Jedi Master

This is one of my pet peeves: manufacturers who don't provide sample footage for their cameras that show them off to best advantage. The footage provided by Kinefinity is particularly bad. The samples from BMD are much better. Ditto for RED.

If you don't like the content of this thread, no one is forcing you to read it. Just avoid opening it and let the rest of us likewise make up our own minds. I've been participating in Internet discussions since the earliest days of Usenet back in 1980 and one thing I detest more than anything else is when someone tries to shut down a discussion because they personally don't like where a thread is going, or its contents. As I said in the paragraph above, if you don't like this thread, don't read it.

Nice one! Autofocus capabilities are increasing with every new generation of cameras. It’s getting faster and more accurate, and camera manufacturers are using AI to detect faces and eyes and to track motion. It’s come a long way since the earliest efforts back in the 1980s. What will it be like in a decade or two? Who knows, but it will be faster and more capable than what we have now, that’s for sure. Will Hollywood use it then? Probably not, but it is, and will increasingly be, helpful for people who don’t have a full crew of operators, 1st ACs, and 2nd ACs—in other words, about 90% of the users of video cameras.

Indeed. That’s why the political situation in this country is in the state it’s in now.

I would argue that an explanation for anything, whether scientific or not, requires objectively verifiable evidence. Science can’t explain everything, sure, but any explanation from any other source should be held to the same standards of evidence. Yes, Kaku went far afield in that book by trying to extrapolate quantum computing to all sorts of things (like climate change) that have no direct connection with quantum computing.

Lets break this down into its component parts. First that 24p is old. This is unquestionably true. That frame rate came about fairly early in the history of cinema and has been with us ever since, for almost a century. The second assertion, that 24p is “wrong”, is specious. I certainly haven’t argued in this thread that it’s wrong (whatever the heck that even means in this context), and after rereading this entire thread I conclude that others aren’t necessarily arguing that it’s wrong either, but that some other rate might be better. The claim that the industry is spending “trillions of dollars a year” is completely off base. The latest data I could find says that the industry spent about $16 billion in 2021. That‘s several orders of magnitude lower than your claim. I find it curious that even suggesting the use of higher frame rates could generate such a firestorm of responses from some on this thread. You’d think that such a suggestion would generate reasoned discussion, but it seems more like the responses of someone who’s sacred cow has been gored. And then it degenerated into a discussion of what is art, with some suggesting that anyone not agreeing with their definition of art just doesn’t understand art (especially if that art isn’t created by a human). I will assert (because I don’t have direct evidence to back it up) that Hollywood is driven by money, not art, and if switching to 43.5763747 FPS would generate more money, Hollywood would switch to it in a New York minute.

I have read the book you referenced and agree with the critics. Kaku is a physicist and doesn’t appear to know much about quantum computing based on what he says in this book. Whenever someone makes a positive claim, such as the existence of the paranormal, or of gods, the burden of proof falls on them to provide objectively verifiable evidence for their claim. Lacking that, we have no reason to believe their assertion (because without evidence, that’s all it is—an assertion). Carl Sagan said that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Some claims are mundane and don’t require much evidence, but others do. For example, if I told you I got a new pet dog, that wouldn’t require much, if any, evidence for you to believe me because dogs are common pets, and many people have one, perhaps including yourself. But if I told you that I got a new pet fire breathing dragon, you shouldn’t believe me without more evidence because fire breathing dragons are the stuff of myths and legends, not everyday reality. I would posit that the existence of the paranormal and of gods are extraordinary claims, and, hence, require extraordinary evidence.

I don’t believe the paranormal exists. James Randi, for many years, offered a $1M prize to anyone who could demonstrate any paranormal phenomena under controlled conditions. No one ever claimed the prize.

Human vision tends to favor temporal resolution over spacial or color resolution. Detecting motion is an important survival skill that we, and most animals, probably developed early in our evolutionary history. Color resolution isn’t nearly as important. Early color TV took advantage of that fact to reduce the bandwidth required to transmit chroma signals alongside the luma signal. We still see that today with 4:2:2, 4:2:0, and other color sampling schemes used for digital video.

Me thinks you’ve been watching too many Terminator movies. 😉

If we had more artists and less engineers, you wouldn’t have this thread or this forum. You’d be exchanging letters written with quill pens with your fellow artists. 😉

Back then I worked for a company that made controller ICs integrated into SSDs, so I went through the teething process! Getting OS developers to change their code to properly support SSDs was sometimes an ordeal. For example, there were lots of complaints of poor write performance, and much of this was due to an OS not issuing trim commands to the SSD. Unlike magnetic disks, SSD blocks need to be erased prior to writing, and erasure is a time-consuming operation than can really slow down writes on a well-used SSD. A trim command tells the SSD which blocks are no longer in use so it can erase them during idle periods. This greatly speeds up writes that are targeted at those erased blocks. If I remember correctly, MacOS was one of the last OSes to get support for trim.

When I said "world" I was specifically meaning the physical world. In that specific case, science does a good job of physically describing how the world works. I never said anything about emotionally based things like morality, art, or cinematic frame rates. I'll try to be razor-specific when I post here to make sure my meaning is clear. Yes, but I can judge it on any basis I want. That's merely my personal opinion, and others will have opinions that differ. I have no problems with that, but do bristle when people tell me my opinions are wrong as if there's some completely objective measure of what's right and what's wrong. It seems that people have very strong opinions on what constitutes art and how it should be viewed by others. I'm fine with the first part, but not the second. I'll interpret art any way I like, and others are free to do so as well. I think it's rather pointless to declare, for example, that art is an exclusively human act. There are many AI art generators online, and I like what some of them produce and dislike the output of others. But to declare that what they produce is not art seems like a stretch. Predictably, people are coming out against AI generated art. Most of what I've read about this seems to be artists being against AI systems training on their images. I, personally, don't see any difference between that and human artists viewing the works of other human artists and creating similar or derivative works. That's been going on for centuries. Don't take the fact that I have strong opinions on this stuff to mean that I don't respect the opinions of others, because that would be a misrepresentation of my position. The forum does have an "ignore" feature. I hope it doesn't come down to that, but it is there if you feel strongly enough about it. For the record, I don't dislike anyone on this forum, even if they have opinions strongly divergent from mine, or even if they dislike me.

I grasp it just fine. It's the people who think humans are the only privileged entities that can create "art". That's only true if you define art in that very narrow fashion. Trouble is, even if you do, it can be impossible to tell the difference between art created by a human and that created by a machine, so the distinction is pointless and only a matter of semantics.

Depends on your perspective. One could argue that Jackson Pollock copied the techniques used in kindergartens every single day. And what makes you think works created by computers are restricted to “faking something that already exists”?

I don’t think I did.

Just like with anything else, you get what you pay for. A $300 Heliopan variable ND is going to have better performance characteristics than a $69 no-name filter. Even expensive variable ND filters aren’t going to perform as well as non-variable ND filters and non-variable NDs aren’t going to perform as well as no filter at all. I have a Heliopan variable ND and it works well, but I only use it when I’m in a hurry, which isn’t very often. Otherwise I stick with non-variable NDs. I have both Heliopan and B+W NDs and I consider their performance to be top notch, but any additional air/glass surfaces are going to have some impact on image quality.

Exactly. Interface a computer to some paint nozzles and point them at a canvas and how would you tell the difference between what the computer produces and a Jackson Pollock painting?

Of these three, only science has consistently and correctly made sense of the world.

How's performance from that tiny USB drive? Not great, I'd imagine, but perhaps good enough for your needs. I remember when SSDs first became available. Operating systems were written to use rotating disks as storage, which don't have write-cycle limitations, so the OS would perform write-intensive operations like paging to an SSD and wear it out prematurely, especially since early SSDs that more primitive wear-leveling algorithms than today. Nowadays things are much better with OSes optimized for SSDs and the SSDs themselves are better (except really cheap ones, which tend to fail more often than mainstream drives). I find those tiny drives really handy for some things. I have my entire CD music collection ripped to FLAC files and stored on one of those tiny drives, which goes into a USB port on my car. It doesn't stick out very far, so less chance of it getting snapped off if something impacts it.

Technical issues, like how an operating system reacts to low disk space, are objective issues that don't depend on personal opinions. Art, on the other hand, is completely subjective. What is art to you may be garbage to me, and what is art to me may be garbage to you. Because my definition of and appreciation of art may be different than yours doesn't mean that I don't understand art, and that shouldn't mean that my views on art (both the artistic aspects and the technical aspects) in any way denigrate your own. As I said in another thread, this isn't a zero sum game. I have a hard time understanding some of what you say. I assume that's because English isn't your first language. Try posting in your native language (at least in your replies to me)--that might be more understandable to me.

This has to be one of the silliest comments I've seen in this thread. Let me pose this question to you: If I showed you two pieces of "art", one created by a human and the other by a machine, and you couldn't tell which was created by the human and which was created by the machine, would you still insist on not calling the work created by the machine "art"?

Most operating systems don’t handle their main drive filling up very well. I’ve found the best way to deal with this is to have separate drives for the OS and everything else. That way, if downloads or data files fill up a non-OS drive, the system doesn’t go haywire.

I agree 100%. Some people fail to understand that the human mind is just a very sophisticated electrochemical computer. There’s nothing magical about it that gives it an insurmountable advantage over non-organic computers, especially in the long run if we keep making improvements and breakthroughs at the rate we’ve been making them. The brain evolved over millions of years to give a survival advantage to humans. Art only came about when humans progressed beyond the stage where they needed all of their cognitive abilities just to stay alive.

Yes, I know. I was working with F-Log yesterday to compare it with F-Log2.