Scott Fritzshall

Well, there's only a finite amount of oil and coal to begin with. We're never going to run out, per se, but as we gobble up the easy-to-gobble stuff, its only the expensive stuff that remains. Eventually, the cost to extract it begins to exceed the profits from extracting it, which means that we start seeing less and less of it, and the cost starts going up. So will we see scenarios where it's unavailable? Probably not. But we likely will see scenarios where it becomes enormously expensive, which we got a glimpse of last year, for various reasons. The idea that we'll always be ok because we'll always find more and we'll always invent new technologies seems pretty foolish to me. Making sensible decisions for the future based on what we know now seems, to me at least, to be the best option. The thing about refineries is kind of silly; oil companies don't even want more. They rarely even apply for more permits. If they keep the number of refineries low, they restrict the supply, thus increasing their profits. I don't even consider high prices to be a bad thing; they're pretty much the only thing that makes people consider how much they're using and attempt to control themselves. What I was going to say to that is that Gore runs his office from there and has a bunch of staff people that work there, and that in terms of being an office rather than a home, it's actually uses far less energy than normal. However, I was looking around for citations for this, and can't find them, and I don't remember where I had read this, so I guess I'm going to have to look a bit foolish and retract that until I find it. Anyway, though, this gets brought up every time someone mentions global warming and it's absurd. Let's say it's all true. That Al Gore is a big fat hypocrite who wants everyone else to curtail their energy use while leading a lavish lifestyle unavailable to the rest of us. All of the stuff he's said- the stuff compiled from tons of scientists who actually study climate science- is still true. He's entirely correct even if he is a hypocrite. And the practice of attacking the messenger rather than the message is consistent with the whole climate change debate- doing anything except engage the actual facts. Most of the research that purports to disagree with global warming is funded by energy companies- not for the purpose of disproving it, since even they know that it's all true- but for the purpose of obscuring the facts. So that they can point to someone who disagrees. Also, in my mind the Al Gore issue just further makes the case for the need for more regulation. No one is voluntarily going to stop using excessive amounts of energy as long it's convenient and fun for them to do so.

The reports I've been reading and hearing about lately all say that climate change is actually happening far faster than most models predicted, and even the conservative estimates prior to that placed irreversible changes happening within a few decades. Not to mention that fuel shortages will also start happening within our lifetimes. Also, nice stealth edit ;) I actually wish you had kept that in, because I wanted to respond to it seriously; it's something that gets deliberately half-explained and people really frequently misunderstand it.

A fair enough challenge. But that challenge must be posed to our grandchildren as well, because they'll be the ones who will have to deal with the consequences of our lifestyles- drastically reduced availability of fossil fuels, combined with the much colder winters and much hotter summers that will be the result of the global climate change that our fossil fuel use causes.

So, this is supposed to be shocking because she said "socializing?" She corrected herself by saying that she would like to have the government take over their industries, or, in other words, nationalizing them. It looks to me in this video like she just forgot the word "nationalizing," said "socializing" instead, and then tried to correct herself. But it's the same meaning either way. It's like if she said "we'll give you a half-dozen eggs... excuse me, I mean we'll give you six eggs" and then people like you jumped all over her saying "ah ha! her slip of the tongue reveals her true motives" when actually she said the same thing twice. Hilariously "unbiased" reporting in that Fox News clip, by the way. So, for the Nth time in this discussion, what exact law is requiring your friend to replace his entire inventory? This should be the least controversial part of this discussion. I'm actually trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here, but you come in saying "Obama is taking away my friend's business," you give only a Glenn Beck video as some sort of evidence, you post another video that looks like it was edited by someone with the political understanding and maturity level of a 12 year old, and then you wonder why people don't take you seriously. If this is really happening (and I honestly don't think you're just making up this entire scenario), let's discuss it. I'm sure this law could affect others on here, so why not let us know the details so that we can all be aware?

There is literally nothing objectionable about anything said in either of those clips. I also notice that you are continuing your trend of not actually responding to people with actual serious questions (ie, what exact policy causes this), and spending your time instead posting stupid crap like this. Could you respond to the completely valid questions about what the exact policies are here?

To be serious though, that does sound like an unreasonably short amount of time in which to replace his inventory. Could you provide more information about the exact policy that's requiring this? A lot of the time, what happens is that legislators say "we need to make a new policy about ____," and then that policy ends up getting influenced or even written entirely by the big players in that industry, and as such ends up being highly favorable to them and highly disfavorable to their competitors who couldn't afford lobbyists. It wouldn't surprise me at all if that's what happened here; that these policies were created by big companies to put their smaller competitors out of business. It would also not surprise me at all if it was just really poorly-crafted, poorly-considered policy.

You can't really open up the shutter any more in order to compensate for light loss. If you were shooting on a digital camera that had an electronic shutter, you could set the "shutter angle" to 360 and gain an extra stop, but you can't do this on a film camera. You're going to need to shoot on a fast film stock, with fast lenses, and you're going to need to crank your lights. There's not too much else you can do.

A few brief things: -"It's just not working" does not mean "you suck." You could, in fact, be excellent, but not what they need, so don't necessarily read too much into that. Plenty of competent, talented people get fired because they just aren't the right fit for the job or the project. -The ability to compare your work to others and be honest with yourself that yours needs improvement probably puts you beyond the capabilities of a sizeable percentage of your competition. Most people are not innately talented, and need to work really hard to be good. Being critical of your own work is what lets you elevate yourself above the place you are currently at. Becoming better is a constant process, and you'll be better off if you can look at the people who are better than you as a new benchmark to work towards rather than as a morale destroyer. -You're apparently in Carbondale? Which is basically nowhere? You might want to think about moving to LA or at least somewhere with a bigger production presence- even Chicago would be a better place for you with more opportunities. -Also if you've got a Masters degree and no debt from that, that's honestly really impressive, however you managed to pull that off, so it probably says something positive about you. Now I have no idea if you're actually any good or if you're actually a person that anyone would want to work with, but nothing that you've written would necessarily suggest otherwise. So basically you should consider this to be a crappy life event but not a judgement, and use it as an motivation to find a better direction or a better way to go about your current direction.

You weren't entire clear on how this was shot; I'm assuming that you meant that you shot the watertower as a seperate element on a 35mm motion picture camera and not a stills camera. So yes, as Phil says, take the whole frame range and put it in there instead of just a single frame. This way, it's got the moving grain and, assuming that you shot it on the same film stock as the other plates, it should match up pretty nicely. Then what you want to do is paint patches to cover up the labels using Photoshop, bring those into After Effects, and just grain those. A second option that can work if you shot a few seconds of the watertower with a locked off camera is to do a frame average on the entire frame range, which will give you a single frame as a result that is basically every frame blended together, and the grain will have been averaged out. This doesn't work at all if you've got moving stuff, but in some cases it's really handy. You can take this single frame into Photoshop, then, paint on it, and bring the whole thing into your AE comp and add grain to it. I don't know how to do a frame average in AE offhand, however, so you'll have to look that up on your own. Actually, that's not strictly true; I can think of a really obnoxious way to do it that should work, but I'm hoping for your sake that there is a better way, so if you can't find one then ask and I'll describe it.

I'm sure you can do it, but it's got some fairly heavy compression, so you're going to be dealing with that. Oh and also until they release that new firmware, it's still 30p.

Well yeah, I agree, but I wasn't really addressing that. My post was only meant to address Tim's original question, and Chris's post right above mine.

No you can definitely do that on a dSLR without any problems. I can't really think of any significant reason for any quality differences between formats other than the skill of the person doing it.

Well basically, whatever it looks like now is what it's going to look like on the big screen, except color-corrected. It's not going to look any better unless you re-do it in HD. It's basically your call whether you think this is adequate to show (my guess is that it isn't), and whether it's worth the time and effort to fix it.

What exactly did you do your downconvert onto? Generally, whatever you have as your offline is not something that's high quality enough to show to anyone. If it was me, I would want to go through the trouble of figuring out what happened here, and try to push the HD version through. You're probably going to be really disappointed with the results if you use the offline version.

Transformers 2 made like a billion dollars this summer, and it had robots that were basically minstrel show characters, so yes I do.

I can give you a good answer if you change your name and also if you specify whether you mean 3d as in 3d CG models, or 3d as in stereoscopic.

You might need to make something custom for this, I don't really know what's out there to help you. At the same time, if you do end up getting it 98% correct but still have a little play in there, you can always stabilize that out.

I think that your idea of securing it in place with a rig is the way to go. If you're not able to completely cover the rig, you'll have to digitally remove it, so you might want to shoot a clean pass without the phone or rig.

Ah, sorry, I can't help you out too much with that. I wish I knew some modelers; I tend to hang out with other 2d people =/

I'm really more of a 2d guy, and most of my 3d knowledge is oriented towards that. I also prefer using XSI for 3d. Why do you ask?

me. I've been at Rhythm & Hues now for close to a year, doing prep as well- a lot of rig removal, but starting to move into comp. I'd actually really like to work at DNeg, and I'm hoping that I can get them to sponsor me soon.

It depends on a lot of factors. If by "pro digital camera," you mean something like a Varicam or F900, then that's probably not adequate. If you mean something more along the lines of an F23, Genesis, D21, or possibly RED, then you'll be fine. At that point, you'll do alright with any choice VFX-wise, so the question of format is really up to aesthetics, budget, and workflow.

what the

No, I've actually seen quite a lot of it. I saw it last Saturday and I've been following the whole Tea Party thing for several months. I've seen the interviews with the attendees (both those made by people who were sympathetic to them and those who were mocking them), I've seen the speeches given by the people speaking there, I've seen massive volumes of posts on message boards by those who have been organizing them. I'm pretty sure that technically, all races were present. As in, like, a few people from each. But actually one of the most apparent things from any of the videos or pictures of any of these events is that they're uniformly a sea of white people, most of whom are at least middle-aged. There will usually be like one or two black people there. Maybe a single hispanic person. I've seen maybe one or two interviews with or comments from people who claim to have been democrats, but given that the purpose of the protests- to the extent that it's ever clearly articulated beyond "we don't want to pay taxes" or "we want our country back" (whatever that is supposed to mean)- is pretty much indistinguishable from the Republican agenda, I'm pretty sure they've always been quite conservative anyway.