Jump to content

George Ebersole

Premium Member
  • Posts

    1,692
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by George Ebersole

  1. So, I'm listening to the commentary on various Harryhausen blurays in my library, and he and others keep mentioning that the studios in the UK used sodium (Na?) based lamps for effects work. And that this somehow gave a better composite image or reduced the matte lines or something. It wasn't really clear how the sodium lamps helped. Does someone know? Is there something about the way light uses Na to cut a closer matte line or something?
  2. I saw a vid on restoring the Parthenon with CGI. Visitors these days are given (or allowed to rent) a Pad that they can hold up to the building, and see what the Parthenon looked like in its glory. A drone with such a camera flying through the thing would probably help add to the experience. I saw another 360 VR vid that was supposed of a police stop or call somewhere in Alaska. It was a dramatization, only there was a small crane shot that sort of blew the experience. It sold the viewer on being a "real" experience, but, well, it wasn't. For me, watching these things is a chore. I think they're interesting, but for dramatic content I really want the creative team to guide me. I don't want to have to physically work to find out what the author's message is.
  3. Yeah, it seems "shot specific" or otherwise a special case for a different style of presentation. And the resolution is pretty low ... I'm not sure why that is, but I'm guessing it's more to do with data processing capability of the cameras. Still, it's interesting, but I think the limits of focal lengths, like you say, limit it's potential ... if any at all.
  4. No one else I guess. 360 is interesting, but unless some new rules can define a narrative, I see it being like 3D, unique, trendy, but otherwise a fad.
  5. Growing up my biological mother ordered my guardian to take me to a lot of plays and symphonies to get an education in the arts. So I hear ya on that. And within the span of 48 hours I've already lost some interest in them (360 VR footage, that is, not the arts :) ). Back in the 80's there was a play called "Tony and Tina's Wedding" where you were actually part of the wedding guests as the actors interacted with you putting on a show of a comedic family. I can see something like that taking off, but it almost strikes me as being the difference between reading a good novel and maybe playing a Role Playing Game with your friends. You get a story out of both, but the novel guides your experience like a film, and you get all the highs and lows you're supposed to. That verse an RPG where you and your friends are creating the narrative. I think 360 cameras fall into that vibe somewhere. Oh well. I guess it's just one of those things.​
  6. I ask because when I use MS Edge to post, I have to hit the "Remove Format" button, which is the pink and white eraser like icon in the top left of the tools. If I don't, then the spacebar doesn't respond, and all kinds of weird stuff happens. But when I use Google Chrome or Explorer, things are okay. Anyone else?
  7. Thanks Phil. It did strike me that as I sit here with my mouse that it becomes a chore to look at stuff. You don't know where to look, and it becomes incumbent on the viewer to know where to look rather than the DP and director helping to guide our attention to things that are pertinent for the story. All the stuff I've seen seems really fascinating, but I think it probably puts too much of the labor on story telling onto the audience. I don't know if that's really true, but like you say we have tools to tell stories. As a teenager and in my 20s I was really into good dramatic shots. I think the 360 camera doesn't really lend itself to a lot of artistry as we know it. Thanks.
  8. I was wondering if anybody had any thoughts on 360 camera technology, or more specifically how it'll effect future media in presenting content. Most of you were trained as DPs or camera operators with one view in mind to show an audience. 360 tech seems to offer a real dynamic viewing option for an audience member, and seems to give them the option of where and what to look at. Do you think your skills will be enhanced or tweaked by this? I'm genuinely curious here.
  9. If it's like any other software, then there should be a backup file for the previous edit before your last one. Meaning that your best bet is a reboot, and then to pick up where you left off.
  10. The MacGuyver of his time. :rolleyes:
  11. That's interesting. I've never heard of a cardboard snorkel lens.
  12. p.s. using a fish eye on the Enterprise in the spacedock does indeed give it scale. Very cool shooting style.
  13. That's interesting. What you're saying is that the Enterprise had a lot of light thrown at it to keep that fuzzy matte blue edge thing from showing up in the print. I did not know Discovery was hand rotoscoped. With some older FX heavy films it does seem like the FX sequences are a touch brighter than the rest of the footage.
  14. Thanks for the compliment on the thread. I guess my main issue is that I read somewhere that a ton of light was thrown on the Discovery model to make it look real. Verse a ton of light being thrown on the Enterprise to show it off to the TV audience. As a kid I had the understanding that 2001 was made either just before are around the same time the TV show came out, and as an uninformed young mind I just thought 2001 looked far more real and better than that cool TV show I also used to watch. I guess in the last five to seven years or so, since I've joined this forum, I've either read here or in a trade somewhere, that the difference was just the placement of lights, but the amount of light dumped onto Discovery to make it look as if unfiltered sunlight were striking her hull. I was always impressed with the Moonraker model shots. It's been ages since I've seen Alien, but good solid effects from what I remember.
  15. Thanks for the replies. I'm going to give this a hard think.
  16. Not to get too off topic, but that's really cool footage. If it weren't for the SUVs in the footage I could have sworn that was California right before the bicentennial when I was a kid.
  17. ​There's no need to wait. You just need to install a reputable security software package like Norton / Symantec on your computer, and keep it up to date. Hacks and exploits are more limited these days than ever before because of the engineers tightening up computer design. Even so there are still ways an experienced hacker can get into your computer, but even then there's not much that they can do unless you give them your information. Usually the minute a hack or a virus is out on the web there's a fix for it, and companies like Norton stay on top of them so regular guys like us don't have to manually do it. And if all you're doing is editing with your lap top, then I think over most wifi networks your media is safe because of the sheer bulk and size of your average media file.
  18. Thanks. I've had ATT in some way shape or form forever, and I'm just really sick of it and calling their tech support service.
  19. I'm thinking of dumping ATT Uverse / Yahoo. It seems overpriced and not as fast compared to Xfinity. I was wondering if anybody here had Xfinity and what you thought about it.
  20. Er, I think comparatively they had a larger market share when put up against any one PC manufacturer, but if you divided the market as it stood then between Apple and PC, then the combined weight of various PC manufacturers outweighed Apple. You could walk into any CompUSA or Fry's, and there would be an aisle dedicated to Apple. That verse multiple aisles of PC hardware and software. And at the studios I was working at at the time the Apple was pretty much a table top toy. There were companies that used them as professional devices, but the tech edge and power processing went to the PC. But that's key, because the board I was showing my friend was for professional editing. Take your footage, digitize it, or somehow keep it resident somewhere, and off you went. I don't recall it catching on all that well, but you could edit professional grade material with it. I don't hold anything against Apple, but like a lot of success stories in the United States it sold itself on its image and the concept of the Mac's user friendliness. For what it's worth I'm glad Apple's joined the 20th century (pun intended) for the sake of Apple users. Still, as a hobbyist has been, an iMac Pro is probably overkill for me.
  21. When I used to shoot training vids for Apple back in the 90s their whole attitude was to take jabs at one another; i.e. someone would get up for a presentation, and suddenly he's got a verbal target on his chest with stuff like "Do you still beat your wife?" There was a lot of joking, some of it verging on bad taste and dipping into sexual innuendo. Like I said a few posts up, that attitude reflected in their product. And to me still does, only the juvenile hip atmosphere that used to be down there has given way to a realization that they needed to create serious hardware. I think the old board of directors, whom I also used to shoot every now and then, realized that hip attitude and a slick marketing campaign to huckster the very primitive Macs on a predominantly PC using market, wouldn't last forever. And even in local news stories up here about Apple employees interviewed would say how they had poured their heart and soul into the company. A few news pieces, during a layoff, had employees saying they felt betrayed. Which to me means that Apple didn't only try to fob off hardware to the public, but fobbed off the company to their employees. And in terms of media hardware, I remember showing one their interns whose father was the marketing VP for SEGA America at the time, a vid regarding a dedicated card that could handle BETACAM editing that you dropped into a high end PC. His attitude was that Apple was coming out with something next year. This was circa 1992...maybe 93 or 94. Well, Apple never did come out with anything close. They were still selling the little smiley face Mac and I think .... thinking here ... coming out with the PC-Mac that could run both OSes and consequently both sets of software. I know people are reluctant to reply to my posts for whatever reason, and I'm not working in the industry anymore, but I think it important for people here to understand the kind of culture Apple has, or at least had, and how that affects their products.
  22. I had been a big Chrome user up until last week when it started to hang severely. It had actually gotten progressively worse over the last few years. Edge, much to my surprise, is lightening fast by comparison, but the downshot is that it has stability issues. It used to be the reverse, with Edge being stable but slow. I used Safari for a couple of years back in 2009 to 2011, but it started to have stability issues, and for some reason took forever to update. It just started breaking down sporadically, and when I tried to uninstall it, it still kept files on my computer that I couldn't remove, even by logging in as an Admin under safe mode.
  23. ​Of all the PCs I've built, I've only ever experienced Blue Screen errors, at most, four times. It strikes me that most people who experience blue screens are modifying their system, and try to get the computer to multitask while the OS is still dedicated towards orderly updating libraries. When the OS gives the CPU new instructions, that process is interrupted, and you get a working but otherwise bad installation. Before I built a new XP machine in 2000 or 2001, I had, up until that time, been installing DOS 6.21 with Win95 and Win98 update CDs. I never purchased the full retail version of either Win95 nor Win98, which, to me at least, should have lent my systems to having instability issues. But that was never the case. It was only when I tried working with the computer while it was installing something that I ever got any kind of instability. Heat and dust getting into the actual CD drives tended to cause the system to hang because the optic reader on the drive couldn't properly read data on whatever CD was in the drive. You would think that the easy solution to that would be to simply open up the CD drive and clean it. But this only worked temporarily, and would give the drive maybe a few months or a few weeks of added life. That verse all the years the drive functioned without being cleaned once. The point of that paragraph being that sometimes things work just fine without being tinkered with, but the moment you try to fix something, there's one over looked component that'll fail miserably, and may sometimes induce a blue screen error. This is just my personal experience. Apple's have become more impressive over the last ten years. Having said that, when I was at BAVC earlier last year training on the latest version of FCP, I actually did have to reboot their machines (all Apples) to get FCP to stop hanging. Like Landon said, computers, in particular PCs, are like any other machine in your house, you need to take care of it. Based on what I see about Apple's design I think they take the dust and heat issue seriously, so there's probably fewer instances of failure, but they're not immune. Just an FYI, I first hacked on teletypes and PETs at UC Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science in the mid 70s. Then learned basic programming on the first Apples at my middle school in I think 79 when Apple and IBMs were close in terms of home computer performance, with Apple having a slight edge, again at that time. I'm glad Apple caught up, but boy did it take forever.
  24. Heh, I thought you might be talking about the airplane sequence with Buddy Hacket and Mickey Rooney.
×
×
  • Create New...