If you are a late bird like I am, you probably have seen these “Girls Gone Wild” informercials on cable TV. This is a reality soft-erotic DVD where it shows young girls “going wild” and do crazy things. Well, I never really “got” this DVD. What’s the point of it? Why would I wanna watch stupid young women doing stupid things?

But I gave the product the benefit of the doubt, thinking that I might feel differently if there was such a DVD with men, targeting women. So tonight, I saw this other informercial, “Guys Gone Wild”. It involved the same kind of stupidity and unnecessary nudity, but with college guys instead. I hated it just as much.

And this kept me thinking: even a third rate porn movie has more practical value than these (arguably popular) “reality” DVDs. Your IQ must be lower than 50 if you find these DVDs entertaining.

So, the first time we made love. No, not my first time (there is nothing worth blogging about it), but the first time JBQ and I made love: it felt so right. For the first time in my life I didn’t feel guilty, or dirty, or used, for having sex. It felt just right. And I cried.

Thanks to Stefan for the link of the big-time director James Cameron interview at Variety:

“4K doesn’t solve the curse of 24 frames per second.”
“I would vastly prefer to see 2K/48 frames per second as a new display standard, than 4K/24 frames per second. This would mean shooting movies at 48 fps, which the digital cameras can easily accommodate.”
“I’ve run tests on 48 frame per second stereo and it is stunning. The cameras can do it, the projectors can (with a small modification) do it. So why aren’t we doing it, as an industry?”

Cameron answers his own question towards the end of his interview here.

That’s where the copyright law and myself are clashing. There are a few things in life that should simply be either cheap, or free. Education is one of them. Healthcare is another.

I find it disgusting having publishers sue schools. But you say, “most schools are private, commercial entities”. Yes, they are (at least in the US). But this doesn’t mean that you will have to strip students of knowledge, who have already paid a large sum to the school itself anyway and he/she’s out of money already.

The solution is exactly the same as the one I discussed about movies/music a few weeks ago. You have a centralized service where schools can license ANY work for really cheap, or pay a monthly fee, to license part of a work and then distribute that to their students. The distribution allowance should be covered in the student’s tuition.

Anyways, education should not be impacted by the copyright law that much, even if it stresses the Fair Use doctrine. While the Greek schools are not that great compared to the west European ones, at least education is ranging from free to really cheap. And nobody gives a rat’s ass about copyright on books when it comes to education, exactly because it is considered a higher goal for everyone, education is a priority. Many times I have talked with sarcasm and bitterness about modern Greeks’ elitism because of their glorious ancient past, but damn, one good thing that have come out of it is total priority on education. It’s part of the culture. My parents lived on beans so I could go to college. Over here, education is just another form of business, and as such, it’s treated as business. Hence the lawsuits flying left and right and the unrealistic tuition fees.

All you have to do is spend four minutes to view the following video released by ABC. It recaps all four seasons of “Lost” so far, all in 4 minutes. Of course it has spoilers, so if you are going to start watching “Lost” in the future you want to avoid it. But if you want to catch up with the current episodes, it provides a good way to do so — in a funny way too.

At last. Comcast brought Sci-Fi Channel in HD in the Bay Area. I was bitching about it only a few days ago. Now we can watch “Battlestar Galactica” in HD. Only funny thing is that I noticed the rest of the channel quality (e.g. NBC) was reduced, and the timetable is that of the East Coast (so we can watch BSG 3 hours earlier). Other new HD channels added were CNN HD, AMC, TBS, Food Channel and Animal Planet.

I thought about the evolution of monitors I owned today. I got my first PC in 1995 (486 DX2/66 Mhz, 4 MB RAM, 420 MB drive).

1995: no-name 800×600 14″ color CRT.
1998: Belinea 1024×768 15″ color CRT.
2000: LG 1280×1024 19″ CRT.
2003: Sony 21″ 1600×1200 CRT.
2005: Dell 1280×1024 19″ LCD + above Sony.
mid-2005: Samsung 1200×1600 21″ vertical LCD + above Dell.
2007: ViewSonic 1680×1050 22″ LCD + 32″ LCD 1080i HDTV + above Samsung.
2008: HannsG 28″ 1920×1200 + above Viewsonic.

I love all animals (well, except snakes), but baby birds are so amazingly beautiful. I got this new camera last Saturday, so I went out to snap some pictures. And there she was, the mom Mrs Duck and her five ducklings. So beautiful. They were not afraid of me at all. It’s nice to be in a country where ducks and geese are not afraid of people, as such a public display of a duck in Greece would result in a definite roast.

Quite a few announcements at NAB this week. From the worst to the best announcement:

By far, the most disappointing camera news came from Canon. Or, should we say, the lack of them. They simply modified their existing tape-based models. No next-generation stuff. They either working hard for next year, or they are seriously behind the curve.

The second worst news came from Panasonic. The HMC-150 and the HPX-170 are hardly HVX200 replacements. Not bad products, just yawwwwn…

Sony actually has pulled their shit together this year. After the release of the popular EX1, here comes the EX3. Now, that’s a camera! But at $9500 price tag, it’s indeed expensive for most.

And the big guns: the RED EPIC and the Scarlet 3k. The EPIC is a 5k camera, while the Scarlet, is a 3k one. The Scarlet is a marvel. It features a 2/3s sensor which can potentially provide quite some background blur all by its own. It shoots a huge resolution that puts Canon’s 1440×1080 prosumer cameras into shame. And all this, at less than $3000 (plus another $3000 for needed extras). Still, this is the cheapest camera you will ever get with these capabilities. A dream come true for every poor indie filmmaker.

Now, the HV20 ain’t that bad either for the $700 it costs. The other day HV20.com forum user LordTangent posted some screenshots captured from the HV20’s HDMI port instead via the tape (which would normally exhibit HDV artifacts, plus it would be 1440×1080 instead of 1920×1080). The captures are from the movie he is working on. Quality is extremely good (check this and this). I could say that whatever the Scarlet will be for the prosumer/pro indie market, the HV20 is for the consumer one today. Both ahead of the curve.

Since Vimeo removed the ability to re-encode in its native resolution any video between 848 and 1279 horizontal pixels, people started upresizing their videos to 1280×720 just so the get the 720p Vimeo Flash re-encoding that features more bitrate (hence, better quality). This is a bad idea though for us who would like to watch your videos in our TVs instead of the computer monitor.

Cheating aside (it costs Vimeo money in unnecessary bandwidth usage), sure, those who don’t care about local video downloads, they can do that. But if you care about the originally uploaded video file (I personally have a collection of 14 GBs of Vimeo videos that I like and have downloaded and watch on PS3/HDTV), then upresizing is a bad idea.

Let me explain: the FEWER hoops a video goes through from capture to final playback, the better it will look.

This is what happens when you upresize.
Step 1. Original resolution miniDV widescreen: 720×480
Step 2. Aspect ratio 1.000 resolution (as the video editor sees it): 874×480
Step 3. Upresize exporting: 1280×720
Step 4. Playback on TV resolution: resize to either 1366×768 or 1920×1080

This is what happens when you export in the right resolution:
Step 1. Original resolution miniDV widescreen: 720×480
Step 2. Aspect ratio 1.000 resolution/export: 874×480
Step 3. Playback on TV resolution: either 1366×768 or 1920×1080

And that’s why upresizing is a bad idea. Because it involves one extra step of picture manipulation that dilutes the quality further. In fact, if everyone in the world had a Pioneer TV like mine, which has a “dot by dot” PC viewing mode without extra resizings (most TVs resize regardless you see), it might make sense to export in 1920×1080 directly out of a miniDV SD footage (no matter how crazy this sounds — this would be the equivalent of upconverting, not upresizing). But because the world doesn’t have the same TV as I have, you will have to take the safe approach. And that’s the “export in the native resolution of your footage, at aspect ratio 1.000″ (aspect ratio 1.000 resolutions are preferred because most players and Vimeo don’t “understand” other pixel aspect ratios). Don’t try to fool Vimeo. If you have a problem with the vimeo quality, just email Vimeo to change their policy back, but don’t cheat.