"Club Penton" - Ask questions to Hollywood insider "Penton-Man"

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Jeff Kleist

I saw it theatrically. Great shoot up of the Gugenheim (sp?)

Guggenheim (3 g’s BTW) < I learned to type like that from “1 s” Esox.

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by juanell

What jeff said! I saw it last week. Tom Tykwer does not pass up an opportunity to put great architecture on the screen. I was asking about the master if you've seen it. How bout this, at least tell me which scenes were shot in 65mm? Please sir:-)

In total, about 7 min. worth.

Specifically, the first and last sequence of the film, as well as all the wide panoramic shots (such as the scene overlooking the Port of Istanbul) and a few other specific scenes.

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by sharkshark

Penton, how good were your seats? Or were you behind Winslett's dad's hat, unable to see the stage?

Between the famous folks and the guy that whistled loudly.

[SquidPuppet]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

You got it.

Yep. Need a pic though.

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by sharkshark

...nice to see others shouting kudos to Muchausen's excellent doc. It's not a Sony property, but I've got to give a shout out to what I think is a tragically underappreciated disc, namely, Zodiac. Launched at the end of the so-called war, it certainly has suffered I think from a lack of momentum.

I loved the film, but the documentary is just jaw droppingly great - Errol Morris like, the interrotron interviews are astounding intimate. Most incredibly, the documentarians actually connect dots that neither the film nor the original police investigation was able to do, as the making-of crew were seemingly among the first to tie these disparate elements together. You literally feel like you're seeing history being made while watching the making of a film. If there's a hell for gormless EPK fluff, there's a large space in heaven for the Zodiac and the peerless team (under Fincher's usual dude, David Prior, no?) that puts that masterpiece together. Seven, Panic Room, Fight Club... nobody can say that Fincher doesn't give value and context to his flicks. Zodiac, and Munchausen along with it, are certainly discs that should be used to hit those "I never watch extras" cretins over the head with. IMHO, of course.

And, yeah, Legend's woman certainly has respelendent bazoombas:



Impressive effects, I hope they look real in person.

Penton, how good were your seats? Or were you behind Winslett's dad's hat, unable to see the stage? And did your stomach get kinda twisted in nots when the screen didn't open during the opening film sequence?

^
There's your pic. Looks to me like it was captured somewhere along the looooooooooooooooong red carpet.

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by juanell

What jeff said! I saw it last week. Tom Tykwer does not pass up an opportunity to put great architecture on the screen. I was asking about the master if you've seen it. How bout this, at least tell me which scenes were shot in 65mm? Please sir:-)

See my post on the last page.
I'll add that the 35mm. stuff got a 2K scan and the 65mm. stuff was scanned at 4k.

Gotta run.

[Doctorossi]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

I'll add that the 35mm. stuff got a 2K scan and the 65mm. stuff was scanned at 4k.

That's a shame. They really ought to be scanning at 4k and 6k, respectively, IMO.

[Jeff Kleist]

All I know is that International deserves to be making $41 million 1000x more than Madea goes to Jail Can anything stop Tyler Perrry before it's too late?

[Bobby Henderson]

Originally Posted by Grubert

That'd look nice but also would be impractical. It has been found that sans serif fonts (Helvetica or Futura) are the easiest to read in the limited time the subtitle is on-screen.

Type design is more complex than that. Legibility and appropriate theme/style have to be balanced against each other.

If it worked in absolutes and higest legibility was the only concern then the subtitles would have to be set in Clearview Highway -which would make for a rather industrial looking reading experience. Not exactly appropriate in visual terms for a lot of movies.

BTW, Helvetica is not a very legible typeface at all in terms of sans-serif families. More open, humanist families like Frutiger and Myriad are have greater legibility. However, again, they're not appropriate for every use.

Foundry quality serif type families, such as Garamond Premiere Pro have various "optical" weights that are balanced in terms of point size. A caption weight is legible at small sizes. Given the fact we read words as whole shapes rather than letter by letter, and we're dealing with HDTV screens showing between 1 and 2 million pixels, certain serif faced fonts would work just fine.

Originally Posted by Jeff Kleist

The problem with the player-generated fonts is the greatly variable quality of them, a big reason why no one is using them

If the BD players supported a scalable type standard, possibly through Java for instance, it would be possible for the movie disc itself to load a limited, tasteful choice of fonts for subtitles -as well as how the type is colored or decorated (outlined, drop-shadowed, etc.). That could work in addition to the "bad" choices of type end users would possibly load into the player. If such a thing were able to work one would have to put some serious limits on the function -mainly keeping someone from loading a 1000 funky fonts into the machine.

[Jeff Kleist]

BD Players are all required to support this, but it's more of a question of how well it's implemented. Better to use TIFF subtitles where QC can be constant is the way the studios see it.

[Brain Sturgeon]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

And who won everybody’s Hottie of the Night Award?
My vote went to the girlfriend of John Legend
https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/movies.php?id=377

who, in IMHO was one of the most phOtOgenic women there.
Did any broadcast HD cameras capture her action(s) for home viewers?

Christy Teigen is certainly fine, but my votes (taking fashion into account) have to go to Tina Fey and Anne Hathaway:




Dayum.. they's fine... The Zac Posen and Armani are perfect on them...

Speaking of phOtOgenic (or not) what was up with Sarah Jessica Parker and Goldie Hawn. They seriously need to get those things under control-- it looked like they were going to take someone out with those things. Definitely NOT attractive...

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Doctorossi

That's a shame. They really ought to be scanning at 4k.....

Do you like Salt with your meal?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0944835/

If all goes as planned, "they" will.

[4K2K]

Originally Posted by Jeff Kleist

BD Players are all required to support this, but it's more of a question of how well it's implemented. Better to use TIFF subtitles where QC can be constant is the way the studios see it.

If Blu-ray players came with a high quality speech to text and language translation chip, couldn't the players generate their own subtitles with whatever font, size and position the user wanted, based on the actual audio from the movie (though it would probably be hard to make those chips make accurate titles)?

[Josh]

Back in 2005, Sony announced that 'Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle' would be the first Blu-ray produced.

At CES 2008, Sony heavily promoted the 'Godzilla' Blu-ray release, and it looks to finally be getting release in March - in the UK!

In one of their first announcements, Lionsgate announced that they would bring 'Pi' and 'Requiem for a Dream' to Blu-ray. MIA.

I could go on, and on, but what is the deal with delayed titles? Sometimes they are heavily promoted, and then never materialize. What is the point of spending all that money to promote a title that will never come out?

[Doctorossi]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

Do you like Salt with your meal?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0944835/

Maybe the real question is "Do I like Angelina Jolie with my Salt?"

[Bobby Henderson]

Originally Posted by Jeff Kleist

Better to use TIFF subtitles where QC can be constant is the way the studios see it.

Unfortunately, raster/pixel-based graphics are wastefully inefficient in using disc space. Vector graphics are far more efficient at least in terms of displaying flat graphical objects like letters and logotypes. If a resident, scalable vector font could actively render subtitle lettering from a text file then the feature would consume far less disc space.

[Jeff Kleist]

If Blu-ray players came with a high quality speech to text and language translation chip, couldn't the players generate their own subtitles with whatever font, size and position the user wanted, based on the actual audio from the movie (though it would probably be hard to make those chips make accurate titles)?

That's a completely impractical solution to the problem, and would require every movie to have all dialog isolated and then mixed within the player (bitstream impossible). You would need a dedicated chip on the level of a high end pentium 4, and you couldn't train the program like you can to a user voice because every movie is different

Or you can do what is already in the spec, which is include subs as an xml file and the player generates them according to the timed script.

Unfortunately, raster/pixel-based graphics are wastefully inefficient in using disc space. Vector graphics are far more efficient at least in terms of displaying flat graphical objects like letters and logotypes. If a resident, scalable vector font could actively render subtitle lettering from a text file then the feature would consume far less disc space.

Subtitle space is inconsequential in terms of both disc space and stream. These files are still compressed, the TIFF is just the input file.

On DVD, a single subtitle is only 10MB of disc space, meaning that if we simply go 6x the resolution, it's 60MB (and probably closer to 30 or 40). Still simply inconsequential when it comes to downloading them, and a consistent presentation on the other end without any compatibility headaches. Plus they can be generated from the same time script that everything else from DVD to closed captions is

[Michael.Schinke]

Originally Posted by Jeff Kleist

All I know is that International deserves to be making $41 million 1000x more than Madea goes to Jail Can anything stop Tyler Perrry before it's too late?

Speaking as person of color I can tell you that ethnic groups are desperate to see what they consider "themeslves" portrayd on the screen. It's a built in audience, like Christian films. It doesn't have to adhere to the same standards of quality that other films do because it is so targeted. It's sad, but it's true. Personally, I think these films, and those like them (Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins comes immediately to mind) speak to some of the most basic racial stereotypes that would get panned in other, less targeted films. But it's the old, "it's OK for us to make fun of ourselves" argument.

[4K2K]

Originally Posted by Jeff Kleist

That's a completely impractical solution to the problem, and would require every movie to have all dialog isolated and then mixed within the player (bitstream impossible). You would need a dedicated chip on the level of a high end pentium 4, and you couldn't train the program like you can to a user voice because every movie is different

Or you can do what is already in the spec, which is include subs as an xml file and the player generates them according to the timed script.

Yes but that doesn't solve the problem that there are some releases with no subtitles at all or no subtitles in the language the viewer wants. So that doesn't help if the viewer has bought that release and can't understand it either because they are hearing impaired or don't understand the language.

So while it would be ideal for all titles to include subtitles in all languages (hopefully a vector based version too, so it could be resolution-independent, allowing for high quality subtitles at resolutions that would look great in all current and future TVs), the reality is that not all discs get encoded with subtitles for all languages and this would be a fall-back system for when they didn't have subtitles in your preferred language, and while I'm sure it wouldn't be totally accurate, it might be better than nothing.

[Jeff Kleist]

Speaking as person of color I can tell you that ethnic groups are desperate to see what they consider "themeslves" portrayd on the screen. It's a built in audience, like Christian films. It doesn't have to adhere to the same standards of quality that other films do because it is so targeted. It's sad, but it's true. Personally, I think these films, and those like them (Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins comes immediately to mind) speak to some of the most basic racial stereotypes that would get panned in other, less targeted films. But it's the old, "it's OK for us to make fun of ourselves" argument.

Yeah, I've seen enough bad gay film as well. I see your point about how people are willing to lower their standards to see themselves on screen in some form or another

Yes but that doesn't solve the problem that there are some releases with no subtitles at all or no subtitles in the language the viewer wants. So that doesn't help if the viewer has bought that release and can't understand it either because they are hearing impaired or don't understand the language.

Very few DVD releases have no subtitles or closed captions on them. Machine translation is godawful, especially the farther you get from the original language anthropologically. Doing so would add hundreds of dollars to the cost of the player to license the technology alone, not to mention the hardware ($30 probably for a dedicated CPU with enough horses, plus additional RAM for storage, probably add at least $50-60 to the build cost (very opitimistic number), if it's even possible in the current spec, not counting for paying R&D. $2-300 premium on the player, minimum by the time all is said and done) and it still wouldn't do the job very well. With something as dynamic as movie dialog, it would fall to pieces. Machine translation works best on very straightforward news type pieces. The second slang, allusion, idioms and such enter the picture, it's done. Look at it this way, how many people, realistically are going to pay $800 for a Blu-ray player that might get a 60% accurate translation on a good day? The easiest way to do it would be to OCR the subtitle stream, the time required to do so and translate it would require a good 10 second read-ahead to OCR the sub, translate and re-render, and I don't know if that's even allowable under the anti-piracy measures.

Studios have no motivation, and often not the legal right to include languages from territories where they don't own the rights. It's simply not practical in any form. The closest you'll get to that is the unlikely possibility of as foreign editions go out, they offer paid downloads of their subs and dubs to international users. I don't expect them to do that however.