December 05, 2005

• Some viewers got motion sickness when viewing the video image. This was due to the fact that the image was so close to reality. Yeah... reality makes me sick too.
• What's the point of this? It requires massive amounts of storage, huge bandwidth, incredibly expensive equipment, and makes people ill. The boffins should be working on solving the important problems, like why, whenever I've spent an evening drinking heavily, I wake up the next morning with my shoes on.
• Solution: Don't wear shoes.
• Then my feet get dirty when I'm stood out in the street, haranguing my neighbours.
• If it was a proper night of drinking, you'd wake up the next afternoon with someone else's shoes on.
• Sounds perfect for this show.
• It has been said (was it discussed here?) that $40 a month buys a residential 100Mbps fiber-broadband connection in Japan. Maybe they're just looking for a way to justify all that capacity. The Japanese pioneered analog HDTV back in the 1980s. Analog HDTV also seemed like a rocket to nowhere - it required insanely expensive equipment (for both producer and consumer), gobbled up huge chunks of increasingly scarce radio spectrum, and faced an extremely serious chicken-and-egg problem. Toward the end of the 1980s, it became clear that a digital system could be superior in some important ways. Even if this thing never leads anywhere, the development effort could discover some things along the way that may ultimately prove beneficial for more mundane systems as well. Perhaps Japanese corporate culture is more open to that sort of possibility.
• This thread is useless without video.
• What's the point? Sony (NHK is related to sony)...develops High end stuff...for broadcast, which filters down, and down...and ends up making them tons of money in the consumer marketplace. 5 Megapixel still cameras @$250. DV cameras @ $500, HDV cameras @ $5K. HDTV @ $700. You do know that a full HD camera runs $60-70k without a lens? This is all about consumer driven business.
• BTW, if this was 16 to 32 bits per channel, it'd be about the same resolution of film (which is 4k x 4k)
• filmgeek!
• I just read filmgeek's bio. You're a professional film editor? That rocks!
• Higher res can't come soon enough. I can't wait for my Esper Machine.
• My main impression can best be summed up by a potential Onion headline: "Earth Runs Out of Atoms To Store Data For New HD Format"
• some wander by mistake -- read Asterix and Caesar's Gift. Seeing how the drunken son comes into his father's house may explain a few things. (And excellent login name, btw.)
• Think of the por...man you think actors are upset by how they look on HDTV now. Wait till this comes out.
• I am reminded of a Russian archaeological exhibit where the artifacts were too valuable to send trucking all over the world, so they made high-resolution holograms of them. The holograms were so accurate that you could put them under a microscope and not realize you were looking at film and not a 14th century cross or whatnot. I searched for a link but am unable to find one. This was at least 10 years ago.
• Seems like there could be some use for this in medical imaging. Not sure what that would be, but I'm sure there is a use.
• Seems like there could be some use for this in medical imaging porn. Not sure what that would be, but I'm sure there is a use.
• I know what that would be.
• Sounds like you need this, rocket.
• What's the point? Sony (NHK is related to sony)...develops High end stuff...for broadcast, which filters down, and down...and ends up making them tons of money in the consumer marketplace. NHK is a Japanese government broadcaster. It's funded by the taxpayers. However it has had a hand in supporting domestic industry. JVC, Panasonic, Toshiba, Ikegami and Sony have all been given a boost (and R&D money) by NHK. The result as you said filmgeek, is the trickle down of technology to the consumer. As a by-product, one-time giants in the American broadcast technology market RCA and Ampex, have effectively crushed out of existance by the Japanese competition. Yeah and that lens for the HD camera...$25-30k. It's all about parting us from our money.
• If it's the same resolution as film, why should the actors look any worse?
• it's a weird and complicated question why film is "better" than video and maybe always will be. Some of it is depth of field and richness of color, which no video camera (barring Lucas's zillion dollar ones) has come close to matching yet. Video actually looks more like what the eye sees, and in the case of narrative film, this isn't a good thing- film looks like imagination, or at least we've been conditioned to think it does- it takes you into another world. Video cues you to think "local news" or "home video" - when the filmmaker is trying to create a different world and make you think the actors are really different people in that world, this isn't good. The thing about the actors "looking bad" is new to me. But maybe we are talking about the reciever here- even if "Friends" was shot on film, on your regular TV its only 640x480 pixels or whatever. Now if all of a sudden we go up to 1000s of pixels, we can see every crater in their faces, I would imagine. As a semi-professional filmmaker, I would just add that i spend a lot of time trying to make video not look like video and thus clarity is not necessarily my friend.
• DISCLAIMER: I am not a very techincal filmmaker and never went to film school, so some of the above may be total bullshit in terms of the terms I used. But I think most people would agree with me on the basic points re: film vs. video.
• But film is blown up to much much larger than a HD tv, and the craters don't show. Though what you say about the video/film difference may be the significant factor there.