Look, there are reasons to have a Linux port on the cell-based PS3. Mostly research and scientific software development. But for regular folks like you and me, the only reason we would want Linux on our PS3s is for one thing and one thing only: media playback.

The problem is that the only usable players with enough codecs, VLC and Mplayer, have compatibility problems with the PPC-based PS3. Thankfully, with the newer PS3 firmware versions, except the MOV container incompatibility, it supports all other major media files already. And for the MOV container, I just use the $20 Quicktime Pro which is able to re-wrap MOV h.264/AAC videos to MP4 without re-encoding in 1 minute time.

So what I really need is Flash 9 support so I can run Hulu.com and watch “Arrested Development” in the TV instead of the browser. But the PS3 browser only features Flash 7, and the Linux PPC ports doesn’t have PPC Flash 9 plugin support either because Adobe doesn’t care about it.

So honestly, as a normal user, I see no reason whatsoever to run Linux on a PS3.

It is not practical or technically possible to shoot movies with exposure bracketing because there is no such camera that can do that (namely, shoot 3 or 5 identical versions of the same shot at the same time with the same lens but at different exposures). However, a camera that already has high dynamic range and shoots RAW can make it possible to create tone mapped HDR-looking movies. 1 RAW copy is not as good as 3 or 5 RAW copies, but it’s better than nothing. The RED One camera should be good enough for this job.

If I had that $150 million that Spielberg has available for the creation of each of his movies, I would do an HDR-like movie. I always had in the back of mind an epic sci-fi movie (a’la Star Wars) with visual elements from the Final Fantasy franchise. A new application or plugin would have to be developed specifically for the movie that does tone mapping (kinda like Photomatix for video), while the actor’s faces would have to be smoothed out in post to look as pristine as in the FF games (I never said my movie would be about humans anyway).

I like the look of these pictures and I think that with a lot of visual effects and CGI buildings would look interesting: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. If you are careful with such color grading you can create a convincing look without looking totally CGI or cartoonish.

Yesterday Nokia bought all of Symbian and today LiPS and LiMo joined forces. We live in the most interest and most difficult of times when it comes to cellphone operating systems.

To make it more clear: today is nothing but 1985 in PC operating system times. Apple has just introduced the Macintosh (iPhone), an OEM-based Windows OS is about to come out (Android), while the developer friendly Amiga is currently have more users than anyone else (Symbian), while the older Atari (PalmOS) and Amstrad (Windows Mobile) are still fighting for a while more. And of course there are myriad other smaller OSes that are not based on the older command line doctrine (”feature phones”), that will almost eclipse in a few years.

The point of my analogy above is that while we don’t know who will finally make it and get that same 95% market share in the mobile industry (as Windows 98 managed to achieve for PCs), that day is coming. It’s unavoidable, because as these devices mature and do “more”, people will rely on them more. And when you have too many people rely too much on these devices, then these people need compatibility between all these devices. And this eventually creates the “monopoly”. We are 10-12 years away from such a “monopoly”, but it will eventually happen. Either through elimination or consolidation.

The real question is: will Apple redo the same mistake with the iPhone as they did with the Macintosh by not opening it to OEMs?

“Fifty artists who recorded Prince covers in honor of His Purpleness’ 50th birthday June 7 have been slapped with a lawsuit by the short-tempered star”, writes Wired.

I am afraid that Prince once again is right, when it comes to the law (even in Norway, which is part of international commerce agreements). These guys didn’t pay royalties, and it’s kind of Prince to not ask for millions of dollars in damages, but simply ask for the records destroyed.

Does this suck? Yes. Couldn’t Prince just be nicer? Yes. But the law is the law, and Prince has it on his side every time he initiates all these shitty actions.

I watched “Rambo” on Blu-Ray tonight and I was delighted to see that their deleted scenes were in HD, and untouched: uncut to regular 16:9 and ungraded. So I could easily go back to the 2.35:1 version and graded in-movie footage, grab some snapshots with my Kodak digicam and compare. Most of the “Rambo” movie uses the blue grading theme that is in fashion at Hollywood in the last 5 years, although if you look closely you will see how the highlights were totally burned out during grading. I really like the ungraded versions, they are more natural, very close to what you would get from a consumer Canon camera like the HV20 when shot in PF24 with “CineMode” turned on and the “neutral” color setting.

Ungraded, as shot

Graded, in-movie


Ungraded, as shot

Graded, in-movie

This is how I would have graded this


Ungraded

Graded, in-movie

As you might know, the biggest free hobbyist/community filmmaking competition on the net is DVXUser’s. There are usually two such competitions every year. The current competition, titled “Timefest” because the key element is time, is now open for viewing. I spent most of the day watching the ~70 entries. You can view the entries here, login info here.

I must say that except two entries, the ones titled “O2” and “RPDM“, the rest pretty much sucked. Sure, there were a few more that were watchable, like “Survival”, “Unzeit”, “Parallel”, “The Small Multiple” and 1-2 more, but for the most part, the vast majority of these entries were pure cheesy suckiness. I remember a year ago, the SpyFest competition, that had at least 5 entries good enough to become full featured films. This time around, there’s a lot more people who entered the competition, but I couldn’t find truly amazing films (except the “O2″ and “RPDM”). This time seems to be about quantity over quality.

The suckiness experienced is not just about the actual camera movement, framing or dialog, which are the artistic part of each movie, but in the technical parts too: overexposed subjects, terrible audio quality, bad exporting quality (someone even exported in QVGA at 12 fps), interlacing, what have you. All the shit is there. There were about five HV20-based entries too, among the worse of the overall bunch I must say (I am sorry if any of these HV20 directors reads this, but I got to write my opinion).

Someone could say to me “oh, at least we tried, where is your entry Eugenia?“. Well, that’s the thing you see. If I know that I can’t do something really well, I simply don’t do it. Or, if there’s no way to make it better, I do it, and I publish it on Vimeo, but if I notice that the result is not up to high standards of an international competition I simply don’t submit it to one. But I certainly won’t release a movie for a well publicized competition and have people laugh at me at the end.

And as for the exporting, gosh, do it right. DVXUser requires up to a 6 minute video, h.264/AAC encoding, and up to 50 MBs of a MOV/MP4 filesize. Now, to achieve this, is pretty easy. Export like this:
- From a miniDV widescreen camera export at 720×400 at 1024 kbps h.264 and 128kbps AAC.
- From an HD camera export at 848×480 at 1024 kbps h.264 and 128kbps AAC.
- From the DVX100 camera export at 852×480 at 1024 kbps h.264 and 128kbps AAC.
For the HD and DVX cameras, if you are not happy with the quality you get, or if you shot at 30p/60i instead, you can go down to 640×360 using the same bitrate. If your film is shorter than 6 minutes, you can upgrade the video bitrate a tiny bit, just enough to gain some additional quality without running over the 50 MB limit. And for God’s sake, remove pulldown if you shot in PF24, and de-interlace if you shot in 50i/60i. Nobody wants to see your horizontal lines on their media player.

UPDATE: What do you know. The “O2″ short movie used the same set that was used on Firefly’s 3rd episode, titled “Bushwhacked”. Pictures here.

I was checking some prices tonight and 1080p TVs are much more affordable now. Don’t make the mistake to get a 720p/1080i TV, make sure it’s a full 1080p one.

I would wholeheartedly recommend this 30,000:1 contrast ratio Panasonic 42″ 1080p plasma panel for $1400, and if you still don’t have the money for it, get a Vizio 42″ LCD 1,000:1 contrast ratio 1080p panel for $800. This plasma Panasonic kicks the Vizio’s LCD ass in terms of quality, but on its turn, the Vizio would kick the ass of most 720p TVs anyway, so always strive for that 1080p panel.

This is the most curious thing. During high school we were about 10 girls in my little town, all in the same grade, that we would hang out together. From us 10, now all at age 35, only 4 got married (including myself). Not having married at that age is kind of unheard of in rural Greece. Sure, it’s normal that someone might end up not married, but when 60% of your friends aren’t, then something’s fishy. My mother thinks… that we have all been cursed somehow (I’ve been engaged unsuccessfully twice before you see), and it truly saddens her every time she thinks about all of us.

I believe in my gut that if I had stayed in Greece I would be one of these unmarried friends too. I never had anything in common with the Greek way of life, ideas and beliefs. I was always my own fruit, kind of a banana in a sea of strawberries. I love Greece, but not for the same reasons the rest of the Greeks do. Thankfully, I fell for a person who is very open minded, intelligent, successful, handsome, and so life eventually smiled to me. I hope life smiles to others too.

Look at this picture. It’s a screenshot from apple’s AppleTV. Look at it carefully and hard to find something wrong with it. You see, the reality is that a UI can tell you a lot about how a company thinks, especially a company that invests a lot in UI design.

What bothers me in that UI is that the “My Movies” menu item is the very last on the video menu. It’s placed by Apple even below the “Trailers”, which are nothing but ads. This shows me how little Apple respects the filmmaking artists in general. If you don’t endorse, via the UI even, the personal video items that folks do at home, you will eventually get users who will pay less attention to the filmmaking art in general: either via not becoming the future Spielbergs, or even via stop buying as many movies as they do now via the iTunes Store.

And that would be the epitome of the read-only culture, as Stanford professor Larry Lessig calls it. Users who are passive in front of iTunes’ offerings, instead of being endorsed to shoot their own videos too. And Apple does this damage without any help from the MPAA/RIAA front, it has just fell on its own pit, without realizing it. This very small detail, shows to me, that Apple is not more modern or forward thinking than MPAA/RIAA themselves (at least when it comes to the AppleTV department), because they can’t see the big picture either. They are in this only for their little store in the corner, without realizing that when time will be 7 PM the market will be empty of shoppers.

The sad part is that this is the same company that also develops iMovie, FCE and FCP.