inebriated perhaps) so we went into a Hungry Jacks store to test his theory. He ordered a Whopper as a "Two for One", and sure enough they gave it to him!
Mind you by the time he got to the front of the queue he had 16 drunk football (australian rules) players chanting "Two for one" so perhaps they just gave it to him to make us leave....
But if it was *genuine* makes you think that maybe us australians are pretty serious about keeping companies honest about their marketing.
Decoding .264 isn't really such a big deal. The ability to do low-cost multi-pass 1080 h.264 encoding at greater than real-time is something that would be EXTREMELY welcome for my company. We're a video post production house and we burn *LOTS* of CPU cycles encoding video for delivery to clients. A sub $500 card that greatly streamlined that process would be VERY welcome. Especially if it's something you could do as a background process that effectively didn't interfere with the operation of the edit suite.
oblig. simpsons.. What advantage does this mainframe have over say, a train. Which I could also afford...
... and get modded informative.
Original video:
- Total Datarate: 310kbps
- Width: 320 px
- Height: 240px
- Video: Sorenson H.263
- Audio: Mp3 Mono - 22kHz sampling
- Total Datasize: 3.28MB
The New Video:So they're still aiming for older Flash compatibility. As they haven't moved over to the newer .264 codecs.
However if you were altering each image on the fly then the processing overhead to do image matching has got to be pretty gnarly.
I guess, gnarly enough that it would be working deterrant.... for a year or two ... and then you're back at the same point we are with conventional captcha..
And all it takes is for someone to leak that library and you've got to start all over again... I don't think you what you're suggesting is really that big of an improvement.
But you know, if I was a the kind of Christian (and I'm not ANY kind of christian - sorry) that took the whole, "God made Us through Evolution" thing seriously, then you already had to consider the possibility that we aren't God's end game. After all, maybe we are only 75% evolved to His master vision.
But to take that the next logical step... perhaps it was Intended that we create our own replacements...
Yeah. And run those figures again at 96kHz...
Hrm, IAAVFXA (I am a VFX artist) and I was lead on a similar project in november last year. We did a number of crowd scenes and got principal photography out of the way in two days with a cast and crew of 9 - 10. However it would be extremely disingenuous to claim that 10 people made those shots in two days. A LOT of pre-production planning was done that probably all told equals about 2 months work for 1 person. AND more to the point those shots are still in post production (i'm avoiding working on one of them right now) and that's 4 operators working for about 6 weeks so far.
Yes the cameras are cheaper. Yes the software costs practically nothing. No, 4 amateurs could not pull that off in 4 days. Those guys are obviously talented compositors and spent a LOT of time sorting out the post production.
I don't know what the situation is in NTSC land. But here in Australian PAL land, (mu hah hah that's 576i or p for us), SD or standard definition is used pretty much interchangeably between EITHER 4:3 or 16:9 anamorphic.
Our SD digital transmission is anamorphic and our analogue broadcast is good old fashioned 4:3.
The parent poster is quite correct in that there is no standard resolution that defines HD content. It's a mess.
Seriously. You should try post producing a show that has been shot at 720p 29.97fps, but tagged as 50fps (over cranked), offlined at 576i / 50 (DV), and then conformed and onlined at 1080i / 50. It's enough to make you're head explode.
To be honest, it's just one of the reasons why us post production guys still have so much "love" in the "love/hate" relationship we have with film.
And yes you are correct. I'm completely off topic. But hey it's been a long day.