Archived: Insiders Thread

[Rio]

Penton-Man or paidgeek,

http://www.411mania.com/movies/colum...ter-Cullen.htm

-When asked about the competing BLU-RAY/HD-DVD technologies, Alan Bell (tech specialist for Paramount) said their main goal was to put something out that could play on all HD-DVD players, including the oldest ones. It was noted that BLU-RAY doesn't have this amount of accessibility at the moment.

Is this "Alan Bell" a same person who left WB recently?

[Joe Cain]

I know this title has been done to death on this thread but I have to add my kudos to the pile. After all the railing & wailing & gnashing of teeth over Dracula's PQ I half expected to see something akin to the old Fisher-Price videocamera's fidelity. I never saw the film in theatres (Anne Rice's decision to work without an editor having effectively killed my vampire fetish by that time), so I was very pleasantly surprised indeed: it's a great adaptation with a (mostly) amazing cast and gorgeous production values. I never thought I'd own a film featuring Keanu Reeves, but while the rental wings its way back to Netflix my own personal copy will be making its way here from some Frys warehouse somewhere. Excellent. Grazie, y'all.

[Grubert]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

Amir, by his own words has stated in the past that revealing the exact data rate (mbit/sec) of a particular title is “against MS’s typical policy.”

Huh?

A year ago I asked the insiders about video bitrates on The Fast and the Furious.

And I got the reply (by Ben Waggoner) that "That'll be up to Universal to state public numbers for."

Was I being lied to?

[Grubert]

Originally Posted by Rio

Penton-Man or paidgeek,

http://www.411mania.com/movies/colum...ter-Cullen.htm


Is this "Alan Bell" a same person who left WB recently?

http://www.digitalhollywood.com/07DH...l07Tues19.html

Previous to joining Paramount Pictures, Dr. Bell was Executive Vice President, Technology at Warner Bros. Technical Operations. He was centrally involved in the unification of the DVD format and the development of CSS. In recognition of his contributions to the DVD format, and to original research in optical storage technology Dr. Bell is an elected Fellow of the both the IEEE and the Optical Society of America. He received his doctoral and bachelor degrees from London University.

1982


2001


2007

Great memory there, Rio!

[patrick99]

Originally Posted by Rio

Penton-Man or paidgeek,

http://www.411mania.com/movies/colum...ter-Cullen.htm


Is this "Alan Bell" a same person who left WB recently?

Can anyone provide the date of his move?

[Grubert]

Originally Posted by patrick99

Can anyone provide the date of his move?

"About a year ago" according to Majidimehr.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showp...postcount=2281

[patrick99]

Originally Posted by Grubert

"About a year ago" according to Majidimehr.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showp...postcount=2281

Thanks, G.

[Rio]

Originally Posted by Grubert

"About a year ago" according to Majidimehr.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showp...postcount=2281

Thanks, Grubert. You are quick!

[cjamescook]

Originally Posted by paidgeek

Sony DADC and SPE have most of the available players for testing and we do extensive compatibility testing in-house.

Okay, call me confused. I am engineer, having worked for computer manufacturers for over 30 years. We spec. things out or implement industry standards and customers use them, expecting to program them according to those specs. Anything less is a bug, with a fix expected by customers, and scheduled according to severity.

BD players must implement the BD spec. Therefore, BD discs should just work. How can players be so buggy that such extensive testing is necessary? At what point do you stop programming around the firmware bugs of some player or chip set used in a set of players?

This has to drive you nuts after awhile.

[WickyWoo]

Just curious (and I'm sorry for off topic), but what Killzone 2 movie are you talking about?

There has only been two and one has been confirmed (the E3 05 one) by many sources to be complete CG (and not on the PS3 at all) and done by CG studio (employees of the CG studio being one of the sources -- no game assets were used either). The second (from E3 07) is full realtime.

The 2005 CG was rendered on a PS3, so they could claim that it was. The words of the presentation were manipulated to imply this was real-time output. The resulting 5fps (which is still impressive for that footage mind you) was recorded and played back at 60 for the presentation. Like the previous claim that the Emotion Engine could "render the FF8 ballroom scene in real time), it's simply not even close

[quote][quote]When asked about the competing BLU-RAY/HD-DVD technologies, Alan Bell (tech specialist for Paramount) said their main goal was to put something out that could play on all HD-DVD players, including the oldest ones. It was noted that BLU-RAY doesn't have this amount of accessibility at the moment.

Is this "Alan Bell" a same person who left WB recently?

Yes, the same one who is a Warren Lieberfarb (father of DVD, but now Toshiba's #1 HD DVD shill) disciple, and co-developed the technical end of HD DVD. It's disgraceful that no reporter I've seen yet have put together these simple connections

The fact that they keep trotting his butt out to talk to every reporter about how wonderful it is should tell you something. Whenever the Paramount deal breaks, I expect so will Mr Bell's employment at Paramount, as he is almost certainly a major agent in the payoff, and the fact that he's frontmanning it says to me that they're prepping him to take the fall

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by WickyWoo

The fact that they keep trotting his butt out to talk to every reporter about how wonderful it is should tell you something.

Well it at least tells me that he has gone beyond his forte as a physicist to becoming the HD DVD lead spokesman de facto since it appears that he is now also an expert in retail marketing (scroll down to bottom paragraph)…………….

http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/11139.cfm

Concerning Grubert’s link to the upcoming Digital Hollywood conference, scroll down to Albhy Galuten’s pic.
Is it just me or does Albhy look like Mick Fleetwood (of Fleetwood Mac) with a full head of hair ?

[Ben]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

Concerning Grubert’s link to the upcoming Digital Hollywood conference, scroll down to Albhy Galuten’s pic.
Is it just me or does Albhy look like Mick Fleetwood (of Fleetwood Mac) with a full head of hair ?

Definitely... he does look a bit like John Paul Jones from Zeppelin as well.

[dialog_gvf]

Originally Posted by WickyWoo

I expect so will Mr Bell's employment at Paramount, as he is almost certainly a major agent in the payoff, and the fact that he's frontmanning it says to me that they're prepping him to take the fall

Or prepping him for some other kind of frontmanning.

Hmmm, isn't Graffeo the HD DVD frontman right now?

Gary

[MerrickG]

Originally Posted by dialog_gvf

Or prepping him for some other kind of frontmanning.

Hmmm, isn't Graffeo the HD DVD frontman right now?

Gary

Maybe I am misunderstanding your quote, but this would seem to imply that Ken Graffeo is stepping away from his role as HD-DVD frontman and that Alan Bell will be taking over that role.

Why does everyone seem to imply that Universal could be going neutral when there has been absolutely no evidence that they have any interest in supporting bluray? None. Zero. As much as I would love for it to happen...

[aygie]

Originally Posted by merrick97

Maybe I am misunderstanding your quote, but this would seem to imply that Ken Graffeo is stepping away from his role as HD-DVD frontman and that Alan Bell will be taking over that role.

Why does everyone seem to imply that Universal could be going neutral when there has been absolutely no evidence that they have any interest in supporting bluray? None. Zero. As much as I would love for it to happen...

They've been sniffing round the Blu plants a lot....

[MerrickG]

Originally Posted by Aygie

They've been sniffing round the Blu plants a lot....

Have they?

[aygie]

Originally Posted by Maxpower1987

Yes.

thanks! was looking for the posts but couldn't find them.

[mattym]

Originally Posted by merrick97

Have they?

appparently so...2 different sources have claimed such.

[patrick99]

Originally Posted by Maxpower1987

Ahh, I see what you mean now that I'm not horribly drunk!

Yeah, he is blaming the wrong part of the chain. Unfortunately GDMX are pretty much bound and gagged when it comes to speaking out about WB's policies about HDM. I suspect that said compressionist would get fired if he blamed the right part of the chain (upper management) for poor quantisation on the Blu-ray release.

Rio: Yes, WB do pre-filter their titles, this comes from someone pretty high-up the chain, though I can't say who. They do it because they think that people want the shiny HD-look with no grain. It also helps bring the peak bandwidth down which is required for HD DVD.

Patrick: We have spoken to WB about their policies, but suffice it to say they are not going to budge anytime soon. Their reasoning is that supporting both cost structures would make HDM highly unprofitable. Basically supporting the lowest common denominator is cheapest for them so that is what they do.

Max, thanks very much for that. You are confirming things that I have long assumed to be the case, namely that Warner high def discs look the way they do because of high level management policy decisions.

[MerrickG]

Originally Posted by mattym

appparently so...2 different sources have claimed such.

Who? Im getting a little interested here.

While its hardly a reason to get excited, it is a reason to be curious.