Railroads hold an almost universal curiosity for most folks. Probably because of the fact that they're both familiar and somewhat mysterious. Most of us have been on a train of one sort or another, but almost no one knows how to work one. You might say that's the same for airplanes, yet there are half a million (or so) licensed pilots in the U.S. There aren't even 100,000 locomotive engineers. Anyone can own a share of a plane and there are lots of small aircraft fields. But trains run on tracks, and almost nobody owns their own railroad tracks (and almost none of that truly privately owned track is standard gauge).
Because railroading is such a close-knit fraternity, there is relatively little documentation out where the rest of us can read it about how you drive a train.
I have done a little bit more research than the average joe on trains because of my CalTrain commute and I'm curious. I know at least a little bit about the signaling aspects and a little bit about mechanically how a modern diesel-electric locomotive operates. So I was super excited about seeing Unstoppable. And I liked the movie quite a bit. However, there were a few moments in the movie where I couldn't completely suppress the suspension of disbelief.
1. The police were shooting at a fuel cut-off switch. Ok, if such a switch existed, why didn't the hostler who lost control of the train just hit it when he realized the train was going to get away from him? This one is arguably defendable - the guy, after all, was not depicted as being a bright guy. You could say that he didn't think of it. But wouldn't it have been easier for them to try taking a long stick and poking at that switch from the truck while they were driving along side rather than trying to jump onto the ladder?
2. Why didn't the cops shoot the fuel tank full of holes and spill the fuel? Diesel fuel doesn't catch on fire when you shoot it. The mythbusters have been over that time and time again. Certainly dealing with the diesel spill would have been far better than the possibility of having to deal with the spilled phenol (or whatever the McGuffin chemical was).
3. Why were they trying to lower an engineer from a helicopter? Why didn't they just put a second guy on the locomotive that they got in front of the train and have him hop on from there?
4. I may be wrong about this, but I always thought air brakes were fail-safe. That is, the lack of air pressure makes the brakes close. If that were true, then the hostlers would not have been able to move the train at all without having all of the brake lines connected. It would take air pressure from the locomotive to open the brakes to let the train move. Someone who knows trains more than me should chime in on this one.
5. There's just no way that the attempted derailment they set up should have failed. If a portable de-railer had any chance of not working, then they could have just put a couple of sticks of dynamite under a rail and blown it up. It's not as if a derailment wasn't going to screw up that section of track anyway.
6. The hostler wouldn't have put the generator into notch 6. The notches are like gears in a car. What they do is connect up the windings of the generator being driven by the diesel motor in various combinations of series and parallel modes. This allows the generator to either generate high voltage and low current or vice versa for feeding into the traction motors (the electric motors that drive the driven axels). Higher notches generally mean higher speeds. The hostler was moving the train at basically walking speed. He'd have not been able to do his job any better by throwing it into "high gear" any more than that would have been a good move for a car with a stick shift.
7. The movie was, indeed, based loosely on a real-life incident that took place in Ohio. The so-called "Crazy Eights" train (CSX locomotive number 8888) was being moved in the yard and the hostler jumped out of the cab to realign a switch and failed to reboard. In that incident, the airbrakes not being connected was a normal yard procedure, and the hostler set the throttle to 100% believing the engine was configured for dynamic braking (in dynamic braking, the traction motors are converted into generators, and the energy they produce is dissipated in a large bank of air-cooled resistors as waste heat), which translates to full braking power. Instead, the engine was configured normally and full power was applied. He set the independent brake for the locomotive, but it was unable to overcome the engine and the train sped up. CSX was able to stop the train using the same technique that was successful in the film (without quite so much drama, of course). They also had a locomotive ahead of the runaway that they planned to place in front of the train to slow it further, but this was not necessary.
8. Applying the brakes at the end of a powered train poses a risk of "stringlining" if the train goes around a curve. To illustrate what stringlining means, imagine a piece of string sitting on a table. Now form that string into an arc (as if it were a train going around a curve). Now put your finger down on one end of the string, and pull the other forward along the tangent line. The string will deform the curve and eventually become a straight line. Tension in a train consist caused by either tail-braking or head-thrust while going around a curve will tend to cause the cars to want to pull to the inside of the curve - basically in concordance to the centripetal force required to turn the train. I believe this, in fact, was what Frank was up to by working the brakes of the trailing locomotive the way they did while the train was on the elevated curve in the film.
9. Why did it take them so long to try that truck trick to get someone into the cab (or, as mentioned above, to hit the fuel shutoff switch from outside)?
The only other complaint I might have about the film is actually a fairly common one for movies - a lot of technical dialogue that you see taking place between experts on film is often implausible because experts talking amongst themselves assume similar levels of technical expertise, and so leave out a lot of common knowledge. You can't really do that in a film, though, because the audience won't understand, so you have experts talking to each other using the sort of language they'd use to explain stuff to outsiders who don't have that common expertise. Particularly over the radio in crisis situations. It happens all the time in all sorts of genres, from trains to submarines, to airplanes, to computers... I don't envy the challenge that such situations pose to script writers, but it always sticks out like a sore thumb to me.
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Saturday, January 22, 2011
HD, FTW
A few years ago (maybe it was in 2001. I don't remember), 2001: A Space Odyssey had a brief nationwide theatrical run. This was my first opportunity to see a movie that was made to be shown in a theater before I was born on a big screen, as it was intended. I had, of course, seen the film before, but always on Television, which until only recently meant NTSC video. Seeing it in the theater was a tremendous revelation. There was just an amazing amount of detail in the original film that I had never seen in all of the times I had seen the film on TV. The most striking example of this is in the scene when the lunar lander was being lowered into the moonbase. On either side of the elevator there are numerous windows, none of which were truly distinctly discernible on TV. There were actors walking around doing stuff and video screens displaying changing information while the lander was descending, all of which lent an extra air of reality to the scene. No doubt Stanley Kubrick went to a lot of extra trouble to add that in, knowing that people were going to be able to see it and that it would make the scene look just that much more realistic.
All that was nice and all, but I had my doubts that even HD would be able to present as much detail as that.
Turns out, I was wrong.
Just on a whim I decided to watch 2001 via Netflix Watch Now on the TiVo. Our Internet connection is good enough that we pretty routinely now get the highest quality streams available.
The stream they're showing now is every bit as nice as what I saw in the theater that day. All those details are clearly visible on our 50" TV from 8 feet away.
In hindsight, it should have been obvious to me. All you need to do is watch a little bit of an NFL game in SD and then HD to see the difference. It's not subtle. Not even a little.
All that was nice and all, but I had my doubts that even HD would be able to present as much detail as that.
Turns out, I was wrong.
Just on a whim I decided to watch 2001 via Netflix Watch Now on the TiVo. Our Internet connection is good enough that we pretty routinely now get the highest quality streams available.
The stream they're showing now is every bit as nice as what I saw in the theater that day. All those details are clearly visible on our 50" TV from 8 feet away.
In hindsight, it should have been obvious to me. All you need to do is watch a little bit of an NFL game in SD and then HD to see the difference. It's not subtle. Not even a little.
Monday, June 7, 2010
iPhone 4 and Arthur C. Clark
The story line in 2001: A Space Odyssey contains a moment where mankind discovers a large magnetic anomaly on the moon. This anomaly is centered on a large object that had been deliberately buried millions of years in the past. When the sun strikes the monolith, for the first time in ages, it suddenly transmits an intense radio signal. The monolith was a solar powered alarm, designed to notify its inventors when (if) the inhabitants of the Earth gained the technological ability and intellectual curiosity to find the device and dig it up.
In the story, the monolith, and the others that appear, all share the same physical description, though with varying sizes. All of them are featureless, black and have sides whose dimensions form a ratio of 1:4:9 - the squares of the first three integers.
A few posts ago, I ruminated on the iPad and how it was very similar to the pad-looking thing that Bowman and Poole watched TV on aboard the Discovery.
Now that we've all gotten a good look at the iPhone 4, I'm struck by how it too bears similarity to something in the movie - in this case, the monolith itself.
It's only a superficial similarity. The dimensions of the phone are not really 1x4x9. In fact, the phone is slightly too thin compared to the monolith. At it's 4.5 inch height, it should be half an inch thick instead of 0.37 inches. And at 2.31 inches wide it is slightly wider than the 2 inches that would make it like the monolith. That's leaving aside the stainless steel strip running around the thin edge full of buttons and ports, and the big home button on the front.
Still, I think anyone who is a fan of the movie who gets an iPhone 4 should for sure get a black one...
In the story, the monolith, and the others that appear, all share the same physical description, though with varying sizes. All of them are featureless, black and have sides whose dimensions form a ratio of 1:4:9 - the squares of the first three integers.
A few posts ago, I ruminated on the iPad and how it was very similar to the pad-looking thing that Bowman and Poole watched TV on aboard the Discovery.
Now that we've all gotten a good look at the iPhone 4, I'm struck by how it too bears similarity to something in the movie - in this case, the monolith itself.
It's only a superficial similarity. The dimensions of the phone are not really 1x4x9. In fact, the phone is slightly too thin compared to the monolith. At it's 4.5 inch height, it should be half an inch thick instead of 0.37 inches. And at 2.31 inches wide it is slightly wider than the 2 inches that would make it like the monolith. That's leaving aside the stainless steel strip running around the thin edge full of buttons and ports, and the big home button on the front.
Still, I think anyone who is a fan of the movie who gets an iPhone 4 should for sure get a black one...
Friday, March 26, 2010
Netflix WatchNow for Wii
We got our Netflix WatchNow disk for Wii today in the mail.
Surprisingly enough, it was in the form of an actual disk. I suspect that Netflix would have preferred to make the app available for downloading as WiiWare. But my guess is that Nintendo would have insisted on charging too much for the privilege. So a disk it is. And sure enough, you pop the disk in and select it from the "Disk channel" and fire it up.
The first time it phoned home and presumably noticed that it wasn't activated, so, like all Netflix devices, it put up an activation code and directed you to type that code into the Netflix website. It then immediately displayed the Instant queue, just like on the Roku.
The first surprise was that, though it wasn't obvious, it is possible to see other lists besides the instant queue. In fact, there are multiple lists, some genre based, others of various suggested titles... It was a nice surprise.
The navigation is fairly natural too. All in all, the whole solution is very Roku-like (as opposed to how TiVo works).
Surprisingly enough, it was in the form of an actual disk. I suspect that Netflix would have preferred to make the app available for downloading as WiiWare. But my guess is that Nintendo would have insisted on charging too much for the privilege. So a disk it is. And sure enough, you pop the disk in and select it from the "Disk channel" and fire it up.
The first time it phoned home and presumably noticed that it wasn't activated, so, like all Netflix devices, it put up an activation code and directed you to type that code into the Netflix website. It then immediately displayed the Instant queue, just like on the Roku.
The first surprise was that, though it wasn't obvious, it is possible to see other lists besides the instant queue. In fact, there are multiple lists, some genre based, others of various suggested titles... It was a nice surprise.
The navigation is fairly natural too. All in all, the whole solution is very Roku-like (as opposed to how TiVo works).
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Avatar, IMAX 3D
Scarlet and I saw Avatar this evening. We went all-out and saw it at the IMAX theter at the AMC multiplex at Cupertino Square.
I was under the misinformed impression that IMAX movies were shown on domed theaters. This theater was just like any other theater I've been in in the last year. I thought perhaps the screen was a bit bigger, and the aspect ratio looked to me to be more square.
As for the 3D part, that doesn't really do anything for me, because my left eye doesn't really work. I've always had trouble with 3D movies. 3D movies are universally designed to present slightly different images to each eye. The first such systems attempted to do this with red and green colored gels, and systems in the 80s and 90s used LCD light shutters to present alternating frames to each eye. Both of those systems really sucked for me. The colored lenses wound up giving me nothing but green, and the alternating frames just halve the frame rate, effectively, which just introduced unacceptable levels of flicker.
Invariably, whatever glasses they hand out for such presentations are required, otherwise your eyes see both images, which results in horizontal blurring.
Well, I'm happy to say that for the first time, I was able to watch a 3D movie without any of the problems I've had in the past. The new systems use simultaneous projection of light with different polarization. So long as I kept the glasses on, it looked, well, just like any other movie does. Occasionally, the polarization didn't exactly meet up and I saw a faint ghost of the view for the other eye, but if I adjusted my head slightly, I could minimize it.
Meanwhile, Scarlet said that the 3D effects in the movie were amazing. She felt like things were flying towards her, like she could have caught them. I was a little envious. But it's a little like listening to tetrachromats describe what they see. If you don't see what they see, it can't really be properly described.
The movie was good. It can, however, be rather fairly described as Pocahantas meets Halo.
I was under the misinformed impression that IMAX movies were shown on domed theaters. This theater was just like any other theater I've been in in the last year. I thought perhaps the screen was a bit bigger, and the aspect ratio looked to me to be more square.
As for the 3D part, that doesn't really do anything for me, because my left eye doesn't really work. I've always had trouble with 3D movies. 3D movies are universally designed to present slightly different images to each eye. The first such systems attempted to do this with red and green colored gels, and systems in the 80s and 90s used LCD light shutters to present alternating frames to each eye. Both of those systems really sucked for me. The colored lenses wound up giving me nothing but green, and the alternating frames just halve the frame rate, effectively, which just introduced unacceptable levels of flicker.
Invariably, whatever glasses they hand out for such presentations are required, otherwise your eyes see both images, which results in horizontal blurring.
Well, I'm happy to say that for the first time, I was able to watch a 3D movie without any of the problems I've had in the past. The new systems use simultaneous projection of light with different polarization. So long as I kept the glasses on, it looked, well, just like any other movie does. Occasionally, the polarization didn't exactly meet up and I saw a faint ghost of the view for the other eye, but if I adjusted my head slightly, I could minimize it.
Meanwhile, Scarlet said that the 3D effects in the movie were amazing. She felt like things were flying towards her, like she could have caught them. I was a little envious. But it's a little like listening to tetrachromats describe what they see. If you don't see what they see, it can't really be properly described.
The movie was good. It can, however, be rather fairly described as Pocahantas meets Halo.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
2012
So I just saw a clip from the new disaster movie 2012.
There's a certain give and take that an author and his audience have. The name for it is Suspension of Disbelief. We can watch Roxanne and set aside whether it's plausible or not that someone with a disfiguring birth defect on his face could not get it repaired because of an allergy to anesthetics. Some folks can even watch Star Trek movies without theorizing about how the warp engines work.
But I'm sorry: if you're in a small twin-engine aircraft over the city of Los Angeles while it's undergoing a catastrophic apocalypse, wouldn't the first thing that comes to mind be to perhaps attempt to gain some altitude so that you don't have to navigate between the buildings that are toppling over?
There's a certain give and take that an author and his audience have. The name for it is Suspension of Disbelief. We can watch Roxanne and set aside whether it's plausible or not that someone with a disfiguring birth defect on his face could not get it repaired because of an allergy to anesthetics. Some folks can even watch Star Trek movies without theorizing about how the warp engines work.
But I'm sorry: if you're in a small twin-engine aircraft over the city of Los Angeles while it's undergoing a catastrophic apocalypse, wouldn't the first thing that comes to mind be to perhaps attempt to gain some altitude so that you don't have to navigate between the buildings that are toppling over?
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Michael Moore and Me
From what we have been told, Gizmo's toilet flushing antics make a brief appearance in Michael Moore's latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story.
Gizmo has been on TV a lot. But at least so far as I am aware, he has never appeared on TV without someone from the TV show calling and asking permission. And we've never said "no" to anyone (we did tell the staff of The Tonight Show when they called to ask if he could appear live with a toilet on stage that we didn't think it was likely that he'd make a good appearance, since he wasn't trained to flush the toilet or anything, but we didn't outright say "no" to them). The most we've ever asked was to be told where we can tune in to tape a copy of the clip for our own collection.
So the news that Gizmo makes an appearance in Michael Moore's movie was a complete surprise. They didn't call and ask. We would have said "yes" to Michael had he had the good grace to call and ask for permission to use our video in his film. I don't agree with Michael's politics, but I would have been tickled to see Gizmo on the silver screen.
Given everything I know about Michael Moore, I'm not at all surprised. He wants what he wants, regardless of whatever rules (like Copyright law) he has to trample or people he has to hurt in the process. If you look up "asshole" in the dictionary, there's a picture of Michael Moore.
Mike, you owe me an apology. My only solace is that I know that I'm at the end of a very, very, very long line.
Gizmo has been on TV a lot. But at least so far as I am aware, he has never appeared on TV without someone from the TV show calling and asking permission. And we've never said "no" to anyone (we did tell the staff of The Tonight Show when they called to ask if he could appear live with a toilet on stage that we didn't think it was likely that he'd make a good appearance, since he wasn't trained to flush the toilet or anything, but we didn't outright say "no" to them). The most we've ever asked was to be told where we can tune in to tape a copy of the clip for our own collection.
So the news that Gizmo makes an appearance in Michael Moore's movie was a complete surprise. They didn't call and ask. We would have said "yes" to Michael had he had the good grace to call and ask for permission to use our video in his film. I don't agree with Michael's politics, but I would have been tickled to see Gizmo on the silver screen.
Given everything I know about Michael Moore, I'm not at all surprised. He wants what he wants, regardless of whatever rules (like Copyright law) he has to trample or people he has to hurt in the process. If you look up "asshole" in the dictionary, there's a picture of Michael Moore.
Mike, you owe me an apology. My only solace is that I know that I'm at the end of a very, very, very long line.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Forgotten old movie tech
Last night, Scarlet and I went to Davies Symphony Hall and watched the 1925 film "The Phantom of the Opera" (starring Lon Chaney) with the original accompaniment score performed on solo organ (and Foley board) by Dennis James. Mr. James played the renowned Ruffati organ installed in Davies 25 years ago this year. It is the largest concert hall organ in North America. It was a spectacular evening, but the real highlight for me was a re-introduction to early motion picture technology.
Advances in the state of the art in any field always obsolete prior technology, resulting in the loss of specialized techniques used to optimize the technology of the time. Case in point: the iambic keyer. It represents the state of the art in optimizing the transmission of morse code. Morse code is an obsolete technology, relegated largely to the amateur radio bands nowadays. With the advent of satellite based search and rescue beacon technology, the last non-amateur use for morse code (namely the maritime service) has gone by the wayside. Apart from Amateurs, nobody therefore has a use for an iambic keyer. And I think it won't be too long before you'll need to go to a museum to see an Iambic keyer - the furthest development of a technological cul-de-sac.
Thus is it with film. When we think of early films, we think of black-and-white silent films. We think of that because we're used to television, and before color television, TV was itself monochromatic (black-and-white is a misnomer: both TV and film offer a continuous greyscale). But, as I discovered last night, early cinema was not monochromatic. Early TV was monochrome because the actual color that the viewer saw depended on the color of the phosphors that were built into his own TV set. Thus, everybody saw exactly one color - which tried to be as close to a neutral grey as possible.
This was not the case for film, however. While the actual photographic process was greyscale, the film stock itself could be tinted. Within the single film we saw last night, I counted at least 3 different film-stock tints. These differing tints were used by the film's creators to change the tone of the scenes. This is something that was impossible for television before the advent of full color broadcasting in the 1960s. When you saw a film on TV, it was greyscale, period (unless you put colored films or other such trickery in front of the tube).
Not only that, but certain scenes in the film we saw last night were actually in full Technicolor! Color photography was in its infancy in the 1920s. It was nightmarishly expensive, but it could be done. In addition, it was possible for much less money to highlight a single color - the Phantom's red cape, for instance - in a particular scene. This was also done in the film we saw last night.
In addition, it was not unheard of for some filmmakers to have certain elements of their films hand tinted. An example of this is still preserved today in the Chriterion Collection edition of Jacques Tati's film Jour de Fête, where the french flag is tinted red and blue.
Lastly, before the advent of synchronized soundtracks, it was customary for the projection frame rate for films to be variable. Usually, instructions were provided to the projectionist along with the reels of film for what speed various scenes were to be shown. Sometimes the projectionist would ignore those instructions and do whatever they felt was right (or perhaps they were just lazy and set one speed at the start). Because of that, individual experiences in viewing a single film could actually vary. Essentially, there is a tradeoff between slower speeds that flicker a bit less and use less feet-per-minute of film, versus faster speeds that make fast action less blurry.
With the advent of synchronized soundtracks, it was necessary to stick with a standardized frame rate (the industry chose 24 fps) to insure that the pitch of the sound didn't vary, but at the same time, one of the tools used for decades to customize the performance was lost.
With modern digital video technology, resolution and frame rate are, once again, adjustable. There's nothing that would prevent someone from varying the frame rate by scene. But the problem is that it likely wouldn't do any good, since most displays simply adapt the incoming material's frame rate to the native refresh rate of the display. Making matters worse, some displays either do a lousy job of this, or fail if faced with non-standard refresh rates. For instance, most cartoons are animated at only a maximum rate of 12 fps (with adjacent frames of 24 fps film being identical), and that's only during action sequences. The reason for this is the enormous cost of animation. It would make sense, therefore, to MPEG encode such cartoons at 12 fps. But this typically isn't done. Instead, the encoding is done at 24 FPS and redundant, empty I frames are sent in the extra time.
With the advent of television and full color movies, these techniques were rendered obsolete. In the case of television, the viewer could only see monochrome anyway, and in the case of movies, full color made the other tricks unnecessary. It is only in experiencing what must be characterized as an early cinema museum performance that we in the audience were privileged to get a glimpse of the highest state of the art of early cinema.
Advances in the state of the art in any field always obsolete prior technology, resulting in the loss of specialized techniques used to optimize the technology of the time. Case in point: the iambic keyer. It represents the state of the art in optimizing the transmission of morse code. Morse code is an obsolete technology, relegated largely to the amateur radio bands nowadays. With the advent of satellite based search and rescue beacon technology, the last non-amateur use for morse code (namely the maritime service) has gone by the wayside. Apart from Amateurs, nobody therefore has a use for an iambic keyer. And I think it won't be too long before you'll need to go to a museum to see an Iambic keyer - the furthest development of a technological cul-de-sac.
Thus is it with film. When we think of early films, we think of black-and-white silent films. We think of that because we're used to television, and before color television, TV was itself monochromatic (black-and-white is a misnomer: both TV and film offer a continuous greyscale). But, as I discovered last night, early cinema was not monochromatic. Early TV was monochrome because the actual color that the viewer saw depended on the color of the phosphors that were built into his own TV set. Thus, everybody saw exactly one color - which tried to be as close to a neutral grey as possible.
This was not the case for film, however. While the actual photographic process was greyscale, the film stock itself could be tinted. Within the single film we saw last night, I counted at least 3 different film-stock tints. These differing tints were used by the film's creators to change the tone of the scenes. This is something that was impossible for television before the advent of full color broadcasting in the 1960s. When you saw a film on TV, it was greyscale, period (unless you put colored films or other such trickery in front of the tube).
Not only that, but certain scenes in the film we saw last night were actually in full Technicolor! Color photography was in its infancy in the 1920s. It was nightmarishly expensive, but it could be done. In addition, it was possible for much less money to highlight a single color - the Phantom's red cape, for instance - in a particular scene. This was also done in the film we saw last night.
In addition, it was not unheard of for some filmmakers to have certain elements of their films hand tinted. An example of this is still preserved today in the Chriterion Collection edition of Jacques Tati's film Jour de Fête, where the french flag is tinted red and blue.
Lastly, before the advent of synchronized soundtracks, it was customary for the projection frame rate for films to be variable. Usually, instructions were provided to the projectionist along with the reels of film for what speed various scenes were to be shown. Sometimes the projectionist would ignore those instructions and do whatever they felt was right (or perhaps they were just lazy and set one speed at the start). Because of that, individual experiences in viewing a single film could actually vary. Essentially, there is a tradeoff between slower speeds that flicker a bit less and use less feet-per-minute of film, versus faster speeds that make fast action less blurry.
With the advent of synchronized soundtracks, it was necessary to stick with a standardized frame rate (the industry chose 24 fps) to insure that the pitch of the sound didn't vary, but at the same time, one of the tools used for decades to customize the performance was lost.
With modern digital video technology, resolution and frame rate are, once again, adjustable. There's nothing that would prevent someone from varying the frame rate by scene. But the problem is that it likely wouldn't do any good, since most displays simply adapt the incoming material's frame rate to the native refresh rate of the display. Making matters worse, some displays either do a lousy job of this, or fail if faced with non-standard refresh rates. For instance, most cartoons are animated at only a maximum rate of 12 fps (with adjacent frames of 24 fps film being identical), and that's only during action sequences. The reason for this is the enormous cost of animation. It would make sense, therefore, to MPEG encode such cartoons at 12 fps. But this typically isn't done. Instead, the encoding is done at 24 FPS and redundant, empty I frames are sent in the extra time.
With the advent of television and full color movies, these techniques were rendered obsolete. In the case of television, the viewer could only see monochrome anyway, and in the case of movies, full color made the other tricks unnecessary. It is only in experiencing what must be characterized as an early cinema museum performance that we in the audience were privileged to get a glimpse of the highest state of the art of early cinema.
Friday, October 5, 2007
MST3K lovers rejoice: RiffTrax!
Those of you more connected to MST3K than I am will deride me for being so out of touch, of course, but better late than never.
Since the MST3K crew reunited as The Film Crew, I've come to realize how much I missed MST3K. I also managed to connect to a bit of my own personal history having found some clips of Disasterpiece Theatre, which was an MST3K like show that aired on XETV in San Diego when I was 12. I used to stay up way late to watch Sal U. Lloyd and The Other Guy skewer bad 50s B movies. They mostly used chroma keying and Chyron rather than voiceovers, but it was still funny stuff.
Anyway, by chance I managed to learn that Mike Nelson came up with a compromise allowing him and his co-riffers to skewer movies without having to actually obtain rights to them. How? By writing and performing commentary tracks that you play along with the movie. Of course, you need to synchronize the two streams, but they have a pretty ingenious method for doing so - a disembodied computer-like voice periodically chimes in during the commentary with lines from the movie that should synchronize precisely with an actor in the movie delivering the same line. If the movie line is late, you pause the commentary for a little bit. If the movie is early, pause the movie. It even works with Netflix's instant watching feature (I tried The Matrix).
Keeping them in sync isn't as hard (or as critical) as it sounds, and the riffing is just as good as it ever was on MST3K or The Film Crew. And to top it all off, the RiffTrax are for movies you've actually heard of!
Go check it out. Most of them are either $2.99 or $3.99 and they're DRM-free MP3 files.
Since the MST3K crew reunited as The Film Crew, I've come to realize how much I missed MST3K. I also managed to connect to a bit of my own personal history having found some clips of Disasterpiece Theatre, which was an MST3K like show that aired on XETV in San Diego when I was 12. I used to stay up way late to watch Sal U. Lloyd and The Other Guy skewer bad 50s B movies. They mostly used chroma keying and Chyron rather than voiceovers, but it was still funny stuff.
Anyway, by chance I managed to learn that Mike Nelson came up with a compromise allowing him and his co-riffers to skewer movies without having to actually obtain rights to them. How? By writing and performing commentary tracks that you play along with the movie. Of course, you need to synchronize the two streams, but they have a pretty ingenious method for doing so - a disembodied computer-like voice periodically chimes in during the commentary with lines from the movie that should synchronize precisely with an actor in the movie delivering the same line. If the movie line is late, you pause the commentary for a little bit. If the movie is early, pause the movie. It even works with Netflix's instant watching feature (I tried The Matrix).
Keeping them in sync isn't as hard (or as critical) as it sounds, and the riffing is just as good as it ever was on MST3K or The Film Crew. And to top it all off, the RiffTrax are for movies you've actually heard of!
Go check it out. Most of them are either $2.99 or $3.99 and they're DRM-free MP3 files.
Monday, August 6, 2007
Casino Royale
So a while ago, before I created this blog, I saw Casino Royale and, since they played a lot of poker, I'd been asked by a couple of friends for my opinions on the depiction of poker in the film.
The very first scene, where Bond was at a ring game and the dealer insisted on table stakes was my first "Yes!" moment. So often in the movies they make a big deal about one player or another trying to either add a marker to a bet or what not, where the reality of modern poker games is that table stakes is all you ever see. I don't think the casino would have (or should have) allowed the car as a bet, since there was no way to quickly establish the value of it so that Bond could correctly match the bet, but whatever.
That takes us to the tournament. Which had some issues.
1. They splash the pot a lot when making bets, particularly all-ins. If you are a monster chip-lead at the table and you go all-in, the usual move is to put out a small token stack of chips as you say "all-in," not to take your hands and mush a big pile of chips forward. After the hand, if you win, you don't have such a mess to clean up if you do it the right way. If you lose, the dealer will count your opponent's stack and tell you exactly how much to count out to double him up.
2. This was a tournament. That being the case, the apparent relationship between the buy-in amounts and the tournament chip denominations is fiction. The players were regularly making "million dollar" bets and raises, but it would be far more likely for them to start with T$10000. And if this was Montenegro, wouldn't it all have been in Euros?
3. Vesper should not have had any qualms about giving Bond the re-buy. His entire explanation should have been, "Bad beat (shrug)." Her response, "That's poker. Go try again." If he was bluffing with 72o, it would have been a different story, but he had LeChiff beat until the river.
4. The last hand had some issues. When the two short-stacks moved all-in, there was $30M in the pot. LeChiff's raise of $6M was way, way, way too small. Given his hand, he should have pushed all-in at that moment. The showdown was also wrong. Bond was the last player not all-in to take aggressive action, so he would have been first to show his hand. He would have shown the straight-flush and everybody else would have mucked. Not nearly as dramatic, of course. But if LeChiff had raised the correct amount, then he would have had to show first and Bond would have shown second - the side pots always come before the main. Another way that play could have gone would have been for LeChiff and Bond to just check the hand down. Their real interests were in getting rid of the short stacks and going heads-up for the tournament. It's hard to make a case for that play with a boat and a straight flush, but it would have been a reasonable alternative. The saying is, "Never bluff into a dry side-pot." Finally, What was Bond doing anywhere NEAR that last hand with 57s? That's a donkey play. It would have been defensible if he was the big blind and was allowed to check, but from what I could tell, he was on the button. Maybe he raised on the button to steal, but then I'd be surprised that he got 3 callers. It would have been far more plausible for him to have shown A8 for a better boat than LeChiff's Aces-over-6s (he would have had top two pair on the flop, too, though at that point the two short stacks had a set of 8s and a flush and were both beating him). In the film, until the turn, all he had was the 7-flush with an outside straight-flush draw. Yes, it's a flush, but it's vulnerable to an over-flush (which in this case the short stack actually had). Last, but not least, if there was $20M in the pot before the flop, why weren't the short stacks already all-in? ESPECIALLY the guy with 8s? What, exactly, were they saving the extra $5M and $6M for? He could have easily pushed Bond out pre-flop, and probably LeChiff as well. The two blinds would have battled it out and the flush would have been sent packing and the 8-boat would have doubled up. The three-handed chip-stacks would have been not entirely unreasonable, with LeChiff and Bond both about even with about 40% chips each and the short stack with 20%.
5. At the end, Bond tipped the dealer with what would have been a tournament chip with no actual monetary value. Asshole. You know that's the case because of all of the real money shenanigans with the passwords and the telephoning into swiss bank accounts and on and on that followed. If the chips were money, then he wouldn't have bothered with any of that. He simply would have cashed them out.
The very first scene, where Bond was at a ring game and the dealer insisted on table stakes was my first "Yes!" moment. So often in the movies they make a big deal about one player or another trying to either add a marker to a bet or what not, where the reality of modern poker games is that table stakes is all you ever see. I don't think the casino would have (or should have) allowed the car as a bet, since there was no way to quickly establish the value of it so that Bond could correctly match the bet, but whatever.
That takes us to the tournament. Which had some issues.
1. They splash the pot a lot when making bets, particularly all-ins. If you are a monster chip-lead at the table and you go all-in, the usual move is to put out a small token stack of chips as you say "all-in," not to take your hands and mush a big pile of chips forward. After the hand, if you win, you don't have such a mess to clean up if you do it the right way. If you lose, the dealer will count your opponent's stack and tell you exactly how much to count out to double him up.
2. This was a tournament. That being the case, the apparent relationship between the buy-in amounts and the tournament chip denominations is fiction. The players were regularly making "million dollar" bets and raises, but it would be far more likely for them to start with T$10000. And if this was Montenegro, wouldn't it all have been in Euros?
3. Vesper should not have had any qualms about giving Bond the re-buy. His entire explanation should have been, "Bad beat (shrug)." Her response, "That's poker. Go try again." If he was bluffing with 72o, it would have been a different story, but he had LeChiff beat until the river.
4. The last hand had some issues. When the two short-stacks moved all-in, there was $30M in the pot. LeChiff's raise of $6M was way, way, way too small. Given his hand, he should have pushed all-in at that moment. The showdown was also wrong. Bond was the last player not all-in to take aggressive action, so he would have been first to show his hand. He would have shown the straight-flush and everybody else would have mucked. Not nearly as dramatic, of course. But if LeChiff had raised the correct amount, then he would have had to show first and Bond would have shown second - the side pots always come before the main. Another way that play could have gone would have been for LeChiff and Bond to just check the hand down. Their real interests were in getting rid of the short stacks and going heads-up for the tournament. It's hard to make a case for that play with a boat and a straight flush, but it would have been a reasonable alternative. The saying is, "Never bluff into a dry side-pot." Finally, What was Bond doing anywhere NEAR that last hand with 57s? That's a donkey play. It would have been defensible if he was the big blind and was allowed to check, but from what I could tell, he was on the button. Maybe he raised on the button to steal, but then I'd be surprised that he got 3 callers. It would have been far more plausible for him to have shown A8 for a better boat than LeChiff's Aces-over-6s (he would have had top two pair on the flop, too, though at that point the two short stacks had a set of 8s and a flush and were both beating him). In the film, until the turn, all he had was the 7-flush with an outside straight-flush draw. Yes, it's a flush, but it's vulnerable to an over-flush (which in this case the short stack actually had). Last, but not least, if there was $20M in the pot before the flop, why weren't the short stacks already all-in? ESPECIALLY the guy with 8s? What, exactly, were they saving the extra $5M and $6M for? He could have easily pushed Bond out pre-flop, and probably LeChiff as well. The two blinds would have battled it out and the flush would have been sent packing and the 8-boat would have doubled up. The three-handed chip-stacks would have been not entirely unreasonable, with LeChiff and Bond both about even with about 40% chips each and the short stack with 20%.
5. At the end, Bond tipped the dealer with what would have been a tournament chip with no actual monetary value. Asshole. You know that's the case because of all of the real money shenanigans with the passwords and the telephoning into swiss bank accounts and on and on that followed. If the chips were money, then he wouldn't have bothered with any of that. He simply would have cashed them out.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
MST3K mark 2
The Mystery Science Theater 3000 guys are back. They call themselves The Film Crew, and their first effort is available via Netflix's Watch Now feature.
The silhouettes are gone, but the commentary is as good as it ever was. There are also fewer skits and more taking apart of the movie.
This effort appears to be direct to video.
The silhouettes are gone, but the commentary is as good as it ever was. There are also fewer skits and more taking apart of the movie.
This effort appears to be direct to video.
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