Open Hatch

[Update Jun 1st: there were several inaccuracies in this article now corrected, and I’ve added some too - all in bold.]

I just ordered a Canon VIXIA HD30 camcorder - this is a higher end HD consumer beast. I’m excited about it. There are many things I’ll do with it.

I’ve been asking around and doing a lot of research about HD and particularly how it may transfer to film and/or project on a big screen, and I want to say I notice a fairly sharp divide between people who insist video should never imitate or copy to film vs. people who say go for it. What’s odd to me is that folks against it seem to usually describe that as the more realistic or practical approach, or that copying video to film is only “dreaming.”

Well, gee, imagine any film maker dreaming.

I’m in no mood after writing my thesis to cite the sources of facts I present and form my conclusions on. Suffice it to say I believe you could verify these facts.

My take is that in truth it is more practical to go digital if you can. We are in a digital cinema revolution, and physical film stock may always have its place, but the reality is that the blockades to shooting digital film which audiences don’t perceive as different after transfer to film - never mind the options to just distribute digitally increasing every year! - blockades to that quality break down steadily every year.

[Why am I speculating? With a ruler I drew a grid on a post-it note at the resolution of HD - 3 pixels an inch assuming a 30 foot screen - and filled it with alternating black-and-white squares, and looked at it from 40 feet back. There would really need to do be some image processing and projection magic with the way pixels transition into each other to make it look good. Fairly obvious “I am pixels” look at that resolution. But I need to know. I’m looking for sources that give a lot more detail on this, and I’ve also simply got to do real application visual tests on all this theory myself, somehow.]

About digital film projection, I’m going to speculate now. I don’t know how this actually plays out, this is theory, and I’d love to know of the real-world tests that certainly are playing out on these questions. But my speculation is that depending, digitally projected high-definition video could look not only anywhere from sufficiently as good as film to just as good, but better. Consider resolution available from the Red One. Here’s a picture of a 2006 model with some kind of super-exo-death-armature-skeleton-frame thing around it.

………………..

[This section had inaccuracies about the resolution of the Red One when I first wrote it - it’s fixed now.]

It shoots 2k (just over 1080 vertical pixels). That’s a bit more resolution than George Lucas thought was good enough (snobs have turned against him after the Star Wars prequels - yes, I will make that abusive statement, anyone who derides Lucas over his Star Wars prequels is a snob - I have qualms with the stories and writing on Star Wars Episodes I, II, sorta III and totally VI, but IV and V still rock the world, and I give Lucas full faith as a technological pioneer: arguably, he has single-handedly initiated the special effects revolution, and then the digital cinema revolution. Whether he simply vanishes like a good Jedi or makes it to heaven or not, before and if you pass the pearly gates, you’ll at least have to give him a hearty “thank you”.) Never mind that the Red One looks like a Star Wars Tie Fighter or something, and has a name reminiscent of Luke Skywalker flying the Death Star trenches - they have their market down - but it can record 1152 vertical pixels (or rows) at 120 frames a second, so that if projected at the same rate, it’s showing images exactly five times the frequency of standard film. I’ve read of tests going back to the 1970s demonstrating that people see a difference between 24 frames a second vs. 60 frames a second, and 120 is twice the upper range of those tests. I’d think that would probably look brilliant. Or you can do about a five hundred more rows of pixels at 60 frames a second, or again about five hundred more than that (or 2048 rows) at 30 frames a second - still a better frame rate than film. And digital projectors that do this are steadily spreading to theaters worldwide - my dear local Wynnsong has some now

Interesting math: that highest resolution mentioned (4x) has 4,096 vertical pixels, and if you divide that into 30 feet (for the typical height of a theater screen, and that link passes those paramaters into google calculator), and express that in inches, it’s about 8 pixels an inch. The math for x1080 resolution gives 3.333… pixels an inch. How does that look when you’re sitting 30 or 40 feet back (or further) from the screen? Losing detail and size for distance, they’d likely appear a lot finer and closer together I’d think. How does the density of pixels multiply across the visual range with distance? [When I first posted this I wondered if ten inches would shrink to 1, visually, so that what used to look like 3 pixels in an inch would be 30, and whether that would be enough - but no, 300 pixels an inch (or 100 times as many as 3 per inch) would correlate with the usual baseline for digital images.] That would seem like a reasonable baseline they’d go for in apparent density for “digital film”. If the visual density multiplies by about a hundred - would it? - I haven’t done that math or looked it up - but if that were the case then x2 resolution might be effectively 600 dots per inch, and x4 resolution maybe 1200 dots per inch?]

I’ve read of cinema house worries over the fickle and perhaps difficult to manage aspects of digital media, and there may be a lot of kinks and things to figure out with digital cinema along the way - but what do we expect? - it’s a brand new medium. Besides, those kinks will probably be worked out fairly fast. It took a good 60 or 70 years or so to figure out how best to technically work film, but vast improvements with digital film are advancing over stages of years, not decades! Ten years ago nobody would have thought you could buy a camera that shot at 1080 vertical pixels for under a thousand dollars. Three years ago the same camera would have cost several thousand dollars. If the trend continues the same quality camera will be available in a few years for half the price, and a camera twice as good will be available at the same price. Expanding that trend to decades it’s easy that around, say, 2020, teenagers from middle to low income families could be armed with camcorders that shoot at a resolution you can blow up to an IMAX screen - and by then there may be some bid-to-rent digital distribution network in place so that they can show their independent film at a local theatre for costs low enough that independent filmmakers of today might gasp. You can distribute for what cost? That low?

That all sounds like a dream, and it could be, but again, given the way these specific technologies have advanced in the past decade it’s easy they may advance to that stage in another decade. In my book digital cinema has to be the way motion pictures go. (I think high definition and beyond will also radically transform home entertainment.) We’ll still use film a lot, I think, especially for long-term storage because digital storage is notoriously destructible and fickle.

I collected this sound a long time ago while looking for rude sounds for work (no, they opted out of using them - I suppose wisely), but ran across it again today.

This has been really cracking me up. The original is at the freesound project, here. Another amusing one by the same user is “nuclear genocide”, here. It’s not done after the first. Wait - there are long pauses.

I recently acquired Corel Painter X and am falling in love with it. This is a digital watercolor painting I recently did in it. Click this medium size thumbnail to open the full image.

Ah, EARTHBOUND.  Here’s a favorite capture from this Super Nintendo classic.  Clicking the medium thumbnail opens a full size image (which has been processed to look better at a very large size).

The morning after I finished that last one, this one came into my head. It’s similar to other stuff I’ve done (Birds in a Storm) in just building layers and layers and may even follow the same chords (I wouldn’t pretend to know - this is all by ear, point and click.) I’m also pretty sure the chords and melody may be similar to something from one of the Ninja Gaiden games.

(Download mp3, ~3.4MB)

At BYU’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Symposium this January (which I was very delighted to attend), Orson Scott Card gave two addresses. The first was a main address seeking to answer this question:

“Why are Mormons over represented among emerging Science Fiction and Fantasy writers?”

That phenomenon has relatively recently emerged in the history of Science Fiction and Fantasy writing - this has been going on long before Stephanie Meyer’s now great fame (and her work certainly counts as fantasy and science fiction). As an example, the Writers of the Future Contest is a blind contest (I’ve personally dreamed of entering since a teenager - and gee golly, I’m a Mormon! - but I’m still sitting on the seeds of ideas which are germinating) - none of the judges know the identities of entrants, and every year a disproportionate number of winners of the contest happen to be Mormons.

Card’s second address was entitled “Science Fiction as a Valid Literary Genre”. To introduce it he said that every year, articles come out in either Atlantic, or Harper’s, or New Yorker about, as he puts it, “.. why Science Fiction sucks.” In this speech Card completely shredded (in my opinion) the snotty, self-absorbed triteness (my words) of literary fiction and most of all literary fiction writers which the aforementioned magazines (and also elitist literature programs at universities) apparently encourage. I have audio recordings of both speeches, which are both very enlightening, entertaining and to me even moving - but unfortunately my recording of the latter is cut off too soon. However I have a full, cleaned up recording of the former speech, which I here present. Strictly I may not have any authorization to do this, so I’m not giving a download link for this recording, and I want to seriously advertise the symposium and the proceedings; if you like this, you’ll probably like Card’s other address and anything and everything else at the symposium, so please: watch BYU’s web site for news on next year’s symposium, and releases of the proceedings from previous years. Email them via the “contact” link at that page and ask them what’s up and when the proceedings will be published.

Meanwhile, here’s my audio recording of Card’s main address. This is just over 47 minutes.

Update: I slightly revised and expanded this song.

I composed and rendered in a Nintendo sound font the following tune.

(Download mp3, ~3MB)

This is from that game they might have made, and which you should have won, but you didn’t, because they might not have made it. But it might have involved a hero running through fields defeating the forces of evil, solving puzzles pertaining to the salvation of the world, acquiring mysterious relics, conversing with wizards and sorcerers and friendly beasts, and advancing in skill and stages toward defeating the ultimate foe.

You are free to download, copy and use this song for any purpose (see the license in the tag), and I request a link to this page in any redistributions. I don’t demand credit but request it in any commercial re-use.

For a few months this whole blog was down and only recently I just made a new blog here and posted new entries. Well I finally got the entries from the old blog out of the backed up database. What made the blog break? It was auto-installed by a tool at my domain called “Fantastico”, which kept nagging me to upgrade to the latest wordpress for security reasons. I think it was incompatibilities with the style that made everything completely dysfunctional after I upgraded. I couldn’t get it working with other templates either. I don’t know what the deal was. I couldn’t login to the blog admin; I couldn’t do anything. Totally baffling.

It would have been way simpler to use Wordpress’ export feature and just get all the entries in an .xml importable file. How did I get the old entries back from the database? show

This bird quartet was made from recordings of one nightingale duplicated, pitch altered, mixed back onto itself and a “reverb” effect added. (Download mp3 file, 412K) I release this free under Creative Commons Share-alike Attrib 2.0. That means you can copy and use it for any purpose guilt-free, but I’d like credit (though I don’t demand it) in any reproductions/alterations. I made this with a demo for a Cakewalk (or any other audio/music application) plugin I’ve been playing with - an exceedingly cool plugin that does simply miraculous pitch corrections and outright changes. It’s called Melodyne. This version of the plugin (1) doesn’t do what this jaw-dropping video at YouTube demonstrates (a future version (2) of the plugin will) - picking notes out of a chord from a wave recording! - but, like I said, it does its own miraculous things. Fortunately, the plugin demo has very little limitations and allowed me to put together this music. There are odd artifacts from - I think - other very quiet background birds in the recordings that somehow got mixed into the pitch-bending, and who get their volume increased four times for the quartet. I best have done a bypass filter and/or noise cleanup to remove them first, but I didn’t notice them at first and now it’s too late. Or if that isn’t other background birds, there are warbling overtones in choirs of nightingales that emerge when they sing in the Western-style musical scale and classical tradition, which we wouldn’t know about, because we’ve never heard nightingales singing that way. (Just imagine what you can do when any pitched sound can be made a dynamic musical instrument. My imagination is running wild). I also have yet to figure out how to make the plugin alter the timing and length of notes - I could give this more variation and difference in the rhythm of harmonies.

I just wrote the following in a forum for reasons originally completely unrelated to any argument favoring religion.  I’m sure this argument has been made by many who favor religion (though I don’t know that I’ve actually read it anywhere, it has to have been written before), but I like to put it in my own words.

The pure irrationality of religion would be an example of a right-brained or intuitive thing that the left has to accept.  There is no way to logically prove that the dictates of any religion are truthful or valuable, but the fact is that there is an observable cause and effect, manifesting its own reason, in following those dictates.  People do good things based on the irrational dictates of their religion, which cause them to feel good, and live more abundant lives, and, since the dictates of religion can neither be logically proved or disproved, it is worth it to risk that the reasons of religion may be true, not false - because _if_ they are true, then there is something real and valid behind the observable happiness in following the ultimately purely irrational dictates of a religion.  And if they are false, why not follow religious dictates anyway?  What would it hurt humanity, if religion is false, to live lives deluded by the happy imaginations of heaven, if we’re all going to die and obliterate into an unknown nothingness anyway?  An unknown nothingness would be the ultimate hurt; delusions of a happy heaven would be no hurt at all compared to that hurt.  That the thought of an unknown nothingness fills man with fear is proof itself that the makeup of man longs for something beyond this life.  Given that none of it can be proved, and it could be either way, I’d pick a life of either delusions about heaven or experienced knowledge of heaven - I’d pick that over nothing at all, risking that heaven could be real.