This article in Showreel describes the technical workflow of the movie I worked on in the last months.
Since it was written a couple of months ago it is missing the online part: The movie actually gets assembled via a perlscript and a database: It reads the Final Cut XML. Asks the operator to load the camera negative LTO3 tapes into the tape robots that it needs. Loads those via all available tape drives and assembles the frames to one stream of dpx files. It takes about 20 hours to assemble a reel for the first time. But it can do unsupervised once the tape robot has the tapes it needs. Changes are faster of course. Only the missing material will be loaded. Doing the actual conform from the disk takes less than 2 minutes. For the last weeks I was watching split screens of on- and offline. Seing all cut’s line up was a very very pleasant thing. I handled terrabytes of data before. Those are worth something as well. But a 85 million dollar movie is a different story. Finding all frames where they should be was a big relief: I never trust anything or anybody. Especially my own code is highly suspioius to me. This paranoia got me my first gray har on this movie. But maybe it was also the reason why the ghost of the digital-movie-disaster landed on another movie, not “Zodiac”. Whatever it was, it worked, and that makes me very happy. Having finished on schedule: Priceless.
Category: misc
Germany had elections the other day. In Germany you actually make a cross on a piece of paper with a pen. That is really helpful, since everybody can vote. It’s easy, non confusing and impossible to rig. Anyway. They got rid of the social democratic / green government, and elected the conservatives. The new chancelor is a woman called “Angela Merkel”. Before the last chancelor Schroeder, the conversative CDU had been in power for a very long time. They had such a huge corruption scandal that not many people were left on their side once the dust settled. Mrs. Merkel got the nomination that way. But most people in all parties did not take her serious. In a way nobody saw her coming: After having won a very tight election she pretty much cleaned up: All established politicians that seems to be power figured for years are gone or on different jobs. Which, actually is a really good thing. Not that I am a Merkel fan, but at least she is an ex scientist. What did the US Prez actually do before he was a politician?
Anyway, she seems to be video casting right now. will be probably in german and, well, we will see how appealing …
Well, and then I tried it, and of course there is no real URL with media enclosures. Just some lame RSS feed.
IT people are such a pain.
If I can not subscribe to something then I kind a think that 90% of all people can not. That does not stop
people from commenting about this in their blogs though. Like me they all mumble around the meme, but don’t actually try the thing that they are writing about. Write first than read (Derived from shoot first then ask questions) .
it’s great to sit in a library in Plymouth, going through email and have 1251 comments, all of them spam. Specially nice if you have to find some rather important email. If I find a free minute will give those sites promoted in that spam the special care that they and their peddlers deserve. Since right now it really did bother me.
I mean planes
Probably nothing, since < a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-NAvPzdjj0&search=made%20out%20of%20meat"> they are made out of meat.
gnn instead of cnn?
Lelouch’ “Rendevouz” on google video. Shitty quality, and are there still people left that have not seen it?
Warner want 1.5 US$ for the Aviator on DVD in China. This might even work.
The ‘municator’ is a very small PC that costs 146 US$. With its 40 GB Harddrive and a CPU that is as fast as a Pentium III it offers what we had couple of years ago as a desktop computer. Imagine the following: If you sign up with an ISP you get this box and a DSL modem. Maybe put them in one box.
The system comes pre configured with firefox and open office. Maintenance could be done by the service provider remotely. The user would use it for web browsing and text processing. The service could include automated backups of your own data and bookmarks. All this would be pretty inexpensive to run once set up.
For 25 US$ a month you could get:
1. Internet
2. Text processing
3. digital photography
No update costs, no virus hassles, no worries. The box is broken? You’ll get a new on in the mail. Your data has been backed up to the service provider anyway. In the future you just push more features out: IpTV, Voip, you name it.
The user experience can be made seamless. How many people actually do like to mess with software installs, security settings and driver nightmares?
AOL should offer this now. Or Google or even Sony or Microsoft could do this. Or At&t or Verizon. If they would not be stuck in their own perception of what their business is, then each of those companies could easy make billions with this.
This machine is really fast enough for 80% of all people being connected to the internet right now. OpenSoftware is available, and ‘just’ needs to be made available automatically. The bandwidth needed to implement this is available too. There is a market and a need. It just needs a little bit of imagination to see this work.
If you should have fifty million dollars lying around then let me know, it could be up and running in 18 months. But I am not holding my breath: Imagination is not in ample supply these days.
While in Germany last week I had some quiet outstanding food at:
Lilienthal
Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße 71
0 40/35 29 93
Prices are in the mid range, but the food was way way better than that. If you should end up in Hamburg one day and would like to experience a more than amazing dinner then this could just be the place.
Just returned from a short trip to Rome. Via Craigslist we ended up in this Appartment in the Via Laurina. It’s just around the corner from Corso and Piazza del Popolo and worked well for us.
Best Coffee I ever had just across the street in a ‘BAR’ that really looks like nothing.