Movies

Tonight Kristyna and I went out to dinner and the movies with some friends. We ended up seeing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which was really excellent.

I won't go into too many details about the film here, because to talk about it in detail would sort of give away a lot about the story. However, I will say that both Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey both give excellent performances. It's the sort of inventive story that could only come from Charlie Kaufman (who I have now come to believe is a genius)... while at the same time being a very touching story about real human emotions and relationships without being cliché.

It's another "instant favorite" of mine, and if you liked Magnolia, I think you'll like this one too. But even if you didn't like Magnolia, see it anyway.

JVC HD Camcorder...

Last night at the MCAI meeting, JVC was on hand to do a presentation about their new "consumer" High-Definition video format, tentatively called HDV. To make a long story short, the have basically taken an HD resolution signal and compressed it in the camera using MPEG-2 compression, to create an MPEG-2 Transport Stream which gets recorded onto a standard Mini-DV formatted tape. Pretty nifty, overall, but there are a few drawbacks:

• The compression is done in hardware, so you don't get a true HD signal, you get an MPEG-2
  
• You need a special HDV Deck (or to use your camcorder for editing) and the format is not widely supported.
  
• The cameras are only 1-CCD (more on that later)
  

JVC has two cameras out, the consumer GR-HD1, and the professional JY-HD10. Price aside, there are two really critical differences:

• The professional unit allows you to generate color bars
  
• The professional unit has XLR inputs
  

If you don't know why those are big deals, the consumer level camera is for you. Otherwise, go for the professional unit.

The camera can record in SD at 480i or 480p, compressed w/MPEG-2, it can also record in standard DV format, or in HD at 720p, also MPEG-2 compressed. JVC boasts that it can playback 1080i, but it can't record in 1080i.

The camera is also only a 1-CCD chip. For a one chip camera, it does take a very sharp, crisp image that doesn't blow out too badly on highlights and it doesn't crush blacks horribly. JVC claims to be using layer technology on the CCD to eliminate the need for multiple CCDs (like the Foveon chip) however, they either need to license the Foveon chip or do a better job implementing the technology, in the SD range, any 3-CCD camera I've seen produces a better image.

Of course, the technology is not designed to be a replacement for higher end HD Cams (like the Sony HDWF900 or the Panasonic AJ-HDC27 VariCam) but I think it falls a bit short on the lower end.

The camera features are extremely limited. You can do far more tweaking on a Canon XL1s or Sony DCR-VX2100 both of which compete with the JVC on price point.

Frankly, I think the "HD" aspect of it is a bit gimmicky, and if what you really want is a great looking NTSC picture, pass on this one. If HD is really what you want, don't jump into it with this JVC. The HDV standard is being adopted by other vendors, and there might be some announcements at NAB in April. I'd be very interested to see what Sony and Canon plan for the format (they are both supposedly developing with it). If you're a die hard early adopter, or have a clear project that justifies it, the JVC is okay, but I have a feeling in a year we'll have a lot more camera to choose from.

Web Animation Round Up

There was a post on boing-boing today with some web animation links, and since I love animation, I thought I'd repost them and add some to the list.

• Animwatch
  
• AtomFilms (Animation Category)
  
• Muffin Films
  
• Robot Love
  
• Door Steps (An Animated Music Video)
  

This is certainly not an inclusive list of web animation... I'd love to see other sites that showcase what's going on out there. Send me your links!

Cinema Now

I'm not quite sure how I missed this one... but here it is, movie delivery via the net from CinemaNow! You can either download the entire movie file to play later, or you can have it streamed to you. Now, I have no desire to sit at my PC and watch movies, but it's also trivial to hook my PC up to my TV (and that ability is becoming more and more common each day). Of course, CinemaNow was started by Lions Gate along with Microsoft and Blockbuster. I haven't used it yet, but I'm going to try it out... it represents a possible future for content distribution, and another potential outlet for independent films that might not get wide distribution otherwise.