Saturday, December 11, 2004

MarsEdit 1.0 came out today, and aside from the lack of (promised in post 1.0) atom posting support (required for titles on blogger), it rocks.

You haven't experienced the merits of offline blogging until you've started composing an entry online on blogger or diaryland, and have something sketchy happen when you try to post on the web site, or have your browser crash, leaving you minus a post that you might have spent some quality time on (laugh now.)

Also, through a post on boinbboing I learned that Fonts in the US do not legally have any copyright protections.

Rock. Who has cool fonts for me?

Tonight jeanne yulia & i saw Oceans 12. Lotsafun. My only regret was seeing it from the fourth row on a digital screen. Digital Screens Still Suck. The one at the theatre on 34th st & 8th Ave had the horrible screen between the pixel blocks showing up, which wasn't too bad for the most of the film. The problem seems to be related to the process used to digitize the film. The movie is worked on in post production and output to film, and then redigitized so it can be shown in theatres.

Now don't shoot me if I'm not describing the process properly, as it is entirely possible that the film goes straight from post processing to the theatre and never actually goes through an intermediary film stage. The problem with converting from digital to analog and back to digital when your target output medium is effectively another computer screen is best demonstrated when you blow up a movie trailer to full screen on an LCD monitor. The monitor doesn't exactly display the resolution of the movie trailer, so it has to interpolate the resolution of the movie to the resolution of the screen. So the trailer looks perfect when viewed in a window on your screen, but choppy when viewed full screen. The same problem seemed to occur for the film in the theatre tonight. Most of the movie looked good, especially since the natural grain of the film tended to smooth out over the grid of the projector. However, in cases where there was text that had been added in post production, (many many instances), the text looks choppy, as if you were looking at a closeup of a computer screen. The answer is pretty simple.

Render in post-production to the resolution of the projector in the theatre, and anti-alias text.

This shouldn't be too hard. Come on now, we've all used AVIDs.

-=-

Tomorrow, (err later today) - New Haven for the first time in a decade and a half.

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