Nigel Dick wrote in 2004 about Music Videos. It’s an interesting read. He does write in the present tense. Although it feels very much that he describes the scene of the 80s and 90s.
Category: media
I don’t watch TV. Don’t have a set. Scott had pointed me to the ‘eyeTV hybrid’ USB adapter from Elgato. Finally I got around to get one for around 150 US$. Recently I also had extended the screen real estate of the MacBook Pro via an Acer AL2216W. Not an amazing monitory, but 1680×1050 for 250 US$ is a great value. So for 400 US$ and change I have now the ability to watch TV. HD or SD, analog or digital.Which is not bad at all. In this configuration NTSC resolution commercials fall on their nose inside of a HD broadcast: I am watching Red Sox vs. Yankees in 720p right now. I will never understand Baseball. But the picture looks great. An alternative would be some icehockey game in 1080i. Which does not fit the screen. And with interlacing that is kind of a problem. I don’t understand how anybody could consider an interlaced format: It was made for Glas Tubes, and glas tubes for TV are on their way out. And especially for HD there haven’t been many around in consumers homes. There are ways to deinterlace etc, but that’s a hack. Any hack will degrade the image. More or less.
Mike Curtis did a great job in writing a point by point list of todays announcement
Here my comments to these Announcements from Apple:
It is nice that all that has been shown is actual product. I am sure that Discreet will tease us this afternoon with ‘technology demos’ that actually look exciting. But their track record of making products out these bits is mixed, to say the least.
Apple did go close to the line -if not over it- in a couple of ways themselves: The new multi resolution / multi frame rate timeline in FCP is amazing. Nothing short of that. It needs computing and gfx power. It would have been nice to mention how much of it you actually use.
The Soundtrack pro demo used Zodiac footage. Which is nice. What was not nice was that they converted the footage all wrong. I never saw the pictures of that movie being that ugly. It’s a soundtrack, not a color or fcp demo, but still. Apple can not use their own tools it seems.
Motion 3 looks amazing. It has tracking and a 3D environment. Bullet point featurewise Final Cut Studio2 is up to par with Flame in the year 2000 it seems. Not bad. Motion did always demo extremely sexy, but it’s uptake in the real world has been limited. Maybe Motion 3 can change that. Apple did a typical Apple by claiming that they now have solved 3D tracking and made it easy to use and just work. That remains to be seen. The demo track was actually kind of pointless. Some Text hovering around in space, nicely far way from the object to be tracked. This would have been a good day for Apple with the real product they had to show for, I do not understand why they had to exaggerate certain things so needlessly.
The quality of the content usedof the demos was actually, well, dismal. On Zodiac they did the dpx conversions wrong, and the other material was really really bad.
I think that Apple should detach their applications from the content section. Have one DVD for all applications!
Then if people like to have demo presets, footage etc, they can
go into the ‘content manager’ (I dreamt that up, it does not exist). Ideally this one would be able to load and manage all those sound loops (god! they even were proud of those free 150 tracks that you get with Soundtrack Pro) Motion Presets (those are as hiddeous as you average default gif collection on the web) etc etc. Either from 27 Data DVDs that apple can provide or that people can / will copy. Or content from a website. Were people can share their loops, clips, fx you name it.
The upside would be that the application install would go fast (like it does for shake) and would not put all that bloat on the disk. And the people that like to have these collections they
can get even more by subscribing to those for instance. Everybody would be much happier.
Compressor 3 looks interesting. It can do lots of nice things by now. Final Cut Server is a product where there is huge need.
Now you would think that they interact with each other. Actually
Compressor3 should be just a function of the media management tool. You would think. Well, apple thinks differently right now. The Compressor3 demo did not mention Final Cut Server3 once. Apple might need to do a bit more integration there. I am not holding my breath in term of “Server”. But then again the Red camera might as well exist tomorrow, and a year ago I said that there would be no way that it would.
Maybe there would be more DVD been sold when they would not be such a pain to be opened. Between those layers of plastic and the stupid mandatory copyright notice and some random preview, menu stuff it takes up to 3 minutes to get to what I want: Watch the thing. Time not well spend.
LA Times about 300, Zodiac Movie critics and audiences.
about the Camera
Local news in Napa Valley
the NY Times
Saw it today in it’s final form. Well, as a 35mm print. Which was kind of sad. On a projector that has serious focus problems. I liked it. It will be interesting how the general public will react. It is certainly not what people expect when they mention “Fincher” and “Serial Killer” in one breath.
There will be 2 screenings of ‘Zodiac’ on 2/18 in Los Angeles. The movie opens on March 2nd.
The flyer from Camera House who organizes the screening since they provided the camera and capture system. You will have to rsvp I believe. Angus, Wyatt and myself will be part of the panel discussion at 4pm.
Guitar hero is a very popular PS2 game. It seems that Activision wants to put in on the Wii.
Gaming consoles and game publishers always existed in this mutual interlock: Lots of consoles sold means lots of publish develop games. That’s the positive feedback loop. Then there is the negative one:
No games no sales for an ailing platform. There is no middle ground in this.
In four minutes this video shows how we got here
Nice. And #1 @
BlogsNow is still the best source for non maintstream items. Those other tools seemed to skewed towards
the big mainstream and established blog themes and news. BlogsNow just ‘brute forces’ it: All links count,
all blogers do. If it matters to enough real people to link to, then it will make the list. No matter what it is.
Crispen Porter and DD camp out in the uncanny valley
some better coverage at stash.tv
If I would be Michael Bay I would be worried.
Here how people reacted to it:
(random, unbiased sampling, there simple was no single positive voice, except of the the press release that the makers pushed)
just creepy
it doesn’t get more unoriginal than this lifeless horror sequel
To me, it looks more like Dana Carvey made up to look like an old man.
freaky
grotesque
“kinda creepy” doesn’t do a thing for my appetite
It’s a desiccated undead zombie-mummy in a bowtie, and it will steal your soul.
.This is so horrifying, it makes me want to hide under my desk
It was so completely believable that I threw out all our popcorn so that zombie Orville wouldn’t tempted to visit.