Category: Life

Apparently FOX sent a letter to Cineplex’ top levels of management, warning them that if they can’t get the camcording issue under control, that they may delay movie releases in Canada. Sort of like they already do to all non-North-American markets.

Multiple figures within the article complained that the laws, which require a substantial evidence base, were without teeth. A case was alluded to whereby a man in the United-States was given an 8 year sentence and a $250,000 fine. (He might as well have “accidentally” run over those that witnessed his criminal act – he would of probably received less jail time.)

The article then goes on about the stereotypical talk of Canada being on a “watch list”, that the rate of piracy in the US fell dramatically when new more tough laws were enacted, implying links of this kind of piracy with the mafia, and making claims that we are a cesspool for pirated imports of DVDs from China/Pakistan/Russia.

These are tough words, and I can’t help but to bear an extreme sense of cynicism of the whole matter. FOX would not actually go through with this; the sheer hypocrisies and questionable lack of effectiveness of such measures ensures it so. No, these are words to scare people into action.

Either way, I hope that FOX does actually go beyond the “pressure tactic” level, and implement such a delay. Perhaps then, they’ll have one less thing to blame Canada for. And perhaps then as well, seeing how we’re second rate to Americans, Canadians will ponder the previously unfathomable idea of investing in their own film industry.

GIS:

• 3D Urban Visualization & Streamlining, Ottawa City Core, UofO Campus, Ottawa Neighbourhood. Using data to recreate the city of Ottawa in 3D, with aims for multiple business applications.

Movies:

• “On Piracy v.1.5” – Finalize cuts, make DVD. Expected Release: February, some time.
• “H4CK3R5” – Complete script, make arrangements to be in production come May. Shoot in late March for one particular scene. Expected Release: In time for Defcon 15 (August 2007.)
• “The Impact of Man” – Write, shoot, release. Expected Release: Beginning of March.
• [Codenamed: Montreal] – Pre-production. Expected Reelase: September 2007.

Web-Design:

• Make anti-bullying website for school board.
• Make o2600 website.

Moi? Busy? Never. And that’s on top of both full-time school and work. And I’m not being paid a single cent for any of these. If anything, esp. as it pertains to the movies, I’m loosing money. I’m a fool for doing all of this now. A complete fool. I can’t afford it, yet I’m doing it. H4CK3R5 is the only project of these that has the potential to not be a complete financial loss, except for the film that is codenamed Montreal. Why, oh why am I doing this?

Do you know? Because at this point, I certainly don’t.

The Internet is based upon an expansion of possibilities, thanks to ever increasing computational power and bandwidths to match. Right, so you go from putting text on a very spartan website in the mid-nineties, to publishing your video creations online while listening to an Internet radio station.

But along that way, there’s always been the unwitting de-evolutionists known as copyright protectors. I don’t call them creators, because often they’re not. And these guys are stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, their content is being reproduced without their consent. On the other, they’re killing innovation. They’ve rendered services that allow for the free, unfettered, exchange of files illegal. They sued the Google search engine. Search engines – the absence of which would render the Internet unnavigable. They’ve sued sites that allowed kids to share videos. Essentially, they want to de-evolve the Internet, or at least make it regulated in their favour. That’s what they’re doing by not going after those who cause infractions, but the technologies that permit it. They might not mean to, but that’s what they’re doing.

These are interesting times we live in. It’ll be interesting to see how things evolve (or not) in the future. Is the Zune, with all it’s restrictions to reverse the new possibilities granted by this technological evolution, an accurate representation of the ethos we expect to deal with in the future of the Internet?

Ahh…

As you may, or may not know, I’ve been trying to get the On Piracy documentary out the door for the last few weeks. It was supposed to be out by Monday. However, the process has been hell. Absolute hell. I’ve barely slept in the last week at all.

To understand the problem, you have to understand how I’m putting the movie together. For every of the twenty-four interviewees, I have a Premiere project file. In these files, I have the raw footage of the interview, and then separate “sequences” for each of the clips they appear in the movie. So I cut the footage up, put them into these clips, clean up the audio, clean up the video, add images, and render. This makes a small MPG file. I do this for each interviewee, each time they appear in the film. I also do this for the narration sequences. So in total, I have about 120 of these clips.

I then put these clips together in a new project file, adjust the volume of the clips, add the soundtrack, add any last images, and render. This is the part that’s problematic. Hours in, it just stops for no apparent reason. There are no error messages – it just stops rendering. But it fails consistently in one spot. It took hours of testing to figure out that it was the images. If I had pictures which were too big in filesize (either due to filetype or resolution), the whole thing would just fail. These images weren’t malformed or corrupt in any way (I checked), it was Premiere. It just couldn’t handle it. At least not when I was rendering such large projects.

So I cut it all up. In the end, the movie was separated into eight segments. I also kept toying with the images, making them smaller, converting them, trying other images altogether, attempting to appease the Adobe god. But even these, hours in, would fail. Sometimes at one point, sometimes at another. If I shut down Premiere and started it up again, I tended to have better luck – and sometimes render all the way through. It was a frustrating experience.

After many sleepless nights, I eventually made progress. I ended up with the massive files I wanted, and joined them together. I produced a DVD. Both these files worked great – everything in sync. But then came the conversion to XviD. Out of sync. To FLV – out of sync. So I cross-encoded the large base file into a raw AVI – still out of sync. It seems like no matter what I do, it messes up. Why? I haven’t the slightest clue.

And that’s the stage I’m at right now. Playing with this until it works.