Tenolian Bell

Depends on what format and the amount of video he's editing. If he's only editing DV or HDV through firewire then there really isn't anything more a PowerMac will do that the MacBook Pro can't do. If he wants to edit any video format higher than DVC-Pro 50, SDI connections to a deck, Fibre Channel to RAID storage, or monitor video on a CRT monitor. In any of these cases the PowerMac would be the better option. The PowerMac is capable of using two internal 500 GB hard drives which is a lot of storage for DV or HDV. While one would need to use external firewire for extra storage in the MacBook Pro. More than likely none of that stuff is a realistic option as it would be really expensive. If you feel none of that is necessary then the MacBook Pro is fine.

This is not specific to Apple. This happens to all hardware manufacturers. Dell has also had major recalls because of hardware problems. Its true this is a big change and an entirely new hardware architecture for Apple. So there will be some wrinkles to iron out. There have been problems found in the MacBook Pro that Apple has been correcting in the computers logicboard and software. Also Apple has replaced any MacBook Pro which has exhibited any serious problems. The MacBook Pro is now at its fourth revision which means early problems have been fixed now. The MacBook Pro has been on back order for the past two and half months, and Apple is only recently able to meet demand.

How was that totally unfeasible? What does every bank in England have that there is absolutely no way that can be done?

Actually it was a flash forward. The cross processed/bleach bypassed material happens after the bank robbery but we see it as the bank robbery unfolds. Whether one liked the look or not is subjective. But I agree with its need. A different look was needed as a cue for the audience that these events were not happening at the same time as the bank robbery. Showing those interrogation scenes during the bank robbery shows the confusion as to exactly who are Clive Owen's accomplices. By the time the bank robbery is over we already know what happened during the interrogations. Which would probably have gotten tedious and boring if we had to watch all of those interrogations at the same time. After the bank robbery is over the story is able to progress to the next events.

The simplicity is the beauty of it. Everyone was looking for something really complicated, the way Clive Owen walks out of the bank was so simple that no one thinks of it. The guy he steals the diamonds from is not supposed to have them in the first place, the guy is not able to report them stolen. From an official standpoint there was no crime to investigate.

All of the information about how they accomplished the bank robbery was shown. But it was not presented in any linear fashion. We saw what they were doing, we just couldn't understand what they were doing. The way it was done was meant to confuse the audience as well as the police. Much of the bank robbery was shown in short clips that you had to remember to put it all together in the end.

Yeah it sounds like a couple of people here may not have totally understood what happened at the end. If I say what the hole was for it would give too much away to people who haven't seen the film yet. But I've probably already said too much. I've sent you an e-mail Freya

No, the hole itself wasn't for hiding anything, or used as a distraction, nor an escape tunnel. It served a very different function.

What were the holes you saw? You didn't feel any surprise at the end? Clive Owen said he was going to walk right out the front door of the bank, through the entire movie we never knew how he was going to do it. Through the entire film he and his crew set up his escape, but we didn't know what they were doing until the end of the film when he walks out of the front door of the bank. Through most of the film we are never even totally sure who is Clive Owen's crew, even though we do see their faces throughout the movie. Nor do we know how his crew is going to get out of the bank with diamonds and not get arrested. Oceans 11 was fun movie. But it was a cute tongue-in-cheek caper film. The robbers used elaborate scientific machinery, computer gadgetry, a fake bank vault set, and several different costume disguises. Its highly unlikely this can be done successfully in real life. Owen's plot used much more simple means to achieve misdirection, smoke and mirrors. Their methods were fairly low tech using common technology. How he ends up getting away is so simple that no one thinks of it.

There are a lot of times in films where all of that minutia isn't explained because it isn't important to the story at hand. Trying to explain it would be a long digression from the point of what's going on in the present. We know somewhere before the story we witness he found out about the diamonds and figured out a way to steal it. We saw the plan in action we didn't see how it was planned. It really doesn't matter how Clive Owen learned about the diamonds, its not really important to the story that was told. You could go on to ask what does he do with the diamonds after he stole them?

This is no misconception propagated by Steve Jobs. A basic google search of the history of OS X will show its history begins with NeXT. All of the details between the two aren't exactly the same because technology has changed over the past 16 years. The ideas, direction, and functionality of NeXT were the basis of OS X. -OS X is based on Mach and BSD the same as NeXT. XNU is a hybrid of Mach, FreeBSD, and C++ that Apple developed for OS X and released as an open source Unix operating system. - OS X Cocoa API framework and Objective-C library are direct descendants of NeXT. -Jobs worked with Adobe to use Display Post Script as the display engine in NeXT. Today OS X's display engine is based on Adobe's PDF the progeny of Post Script. -NeXT was the first operating system to use an icon dock, icon shelf, 3D widgets, system wide drag and drop, real time scrolling and window dragging, publishing color standards, transparency, sophisticated sound and music processing, advanced graphics primitives, and modern typography. All of these features are distinct characteristics of OS X's eye candy. The failure of NeXT was largely due to the fact that it was ahead of its time. Hard data drives where not very common at the time and were very expensive (640 MB cost $5000). NeXT operating system was so large that it would fit on a stack of floppy disks and needed dedicated storage. Instead of floppy's or hard drive the NeXT system shipped with a new type of magneto-optical storage device with disks that cost $100 each. The operating system required a lot of RAM for the time and its hardware was shipped with 8 MB which cost $3000. The entire system cost $10,000. The high cost of the system and the meteoric rise of Windows is why NeXT ultimately failed in its initial introduction to the market. The system proved to be a good idea as at this point all operating systems use its innovation to some degree. The reincarnation of NeXT in OS X has come about in a time when hardware is able to run the software at a price the consumer market is able to pay. Other criticisms, mostly coming from technically proficient users and developers of websites and browser-based software applications, concern Internet Explorer's support of open standards, rather than use proprietary extensions to achieve similar functionality. Internet Explorer supports, to some degree, a number of standardized technologies, but has implementation gaps and conformance failures — some minor, some not — that have led to criticism from an increasing number of developers. The increase is attributable, in large part, to the fact that competing browsers that offer relatively thorough, standards-compliant implementations are becoming more widely used. Internet Explorer's ubiquity, in spite of its perceived inferiority in this area, frustrates developers who want to write standards-compliant, cross-browser code. It can also prevent widespread adoption of new technologies. Web developers must work with the least advanced technology across all browsers they wish to support, and Internet Explorer is often criticized for often having the least advanced support. Microsoft's Internet Explorer page is not even close to being valid HTML. The current standard is to create web page content in HTML (or XHTML) and define the style separately in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), but Microsoft FrontPage, their web site design tool, does not create separate CSS or valid HTML. Their current development tool, Visual Studio with ASP.Net, does not create valid XHTML or CSS. Nor does Microsoft Word. Internet Explorer's notorious lack of properly handling CSS causes many web developers to create IE specific web sites. But the biggest challenge facing anyone who wants to take on IE is that most Web sites are built to work best with Microsoft's IE simply because it's what sits on most PCs. That means some sites may not look quite right or may not be accessible at all via a browser other than IE. The HTTP standard requires file types to be based on the MIME type string sent from the server. The browser must handle the file appropriately for the MIME type passed. As of version 6.0, Microsoft® Internet Explorer determines a file's type by its extension, not conforming to the standard. For a conforming browser and development library see Mozilla and netlib Netscape 8 takes the best of both worlds. It runs both IE and Mozilla's engines, should sites you want to visit render properly only with IE.

An interesting tid bit I just read. The first web browser was called the World Wide Web, it was written on and for NeXT Computer in 1990. NeXT was formed by Steve Jobs after he was fired from Apple in the mid 80's. The NeXT operating system was the Unix based forefather of what we know today as Macintosh OS X.

I really enjoyed the film. It was essentially a throw back to 60's/70's bank robbing films. In the film they referenced "Dog Day Afternoon" and "Serpico". I wouldn't call this a trash genre especially in the sense that Sidney Lumet's films dealt with real corruption and social issues of the time. What I really enjoyed about "Inside Man" are the people and witty dialogue. I laughed as I watched the film and kept thinking to myself, that is New York. You got a genuine feel for the real people in New York. Its a mixture of many different cultures and ethnicities all existing in the same space. You witness the beauty and animosity of that situation.

An addendum to what I said above. Safari caching should not negatively effect most people. The only time I can see it being an issue is if you have minimum RAM (512 MB), use a lot of applications at the same time, and rarely turn your computer off. Once you turn your computer off then back on that will clear everything out and you are starting fresh. The more people who use web browsers other than Internet Explorer will force most all web designers to comply with open web standards and not only to Microsoft's proprietary Internet Explorer standards. The test skin seems to be good Tim Safari has not crashed.

Or possibly Filip you don't see the commercialization of it all. You are looking at movies as an art form while many view it as a business. Because all of the major studios are owned by conglomerates. The parent companies want to use movies, television, and celebrity to sell their other products. I slowly painfully have been learning this lesson myself as I spend more time in LA. You become privy to conversations of producers speaking about having some certain actor in their film because Honda will pay big money for product placement if that particular actor is driving the car. I've heard conversations of agents competing to represent certain actors. What they use as leverage are commercial advertising deals that have nothing to do with that particular actors talent. Agents and managers are working hard to set up contacts and representation between actors and clothing, perfume, pizza, cars, bubble gum. Whatever that actor's physical attributes or celebrity persona can sell.

I've noticed Safari crashing on this site of couple of times also. Safari is in a bit of an interesting place. Firefox has been built from the knowledge of Mozilla which is over ten years old. Internet Explorer is built from the Spyglass render engine which is ten years old. Safari is built from WebKit which is a splinter of the Konqueor render engine and Java Script. Apple created WebKit itself which means Safari is a brand new browser and is only about 2 and half years old. Ironically Apple hired the lead developer of Firefox Dave Hyatt to be the lead developer of Safari. Microsoft created Internet Explorer, made sure it would come packaged on every Windows computer sold, used its money and influence to kill Netscape. After MS had nearly everyone using Internet Explorer the company then went to sleep on any further development of it. Alternative browsers such as Firefox and Safari came about because of the development of new functionality and new interaction between web browsers and web sites. New technology that Microsoft for the most part still does not support today. Internet Explorer is the most used web browser in the world. But that has been on a decline from 96% at its highest to now around 85% today. Microsoft created proprietary extensions in Internet Explorer for displaying websites and also still supports old IE extensions. Most websites have optimized their rendering for IE which allows them to display faster and more accurately. This causes problems for anyone who does not use Internet Explorer because their browser cannot use IE proprietary extension or support old IE extensions. So those browsers will load slower or improperly display the web page. Safari was launched in 2003 as a brand new browser. It has pretty much had to go through the same amount of development in 2 years that Firefox and Internet Explorer had 8 to 10 years to grow. Safari has had its growing pains it was slow and buggy from the start, every update has improved the browser by huge leaps. The current version of Safari 2.0.3 is very good. If anyone is using any earlier version will still see Safari's problems. I used to use Firefox a lot because Safari just did not work well on some websites. Part of this was because of Safari's problems the other part is because of websites optimized for Internet Explorer. But today I use Safari exclusively. I tried Firefox for awhile. It works fine but I think I did not like the look and feel of it. It felt as though I was using something not made by Apple. Safari matches the look and feel of Apple's user interface, as well as seamlessly integrates into other Apple applications. I have not used Firefox in awhile so this may not be the case anymore. Tim is right that Safari does cache web data. Many websites are still designed to work better with Internet Explorer. Safari will load that page slower than IE is able and their really is nothing Apple can do about that. Caching the website is one trick to get around that problem. When you visit a website Safari will save that website in memory so when you come back to that website it pops up instantly instead of waiting for it to download. The downside to this trick is that it uses up memory (RAM). If you don't have much RAM in the first place you will run out quickly. The more programs you have open, the more websites you visit the more RAM you will use. After the RAM is used to capacity the cache is saved in virtual memory to your hard drive. The problem with this is it takes longer for your computer to access your hard drive than to access RAM, possibly even slower than if Safari just downloaded the web page from the internet again. You will then notice Safari slow down. The solutions to this: add more memory to your computer, disable Safari caching (which would force Safari to redownload every website instead of saving it), or periodically empty Safari cache.

We've had some disagreements on this in the past. But I agree to my eye the DVD of a television show looks for the most part looks much better than when it was broadcast. I don't work directly in the broadcast industry, but from conversation I've had with people who do. A broadcast television show can go through two or three stages of compression before you see it. The compression is pretty evenly distributed by hardware with little compensation for motion or picture detail. With the heaviest compression coming in at the end of the chain from the cable/satalite provider. With professional DVD compression. A trained person will watch and judge motion and detail to decide where to apply most compression and where to apply the least. The hardware used in professional DVD houses are very specialized and expensive. Shows are also spread out across multiple DVD's which can require less compression.

After looking it up Quicktime does use a 2 pass system.

The better encoders will make multiple passes over video. Analyzing motion and detail to decide where to best add the most compression. Quicktime to the best of my knowledge only makes one pass over video which isn't as efficient for file size vs. compression artifacts.

These aren't Apple numbers they come from Nielson. Nielson is the same company that measures broadcast network audiences and determines how much advertisers pay for commercial time. The point is to be agnostic and free from bias to anyone. Unless you have some information to the contrary. From the Nielson numbers for the past three years Quicktime downloads have been going down while iTunes numbers are dramatically going up. So actually its the other way around. Quicktime is being force-fed to those who want iTunes. But then iTunes isn't fully functional without Quicktime.

An article I've just seen that is apropos to Phil's complaints. http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0603/ The article speaks about iTunes phenomenal adoption and user rate. In three years iTunes has gone from zero to 18.5 million unique users in the US. The article states that in the US people who use iTunes on average use it twice as long as users of Windows Media Player or RealPlayer. At its current growth rate iTunes will over take RealPlayer with over 30 million unique users and only second behind Windows Media Player with 71 million users. The article also points that most iTunes users choose to download iTunes in contrast with Windows Media Player which comes bundled with nearly all Windows systems. The article separates iTunes and Quicktime use. But in reality both are tied together. I can see how annoying iTunes and Quicktime can be to a Windows user if they only want Quicktime and not iTunes. But from a business perspective and consumer electronics as a whole this is proving to be a winning strategy for Apple.

The iMac is a really nice hardware. You are right most PowerPC native software will run slow on your Intel iMac and some of it won't run at all. The good part however the Intel native applications you do have are running just as fast and in some cases slightly faster than my dual G5. Final Cut Studio is expected to be Intel native at NAB 2006. Adobe Creative Suite is expected in either late 2006 to early 2007. By the end of this year most Mac applications should be Intel native.

Actually this technique is about 25 years old. Used long before there was DV. Its nothing new.

If the scene was low lit for mood or tone you would have gotten an image on film. The major difference in underexposure is that you will see significant amounts of grain on film before you see significant amounts of noise on video. You would have to have extremely little to no light before you would get no image on film. I've been to the Law&Order set many times. Mostly watching Constantine Makris light. The first time I met him they had just recieved a new Panaflex Millinium he was complaining about how the camera keeps going down. He said something like "the more computer crap they put in these cameras the more complicated they become. Back in my day they were more simple and just worked. " Anyway the lighting style of Law&Order seemed pretty simple and efficient. I'm sure that helps speed the shooting pace. One scene that stood out to me in the pilot of Conviction. The scene where the new young DA has come into the office. A warm hard shaft of light from the other side of the building into the office as he speaks with a senior DA. The senior DA is sitting at is desk putting on his shirt. Over the DA's shoulder is a window overlooking New York. Inside the office the sun is low to horizon shooting hard shafts of light through the building. While outside the window it is clearly over cast and gray. Normally outside a window in New York on a sunny day you would see warm sunlight illuminating the tops of taller buildings, taller buildings casting shadows on shorter buildings. In this scene you could see warm sunlight in the office while looking out of the window you clearly see an overcast gray skyline. I thought it was an odd choice.

Does Spectra have Velvia stocked away? I recently e-mailed Fuji about Velvia and this is the response I received.