Walter Graff

I care less about politics but as a studier of American History I know that no attempt by the government to help out a bad economy has ever worked. Neither will this. Stimulation comes from the private sector. Specifically, no president has ever been able to help the economy, it's just not part of his job description. Yet another waste of money masked as the thing that will make things better for America. Just doesn't work like that. Never did. Never will. It's the private sector that does. Watch Wall Street for much better indication of when we are recovering. And non partisan groups have said every job this bill creates will cost the American taxpayer between $100k and $300k per person hired. It was passed tonight as a compromise so let's write the check and wait for our taxes to increase.

The only misnomer her is that Kodak's major stake as a business is as a motion picture film company. Yet one look at their numbers show that motion picture film is a rather small percentage of Kodak's overall business. They slowly made a switch some time ago into the digital world. In fact most of what Kodak does these days is involved with digital, not film. Last year their digital division was nearly $5 billion of their total income. Their entire film division (consumer and proffesional) was $1.9bil. And all other division's were an additional $3.5bil. So while Kodak's certainly is the name in film, their total income from film was $2bil while the rest of the company earned nearly $9bil so as you can see, a couple hundred million was not going to do much in the area of film for them. Certainly not going to reverse the 4000 people they layed off last time around. But then again many of those layoffs had nothing to do with motion picture film. Kodak needs to do a lot of company wide trimming as it's lost some of it's center trying to get it's hands in too many things at once.

It's okay. Obama will fix everything! :(

You got the link wrong: http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/375/ LMFAO

As they say in Ed Wood, "Bullshit". You started this post in September. Fiscal year ended three months later. It's now five months. Did they wait till December to bill? And if they did most companies want to have all ins and outs etc paid for by the 31st of December. Now they aren't getting paid by vendors till February? An acountat would laugh at the jibberish they present. You aren't getting paid anytime soon.

Formatting a drive basically tells the drive to rewrite the file that is the pointer on the drive. Files remain intact unless you do an extensive cleaning of the drive and tell it to go to each sector and delete. It all depends on how you reformat. But often the files are still there. Anyone can download the free version and see. A data recovery company usually uses the same software you can buy so do it yourslef.

Light enters your lens as a wave. As these waves spread out, particles of light that pass through the center of the lens hit the center of the target faster than those diffracted more by the lens. Basically, any lens has a bright spot in the middle and everything else that comes through it does so at more of an angle so it takes a bit more to get there due to diffraction. Aim light through even the most perfect of lens and you will see it makes 'rings of light' on the other side as the light hits the target at some point. Look up Airy Pattern on the web to see a definition of this and you've found the core of the problem with small chips and a small iris'. As these waves hit the pixels in a chip you get overlapping of brights and darks due to the small individual target areas and the 'edges' of the waves of light. These areas that overlap (light and dark) end up canceling each other out making grey and cause you to lose sharpness of the image being projected through the lens. Technically it’s about contrast loss due to diffraction. The larger the targets on your chip, the more they get the good light and the less they get the overlaps of 'bad' light and hence loss of sharpness. On the other end of the equation, the higher the f-stop number the more you create bigger gray areas in those “rings” cause you are letting less of a wave through making more areas of light and dark after diffraction. On top of that different frequencies of light all have different timings in terms of the Airy Pattern created. In other words you have a rainbow of colors all trying to make their way into your CCD pixel. Add all sorts of coatings to lenses to try to alleviate this and you have the difference between better quality lenses and those things with the name ‘Leica’ printed on them that are found on cheap cameras. But even the best of the best lens has a physical limit to focusing light properly and it’s the iris that then becomes your worst enemy. See, there actually is a reason some lenses are $100k each. But money can’t buy love and eventually all lenses suffer the same fate, just some faster than others. The more you close down the iris the less light enters and the more your contrast drops. When it hits zero, you now have lost resolution. Every lens has a diffraction limit. Since it’s all-mathematical, known expressions for what percentage of contrast you have are known by the size of the target you have and the F-stop of the lens. It’s part of a big complicated equation called Modulation Transfer Function (MTF). On a chart that shows how much contrast ratio light gives you through a lens, the graph looks like a diagonal line for the most part in the center and curves off at the top and bottom. So for a camera like a 2/3 inch F900 you’d be at about 70% contrast at f4 meaning you haven’t hit the limit of measurable contrast (sharpness is still possible), but you are already close to making a worse picture than if you were wider on the lens. At about f13 on a F900 you are at the limit for contrast in the shortest frequencies and if you close down more than that you loose the "HD" in HDTV completely. In other words, you might as well have a SD camera cause your camera can't make HD. For a 1/3 inch chip zero contrast at the highest frequencies happens at F7. But because of the tiny size of the 1/3 inch chip, it doesn't take much before before you lose contrast fast at even wider f-stops and at 2.8 you get don't really do much better as you get about 65%. UGH! That graph of usable levels of light is a far shorter diagonal line on a 1/3 inch camera. So as far as you can stay away from F7 on a 1/3 inch chip camera and the more light you can let in by always shooting open as wide as you can, in addition to being as perfectly focused as possible, the more you are making the resolution the camera was designed to make. Of course as cheaper lenses on these cameras are often used, you end up having other aberration issues wide open but that’s another story. Want to see it all in action? You need a tripod, a camera and outdoors. Put ND on the lens and shoot any shot, a tree-lined driveway, etc for example making sure proper exposure gives you wide on you lens. Now take some ND out and shoot at f5.6. Now take more out until you are at f8. Now take you footage inside and do a split screen of the same shots at different f-stops. Notice how sharp and crisp the wide open looks and how miserable, soft and milky the closed down shot looks, sort of like a first generation DV camera. Welcome to physics.

As long as a hard drive has data on it it can be retrieved. It's the drives file system that tells your computer where the files are, and even if that is corrupt, the data still exists and can easily be retrieved. I use datarescue 2. http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php With it you can recover basically anything including deleted files. I have saved many a "lost" drive with it. There are a number of programs that do it. All you need is another drive for the data to be written to. Due to the method Macs write to drives, it's nearly impossible to lose data on it even if the drive is corrupted and can't be read by the computer.

Whoops! Data Rescue for mac will let you see what is on the drive and recover it.

Real simple, if you are closed down beyond f4, you ain't making an HD picture. Always shoot as wide open as possible.

The only experience I had with such extremes was in the early eighties doing some multiple overnight timelapses. We set up in the dead of winter. We learned that not only do you want to wait after you bring it in, but when you set it up, you also need to let is get acclimated too, then do a final optics check before you leave. Give it plenty of time to acclimate to going outside. In one instance we got condensation on the rear element of the lens. Thankfully we checked the rear element before we were all done as the lens had formed ice crystals in one corner. I can't tell you the temp when we did our overnighters, but it was below zero. We did blanket the camera, which may have given us a slightly warmer temp inside. I remember my assistant made a really nice wrap out of a sound blanket. And indeed the next day when we went to change mags the temp of the camera was noticeably warmer than some of the other equipment left exposed. My assistant was very cautious about the temp change going indoors and took the mag and first brought it into his car where he slowly heated it up, then later brought it inside. He said he would do nothing till the mag reached room temp by touch. The film ended up perfect albeit the first night we had an annoying little lens flare from a light that was in the shot. A slight adjustment of angle fixed that.

Yea, I realized that as I was going to sleep last night. :(

John has been around for a long time and I doubt many people don't know his name.

Finally, someone tells the truth about marketing, comparing film to video and RED. Thankfully John Galt sets the record strait. http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/th...uture-of-pixels

You have an interest and desire and a bit of experience and that is all you will need to get in the door. It's what you do once you're in that will determine if you make it. Call around to production companies and say you are a production PA and would gladly work on any project and see if they have anything for you. Send me your info and I'll make a resume for you.

You said it best Chris. Most folks turn on a TV and expect it to be right. There are plenty of tips and tricks on the web that can show all how to properly set up their plasmas or LCDs. I suggest everyone try it. Big differnce in picture quality once you have tweaked it. http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-11249_7-5582255-1.html As for Blueray quality, is it really any differnt than just the subjective taste of a filmmaker? DVDs are not the same as the projection of a film, and there are differences, but those differences are based not on some gold standerd but on each film you watch. Sure sometimes graphics and SPX look strange, but then again, I have yet to see any film that anything really looked that good and 100% beliveable if you concentrated on it compared to the live action. And sometimes as we know, films simply don't translate well to DVD in the digital realm where nothing analog made it look and feel like we see.

How about three lights and two bounce cards? White source for face glow. Red light aimed into small foam core that bounces at face, that is either turned on and off or up and down on dimmer with blue light and foam core doing same thing. Often one doesn't have to have flashing and the like ot make a nice police effect as you describe. Add a $20 strobe to that and you can have al three effects for a mixture. Really it's about the audio for me in such a scene anyway. Good sounds of car door, police radio, non descript voice etc.

SMPTE bars are smpte bars so if both are smpte bars it matters not which ones you use. If you have a wratten filter you can use that to observe teh screen and make adjustments. Scopes can certainly tell you a lot about exposure and the like but they alone can not be used for color correction although need to be used in conjunction with a monitor. But perhaps the $100 for a spyder calibrator might be good for this project and others down the road?

Yea, I think its more their manufacturing side that will get hit since sales are down. They are shutting 27 plants worldwide. Already closed one in the US. Not good to be Japanese these days with the Yen rising as others fall on top of the global crisis. Hitachi repeated its forecast that it would post a $7.8bn loss for the year. Sony's profits fell 95%. 95%!!!! Toshiba Corp expects a loss of $3.1 billion. Tough time right now whatever you are doing.

http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/04/technology...sion=2009020404 TOKYO, Japan (CNN) -- Panasonic Corp., hard hit by the global recession, will cut 15,000 jobs by March 2010, the company announced Wednesday. Half of the job losses will come from plants in Japan, with the rest from international workforce reductions. No breakdown of overseas job cuts was provided. Panasonic (PC) also announced third-quarter financial results. The electronics company posted a net loss of ¥63.1 billion ($710 million). The company said it expects a loss of ¥380 billion ($4.25 billion) for the fiscal year ending March 31. Panasonic joins fellow electronics giant Sony (SNE) in forecasting an operating loss. Last month, Sony warned it will close out the fiscal year with an operating loss of ¥260 billion ($2.9 billion), its first in 14 years.

I really wanted the poll more than the discussion

http://www.aolcdn.com/tmz_audio/020209_christianbale.mp3

Easy enough to do what I said in the other post, same question. Hi con the sky in photoshop making soft mask around tree into sky. Insert your stars into the mask. If the tree movement is too much you can simply use soft masks and move them around the tree without using outside software.

MC3 is supposed to be optimized for Multicore but I'm told that doesn't mean it uses it. All depends in configuration and settings. And even then multicore processing doesn't necessarily mean better.

Screen size, input output ability without money and add on's to do so, usability (towers have more options for configurations and speed), connections inherent in the computer, etc