dcinput

Bre Pettis is officially a Rocketboom correspondant. Bre used to work for the Creature Shop here in London way before I did but we ended up meeting by chance over the interweb after the Shop closed down. When he came to London with his lovely girlfriend we met up with Kosso and Joe Twist whom I had by chance met previously. Bre is such an awesome guy and is one of the best video bloggers out there. I’m really happy for him!

Mark Nelson: “The use of the JPEG format is becoming so mired in patent snarls that it is quickly becoming an albatross around the necks of any companies doing imaging”.

Mark is worried about people developing things around standards such as JPEG-2000. I don’t know enough about what he’s talking about but something to keep an eye on considering the DCI adoption of the format as its standard.

Lots of interesting digital cinema things happening at NAB. I’d love to be posting about them but I’m just too busy at work. Great coverage over at Digital Cinema Matters. Also daily podcasts from fxguide.

fxguide have anounced their fxphd beta, a sort of online university specifically geared towards the visual effects industry. After registration you become a post grad and attend 3 courses a term of which there are 4 a year. There is a background fundamentals which is compulsory and then you can choose from many courses covering a wide variety of subjects: Toxic, After Effects, Shake, Final Cut Pro, Avid Express etc. You receive one 30 mins training video per week for each course.

“As you work through the video your professor is online to answer questions and guide you. There are practical files to download from real shots and projects- you can then compare your results with the final.
AND running along side fxphd is Creative Jobs Network recuitment - as you develop your reel and portfolio you have direct access to senior post recuiters the world over.”

Another interesting thing about it is that they are distributing the course material using Bit Torrent. It’s great to see some legal uses for this great technology and even better to see people actually trying to make money with it. Another Next Step for Bit Torrent. Class enrollement beguins 1st of May. It may be time to get a new pencil case.

One thing I note is that there do not seem to be any courses covering the more technical/engineering aspects of the industry. The sort of infrastructures that are required to support all the fabulous work that digial artists do are specialist and highly complex. Workflows and their implementation within a company and the management of enormous quantities of data are all very important aspects of the VFX world. It can be hard to find good people with the right skills for these roles.

Digitaler Film has an interesting flash movie thingy of how digital distribution works. It’s in German so no real clue as to what the guy is saying but liking the demo anyway. Here is his site through Google translate.

Avid anounce Avid Interplay: “The world’s first nonlinear workflow engine that fuses integrated asset management, workflow automation, and security control into a single system, delivering a business-wide workflow for postproduction and broadcast settings of any size”. It looks seriously cool. The real question is how well it integrates with 3rd party software. If you end up getting locked into Avid products it wouldn’t be so good.

Want to know what files are being exchanged on the darknets? Check out Peer Mind which lets you see the popularity of music, film, software, games and ringtones on P2P networks. Om Malik explains that although they don’t yet give rankings that include Bit Torrent they soon will as well tracking Fast Track, eDonkey and Gnutella networks.

Om Malik: “Improbable as it may seem, but the bandwidth glut created by the telecom bubble of the late nineties might be coming to an end”.

I’ve just gone through my bloglines feeds and deleted just under half of them. Maybe I’ll sleep easier at night now.

Ever wondered what the inside of the Beeb looks like as you’re leaving? Check Kosso’s sidebar video.

I haven’t been writing much about documentaries recently. In fact since finishing my documentary making course last month I’ve pretty much haven’t even watched any. I do remain hugely interested in documentaries however, which is why I was so happy to come accross a link from loadedpun to a site called iamorlando which finds and makes available excellent documentaries that are on Google Video

Sure is refreshing to see content from a video sharing site that’s a little more serious. The “History of Video Games” one is great. Kind of reminds me of reading “Hackers” by Stephen Levy.

I’ve noticed that my adventures in webland over the last two years have given me the same feeling of interest and excitement as when I was reading this book. It’s almost as if the web itself was a documentary except you get to see events unfold as they happen and, should you wish to, you get to participate in them. If you decide to remain an observer you get to decide the direction of the plot by which links you click on.

I think its high time for a Web 2.0 equivalent of War Games. Anyone want to write a screenplay with me?

Google Video: The Easter Bunny Hates You [violence warning].

Happy Easter everybody! Hopefully you’ve all had a great weekend. Don’t eat too much chocolate…

Chris Bliss’ juggling rocks.

Loaded pun: “A South Korean company has devloped an lcd projector built into photo and video capable cellphones which projects a seven inch display on flat surfaces”. Watching a film on the beach at night could be pretty neat. Can’t imagine the big cinema chains liking this one.

BBC News: “Recent estimates say that around a third of all internet traffic is based around BitTorrent”…”Some ISPs go even further, breaking down customers’ net usage into different types of activity, and discriminating against bandwidth-hungry file-sharers”…”What we’re seeing is ISPs introducing tiered services”.

Frank Gruber analyses the various services that sell online music on TechCrunch in a two part piece. In this first piece he compares pay-per-download services. The next part will look at all you can eat subscription services. The outlook is heavy DRM and an AAC/WMA format war which is bound to end in tears for us users.

Dave Winer: “Instead of thinking of “user generated content” think of the Internet as an idea processor, and you’ll be much closer to the power of what’s going on”.

I’m always looking for different ways of looking at the internet and I like this one. Depending on who you are and what you do the internet can seem like very different things, and it changes over time.

When I first started going online in the early nineties I was pretty impressed but I soon got bored as I realised that really the internet was just a glorified catalogue. Websites were static and they just tended to show you things. You couldn’t really interact. I’m sure there were interesting things going on in the web then but I just wasn’t aware of them.

The web today is a very different place. People of all walks of life all around the globe are able to interact in so many different ways, share things, create things, do business and more. Its incredible that the web has so far met everyone’s needs. The pace of change is accelerating rapidly and the boundaries of what the web is are being pushed in ever more directions. The whole net neutrality issue is somehow related to this. Will the web continue to evolve as something for everyone? It’s an important question.

The web as storage in the clouds: Amazon S3 - Simple Storage Services.

Great audio interview by Dr Jobbs with Amazon’s Adam Selipsky about the new S3 service. I’m starting to see the big deal with this thing. I’m also starting to get some really good ideas for new projects. When you don’t have to worry about storage things could get a lot more fun for developers.

Looks like the Da Vinci Code will get released after all as Dan Brown wins his case at the High Court in the UK. Any publicity is good publicity.
NYTimes: “The authors of ‘Holy Blood’, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, had failed in their effort to prove that Mr. Brown had stolen their ‘central theme’ because they could not accurately state what that theme was”.

Rushi has compiled a great list of links for AJAX newbies and its kind of geared towards PHP programmers. Just what I was looking for.

Techdirt: Universal Pictures are trying to beat dvd counterfeiters at their own game in Russia by selling “cheap ‘n early” dvds at lower cost and quality.

I missed this post on Cinematical last weekend about the upcomming Shrek spin off “Puss in Boots”. I had wondered what had happened to this idea. While I was working at the Creature Shop last year I had a load of fun doing some motion capture tests for this. Due to the fact that cats have weird back legs that bend the wrong way, the physical department, which built the animatronics, had made a special Puss in Boots exoskeleton that a human wore and to which the motion capture sensors were attached. In this way the motion data that was captured would look like it was from a walking cat.

I ended up doing the initial testing for the exoskeleton as I was about the right size and had to prance about the studio with a pretend sword. When it came down to the actual motion capture shoot they got someone else in but I did get to try on the Honey Monster outfit that day too. Brings back such good memories.

Complete coincidence but I’m going to a reunion lunch of the Creature Shop engineering team tomorrow which should be interesting. Damn it’s such a shame that the place closed down.

BBC News: “Hundreds of thousands of people have signed up for new .eu domain name since it became available to the public on Friday”. Damn it some person with my name got the one I wanted. Imposter!

BBC News: “Digital download-to-own is the new holy grail of the film and TV industry as it fights to respond to the twin challenges of piracy and new market entrants”…”However, the consumer must be at the centre of all new strategies and DRM systems that are not sufficiently flexible are doomed to failure”.

Dave Winer: “Why not let me go, quietly and peacefully, I’ll stop writing my blog, I’ll stop developing new stuff, you can be me if you want, I won’t be in your way. How about it?”

Quite appropriate that this should be the first entry in my new blog format. I really hope Dave doesn’t ever stop his blog. I would really miss it. A lot.

The Forbes Billionaires List: Ronald Perelman who recently bought the parent company of where I work is number 94 with $6.1 bn.

Which Muppet are you? The Muppets Personality Test. I’m Gonzo!

Google Mars - you ‘ve got to be kiding me. Hmm Mars sure seems pretty small these days.

Wired magazine reports that “Sweden is one of the worst places in the world when it comes to illegal sharing” due to bit torrent.

OM Malik writes that MySpace is about to release a Messenger service cleverly called MySpace Messenger. I’ve never quite figured out the point with MySpace. I mean sure I have an account (can you guess what the login is?) and sure, trying to get as many hot girls and famous bands as your friends is fun for 10 minutes, but whats the point? It will no doubt be a success though.

The New York Times: “Hewlett-Packard has a mode on its new R-series that it says removes the 10 pounds a camera is said to add”.

Mitchell Szczepanczyk wrote a piece called the “The death of the blogosphere” a couple of weeks back about how big businesses were in the process of creating a multi-tiered internet which will kill “net neutrality” and eventually destroy the web. He was also interviewed on the small WORLD podcast a few days ago about this. The topic has been aproached several times by Adam Curry on recent episodes of the DSC.

I need to do some more research on the subject as to be honest I don’t really understand that side of the argument that well yet. I’m not even entirely sure we’re talking about the same thing. It’s definitely something that could have a major impact on the roleout of d-cinema over the next few years. I’ve recently heard several convincing arguments why a multi-tiered system would help the world of d-cinema. I’d love to hear people’s views on this topic.