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BBC News reports on net neutrality and what Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, has to say about it. “What’s very important from my point of view is that there is one web. Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring”.

It does worry me that the roll out of digital cinema around the globe could contribute negatively in the long run to the net neutrality issue. I’d hate to look back in 20 years and think that I played a part in breaking the web. Dave Winer says that the dark nets are already here, and he’s right of course.

Sorry for the lack of posts this week. I am on a Redhat course this week which is pretty much taking up all my time. It’s linux 9 to 5 and then revison till midnight as soon as I get home for the exam which is on Friday. Exams aren’t much fun and my brain is starting to melt.

DCinemaToday: “Doremi Cinema has been selected by Deluxe Digital Cinema, Capital FX and EFILM London to provide its DMS-2000 DCI 1.0 JPEG2000 mastering station for encoding movies in 2K and 4K formats. The purchase also includes two Doremi DCP-2000 DCI JPEG2000 digital cinema servers”. I’ve been so busy I totally missed this press release. The Doremi server is in the building and hopefully I shall be able to play with it very soon.

Scott Kirsner: “My working thesis about the visual effects business is that, despite the growing number of big-budget movies relying on computer-generated imagery, the ability of “blue chip” visual effects firms (such as ILM, Sony Pictures ImageWorks, Digital Domain, and Rhythm + Hues) to command premium prices will drop”.

Screen Digest: “On the back of the Hollywood studios releasing their technical specification for d-cinema in June 2005, there was explosive growth in the number of d-cinema screens globally during the second half of last year, with numbers doubling in a six month period”. Their report is pretty pricey at $2475 for print and get this, $4950 for an electronic copy.

Great superb article in CNNMoney about John Lasseter: “We have this precious entity that is Pixar. It’s like a living organism, like we had found out a way to grow life on a planet that had never supported it before. We wondered if a deal like this would ruin it all”.

Steve Gibby interviews Jim Jannard founder and chairman of Oakley and RED Digital Cinema about their new digital video camera called simply RED. The camera has been hotly anticipated. It can shoot at 2540p, 4K, 2K, 1080p and 720p.

Mike Curtis gives his thoughts on why this camera exists.

So if you can have a completely digital pipeline from capture to display what’s going to happen to digital intermediate companies? Are they going to have to some up with a new name for what they do?

This evening I’ll be at the CFX Short Film Awards. Looking forward to it.

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.

Happy St George’s Day!

Saint George is the patron saint of England, Georgia, Bulgaria, Portugal, and Catalonia and the 23rd of April is the aniversary of his death in 303. In England it is the National Day.

The legend of George and the Dragon tells the story of a town that was forced to offer a daily living sacrifice to a local dragon in order to get to get to the town spring. As the victim was chosen in a lottery eventually it was the beautiful princess’ turn. Only moments before the princess was gobbled up by the evil dragon, George, who happened to be passing on a white horse, interveened by slaying the dragon, saving the princess. The grateful citezens who had previously been Pagans all converted to Christianity.

NAB 2006 has started in Las Vegas and runs until till Thursday. From what I can remember fxguide podcasts will be doing podcasts or possibly live webcasts during the event. James Cameron, the famed director, will keynote the Digital Cinema Summit on Sunday. Mike Curtis from HD for Indies is there and has already posted very extensive notes for Saturday.

Great interview with Dave Winer on Rocketboom with extended bits about advertising, the history of the personal computer, the holiday season, habits online, the ownership of rss and writing style. I used to watch Rocketboom religiously but I’ve found that since I don’t have pc speakers at work or a video ipod I simply don’t have the time anymore. I need to get back into it though, Amanda makes me smile.

The weather forecast is looking nice in London for the next few days with temperatures ranging from 17 to 20 C [BBC, weather.co.uk]. April showers no doubt though.

Happy 80th Birthday to the Queen!

BBC News: “Buckingham Palace said she had received 20,000 cards and 17,000 e-mails”. Maybe I’ll send one. Anyone know her address?

[Update1: BBC TV News reports over 70 000 emails]

[Update2: BBC Radio 1 reports over 17 000 emails. Maybe I miss-heard]
Royal family contact details. Just in case. Email the Queen here. Looks like she doesn’t give out her email address. Clever girl.

A birthday email to the Queen.

Alexa O’Brien interviews Bob Gibbons Director of Marketing and Communications at Kodak Digital Cinema. Kodak came to the office last year to run a training course. It was really interesting but I couldn’t help feeling weird as we were the people who would be stealing their jobs. Good to hear they are taking digital seriously. At the training this didn’t come accross at all.

DCinemaToday: “Barco and Silicon Graphics announce that worldwide media company Deluxe Labs has installed a Barco DP100 2K D-CINE PREMIERE projector at its Hollywood facility through SGI Professional Services”.

Its nice to finally see some press releases from Deluxe and EFilm considering their considerable input into digital cinema recently which, especially in Europe, has remained under the raidar. I get the feeling that we’re going to be seing a lot of very interesting things from these guys in the near future. Key word in this press release: worldwide.

I’ve had many dealings with SGI in the last few months and I contiunue to be extremely impressed. Whether it be in times of exteme time pressure or periods of technical planning their engineers continue to produce the goods without fail. Their share price may be low right now but sending investments their way at this time might just make you some money in the next few years.

There’s a UK podcasters meet up with Adam Curry and the podshow massive happening in London this coming Sunday (3pm) at the Bricklayers affectionally entitled Curry Club. Great pub by the way. Sign up on the Wiki if you want to come. I’ll definitely be there…sounds like fun. Beer and darts…how could I possibly pass it up? I’ll see if any of the ICSelect crowd want to come down.

It’s also the London Marathon on Sunday so good luck to my two most excellent buddies Laurie Bantin and Tony Uberschar of (among other things) the fabulous Terra Plana. May the best man win. As much as I’d like to be there with you I’ll be in a far more sensible place: the pub.

Check out these most superb Terra Plana shoes.

LATimes: ” Historically, the porn industry has adopted new technologies more nimbly than Hollywood”.

DCinemaToday: “The QuVIS Digital Cinema System™ is part of the QuVIS Digital Cinema Solution, which includes the QuVIS Acuity™ and QuVIS QuStudio™ for post production, mastering, and content management, including encryption, secure distribution and key management. QuVIS QuShow™ provides screen management of content for in-theater scheduling and show playlist management; either standalone, or in conjunction with an existing system”.

I am mainly linking to this article from the New Yorker because I haven’t finished reading it and I want to go back to it later. It’s about possible US plans to attack Iran. Pretty scarry stuff.

It’s great to see that my old University Imperial College supports RSS! One for news and one for events.

Looks like Universty College London, where I did my Masters, has one for news too! It’s a little harder to find but it sure is there.

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”.

DCinemaToday: “Twentieth Century Fox International, chose Nordisk Film’s digital screens for their first ever international release in JPEG2000. A dubbed and a subtitled master of “Ice Age 2” were prepared and distributed by Deluxe in conjunction with Éclair Digital Cinema. The film opened successfully on 3 digital screens today, including, the Imperial, the largest venue in Scandinavia (1100 seats)”.

More coverage of the same event on Digital Cinema Matters and The Hollywood Reporter.

Cinematical reports that the court cases against The Da Vinci Code might not be entirely finished as religious groups in Korea have filed an injunction against the film’s release there saying that it “may disparage and insult the divinity of Jesus Christ,” and could also lead to confusion if viewers “believe that [the] fictional tale is historical fact”.

BBC News: “Shares in Walt Disney have risen on news the US entertainment group plans to offer some of its most popular TV shows online for free”.

Many on the web react to the news with aprehension as the topic makes the top of memeorandum.

Steve Jobs can’t be too happy about losing out on the sales of these downloads he’s recently been getting. In the words of a certain Disney majority shareholder as he looked at the market “you win some, you lose some”.