End of an Era

If you’ve gone to the local Cineplex lately to see a movie, you’ve no doubt noticed a card at the beginning of the feature “Digital Projection by…”

Studios and distributors finally made the decision to phase out distributing film prints. This has impacted the theatre owners, and they’ve converted over screaming and kicking, as the investment to convert a theater over to digital projection can cost between $50,000.00 to $100,000.00, although the norm is about $80,000.00.

Now, it’s not as if this technology is new. In 1999, “Star Wars Episode 1” was digitally projected. My sister and I were among the first 100 people to see this at the AMC in Burbank. What impressed me the most was how clear everything was. The stars in the sky shots were solid points of light, the colors too were much brighter. Unlike when you’d see a film projected at 24 frames a second, you get gate flutter, the slight difference of each frame shifting when it locks in the projector, it makes the image slightly blurry and the colors more muted.

So why did it take 14 years for the theaters and the studios to finally convert to digital?

It actually was a slow process. In 2008 Disney released its first 3D digital feature ”Bolt” and ushered in a whole new movie going experience. And if you wanted to see this feature in 3D you had to pay a premium - that is still in practice today.

But getting back to good ole 35 MM film. A film print is expensive, about $1,500.00 to $2,000. It is shipped heavy film containers, and the modern way of projecting a print is very hard on the film and if it becomes damaged the distributor has to FedEx out a new one to the theater. So if a studio is showing it’s movie in 1,000 theaters, it costs $2,000,000.00 just to get in on a screen.  When studio cuts a deal with a distributor (providing it does not own their own) a big part of the negation is what are they going to pay for P&A (prints and advertising). Sometimes the studio will make that a line item in their total production budget. No deal is exactly the same.

One of many different 33 MM projectors.

In 2001, Eastman Kodak, seeing the writing on the wall, offered a digital projection system (as I recall, using Texas Interments projectors), whereas Kodak would lease the equipment to the theater owners, transfer the film to the digital format and distribute the digital information as well.

Unfortunately for Kodak, the theatre owners didn’t like the idea of leasing equipment from them and the distributors didn’t like the idea that someone else had control over their content.

But one day, some savvy exec at the studio (or more likely some bright up and comer) did the math.

A 200 gigabyte hard drive (the amount of storage you need for a feature) costs about $250.00. That’s $250,000.00 to distribute a 1000 copies, not $2,000,000.00 and you don’t have to worry about the “print” getting scratched or damaged.

Now the Kodak model wanted the distributors to pick up the cost of converting the theaters over to digital as it would be a huge savings for them in the long run. But none of them could even sit down in the same room together, yet alone agree on something like that!

I’m not sure who joined hands and told the theaters that they would no longer be distributing their films on film, but the theaters are converting over very quickly and as of the end of the year, film, as we know it, will pretty much be a thing of the past.

This is troubling to me as more and more features are being shot on digital cameras, it’s edited digitally, conformed digitally and distributed digitally.

How stable is that medium?

We see motion pictures that are over 100 years old as they were able to restore, or just pull a print from the original inter-negative.

What happens if we have a huge solar flare and it wipes all the digital storage devices clean?

Ok, so you can store it on a Blu-Ray DVD. But what’s the shelf life on that? I don’t know.

If I were making a film, sorry a motion picture, I’d shoot it digitally, that saves a ton of dough right there as you don’t need film stock, you don’t need to develop that stock, nor do you have to pull a work print so you can watch dailies the next day, you don’t need the audio transferred over to mag stock so you can sync your work print. A whole lot of $$ are saved below the line, not just in distribution.

But what I would do is have the conformed, color corrected motion picture scanned back to film for good measure, because you know it will keep for another 100 years as long as it’s kept in a cool dry place.

But I’ll miss the old way on set… “Sound ready, Ready! Camera ready, Ready! Roll sound… Speed, roll camera, Speed, mark it… Scene one, take one, clap… and ACTION!”

Those were the days…

Jack's Rant May 14, 2011

Ol' Man River

Banks of the Mississippi

Breached.

Ol’ Man River Dere's an ol' man called de Mississippi

Dat's de ol' man dat I'd like to be

What does he care if de world's got troubles

What does he care if de land ain't free

Ol' man river, dat ol' man river

He mus' know sumpin', but don't say nuthin'He jes' keeps rollin'

He keeps on rollin' along
Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II

Well, Ol’ Man River has done it this time. But this all can’t be blamed on just a lot of water. According to an article by ABC News, we had something to do with it too.

Here’s what they had to say.
As the Mississippi River continues to rise and the threat of flooding moves south with the current many critics of the Army Corps of Engineers are blaming man rather than Mother Nature for the high water.

"This is largely a man-made disaster -- to point it only to rainfall is naive," said H.J. Bosworth Jr., civil engineer and director of research for Levees.org. "Yes, there was lots of rainfall, but there was also lots of development. Every time you build a parking lot or a Walmart you add to the burden of the drainage system and all that drainage goes into the Mississippi River."
Bosworth says many parts of the water system including the levees were built prior to the creation of the fully developed urban areas and that this transition from soil to cement created major problems.

"If the rainfall increased in a forest the forest is going to suck up 90 percent of that rainfall. But if it happens in a urban area the pavement and roofs aren't going to suck up anything," Bosworth told ABC News.

The affect is multiplied on the mighty Mississippi because rivers in 31 states drain into it or its tributaries.

"The rivers need some room and we are getting that message explained very clearly to us year after year. It's time we smelled the coffee," said Robert Criss, professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. "There is a lot of evidence that floods are not only getting deeper and more severe, but also more frequent."
Criss attributes the rise in devastating floods to the continued constriction of the waterways and increased building in vulnerable areas. He says that as levees continue to be built higher it creates water that has enough power to tear through a landscape like a tsunami if the levee is breached, destroying everything in its path.

"What we need instead is a more thoughtful system where we have gates within levees and when we require flood water storage these gates are opened," said Criss. "This will save levees, save farms and rejuvenate soil."

Criss says that when water is released at a massive rate like in Cairo, Ill., when the Corps blasted the levees to flood farm land and save homes, it is a destructive process and the land is often not salvageable.

Both Criss and Bosworth agree that part of the problem is inaccurate assessments by the Corps.
"There are plenty of people living in designated 100-year flood plain areas and by government standards that's more like 10-year flood estimates," said Criss. "Every year is a 10-year flood now or worse. ... In terms of the Army Corps of Engineers' flood statistics I was able to show that there's not one chance in a thousand that their statistics are correct."

Bosworth quipped that a 100-year flood is more like a "once a mortgage" flood.

According to Criss the "fraudulent statistics" encourage people to live in flood plains because based on the Corps' assessment people receive subsidized insurance and other financial benefits.
"We need to start using opportunities when they are available to get people and infrastructure out of the flood plains rather than walling off more of the flood plains," Criss told ABC News.

"Currently, we are putting more infrastructure in the flood plains. We have square miles and square miles of flood plains that are now huge shopping malls or other things."

They Paved Paradise and put up a parking lot; and this is what they get for their trouble. HA!

Jack's Rant February 3, 2011

A s d f j k l ;

Those were the first keys I learned in junior high school typing class. As most of us know, it’s the center row of a key board layout known as “QWERTY” – the first five letters of the keyboard below the numbers.

Almost all of us know how to type on a QWERTY keyboard as it has been the standard keyboard for most civilizations that use the Roman alphabet. What you may not know is that this keyboard was first designed by Christopher Sholes, Carlos Glidden and Samuel Lewis in 1867.

Now the reason for this rather confusing design of keys (one would think that it would have been designed with the most used keys in the center and the least used keys on the edges) was for just that opposite reason; Before the new design of the keys was introduced, the type-writer’s keys would jam if you typed very fast. That, in itself made writing by hand faster than typing on a type-writer (as they were called way back when.)

This invention allowed people to type substantially faster than a person could write by hand, and by 1878, Remington, who had bought the patent, manufactured the first typewriter with this keyboard configuration. The rest is history.

Now, why do I mention this?

I needed to buy stamps today. There is a small local post office near the studio where I work, and I thought I’d drop by there on my way home to pick up some stamps. There was only one employee, Victoria, working this afternoon. There was only one other person in front of me, so I thought I’d be just a few minutes and be on my way.

No such luck. It seems that this person was shipping a few boxes all of which needed insurance, special handling and priority mailing, all of which required Victoria to enter, multiple times, both the sender’s and sendee’s information. Not withstanding the usual unorganized nature of the USPS, Victoria had not learned to type on a standard keyboard. I guess if you work for the post office that’s not required of you if you work the window at one of the thousands of post offices throughout the USA. I guess the USPS never realized that there was a standard for typing, or that it might be important for employees to use such devices, even though it has been around since 1878.

So Victoria hunt and pecked for 7 minutes to ship the first package. I guess they don’t have a copy and paste option on their computers. Or, good old Victoria never learned that option, as it was pretty obvious she didn’t have any typing or computer skills. And we wonder why the USPS is under water.

As the line grew behind me, wrapping into where the P.O. boxes reside, and seeing the number of packages she had to process, I figured I’d be there for another half hour before I could buy my stamps, so I left.

But had the keyboard been laid out in a more friendly matter, even if Victoria had not learned to type, she could have processed the order more quickly.

Now, here’s my point (yes I have one), here is a keyboard that was designed over 130 year ago that is still in use today. Even my iPhone’s keyboard is laid out that way. Almost every keyboard in use today uses this obsolete inefficient design, even though there have been countless keyboards invented that are far superior to the very one that I’m typing on this inefficient one as I write this blog.

But there are many other things that hearken to an erstwhile day. My iPhone has an icon on it for voice messages, its two circles with a line at the bottom connecting the two, as if it were a tape machine. I haven’t used an answering machine with a tape in it for 20 years.

And it’s likely to become the iconic symbol for messages for generations to come that have no idea of what tape is, yet alone where it came from.

I know that there are many other examples of this that I’m not going to bore you with.

And all I wanted to do was buy some stamps, I could have printed them out on line. HA!

Jack's Rant January 27, 2011

Old Man River…

As of January 27, 2011 there are three senators in their 80s, 18 in their 70s, 37 in their 60’s, 31 in their 50s, and only 12 that are under the age of 40 years of age.

I’m speaking as a person in my 60’s, but, these old guys in the senate are OLD! Moreover, they are old and OUT OF TOUCH!

At my age, I have problems keeping up with new technology that changes daily, yet alone the social network that propels it. We need young fresh innovative people in office, not these died in the wool career politicians that have no idea what a Facebook page is, yet alone Snype.

And here we have an electorate whose average age is 61 years old.

These guys are so old that when they fart they pass dust!

What brought this to mind was watching the State of the Union Address earlier this week and looking on a sea of old, worn out (some appearing to have drunk to much) senators and representatives of the people, who have no business representing anyone, other than the retirement community that they should be settled in.

We wonder why Washington is so out of touch with us until we begin to look more closely at who is representing us, and, unless you can’t do the math, it’s electorate from the 20th century who doesn’t understand today’s electronic media. (In fact, some of them are still amazed by the invention of the light bulb!)

When the “founding fathers” formed the new nation, George Washington was 44, Thomas Jefferson was 33 and John Adams was 41. Now one might argue that people didn’t live as long as they do now. The exception was Ben Franken who was 71 and entertaining women of pleasure when in Paris! But the simple fact is the founding fathers were by average under 40 years, unlike today where we have an out of touch congress so obsessed by their own personal gains and profits that they have totally neglected the popular.

I am a baby boomer, and as such we have a huge clout in how Social Security and Medicare is managed. We are all over 60.

But I have to tell you, I don’t think it’s a good idea that the country be governed by a bunch of people my age or older managing the affairs of the younger generation.

They need their own representation. I do not believe that the founding fathers ever thought that one would ever hold a political office more than a few years, as it was their view that this was akin to jury duty; something you did for your country and then moved on.

Clearly, by the looks of the Senate, and to a lesser degree, the House of Representatives, we have career “old fogies” that are not in touch with the modern American dream, nor the mandate of our founding fathers who established them.

If ever there is a time for total over-haul of the people that represent us, it’s now!

Where’s Tomas Jefferson when you need him? HA!

Jack's Rant January 10, 2011

“Second Amendment remedies” – Sharon Angle, a Tea Party candidate for Congress, Nevada

The second amendment gives all Americans the right to bear arms. In this country there are 9 guns for every 10 people. Now that’s not to say that 9 out of 10 people have guns. Many people have several, or an entire armory of guns. Both are rather scary if you ask me. Eluding to “remedies” as using your gun to eliminate anyone who disagrees with your political view is as despicable as Adolph Hitler’s reign of terror in Germany.

Sarah Palin had on her website cross hairs over Democratic members of Congress who she felt didn’t comply with the views of her, or her Tea Party members. Take aim, fire! She does hunt elk after all. We aren’t entirely sure what Dick Chaney hunts, but that’s for another blog.

One of Palin’s cross hairs was over Gabrielle Giffords, Democratic representative in the state of Arizona. And someone did just that this last Saturday. Took aim and fired.

If anything could be said to be positive out of this tragedy is that it has generated a huge national awareness. A mentally disturbed person decided to go on a shooting spree. News at eleven.

The political discourse has become so toxic, including a South Carolina congressman shouting out “You lie” during President’s Oboma’s state of the Union address, that it appears to be a tacit approval for anyone to act in any manner they please without regard to manners or civil behavior.

This last political campaign was by far the most disgusting, vile, unethical campaign season I have ever witnessed in my over forty years of being a registered voter.

Is this what our country has become? So toxic and vitriol that unless you behave as a Visigoth on a rampage that you will not be elected to office?

Or worse yet, follow the campaign slogan of a wanta be politician that it is quite all right to resort to use your “second amendment remedies” if the rest of the electorate doesn’t agree with your view.

Clearly this is anarchy. It is fueled not only by many talk show hosts, but reinforced by not only political candidates and their campaigns but by members of Congress as well.

I ask myself, where does this end? Or is this just the beginning.

Almost 150 years ago this country was engaged in a civil war. Civil, that’s what they called it, but was anything other than civil. Over 618,000 lives were lost during that conflict. It was the worst war ever fought on US soil and more people died in that conflict than in any war that the USA has been engaged with since. In fact, if my facts are correct, lost in any war, prior or since.
Now we are engaged in a national debate that asks the question: has this toxic rhetoric, spoken from any faction, right, left or center, gone too far.

Hello? Has no one been paying attention? The horse is out of the barn! The cat is in the cradle, the wolf is in the hen house!

Yes, this has been TOXIC since the 2008 Presidential campaign.

So toxic that it can not be buried in a landfill, nor can it be sealed in some erstwhile salt mine in Utah. This is unacceptable behavior of our politic. And until our elected officials elect to behave in a civil manner, to one another and to the people who they represent, then we may indeed be engaged in another, much more violent and better armed civil war.

Maybe I need to go to Walmart and rearm myself. HA!

Jack's Rant January 5

News article:

You've probably heard the news by now: Mark Twain is getting an extreme makeover. An Auburn University professor, Alan Gribben, has decided to whitewash the 219 instances of the N-word right out of "Huckleberry Finn," and while he's at it, he's going to remove "Injun," too, for good measure. The new and supposedly improved version is to be published by New South. The impetus behind it? To get the book back into the many classrooms from which it's been banned in recent years.

As I channel Mark Twain once in a while, this is what he said to me…

“Now, upon notification of this news, I must remark, that it is an understatement for me to say that I was less than pleased that someone, yet alone an academic, should take on the dubious task of editing any work of mine for any reason, yet alone “Huckleberry Finn”. I reckon that because of their stature as a member of the educated elite, they have a God given right to edit any work; that they, in their wisdom, chose to do so. But, I must confess, if that is their case, it is a fright to think what else they might focus on their editorial skills.

“Now another might think that this is good idea; as there are many words that offend people today, and I can only speculate that there might be many that might offend future generations. In my own defense, it would be impossible for anyone of my time, other than Jules Vern perhaps, to predict what those words might be. I must admit, that what I have written, in all of my works, is in the vernacular of my time.

“It does, howsomever, make me shudder in my boots in my feet and my thumbs in my vest, to consider what other volumes they might set upon to do the same.

“Censorship, in any fashion is the first step to revising not only the past, but the history therein recorded, fiction or not. For anyone to take it upon themselves to revise, for their own personal taste, is as objectionable and as disgusting as an attorney keeping his hands only in their client’s pockets.

“As having had to deal with many lawyers with their hands in my pockets, I can assure you with total conviction that, although you may conger that it is something as that will not occur again, it becomes as habitual as smoking a cigar.

“My advice, to anyone considering lighting up that fire of taking it upon yourself to revise, for any reason, history, facts, or fiction, is that you douse it down with haste, ash out, and allow another generation to decide for themselves the value of that work, with knowledge of the prior language used in that era.

“If we continue to review the past, as if it is for some future historian to reconsider to their current moral standard, then we are asking of ourselves for a history of untruths.

“As I am recalled to say: ‘when you tell the truth you never have to remember anything’.”

If they only knew the truth to begin with! HA!

Jack's Rant December 24, 2010

The Fact Is…

“Just the fact, please, just the facts”, as Joe Friday was known to say on the popular ‘50’s cop drama “Dragnet”. Facts are an important thing, in particular when writing history.

Fact is, George Washington had 316 slaves living on his estate when he died, at least that’s what’s reported on the Mount Vernon web site.

I have no reason to doubt that of all groups the Mount Vernon society of historians would under report the number of slaves that George Washington owned when he died. But, one asks, who came up with that number. It was likely logged as an asset with someone who was in charge of his estate, and, as slaves were of value for his heirs, proper accounting of all of Washington’s assets were important.

Now, it could be that they grossly underreported the number of slaves. Or over reported. I have no idea. They don’t site a particular document validating that he did or didn’t own.

As a fact, we know that there was housing were slaves lived in Mount Vernon, so the notion that good ole George owned a few seems to be certain. The exact number, I can’t be sure.

So, the facts.

We get to much information these days, it seems, if we chose to look for it. And often many of us, like me, who wanted to know how many slaves Washington owned, turned to the internet.

Pending on the query, the all knowing web can offer up a plethora of choices. Sorting though hundreds of links, you can choose the one that best supports your viewpoint best, even if it’s not true. Who cares.

You have a source that supports your idea even if it isn’t true and therefore you can cite it as fact. Woo hoo!

It seems today you can substantiate almost any claim, true or not. President Obama is not a US citizen, proof on “obamacrime.com”. So it must be true.

Recently a huge amount of uncensored documents have been posted on Wickileaks.org. Now this has put a lot of people in Washington (who was named after the slave owner, by the way) in a thither.

Most of the information, if not all, is classified. Releasing it to the eyes of the public is nothing less than what Richard Nixon went through during Watergate.

God forbid anyone should see the raw data of what solders in the trenches or diplomats were actually communicating about international situations should be allowed to be seen by the American people, or anyone else!

I do not condone Wickileaks for publishing the secured documents. But it speaks volumes about the “facts” of what is actually occurring in our world today. Anyone who is willing to sort though the raw data, told from a field officer in Iraq or the diplomat in Egypt, I believe will soon realize that there is a true story to be told here, and one that is not being reported from our government or any news source you choose to believe..

And then you have to ask yourself. Is it true?

As Mark Twain said “When you tell the truth you never have to remember anything.” When was the last time we heard the truth from the government or the news?

I don’t know. I doubt I ever will.

I doubt that we ever have. And that’s the truth! HA!