Various TOTEM posts 2004 - 2006

[Boyd Ostroff]

http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/pom/...FREE&cm_ite=NA

So what happens when Apple's video iPod hits critical mass? Say, when 10 million people have a video iPod? And what happens when Apple offers enough video content on iTunes that it hits critical mass? Say, 5,000 different shows and movies? And what happens when Apple's hardware fully integrates into your living room home theater system?

Do you see where all this is headed? The three won't work together incrementally. We're looking at exponential growth. And strategically for Apple, we're looking at de facto standardization around its video platform.

[Richard Alvarez]

Gang,

I'm looking at possibly doing some shooting in Tahoe in the snow in the coming weeks. I pulled out the petrol cover I bought last year (and believe it or not, have never needed. I LOVE northern California)

Bottom line, I've put it on my XL2, and I THINK I've got all the zippers and straps adjusted right... but is there an instruction sheet on the web somewhere? I looked at the site, and got some nice pix, but I'd like to know what some of these zippers and pouches are meant for.

Thanks in advance to the "Vast and unpaid research department".

[Meryem Ersoz]

good for a laugh....

http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/t...od-accessories

[Boyd Ostroff]

http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/tech.../10272986.html

Amazon's strategy is attractive to the studios which are eager to encourage DVD sales. The Journal says that the studios are considering letting Amazon have the movies in its digital service at the same time that they are released on DVD. Online movie purchases would be more profitable to the studios than online rentals, the paper says.

There's another interesting factoid in this article that I never realized: Amazon owns imdb.com.

[Jack Zhang]

Any more info? What equiptment did they use to convert in real-time?

Edit: It was the "Vincent Price's St. Patrick's Day Special" on the most recent episode with Matt Dillon(spelling?)

[Boyd Ostroff]

http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/tech.../10277132.html

Just a few months ago, the bigwigs at Samsung Electronics boasted that flash memory would wipe out the hard-drive industry in the next few years. Now there are persistent rumors that the Korean giant may buy Western Digital, the world's No. 2 maker of hard drives

[Keith Loh]

Fellow DVInfoers, I haven't stopped filmmaking, I've just decided to become more of a screenwriter.

Toward that I've agreed to become one of the moderators of a local screenwriting group in Vancouver with the appropriate URL: http://www.vancouverscreenwriters.com. If there are any screenwriters here based in Vancouver or in B.C. (or anyone really), please log on and check it out. We have a running blog for local and general film/screenwriting news and a forum that needs a kick start. The three of us who run it work everywhere but in film so it would be great to have industry people log in for the splash of reality. I'm not completely privy to what the plans are but I believe the idea is to reach out and provide an online space/forums for other similar screenwriting groups.

The group also meets for networking once or twice a month.

[Bob Hart]

I need to have a second or even more of this achromatic dioptre for AGUS35 projects.


Efforts so far over four months.


One Australian vendor. - No success despite several enquiries.

Another Australian vendor. - No ringback on a Friday as promised. Enquiry made the previous Monday. Follow up call. Ringback assured by front office. Did not happen. Follow up call came by accident. My number had been incorrectly dialled. front office undertook to get the rep to call back. Item not stocked in Sydney, or Brisbane despite computer stocklist saying it was.

The item has to be imported, so after all this obfuscation, I have said no thanks, I shall try elsewhere, namely Singapore.

But, to keep the faith, an international phone call was attempted to a primary US vendor's posted number after no email address could be found on the website that did not require an order number to be added first. International orders page locks on South American countries only.

The posted number cannot be connected. The alternative number was called. This number yielded a follow-me menu of four generations of number entries, then I got the waitawhile machine complete with musak, all with international call meter ticking away. Needless to say after a minute I bailed.

Commerce is failing because there are too many suits in big top floor offices and too few hands on the shop floor.

To Century Optics. I don't think this is a way to successfully do business. You will be better off by-passing all the middlemen and selling direct.

My next enquiries will be to two Singapore vendors. If these are not successful, my next move is to have the lens I already have copied, also in Singapore at a considerable discount over the price of the genuine item and yet of comparable quality.

Keeping the faith is so damn difficult these days.

This is an open call to Century Optics, offer me the product and I will buy it.

[Michael Wisniewski]

Thought this was interesting,

In Spanish:
Cortometraje = Short film (CORE TOE MAY TRA HEY)
Largometraje = Feature film (LARGO MAY TRA HEY)

[Boyd Ostroff]

The May 29 issue of Fortune magazine has a very interesting collection of articles about Hollywood and movie-making. Some of it is available online, but I don't think the whole thing is there: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortu...eof_hollywood/

Am just starting to read through the articles and they're filled with facts and figures related to topics we often debate here. A few things I've learned so far:

• William Fox built 1,100 theatres and was a pioneer in putting sound on film. But his investments were poorly timed and he lost everything in the great depression, then went to jail for bribing a judge and died in obscurity.

• Warner made $943 million operating profit last year, way ahead of Sony at $243M, Disney at $207M and Paramount at $62M. But the significant thing is that despite the speculative nature of movie-making, all these companies turn a profit.

• Box office sales typically account for 25% of a movie's revenues with another 25% coming from cable and broadcast. But nearly 50% now comes from DVD sales, rentals and on-demand viewing.

• TV networks used to think that nobody would pay to watch programs which were broadcast over the air for free, but they were wrong. In 1999 there was nearly zero income from DVD sales of TV shows, but in 2005 they resulted in nearly $4 billion.

• In the old days the networks followed the "LOP Theory" - Least Offensive Program - which assumed there was only one TV set which all the viewers in the household would compromise and watch. That sort of programming doesn't do well today.

• In 1946 the population of the US was 141 million and movie theatres sold 4 billion tickets - an average of 28 movies per year for every American. By 1973 ticket sales fell to 864 million due to the influence of TV. By 2005 ticket sales were up to 1.4 billion, but with a US population of about 300 million that's less than 5 movies per American.

• The first megaplex theatre - The Grand 24 - opened in Dallas in 1995. It was very successful, but spawned the overbuilding of theatres in the years which followed, leading to bankruptcies and consolidation. In the past four years some 12,000 theatres have changed hands.

• Ronald Perelman, who owns Panavision, is betting that the transition to digital will go slowly and bought film service company Deluxe last January. He says, "Deluxe can transition to digital services along with the rest of the business. When that happens, I don't have a clue. Right now it's not even clear what the savings would be if you really drill down."

• In 1999 FORTUNE ran an article about movies converting to digital. Studios and distributors they interviewed said the transition would begin in 3 to 5 years and be widespread by 2009. At that time there were 10 digital screens in the US. But today there are still only 192 digital screens vs. a total of 38,000 analog screens....

Lots more good stuff in there... I've only read two of the 7 articles so far! :-)

[Stu Holmes]

Thought this was quite amusing:

http://www.thompsound.com/Articles/ten_sins/

[Charlie Katz]

I like the idea of listening to a CD and especially MLB.TV while I do video editing. I'm not worried about the sound interfering yet, I'm just doing
first pass cutting and I've got lots of hours to work with. I bought
a SONY VAIO 820 which has Sigmatel Audio and then bought Pinnacle
Studio Plus and have installed all of their patches. I start up the music
or ballgame, and then load Studio Plus. At 100% of load, the sound cuts out.
I can listen to MLB.TV alongside of a Music CD (Windows Media Player) and
no problem from either.

Pinnacle says no one else reports this problem. I would like to understand sound cards - do they have a feature for exclusive use ? Surely if there is,
then Studio is requesting it. But why wouldn't they know of other's having
this problem. Is it possible all sound cards don't support exclusive use ?

Any other guesses ? SONY says I have the latest version of firmware and
driver for the sound. Sigmatel doesn't want to talk with me.

thanks
Charlie_Katz@yahoo.com or answer here

[Boyd Ostroff]

Interesting article about Apple's negotiations with the movie studios:

http://yahoo.businessweek.com/techno...621_022435.htm

Some Hollywood insiders are uncomfortable haggling with Jobs, who is a director and the largest shareholder of a huge rival, Walt Disney & Co. Another reason a deal may not be imminent is that neither side needs it to happen right away. Music studio sales were collapsing at the time they negotiated deals with Apple. Not so with Hollywood studios

[Keith Loh]

Pitchfork ( a really good music site ) reaches way back to highlight 100 'awesome' music videos. By awesome they mean both good and memorably bad.

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/articl..._Videos/page_1

[Heath McKnight]

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/stor...817636,00.html

Interesting that they'd take the photo in front of a (nuclear) power plant.

hwm