Remains of the Day

The Conciliator

Larissa MacFarquhar profiles Barack Obama in this week's New Yorker.

Technorati Tags: newyorker, politics, obama

Tidbits

Lousy placement of a Yahoo ad at a baseball stadium.

Mozy offers 2GB of free online file backup for Mac users. Their unlimited backup service is only $5 a month which is not a bad deal. You get backup religion the first time your hard drive dies and takes your MP3 collection to the grave with it (Disclosure: that link contains my referral code, and for every four customers I refer I get 1GB additional free backup).

"As Hotel Prices Rise, a Villa May Be a Bargain" - the headline says it all. I want to stay in a villa!

Mmm, now this is some fresh sashimi (YouTube)

Technorati Tags: food, humor, internet, tech, travel, video, web, youtube

All you can eat

After the production madness of winter quarter, I thought the spring quarter might be a more relaxing one, but it's turning out to be just as, if not more, busy.

Part of that is my own choosing. We're assigned to take 22 units of class this quarter as 1st years, and they recommend though do not require 1 elective. But I discovered that we're allowed to take as many electives as we want, and there's no difference in your tuition if you take no electives or a hundred.

I'm interested enough in all sorts of subjects related to film that this was like being set loose in an all-you-can-eat buffet. So I signed myself up for four electives for a total of 34 units of class. I also have to edit my 6-minute film from last quarter for screening during finals week, and I have given up three Saturdays to all-day workshops led by Stephen Burum, this year's Kodak cinematographer in residence (legendary for his longtime collaboration with Brian De Palma, his work heading up 2nd unit on Apocalypse Now, and his contributions to the American Cinematographer Manual).

I had one day in April which was open, last Sunday, and I spent it doing homework and laundry. In May, I also have one day that isn't already booked by class, weddings, or workshops. It's amazing how quickly all my plans for going out and working out and trying out some restaurants and watching movies all just evaporated.

But for the most part, I'm digging all my electives, and I'm learning tons. The craft of filmmaking just requires a life-consuming commitment. Sleep is scarce these days, and I've found myself dozing off Grandpa Simpson style

Being a student has one great advantage, and that's access to student-discounted software. I've finally got Pro Tools installed on my desktop and I'm learning my way around it. You can do some amazing things with the software--it's like Photoshop for sound. Add the Pitch N' Time plugin and you can turn your out-of-tune karaoke rendition of "Welcome to the Jungle" into something Simon Cowell would be proud of.

One of the most enjoyable classes I'm taking is Music in Film, and our first exercise was to go through North By Northwest and log all the musical cues, when they began, when they faded out. When a director sits down with a composer for a "spotting session," the director will collaborate with the composer to select when music should come in and go out. What's fascinating about Bernard Herrmann's score for North by Northwest is how Hitchcock had Herrmann hold back on bringing in the musical cues until the last possible moment. In places you'd expect a swelling musical cue to come bursting through the speakers, there's nothing (the famous farm field scene is a great example).

Our professor talked about why that might be, and that restraint is really striking given how liberally modern movies use score to cue the audience on how to react emotionally to scenes. Most viewers never stop to think about why music comes in at a particularly point in the movie, and it's a useful exercise to do with one of your favorite movie scores. Our exercise for next week's class is to spot Monsoon Wedding, a really enjoyable movie, and not just because of its score. Listen to just the title credit score, and without having seen a single frame of the movie, you should be able to predict the theme of the movie.

Our professor took us on a field trip last Friday to the famous scoring stage on the Sony Studios lot. Named after Barbara Streisand, it's the scoring stage of choice for John Williams, and so many famous scores have been recorded there. On this afternoon, we had the opportunity to listen to a scoring session for an upcoming episode of The Simpsons by renowned composer Alf Clausen. While Alf conducted an orchestra in short cues to match the Simpsons footage projected on a large screen (some of the animation hadn't been finished and consisted of sketches), we sat in the control room and watched through the glass, listening to the music on one of the most sublime sound systems imaginable. It was inspiring to see how much work goes into a 7 second musical cue for a half hour episode of The Simpsons. Very few TV shows score with an actual orchestra. Lost, for one, and Desperate Housewives, though on a much smaller scale. That might be it. Who would've guessed The Simpsons would be among that elite group (I say that not to disparage the show, one of my favorite TV shows ever, but to express surprise that a half-hour animated satire would spend more on its score than most hour-long dramas).

Listening to the music in the control room elevated the familiar Simpsons musical cues to a sublime place. I refuse to believe people who say they can't hear the difference between an MP3 played off of their iPod and a well-recorded CD played over a good pair of speakers. From the live performance of music to your ears, much of the magic can be lost. To hear Clausen's score live was like setting foot on a place I'd only seen in postcards before.

I love hearing behind-the-scenes stories about film shoots from a wide variety of guest speakers and professors. Not surprisingly, in an industry full of storytellers and mercurial personalities, the stories that are passed around have the finely honed quality of mythology. I can't really share the stories here, but suffice it to say that events like the David O. Russell tantrum aren't new to folks in the biz.

The only downside of my crazy schedule this quarter, besides lack of time for sleep and exercise, is that I've been having a series of disturbing dreams, all linked. Last night was the most disconcerting episode yet. In this dream, I've shot and killed someone, and though no one knows I'm the killer, many people are suspicious and closing in on me. Feeling the net encircling me, I spend the entire dream in a sweat, with a sense of doom and guilt crushing all the hope out of me. By the time I wake up I can't remember who it is I'm meant to have killed, but for the duration of the dream, I feel the guilt of a murderer, and it's unsettling beyond belief. In that elusive way that dreams slip through your fingers like water, I can't recall the details anymore, but I'm certain I've had this dream more than once this quarter.

I realize that Freud's theories on dreams have been discredited, but I'd love to know what the current state of thinking is in the field of dream interpretation.

This, thankfully, is not a dream. ESPN Experts? More like ESPN Expert:

Technorati Tags: basketball, bulls, filmschool, movies, music, dream, sports

World's 50 Best Restaurants

This list of the world's top 50 best restaurants brought to you by S.Pellegrino. The top 10:

1 El Bulli (Spain)
2 The Fat Duck (UK)
3 Pierre Gagnaire (France)
4 The French Laundry (USA)
5 Tetsuya's (Australia)
6 Bras (France)
7 Mugaritz (Spain)
8 Le Louis XV (Monaco)
9 Per Se (USA)
10 Arzak (Spain)

Alinea cracks the top 50 with the best showing of any new restaurant to the list, landing at #36.

Technorati Tags: bestof, food, list, dining, restaurants

Nibble

One of the things about LA bike culture is that cruisers predominate. Going down the beach boardwalk on your tricked out road bike doesn't impress anyone. Perhaps "The Ride" by Ellsworth is a suitable compromise: a high-tech cruiser. What a beauty, at least until someone knocks you off of it and steals it.

A whole lotta free MP3s over at WuTangCorp.com, home of the Wu-Tang Clan & Killa Beez.

Weng Weng, the 2' 9" Philippine dynamo, Agent Double 0, lives on thanks to YouTube. I think I'm impressed that someone actually took the time to write that rap.

Technorati Tags: bike, cycling, gadgets, LA, music, mp3, video, youtube

Glimpses of the short Peter Jackson shot on the Red prototypes

Here are some 4K res JPEGs from the short. Here's a short snippet of the short at 1K res (you'll probably have to try one of the mirrors at this point). It's such a short clip that it's hard to draw any sweeping conclusions, but that little bit is pretty sweet. In particular, it has a film-like DOF (Jackson's DP shot using Cooke S4 primes and Angenieux Primo zooms).

Here are some war stories from the shoot itself courtesy of HD For Indies. At this point, I'd sell my car to get one of these Reds, but I don't think that would be enough (literally!).

Technorati Tags: camcorder, camera, cinematography, filmmaking, gadgets, movies, Red

The rule of "four to fourteen"

From an interview with Renaissance man and film editor extraordinaire Walter Murch:

BLDGBLOG: When you’re actually editing a film, do you ever become aware of this kind of underlying structure, or architecture, amongst the scenes?

Murch: There are little hints of underlying cinematic structures now and then. For instance: to make a convincing action sequence requires, on average, fourteen different camera angles a minute. I don’t mean fourteen cuts – you can have many more than fourteen cuts per minute – but fourteen new views. Let’s say there is a one-minute action scene with thirty cuts, so that the average length of each is two seconds – but, of those thirty cuts, sixteen of them will be repeats of a previous camera angle.

Now what you have to keep in mind is that the perceiving brain reacts differently to completely new visual information than it does to something it has seen before. In the second case, there is already a familiar template into which the information can be placed, so it can be taken in faster and more readily.

So with fourteen “untemplated” angles a minute, a well-shot action sequence will feel thrilling and yet still comprehensible: just on the edge of chaos, which is how action feels if you are in the middle of it. If it’s less than fourteen, the audience will feel like something is lacking, and they’ll disengage; if it’s more than fourteen, so much new information is being thrown at the audience that they’ll also disengage, though for different reasons.

At the other end of the spectrum, dialogue scenes seem to need an average of four new camera angles a minute. Less than that, and the scene will seem flat and perfunctory; more than that, and it will be hard for the audience to concentrate on the performances and the meaning of the dialogue: the visual style will get in the way of the verbal content and the subtleties of the actors’ performances.

This rule of “four to fourteen” seems to hold across all kinds of films and different styles and periods of filmmaking.

Also from the same interview:

BLDGBLOG: As far as an acoustically rich space goes, is there a specific place – or a building or a landscape – where you like to record sounds for use in a film? How does the actual space affect the sounds you can record in it?

Murch: Well, first of all, I record a sound without any atmospheric envelope around it. I then take that recorded sound and find an acoustic space that is as close as possible to the acoustical space in the film; I play the sound in that space; and I record the resulting reverberation on another device, placed to extract the maximum reverberation. Then, in the final mix, I have the ability to blend those two sounds: the “dry” sound itself, alongside a sound which is almost all reverberation.

In musical terms, you could say it’s like the relationship between the string of the violin and the reverberation and amplification added by the body of the violin itself.

By first separating and then balancing those two elements together, I can custom-fit what seems to be the right dimension of sound implied by the space on screen. If you have too much reverb, and you don’t hear enough of the original sound itself, the result is too diffuse and ethereal to be realistic – but sometimes that lack of realism is exactly what you want. On the other hand, if you play proportionately too much of the dry sound, it doesn’t seem to connect to the space you’re looking at. But maybe that’s exactly what you want – that kind of dislocation. It all depends on the dramatic intent of the moment. But these two elements give you the handles to control the final result.

Over the last forty years, this time-consuming technique of physically “worldizing” the sound has been gradually replaced by increasingly sophisticated digital techniques, though the principle is the same. Now we can record a digital “snapshot” of a real acoustic space, using tone bursts and frequency sweeps, and then impose the resulting parameters on any sound we want, back in the studio.

Even if Murch weren't a famous editor, he'd be one interesting dude.

Technorati Tags: editing, film, filmmaking, movies

David Halberstam killed in a car crash

Famous journalist and writer David Halberstam was killed in a car crash today. His book Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made was my favorite non-fiction book on Michael Jordan.

Technorati Tags: book, obit, writer

Even with the wimpy dollar, perhaps some deals in Europe

I'm not sure how many years in a row the NYTimes Travel section has been running its once-a-year "Affordable Europe" feature, but I remember it from last year, and it has returned. Well-worth checking out if you're planning to hit one of Europe's more popular cities in the coming year.

Technorati Tags: nytimes, travel

Dead market for digital goods

China, with a population of 1.3 billion, purchased 244 legitimate copies of Windows Vista in the 2 weeks after it launched there. Pirated copies sell for $1 on the street.

I'm certain it's no different for any other digital media product--CD's, DVDs, any other software. I'm doubtful China will be a viable market for any digital good in my lifetime.

Technorati Tags: business, china, software

The Bourne Ultimatum trailer

Yahoo snags the early online screening rights to The Bourne Ultimatum trailer. Half of it is recycled footage from the old movies.

I read the books a long time ago (junior high?), and based on my admittedly hazy memory of the books, the movies have completely gone off on their own storyline. What happened to Carlos the Jackal?

Technorati Tags: film, movies, trailer

WKW, this time in English

Wong Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights will open Cannes.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, cannes, wkw

Optical Heterodyning

Researchers at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs have developed a prototype of a heterodyne light field camera that allows you to change the focus point of an image after it's shot. Essentially, if you didn't set the DOF focus range on the right portion of the image, you can adjust it in post. It does this unblurring by increasing the DOF by 10X.

I imagine that in the future, consumer point-and-shoot digital cameras will have all sorts of features like this built in. With memory growing cheaper by the month, future point-and-shoots will allow even the worst photographer in the world to take an in-focus, properly exposed photo. I foresee camera in the future snapping multiple exposures of an image so you can simply select the right exposure afterwards (you can do this to some extent by shooting RAW today, but most photography novices shoot JPGs).

Technorati Tags: camera, gadgets, photography

The free and the not-so-free

"Let's Get Digital 1" is a free digital song compilation from Insound.

Two reports on the Red 4K camcorder from NAB (Part 1, Part 2). Peter Jackson shot a short movie with two Red prototypes to show in 4K at NAB, and a version of that should be available to download from Red.com in a couple days according to a forum post by Jim Jannard.

Also at NAB, Panasonic debuted the AG-HPX500, the big brother to the HVX200. The HPX500 shoots DVCPRO HD with 4:2:2 sampling on 3 2/3" CCDs, and unlike the HVX200 it accepts interchangeable lenses. It will retail for $14,000 which is good for what it does (though whether or not you agree depends on whether you're a pro in the biz or just your average joe).

Technorati Tags: camcorder, cinematography, filmmaking, gadgets, music, video

Bye tunes

A crippling blow to Internet radio. That's a damn shame.

Technorati Tags: internet, music, law, radio

Rodrigo Y Gabriela

I went to the KCRW Sounds Eclectic concert last night at the Gibson Ampitheatre in Universal City, an entertainment complex that sprouted up around Universal Studios sometime since my last visit when I was just a wee lad. The lineup went:
Bitter:Sweet
Breakestra
Cold War Kids
Rodrigo Y Gabriela
Travis (this year's unannounced guest)
Lily Allen
The Shins

Each group played about 7 tunes or so, a format that seems to encourage artists to play the biggest 2 or 3 new tunes off of their latest album plus a retrospective of their greatest hits.

The group that got the largest ovation was the Mexican acoustic guitar duo Rodrigo Y Gabriela. They were electrifying. You can hear samples at their Myspace page (try "Diablo Rojo"), but this is one group you have to see live. If you have speakers worth a damn, compressed audio won't do justice to their sound, and seeing their fingers and hands working into a frenzied blur will drop your jaw.

The propulsive pace of their first song got everyone's heads and feet tapping, and then they wove in a sweet cover of "Stairway to Heaven" that brought a hush down across the crowd. At one moment they even snuck in the opening cue from Metallica's "Enter Sandman"; it was there, a subtle flourish, and then they were on to the next bit. Not only is the music good, but they've got a flair and a sense of showmanship that really works. You don't have to take my word for it; more credible music names have already paid their tribute.

Here's a link to their latest album. A CD this good deserves a mongo image:

Rodrigo y Gabriela (with Bonus DVD)

Technorati Tags: concert, LA, music

Updates from the Apple Keynote event at NAB

Updates from today's Apple event at NAB thanks to Engadget. And the relevant info is at Apple's website now, too.

Final Cut Studio 2 includes Final Cut Pro 6, Motion 3, Soundtrack Pro 2, Color, Compressor 3, and DVD Studio Pro 4.

There's also a marketing video talking about how to use FCP6 with the Red camera, and here's the NAB reel highlighting content edited by FCP.

I wish I had time to sift through all the details today, but I have a lot of work to do for class today, using, what do you know, FCP.

Technorati Tags: Apple, filmmaking, finalcutpro, hd, Mac, editing, software, video

Trying to laugh through the tears

Next year, I'm mailing my taxes via UPS or Fedex. Still fuming and on hold waiting for various financial institutions to answer their customer service lines and resend my 1099's. Argh. But through the tears, perhaps a few nuggets of laughter...

The Apple iRack.

Google Maps directions for New York, NY to Paris, France...skip ahead to step 23 (via a Sports Guy reader)

Also funny, from the same Sports Guy column, this box score from the San Antonio-Phoenix NBA game. Skip down to Robert Horry's line for the Spurs.

Ryanair CEO vows to offer flights from the U.S. to the UK for less than $10.30. You'd probably pay more because Ryanair charges for all sorts of basics a la carte, but still.

Some progress today in the fight against global warming.

Jackie and Jet team up (with an assist from Yuen Woo Ping). It would have been a dream of a pairing if they two of them were about 10 to 15 years younger, but we'll take what we can get. Meanwhile, the Weinstein Co. could use some wire work.

Tiger Woods Reveals He Is Zach Johnson.

Technorati Tags: Apple, basketball, google, humor, movies, NBA, golf, sports, theonion, travel

Certifiably awful

I mailed out my tax documents to my preparer in late March. I remember thinking as I was driving to the post office that perhaps I should stop at Kinko's and make copies of all of the docs, but I was in a hurry to pack for my spring break plane flight, so I didn't (this is what they refer to as foreshadowing). I mailed my docs certified and asked for a return receipt.

Well, about all that did was allow the USPS to certify today that yes, they had lost my tax docs (I'd say they "lost it in the mail," but since they are the mail, that sounds nonsensical). You do get a refund of your postal service fees which is about the least consoling $7 you'll ever be handed.

So now my afternoon has been transformed from trying to finish the homework for tonight's class to scrambling to re-assemble all my tax documents (insert bad pun about going postal). Someone please just club me over the head with a bat.

Technorati Tags: mail, taxes

=)

'Most E-mailed' List Tearing New York Times' Newsroom Apart.

Technorati Tags: humor, nytimes, theonion

Killer

Caught Killer of Sheep with some of my classmates tonight. Charles Burnett's 1977 MFA Thesis Film at UCLA was shot in Watts on weekends and could not be distributed due to the cost of music licensing. Ross Lipman of the UCLA Film & Television Archive restored the movie and transferred it to 35mm from 16mm, Steven Soderbergh put up half of the $150,000 to secure the music rights, and the movie is making a limited tour of the country. It is a stunning black and white elegy to life in the ghetto, and that's before considering that it was shot as a film school thesis.

Thank goodness they secured the music rights (to all except "Unforgettable" by Dinah Washington for the last scene of the movie, but it's replaced by an encore performance of "This Bitter Earth" which is just as gorgeous); the soundtrack is amazing.

Technorati Tags: film, filmmaking, filmschool, movies

Sometimes, the best things in life are free

As an experiment, The Washington Post asked Joshua Bell to pull out his Stradivarius violin and play, unannounced, at the L'Enfant Plaza Metro Station one morning. On January 12, for 43 minutes, that's just what he did. 1,097 people walked by him. How did they react, and how much money did he collect? Click through to find out (includes some amusing video clips).

Technorati Tags: art, classical, music, violin

Fun with movies

Fun with movies is back with the fourth in its "identify the movie based on one frame" puzzles. Good times.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, puzzle

He can read minds?!

In my baseball dreams, I was always a pitching/hitting star, a sort of Babe Ruth who could switch hit and switch pitch. Because of platoon splits in baseball (left-handed hitters tend to struggle more against left-handed pitchers, and right-handed hitters tend to struggle more against right-handed pitchers, though the effect is not as pronounced as with left-handed hitters), being an ambidextrous pitcher would be an advantage assuming you actually were competent pitching from both sides.

Such a pitcher exists today, and he's pitching at Creighton University. Within the article, I realized that one theoretical advantage of such a pitcher is negated by the rule that "a pitcher must declare which arm he will use before throwing his first pitch and cannot change before the at-bat ends." Otherwise a pitcher could force an opposing manager to use up pinch-hitters by switching arms after they'd been announced.

Technorati Tags: baseball, sports

My coconuts bring all the boys to the yard

The last day of the last shoot of winter quarter in my film group was an overnight shoot in a grocery store out in timbuktu (read: east of Pasadena). I was the sound mixer, so I spent a lot of time staring at walls of consumer food packaging and labels. My favorite was this photo on a bag of tortilla chips.

"Made with Natural Ingredients." Heh. In the land of Dr. 90210, it's a claim worth emphasizing.

Technorati Tags: ads, humor, marketing, photo, sex

First year 15

Winter quarter was brutal on the body. Lack of cardiovascular exercise from being confined on set and extra calories from the craft services table always hovering nearby took its toll on us all. I began this quarter with the best intentions (the other day I got my first little Nike plus voice congratulations from Lance Armstrong after a run along the beach, and I was embarrassed at how thrilled I was to hear it), but if there is one land mine that could blow it all to hell it's my discovery of Dreyer's Slow Churned Rich & Creamy ice cream. Half the fat and a third fewer calories? Amazing.

Technorati Tags: fitness, food

Does a keyboard and an internet connection a film critic make?

Ronald Bergan wrote a post at the Guardian titled "What every film critic must know."

...it seems that film, the most accessible and popular art form, is just not treated on the same level or with the same degree of seriousness as the other arts.

Unfortunately, this has led to a deterioration in film criticism, which has become primarily descriptive, anecdotal and subjectively evaluative rather than analytical. Most reviewers deal primarily with the content of a film - anybody can tell you what a film is about - rather than the style, because they do not have the necessary knowledge to do so.

He goes on to list what he believes every film critic should know (difference between a fill a key light, e.g.), have read (Eisenstein's The Film Sense, for one), or seen (Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinéma). The good thing is, I should be qualified to be a film critic by the time I graduate film school if other avenues don't work out. The comments on Bergan's post are, as expected, heated. I think his requirements are too extensive, but I tend to agree with him more than I disagree.

I don't read as much film criticism as I once did. One reason is that few critics write well enough that their reviews are enjoyable to read as just pieces of writing. Another reason is what Bergan notes about reviews becoming too descriptive. A third reason is that it's difficult to find a reviewer whose tastes match well enough with your own that their opinions can serve as positive leading indicators (though a great reviewer can educate even when you disagree with them). I also enjoy seeing movies fresh, and I'm not just talking about spoiler-free. Having someone's opinion in my brain can subconsciously push me towards agreement or disagreement even before I've seen the movie.

I also don't watch as many movies in theaters as I used to. With so many classic movies now available on DVD, there's greater competition for my entertainment consumption, and I've seen so many movies that I'm suffering from severe Hollywood fatigue.

One worthwhile type of film criticism, to me, is the review that articulates why I feel a certain way about a movie. Some of Bergan's requirements about film stylistic techniques are helpful in this regard, but Pauline Kael provided many of those mini epiphanies and I never thought of her as a very technical film critic. Much of film influences us subconsciously, but having stylistic choices brought to my attention doesn't detract from the effect, it only enhances my appreciation of the filmmakers' craft. I took a class in fall quarter of film style in which we watched one movie a week and discussed the stylistic choices in a particular area, for example in editing or camera movement or story structure. It was one of the most instructive classes I've ever taken and made me aware of how rare good film style criticism is these days.

Lone contrarian voices in a sea of agreement catch my attention as well, though only if they're critics who seem to know something about film. I'm naturally attracted to contrarian opinions. Consensus among a broad group of critics that a movie is terrible or great will pique my curiosity; the former is usually a decent sign that a movie is, indeed, awful, while the latter seems to throw down a gauntlet. I can't help but see what the commotion is all about.

I've met perhaps five people in my life whose opinions about movies always interest me, but I can't remember who two of them are.

But despite the somewhat depressing state of film criticism, I still find it far more useful than music or book criticism. I don't understand enough about music, but most music criticism seems to me purely subjective. At the end of the day, what most matters to me when reading a review is to feel as if an intelligent mind is grappling with their reactions to a piece of art and sharing their revelations.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, criticism

In a world...

Profile of Dan LaFontaine, the voiceover actor of choice for movie trailers and TV ads. I got a laugh just listening to the intro on his website.

Technorati Tags: movies, ads, trailer, tv

Google Desktop, now for the Mac, too

Google released Google Desktop for the Mac. You can download it from the Google Software for the Mac page. The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) has an early review (it seems to hold up against Spotlight).

Technorati Tags: Apple, google, Mac, search, software, tech

Encoding for Apple TV using Quicktime Pro

I tried encoding an episode of Spooks (known Stateside as MI-5) from Season 5 for the Apple TV using Quicktime Pro. My laptop had to run all night! I don't want to spend 99 Euros for hardware acceleration, but I'm not sure I have the patience to deal with overnight encoding times either.

Technorati Tags: Apple, gadgets, Mac, tv, video

Cooke and Red play nice

Red Digital Cinema has added support for Cooke Optics /i Technology. I'm not sure if that will be supported with the first batch of Red One cameras, but it should be in subsequent shipments. This tech allows lens information (focus distance, focal length, aperture, depth-of-field, hyperfocal distance, lens serial #, lens type, etc.) to be passed from the Cooke lens to the footage for each frame. Digital photographers who preview their shots in Adobe Bridge or Photoshop already know how useful that type of information is.

On a movie set, it makes the job of the Assistant Cameraperson (AC) a lot easier. Last quarter we all had to play the role of AC once. The week I was AC, I was scrambling the whole time to record all that information about each shot before each shot, trying to fit that in between slating, pulling focus, checking the gate, swapping lenses, moving the camera around the set, loading and downloading film--it was a neverending flood of activity. Not having to write down all the shot info down would save a lot of time (on a big-budget production, of course, there would be 2nd or even 3rd AC's and a even a person dedicated to loading and downloading film).

Technorati Tags: camcorder, cinematography, filmmaking, gadgets, hd, movies, camera, video

But the soul lives on!

I like this exchange from an interview with Douglas Hofstadter in the NYTimes Sunday Magazine:

You write movingly about your wife, Carol, who died tragically in 1993, and suggest that her soul remains embedded in your consciousness. You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people’s brains. It’s a less detailed copy, it’s coarse-grained.

Technorati Tags: nytimes

RumoRED

Peter Jackson is rumored to be testing the Red camera, and his Weta Digital is said to have 5 of them reserved. As confirmation, people have posted images of Jim Jannard's Learjet in New Zealand.

Technorati Tags: camcorder, filmmaking, video

Image spam

Those of you who use Apple Mail might wish to add this rule to catch annoying image spam. I used it in combination with a few other home-grown rules and SpamSieve to keep my inbox clean enough to eat off of.

And, if you're bored with the conventional Mail icon and tired of waiting for the new Star Wars stamps, you might wish to change your Mail Dock icon. Checking my e-mail is so much more enjoyable when my cursor can caress and click on, say, Alessandra Ambrosio instead of that red-tailed hawk. Instructions on how to change your Mail.app icon are here.

Technorati Tags: Apple, email, Mac, spam, software, tech

Spring break's over

Auto porn: a part by part look at the new BMW M3 V8 engine. Featuring brake energy regeneration (reminds of of the old Tiger Woods/BMW joke). Hear the sound of the new V-8 during acceleration. Check out these headers, and imagine them glowing bright red. If Paris were an auto-snob, she'd say, "That's hot."

As one article noted, these images of the BMW engine headers recall Edward Weston's photo of a pepper. Compare:

Arnold Kling on the single-payer health care:

1. People are forced to buy something that they don't seem to want
2. Provided by a monopoly
3. Paid for by higher taxes

Three funny Onion sports headlines:

• Greg Oden On Final Four Appearance: 'I'm Happier Than I've Been In 30 Years'
• Confident Phil Mickelson Guarantees Tiger Woods Will Win Masters
• Tiger Woods Signs $15 Million Deal To Endorse Alex Rodriguez

TigerCinema.com seeks to be a Netflix for Asian DVDs. They state that 95% of their titles have English subtitles and that most are Region 1. Sadly, the search and browse functions are somewhat crude. No browse by country? director? actor? The browse tree for Martial Arts is only one level deep! Good luck delving through 23 pages of results. The selection is decent but not as complete as I'd expect for such a niche-focused site. It's probably not entirely their fault as there are so many editions of many Asian movies, and many editions are out of print or hard to find. They probably can't stock enough copies of certain titles. For now, there's still eBay and HKFlix and YesAsia and sites like that for those willing to buy. Many eBay DVDs are simply burned copies and will not last very long; I treat most of those as disposable copies.

One of the best channels for showing off your high definition TV is Discovery HD Theater. Perhaps the best program to air on that channel yet is Planet Earth which debuted last Sunday. Apparently viewers agreed as the show snared 12 million viewers total over 3 hours and had a 3.6 HH rating, Discovery's third highest ever. I've only watched the first episode, "Pole to Pole," and it was spectacular, all of the footage having been shot in high definition. They say porn is the killer application for any new video technology, but IMHO sports and nature shows are the most desirable types of programming for HD.

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