Let’s be clear here: I’m not talking about a mutual friend, a coworker, a family member or a member of your social graph coming over to stroke your aluminum and glass baby. Those folks can play all they like. I’m talking about complete strangers who want you to sell them on the iPad just because they noticed you had one. On the subway, in a cafe, standing on the street; strangers have shown no mercy in their quest to learn more about this “magical” non-computer computer.

Enough. I’ve had it. Here is a guide to avoid making iPad users uncomfortable, surly and want to go home and write a blog post about how much you suck.

1. Don’t Ask if I Love My iPad

I do love my iPad, for a number of reasons, but they are probably different from yours. I don’t love your wife, but I’m sure you think she’s the tops.

2. Don’t Ask Me What I Use it For

That’s none of your beeswax.

3. Don’t Mention “I’ll Get the Next One”

If you’re jazzed about the iPad 2, which doesn’t exist, then don’t ask me about my iPad. You’re making two social blunders when you bring this up: 1) You’re wasting my time because you don’t actually give a crap about the iPad and 2) you’re passing a judgement on my early adoption.

4. Don’t Tell Me About Your Kindle

I had a Kindle and I returned it, but that’s not the point. I don’t care about your Kindle, and you don’t care about my iPad. Haven’t we covered this?

5. Don’t Say “Sorry to Interrupt You”

Just don’t interrupt me.

• @repressd Whoops! Good job! Too many to read, great minds think alike.. Chew on this: Bedtime for Garbonzo #filmfoodeating NOW I’M DONE!
• My final #filmfoodeating Spider-Flan, Grouperman, Cat on a Pot Pie Roof, Beauty and the Feast, Cracker, Gumbo, Free Chili, Meat Streets
• Oklahomefries! #filmfoodeating that one’s for you @deadcenter
• Canard Boiled #filmfoodeating addendum to John Woo Edition
• Lard Target, A Feta Tomorrow, Face Froth #filmfoodeating John Woo Edition
• Purple Chrain #filmfoodeating @kashrutnews @Jewishtweets I know you’ll get this.
• Spinal Frappe, Henry Portrait of a Cereal Killer, Boureka (baraka), Black Nar-tzimis, Gentlemen’s A-quiche-ment #filmfoodeating
• Passion of the Slice, Greatest Story Jello Mold #filmfoodeating Jesus Edition
• Fiddler on the Stew, The Cholent (the chosen), Lentil #filmfoodeating Jewish Edition
• Husbands and Chives, Shadows and Nog, Brine and Misdemeanors, Bananas #filmfoodeating Woody Allen Edition
• Wages of Pear, Á Bout de Soufflé, Elevator to the Shallots, The Seventh Veal #filmfoodeating @CRITERION Edition
• Last Bite at McCool’s, Lawrence of Arrabiata, Cakes on a Plane, The Graviator, Meringues of New York, I Am Ham #filmfoodeating
• While You Were Eating, Juarassic Tarte #filmfoodeating contributed by my twitterless girlfriend
• Leaving Lox Vegas #filmfoodeating this one is sort of a repeat, but I couldn’t resist.
• Guacstoppers, Blue Chips , Leaving Manchego, Vicky Tortilla Barcelona #filmfoodeating
• You’ve Got Kale #filmfoodeating
• Detroit Guac City #filmfoodeating that ones for you @NachosNY
• Bakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo #filmfoodeating
• Gourd of the Rings #filmfoodeating
• I don’t know why this is trending, but I love it #filmfoodeating Schindler’s Grits

And if you’re reading this paragraph, it means that wordpress code works over email too. Hooray! Happy blogging, and chag sameach to my Jewish friends in the blogosphere.

But now it’s NAB 2008. So you’d think maybe this Red thing would pick up and start getting adopted.

Nah.

“Screw 4K, let’s build a 5K camera” said Jannard and his cohorts. “Hell, why not build a 3K ‘pocket cam’ while we’re at it?” This bravado from such a young company comes thanks to the advent of vaporware. For those unfamiliar, let’s get a deinition on that one:

va·por·ware [vey–per-wair]

–noun Computer Slang. a product, esp. software, that is promoted or marketed while it is still in development and that may never be produced.

The concept of vaporware is very simple. Say you can build something, get people jazzed about it, then hopefully follow through on the promise. Oh yeah, get their money in the meantime. Now, this is a good business practice. I believe in giving innovators the money they need to get their ideas off the ground. After all, you can’t invent without capital, and aspiring minds should be as unburdened with financial woes as possible.

Which is why Red is such a fascinating company. The major camera manufacturers have their hands tied by trying to create so many damn things that innovation is a much muddier process for them. The pro video market isn’t so big, and ever since the XL1 came out like a decade ago, they’ve spent most of their energy getting cameras into “prosumers’” hands. What this means in the end is that even Sony and Panasonic can’t get out of the ditch their in because prosumers, those videographers trying to get a cam for under $10,000, are driving the market. So the idea that a startup could enter the industry without all that baggage intrigued many. Such a company, with the capital to back it, could really shake things up, and create much-needed competition in the high-resolution acquisition market.

But where is the elusive Red Camera?

Some say Soderbergh has been retooling it for the company. I don’t have any proof of this, though Mr. Soderbergh has shown considerible interest in the camera. Being that they shipped in November of 2007, it shouldn’t be expected that they’d be an industry standard by now, however, it is rather disconcerting that
hardly any work has been shot on them.

I have been one of the lucky few to see some footage off of the camera (secrets secrets), but it’s hard to judge what it really looks like, since I saw a highly compressed 1080p downconvert from the 4K original. And with that we hit upon the fundamental problem with 4K aqcuisition: there is currently no way to watch 4K video. unless you print it out to 35mm film, the advantages of the format are nebulous, at least in 2008. Even a downconvert should still benefit from the added resolution of the large “Mysterium” chip, but my trained eye (I look at video and film all day long) couldn’t see a real advantage to the latitude of the 4K format. In other words, the Red One seems to be plagued by the same problems as other HD formats. But like I said, I am yet to see a raw 4K projection of Red footage.

My gripe isn’t with the Red One. I’m more concerned about their new cameras, the 5K Epic and 3K scarlet. The 5K Epic will go for $40,000 when it comes out in “early 2009″, and the 3K Scarlet will run under $3,000 around the same time. The former will be big brother to the Red One, building upon its innovations. The latter is a “pocket-camera”, like a fatter Canon HV10 with a 2/3″ Mysterium sensor in it. A few points and then I want to wrap this rant up. First off, Red will give you a full refund for a Red One when you buy an Epic 5K. Wait, what? What does that sound like to you? To me, it sounds like the Red One, which hardly anyone has adopted yet, is already obsolete. Hold on, let’s chill back here and analyze.

THE RED ONE IS OBSOLETE. When it shipped, the Red One body cost $17,500 sans lens, grips, or any kind of VTR or Hard Drive system. While not chump change, it was still cheap enough to justify a revolution. The epic 5K will cost more than twice as much with the same limitations. Panasonic offers cameras at a similar price point, which makes one wonder if Red can really compete, though their cams top out at 1080 HD.

Now, as for the Scarlet, who needs this camera? It’s incredibly expensive for a system with a fixed lens. I can go on and on about this so I’ll be brief. The beauty of the Red system was that it had interchangeable lenses and only what you needed to make digital cinema possible. The Scarlet seems to throw all the limitations that the big boys have been holding us back with for years into a sexier little body.

But this is all academic. Because these cameras don’t actually exist yet. Will they ever? Or will they get lost in the silicon heaps of vaporware.

Mr. Jannard, please please deliver on your promises of revolution. We can only drink the kool-aid for so long.

As many of you may know, Robert Zemeckis has been on a mission for most of his film career. A student of Spielberg’s (read P.T. Barnum’s) school of larger-than-life-cinema thought, Mr. Zemeckis has made a point of utilizing cutting edge technology in nearly all of his films. In this sense, among others, he has left a prolific footprint in the annals of film history.

His Back to the Future series pushed our imaginations to a new limit, while his Who Framed Roger Rabbit? changed the possibilities of live actors mixed with animated characters. (Remember that last film, it’ll be important shortly.) Toning down the kid in him, he earned an Oscar for his American opus, Forrest Gump, the first film to take advantage of the more realistic possibilities of digital technology. When you sit and think about it, the scope of his contributions is far-reaching.

Unbeknownst to many of us, Mr. Zemeckis has been working on a major film experiment. It’s unclear for how long the man has been considering this, and it is even fuzzier to anticipate when the project will come to its complete fruition. Ultimately, he envisions a cinema where you can put everything, in place after your actor is done giving his performance. Uhh, what?

For those who missed it, his 2004 The Polar Express was an animated holiday feature starring Tom Hanks in a number of starring roles. The revolutionary bit though was the fact that, besides the fact that each cartoonish incarnation of Mr. Hanks bore varied resemblances to the man, was that the action was actually captured directly into a computer off of his face. For a frightening sight, check out some behind the scenes shots of Forrest Gump himself with a face full of yellow motion capture balls. (In short, the technology captures the movement of brightly colored balls into a compute, which is then turned into an animated character.)

It’s not that motion capture, or mo cap for those who speak biztalk, is such a new and groundbreaking idea. The technology itself goes back a good 20 to 30 years, depending on who’s counting. The incredible Andy Serkis took the concept to a new level with his portrayal of Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, a feat he duplicated with wild finesse playing the title role of the same director’s King Kong. In 2003, director Ang Lee offered his own expressions to Bruce Banner’s digital alter ego in his own Hulk. But in each of those instances, and the more recent appearance of Savion Glover’s phenomenal dance moves in Happy Feet, the actor was wholly altered to create something new. The actor has been but one tool in the animator’s kit, which is then covered in paint, fur, and deformity (compared to the human actor).

Not so for Zemeckis.

The same year as The Polar Express, one-hit-innovator Kerry Conran released his Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, a film created nearly entirely in a computer. There are real actors in it, but that’s about as far as the reality goes. Everything else (sets, props, extras) was generated within a computer. The idea was simple, to give the filmmaker limitless imaginative possibilities, and limit the difficulty of securing elaborate locations by filming everything in the comfort of your own green screen. Zemeckis is looking to one-up the Conran concept, which was at once ahead of it’s time and behind it. While a whole film had never been done in that manner, the green/blue screen technology has become a tradition in cinema over the past 40 years, 80 if you consider that rear-projection is essentially the same idea.

Try for a minute to get into Mr. Zemeckis’s state of mind. You could show up to your set, and go through the whole script with a single actor over the course of just a few days. There are no costumes, no makeup, no boom poles flying about; none of the traditional interruptions that get in the way of a director and his actor. Essentially, you are going to a rehearsal, except this time, everything is being “shot” and will be used in the final film. Everything else, right down to the camera placement and lighting, is done later in a computer. There is limitless autonomy. Wish it were raining? Want it to take place at a different setting? Think your main character would look better with a beard? No problem! Fix it in post will take on a new meaning.

This is where Beowulf will come into play. The film is entirely computer generated from mo cap work of recognizable stars, who look just like themselves in computer form. The AMPAS is in a tizzy over what to consider the film, as mo cap work blurs the lines of animation, as well it should. Our perception of what is real and what is not will once again be rocked, even if this particular film is not the one to do it. With a healthy amount of decades left for Mr. Zemeckis, I imagine he will one day achieve a look that appeases his need for control and meets the audience’s watchable standards.

Ultimately, Robert Zemeckis is finding ways to limit the collaborative process and increase the power of the auteur. With that in mind, I’ll invoke my favorite anecdote on the subject:

Sidney Lumet claims to have once asked Arthur Miller why he chose to stick with a career in theater, given that his early novel “Focus” possessed every bit as much of his scribe talent as his plays. Why give up the autonomy of the novel for the process of the theater? Miller valiantly responded that he loves seeing what others could bring to his work that he may not have seen.

So it bears the question, left to his own devices, would a Robert Zemeckis film be worth watching?

Only time will tell.

That’s right. I’m talking about the Blu-Ray HD DVD format war.

Just this week, the armed forces’ favorite filmmaker, Michael Bay, aired his frustration over Paramount’s dropping of the Blu Ray format. While the rest of us banded together to simply label him a douche, as has now become common suffix for Mr. Bay, tantamount to Esqire. But the overpaid moron’s statements seems to be a reflection of what’s going on in the media industry in general right now. See, the whole concept of digital delivery is incredibly new to us, and the growing pains are drawn out and, quite frankly, awful.

So there are 2 amazing formats out there which have been started by various companies, Sony being the big cat in the Blu-Ray camp up against Toshiba’s rabid dog over at HD DVD. The tech specs on the actual formats are extremely confusing, but it mostly boils down to the same thing. They are both incredibly secure (though hackers have already gotten through to rip them) and both offer different flavors of sweet scripting, so you can write mini programs for some sweet special features. Both have extremely high capacity and thus, here’s the one we care about, can hold full frame HD media in progressive scan.

For those aware of HD’s 20–30 year history (depending on who you ask), you know that the fight to bring HD where it is today has been an ugly uphill battle, much of it involving negotiations with the FCC and other governmental agencies. If you consider how long the format has been around, you’ll see that it’s ridiculous how long things are taking. It’s nearly 2008 and still, few providers offer more than a dozen HD channels. We already have 720p TVs crossing well below $1000 and 1080p on their way, it is in fact conceivable to get HD into every Americans’ home. The Europeans may not have as many networks as us, but they’ve already got their shit together in the HD world, offering tons of cool content and televisions that we are yet to enjoy.

But that’s a different story. We’re here to talk about optical media.

The amount of titles available in these formats is enough to get a collection started, but the issue for us end users is picking a format. You don’t want to get the wrong one and then have all these titles, then have to repurchase them later. Sony should have been the declared victor by now, but a lot of things happened to keep Blu Ray down, much of it Sony’s fault. The biggest fluke was the Nintendo Wii, which has been killing the PS3 in the market. No one saw it coming. Sony has been reciting their mantra of function over form in regards to graphics performance and HD output, and Nintendo slipped right under their radar with a superior gaming experience.

For those not keeping score at home, the PS3 was setup by Sony to be the HD DVD killer. The PS2’s popularity was so great, Sony figured for the money you’d get a top of the line gaming system and a Blu Ray player, stock up on media, and forget about the competition. But anyone who’s ever used the PS2’s DVD player knows that it sucked…a lot. Beyond that, people are much happier shelling out $200 for a Wii than $600 for a PS3. The amazing part of it all is that the Wii is beating them EVEN THOUGH they are incredibly hard to find. After the PS3 mixup kept HD DVD alive, we’ve moved to our current state, with players being overpriced on both sides, making the decision to convert even more frustrating.

In the world of post production, where I spend my days and nights, this frustration is 10-fold, because we work with HD content all the time and have to deliver to our clients either cost-prohibitive tape or a standard def DVD. We’re in the process of testing Blu-Ray software, but it almost never comes out right. The only other option is to drop $25K on one of only 2 legit Blu-Ray authoring programs. The second is $50K. Why not go HD DVD then, you say, since Apple’s DVD Studio Pro supports it? Well, burners aren’t available in the US. So the confusion drags on ever longer, much longer than the Beta/VHS war went on.

Don’t forget, this format has been around over 2 decades and just now it’s gaining legitimacy. We’ve already begun inventing 2K workflows and the first 4K plasmas will make their way to the pro market soon. By the time the dust settles on HD, which I sorely hope will be in 2008, we’ll already be on to the next thing. Let’s hope we can pick up the pieces of standardization the next time around and not screw the public.

—

Listening to:

Paul McCartney

Chaos and Creation in the Backyard

That’s right, America’s favorite wire-tapped mayor of the most dangerous city to live in (how many murders so far?) is chillin’ in an iLine. Looks like not all Lame Ducks have to be all that lame. So I’m off, folks, to join the line. I’ll give 5 hours of my life to the off chance I’ll get a sweet phone. Bringing a book and a play, and my laptop and plenty of CocaCola. Visit me at the 5th Ave. Nuthouse to see Jon before iPhone, which may be totally different from Jon after iPhone. Rock on kids, and here here to capitalism.

—

Reading:

Andrew Neilson

Stitching

Ever since, I’ve become a huge Apple fanboy, with my ear close to the tracks. Those of you who know me know that my hero is Steve Jobs, and my favorite TV movie is Pirates of Silicon Valley. Now, lately, the internet (read the world) is abuzz with talk of Apple’s latest creation, the iPhone. There is a lot of heated debate over it. And there is one very common argument that is really pissing me off that I’d like to share.

iPhone and Apple critics wont shutup about the fact that Apple is just building up a product that isn’t so revolutionary. They’ll say that you can’t shoot video with it, or no Flash, or touch screens have been around awhile, or any number of things that the iPhone can’t do. Then, to the fanboys like myself, they’ll say we’re just caught up in a marketing scheme, that we’re brainwashed by the Jobs Machine, in fact that whole world has been brainwashed. Then it turns into an argument of how there are better mp3 players than iPods and Macs just have pretty casings with crap inside, blah blah blah.

So here’s my answer to all of you, if you ever happen upon my humble blog: So what? Who cares that Apple has a die-hard following? We’re not brainwashed. They have great marketing! We stand here on the eve of a revolution, the release of the iPhone. Now, whether or not it is a revolutionary device is at the center of these debates, but no one realizes that the device has nothing to do with this revolution. Have you ever seen this hype over a gadget? The answer is no. This is bigger than Halo 2, bigger than PS3, bigger than, hmmm, Windows 98? The “damage” is done. The revolution happened. The iPhone is already a success because it made people so excited about a product that none has ever gotten this jazzed about. The precedent is set, and now gadget releases, we will see more and more, will be like movie releases. Hit ‘em hard and fast, then make a sequel!

Anyway. Tomorrow I’ll get in line with the rest of the nutcases (read enlightened) and hand over my money to the revolution.

—

Watching

ER

Third Season

Kudos to Blanford, who in this month’s AC (June ’07) while talking about screening 35mm dailies, says “‘If your movie is going to be projected from a film projector, you need to see what that’s going to look like so there won’t be any surprises…At some point in the future, when we’re just doing digital projection, we should be looking at our films digitally and projected big.’” While it’s not like he discovered plutonium or anything, but it’s a decent enough statement. Of course, we are projecting digitally on some level, so what’s a DP to do? Get a previz vehicle loaded with 35, 4k, and everything in between. Sounds Great!

And speaking of vehicles, last night kicked off Bryant Park’s summer film festival. This is when throngs of people stuff themselves into the park to watch a film they can just barely hear. Imagine the drive in with no cars. This year’s opener was, you guessed it, the namesake of this blog: Annie Hall. Such Small Portions is the punchline to the film’s opening joke for those who aren’t keeping score. As for the vehicle I mentioned earlier. There is this sweet silver old timey camper loaded with full 35mm projection in it that parks itself in the middle of Bryant Park and projects the films all summer. It was great. They even showed a Merrie Melodies short and a print of the old HBO Feature Presentation into (where the stars are shooting in a circle around the O, from the early days of cable kids). It was great experience, but it also made me appreciate why we pay money to sit in a dark sound proof room for these things.

—

Listening to:

Phil Collins

No Jacket Required