Manipulators
It’s been a while since I’ve contributed to this sleepy little blog. There’s been a lot going on these days! One of the last, big projects I just got to the point of “going live” is VFX Nexus. It’s the tool I’ve been honing along with my business partners for years. I’m pretty dang proud of it, and I’m looking forward to hearing how other people are getting along with using it.
I find I only need to go to the big industry trade shows every-other year, but this last year at NAB was almost entirely worthless.
Personally, I go to NAB to SEE WHAT IS NOW AVAILABLE and to FIND OUT MORE ABOUT PRODUCTS. Back in the days of E3 there were two classes of people working the booths: company people and booth-babes. You didn’t expect much from the booth-babes, but they could swipe your badge, hand you some literature on the latest stuff and maybe point you towards a company person for more in-depth info. Plus they were pretty and pretended to not mind talking to endless waves of sweaty geeks.
NAB was at the other end of the spectrum, it’s named for the National Association of Broadcasters after all and is attended by many much-older engineers who don’t mind looking at a nice rack either–if it’s made by Winsted. Professional engineers (and sadly executives) looking for either in-depth technical info and/or the opportunity to schmooze and ‘network’ for contacts, other jobs, vendors, customers… That’s what it was AND IS SUPPOSED TO BE.
Now NAB is worth even less than E3 ever was because the mindless booth-babes are fully clothed and *don’t* have anything more than a flier with a web-address to hand out. Many of the people staffing the booths at this years NAB may have actually been full-time, regular employees of the companies–if you count lobotomized members of the marketing (redundant?) or maybe janitorial departments. As often as not they didn’t even have meaningful knowledge of their own company’s product line.
Again and again I’d ask somebody for information on something and they wouldn’t know what I was talking about. I’d ask them for at least the brochure on it, and at best they’d only have the generic full-line brochure (no specific information whatsoever). Next they’d offer to swipe my badge to get me the info, but as often as not they didn’t even understand what division the product I was asking about fell under, so they couldn’t specify it in the swipe system.
Even when one of these smiling badge-swiping simians could find the checkbox for the specific item I was wondering about the end result was not a detailed brochure in the mail the week after NAB; it was AN EMAIL WITH A WEB-LINK TO THE GENERIC INFO ON THEIR WEB PAGE. So what the HELL was the point of going to NAB at all??? Going to Vegas, sure, but I could’ve just browsed websites in the hotel’s business center, maybe printed a couple pages and had the same benefit as spending 2-3 days wandering around the show floors…
When everybody in the industry solemnly agrees the Internet killed this trade-show in 4 or so years, remember it is because THE TRADE SHOW ITSELF HELPED. When I walk up to a booth to find out more about something that I may well be about to spend several hundred thousand dollars on I want to speak to somebody involved in the design or AT LEAST the support of the product in question. NOT whichever vaguly attractive secretary some executive thought might put out.
Especially in broadcasting/production/VFX/post, we don’t have a Gizmodo.com to point out all the newest stuff, we have NAB–where companies made the conscious choice this year to NOT send their engineers, only MARKETING SHMUCKS (and executives… thank god!).
Wow. I think the experience of Golden Compass is best described as 180 degrees different from The Legend of Narnia (AKA The Passion of the Lion).
The basic premise, the core ideas driving at the heart of the story are far more interesting than Narnia’s. But the execution, dear god. The way this movie was executed should lead to the execution of every writer and executive that worked on it, and the execution of the director should be botched and last 113 agonizing minutes.
The exposition is clumsy and damn-near endless (including a long clip at the end spelling out the need for the sequels) but the worst feature has to be the acting. Even the CG polar bear overacts dreadfully. As does every other single character except possibly Nicole Kiddman (maybe it’s the botox). After setting this trend the director makes sure you don’t miss a “nuance” by framing most shots so the face of the actor EMOTING fills the screen. Sam Eliot’s a great actor, when properly cast and with a director who doesn’t hit him in the face with the camera lens every other shot (the intervening shots are 1-shots from below, making him HEROIC). The Seafaring king reminds me of DeNiro’s mincing Pirate Captain in Stardust but somehow LESS SUBTLE.
The only thing this movie really has going for it are the visuals. There are truly extraordinary vehicles that go far beyond tired steampunk to something actually original, especially the vehicles of the Magisterium. The CG animal companions aren’t bad, and the polar bear fight towards the end is surprisingly powerful, if again overacted… by CG bears…
Having seen it I can certainly understand all the negative reviews it has gotten, but not the positive ones. Ebert gave it 4 starts for crying out loud. Maybe if you have an especially stupid or impressionable child… this would probably entertain and (more importantly) shut it up.
I suppose the underlying (if somewhat under-emphasized) message to question authority would be good for any young spawn to be exposed to… but I doubt the message carries much weight when it’s set in an explicitly fantasy world and the audience starts to root for the misbehaving little brat to fall down a well. Far more clearly than question authority the message the movie is likely to impart is LIE *alot* and everything will work out for the best.
Working in VFX I usually stay around through end credits, and I am certain I know some people who worked on this (who I’d like to congratulate–as I said, visually it is stunning in places) but I couldn’t stomach sitting through the end song to save my life. If I’d been handcuffed to the chair I’d have chewed off my own hand to get away. This movie couldn’t be more clear in its blatant attempts to copy the success of Lord of the Rings and Narnia, right down to trying to do a Lord of the Rings original song that relates to the movie. Except, that is, without anybody with talent writing (or performing) the song. “Lyraaa… LYRA, her spirit walks beSIDE her, LYRIA!” OUCH! Just bit into my wrist tendons to stop me from going through and typing out any more of that drivel… that was pretty nearly the complete lyrics though… again and again.
So when I saw a poorly informed blurb claiming Vista is 50% slower than XP I wrote it off as BS. But then a couple people sent it to me so I looked into it in more depth…
Original Story.
And I confirm my call of BULLSHIT. CIO Today? Devil Mountain Software? It’s like Gartner group FUD but without even the name of Gartner to back it. It’s transparently a company trying to make a name for themselves by saying something controversial and hoping nobody actually looks into what they said. Which isn’t likely given the claim…
1st, their benchmarks are *Office Tasks*. Exactly what modern computer can’t run even the latest Office (which is an improvement, over OfficeXP, BTW) blazing fast? But if you string together a macro of every action in every Office program… you have… a fucking worthless benchmark!
2nd, There have already been plenty of comparisons of XP to Vista in 3D games and even 3D apps, far more relevant to any of us following IT for VFX… They show a slight difference, often going both ways but with a slight edge to XP.
3rd, There is always going to be somebody afraid of the next thing (Gartner / CIO Today), these same people said the same things about XP (and they were right, **initially** and Win2k–where they couldn’t have been more wrong, even when it first came out it was an order of magnitude better than NT4).
–Newsflash: new OSs will have bugs in addition to the improvements… but eventually the bugs get worked out, then you just have improvements. The security improvements made XP a must-have (eventually), those plus virtualization plus other improvements will eventually make Vista must have too, hopefully around SP1. We’ll see.
But the fact that we know people who are now successfully using Vista64 for Lightwave far outweighs this ‘Devil Mountain’ BS.