How not to video Bill Gates
 

Great Cinematography or Photography, Invasion!
 

I started watching a show this year on TV called "Invasion", which comes on right after lost. I love Sci-fi and check them all out. Most are duds like Surface, and Threshold. But this one is good!

In addition to good writing and plots, which I hope it can maintain, it has one other very appealing point. Its director of Photography is Jeffrey Jur, A.S.C. and he is fantastic! I looked him up and he has many shows and movies to his credit. Just check IMDB. Watch and learn!

I sometimes have to watch the shows a couple of times or more just to look at the photography. This is a man most all of us can learn much from. If you have never scene the show, even if you don't like the genre or TV in general, tape a few episodes and turn the volume down and just watch the camera work. It is shot in Hi-def, but I don't know what camera and have not even attempted to find out yet.

If you have not seen it yet, check it out on Wednesdays at 10 EST. You will learn a lot and I will guarantee it! Like the show or not, you will learn!

Mike

Microsoft Still a Long Way From Home
 

http://www.thestreet.com/tech/ronnaa.../10253957.html

Shaky Times at Sony
 

http://www.fool.com/News/mft/2005/mf...gvisit=y&npu=y

Little Drummer Boy
 

Hey guys and gals
How well do you know your christmas music?

There is a popular version of Little Drummer Boy that is sung by a woman with an angelic higher pitched voice, the version has been around as long as I can remember, and is slow and pensive.

Anyone know what it is or who she is?
I'm asking because I've been listening to royalty free versions of the song all day for my DVC4 entry, and I need to listen to the original that is in my head one more time.

Thanks!

Washable keyboards and mice + scratchless discs
 

http://www.unotron.com/US/Products.html

and

http://www.scratchlessdisc.com/

Wow...

heath

"Podcast" is Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year
 

http://macdailynews.com/index.php/we..._year_podcast/

Superman Returns teaser posted in HD
 

Best TV quote of the Year
 

It's the time of year when "best of" lists start appearing.
We've had a great thread on movie quotes, so it's time for some memorable ones from TV broadcasts.

My contribution is one that was on Wed., Dec. 7th, on ABC's Nightline. An old friend, Mary Gardner, whose mother grew up across the street from me, was interviewed on the show.
She was on the airplane where Air Marshals shot and killed a berserk passenger. As she described the FBI investigation, she said, "I was questioned up the wazoo!". The whole family talks like that, all the time. Try and top that one, from a real person or any scripted actor.

Google announces video store
 

http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/...rketplace.html

Downloads Will Intensify Shine on Apple
 

http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/pom/...FREE&cm_ite=NA

Rain/Snow Cover with Petrol
 

Gang,

I'm looking at possibly doing some shooting in Tahoe in the snow in the coming weeks. I pulled out the petrol cover I bought last year (and believe it or not, have never needed. I LOVE northern California)

Bottom line, I've put it on my XL2, and I THINK I've got all the zippers and straps adjusted right... but is there an instruction sheet on the web somewhere? I looked at the site, and got some nice pix, but I'd like to know what some of these zippers and pouches are meant for.

Thanks in advance to the "Vast and unpaid research department".

Top 10 Strangest Ipod Accessories
 

good for a laugh....

http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/t...od-accessories

Amazon near movie deal
 

http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/tech.../10272986.html

There's another interesting factoid in this article that I never realized: Amazon owns imdb.com.

SNL makes history with LIVE 60i to 24p conversion from 1080i to 1080p!
 

Any more info? What equiptment did they use to convert in real-time?

Edit: It was the "Vincent Price's St. Patrick's Day Special" on the most recent episode with Matt Dillon(spelling?)

Samsung may buy Western Digital
 

http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/tech.../10277132.html

Vancouverscreenwriters.com
 

Fellow DVInfoers, I haven't stopped filmmaking, I've just decided to become more of a screenwriter.

Toward that I've agreed to become one of the moderators of a local screenwriting group in Vancouver with the appropriate URL: http://www.vancouverscreenwriters.com. If there are any screenwriters here based in Vancouver or in B.C. (or anyone really), please log on and check it out. We have a running blog for local and general film/screenwriting news and a forum that needs a kick start. The three of us who run it work everywhere but in film so it would be great to have industry people log in for the splash of reality. I'm not completely privy to what the plans are but I believe the idea is to reach out and provide an online space/forums for other similar screenwriting groups.

The group also meets for networking once or twice a month.

The quest for a Century Optics CE-AD5870
 

I need to have a second or even more of this achromatic dioptre for AGUS35 projects.


Efforts so far over four months.


One Australian vendor. - No success despite several enquiries.

Another Australian vendor. - No ringback on a Friday as promised. Enquiry made the previous Monday. Follow up call. Ringback assured by front office. Did not happen. Follow up call came by accident. My number had been incorrectly dialled. front office undertook to get the rep to call back. Item not stocked in Sydney, or Brisbane despite computer stocklist saying it was.

The item has to be imported, so after all this obfuscation, I have said no thanks, I shall try elsewhere, namely Singapore.

But, to keep the faith, an international phone call was attempted to a primary US vendor's posted number after no email address could be found on the website that did not require an order number to be added first. International orders page locks on South American countries only.

The posted number cannot be connected. The alternative number was called. This number yielded a follow-me menu of four generations of number entries, then I got the waitawhile machine complete with musak, all with international call meter ticking away. Needless to say after a minute I bailed.

Commerce is failing because there are too many suits in big top floor offices and too few hands on the shop floor.

To Century Optics. I don't think this is a way to successfully do business. You will be better off by-passing all the middlemen and selling direct.

My next enquiries will be to two Singapore vendors. If these are not successful, my next move is to have the lens I already have copied, also in Singapore at a considerable discount over the price of the genuine item and yet of comparable quality.

Keeping the faith is so damn difficult these days.

This is an open call to Century Optics, offer me the product and I will buy it.

Production in Spanish
 

Thought this was interesting,

In Spanish:
Cortometraje = Short film (CORE TOE MAY TRA HEY)
Largometraje = Feature film (LARGO MAY TRA HEY)

FORTUNE feature on "The Future of Hollywood"
 

The May 29 issue of Fortune magazine has a very interesting collection of articles about Hollywood and movie-making. Some of it is available online, but I don't think the whole thing is there: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortu...eof_hollywood/

Am just starting to read through the articles and they're filled with facts and figures related to topics we often debate here. A few things I've learned so far:

• William Fox built 1,100 theatres and was a pioneer in putting sound on film. But his investments were poorly timed and he lost everything in the great depression, then went to jail for bribing a judge and died in obscurity.

• Warner made $943 million operating profit last year, way ahead of Sony at $243M, Disney at $207M and Paramount at $62M. But the significant thing is that despite the speculative nature of movie-making, all these companies turn a profit.

• Box office sales typically account for 25% of a movie's revenues with another 25% coming from cable and broadcast. But nearly 50% now comes from DVD sales, rentals and on-demand viewing.

• TV networks used to think that nobody would pay to watch programs which were broadcast over the air for free, but they were wrong. In 1999 there was nearly zero income from DVD sales of TV shows, but in 2005 they resulted in nearly $4 billion.

• In the old days the networks followed the "LOP Theory" - Least Offensive Program - which assumed there was only one TV set which all the viewers in the household would compromise and watch. That sort of programming doesn't do well today.

• In 1946 the population of the US was 141 million and movie theatres sold 4 billion tickets - an average of 28 movies per year for every American. By 1973 ticket sales fell to 864 million due to the influence of TV. By 2005 ticket sales were up to 1.4 billion, but with a US population of about 300 million that's less than 5 movies per American.

• The first megaplex theatre - The Grand 24 - opened in Dallas in 1995. It was very successful, but spawned the overbuilding of theatres in the years which followed, leading to bankruptcies and consolidation. In the past four years some 12,000 theatres have changed hands.

• Ronald Perelman, who owns Panavision, is betting that the transition to digital will go slowly and bought film service company Deluxe last January. He says, "Deluxe can transition to digital services along with the rest of the business. When that happens, I don't have a clue. Right now it's not even clear what the savings would be if you really drill down."

• In 1999 FORTUNE ran an article about movies converting to digital. Studios and distributors they interviewed said the transition would begin in 3 to 5 years and be widespread by 2009. At that time there were 10 digital screens in the US. But today there are still only 192 digital screens vs. a total of 38,000 analog screens....

Lots more good stuff in there... I've only read two of the 7 articles so far! :-)

Top Ten Sins of the Boom-Operator
 

Thought this was quite amusing:

http://www.thompsound.com/Articles/ten_sins/

Can't have background sound while video editing
 

I like the idea of listening to a CD and especially MLB.TV while I do video editing. I'm not worried about the sound interfering yet, I'm just doing
first pass cutting and I've got lots of hours to work with. I bought
a SONY VAIO 820 which has Sigmatel Audio and then bought Pinnacle
Studio Plus and have installed all of their patches. I start up the music
or ballgame, and then load Studio Plus. At 100% of load, the sound cuts out.
I can listen to MLB.TV alongside of a Music CD (Windows Media Player) and
no problem from either.

Pinnacle says no one else reports this problem. I would like to understand sound cards - do they have a feature for exclusive use ? Surely if there is,
then Studio is requesting it. But why wouldn't they know of other's having
this problem. Is it possible all sound cards don't support exclusive use ?

Any other guesses ? SONY says I have the latest version of firmware and
driver for the sound. Sigmatel doesn't want to talk with me.

thanks
Charlie_Katz@yahoo.com or answer here

iTunes movie downloads may not happen anytime soon
 

Interesting article about Apple's negotiations with the movie studios:

http://yahoo.businessweek.com/techno...621_022435.htm

Pitchfork's 100 Awesome music videos
 

Pitchfork ( a really good music site ) reaches way back to highlight 100 'awesome' music videos. By awesome they mean both good and memorably bad.

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/articl..._Videos/page_1

A steam-powered iMac
 

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/stor...817636,00.html

Interesting that they'd take the photo in front of a (nuclear) power plant.

hwm

New Canadian show "11 Cameras", your take?
 

http://11cameras.com/TheShow/

The show is shot using HVX200 cameras with the whole show shown through the perspective of a webcam. It delves into the lives of the people behind the cameras, the story almost puts you into the situation.

If you've seen this show, what do you think about it?

New Razr phones
 

http://blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/...las_stayi.html

I think they play video.

hwm

Standar subtitling rules?
 

Hi,

I'm not sure where this topic should go, but I need to subtitle a 45min narrative project I just finished and I'd like to know some basic/standard subtitling rules.
Which font? (where to download for free?)
Which size?

so far I have this:
• three seconds are needed to read a line,
• a single subtitle showing should not exceed two lines, and
• a line of subtitles should not exceed 37 characters.

Met Opera House to Broadcast Performances to Movie Theaters
 

The Metropolitan Opera House here in NY is going to start broadcasting their performances live in High Definition and surround sound to movie theaters around the country.

They hope to make the show accessible to a wider audience. And make money selling tickets of course.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/07/ar...ic/07unio.html

How Blu Ray and HD-DVD are made - Documentary
 

I think some of you may be interested in this documentary.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...R+hd-dvd&hl=en
This was on Google for several days now.

cellphone video is coming of age...
 

The video quality is good, but the video itself is good which goes again towards the notion that good gear can never make up for bad talent. But talent can make the cheapest gear look good.

Here's the Youtube link...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsxCPMpRRK8


-gb-

SciFi's tech column on gaming and hi def DVDs
 

http://blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/...how_the_p.html

Interesting.

heath