Is it winter yet by you? We've had absurd ups and downs in the temperature, and I'm just guessing that the rest of the leaves on the trees will give up their fight for life shortly; winter feels imminent. (sp?)
Saw three good movies recently, and for those of you whose lives are too short to see mediocre movies, all three of these are way above average:
- Trainspotting. Not for the faint of stomach, but an excellent film.
- Emma. The exact opposite of Trainspotting. Literally, the exact opposite. Although some might call it a "chick flick", I liked it anyway.
- Big Night. A movie about two guys running an Italian restaurant in Jersey in the '50s. A movie that revolves around ITALIAN FOOD!!!! WOW!!!! Two thumbs up! -burp-
The whole DVD demonstration was very impressive. The DVDs look just like CDs, and can hold 135 minutes of digital compressed video, and up to eight (I think) channels of 5.1-channel true surround-sound digital audio. The first-generation player that he brought with him was a Panasonic, and looks almost exactly like a CD player. The remote control for the player looks pretty much like a VCR remote, but with the addition of some extra buttons that guide you through menus on the screen. He brought along one of the discs he made, which was "The Shadow", a bad movie that nobody saw, but a nice demonstration nonetheless. When you put the disc into the player, the first thing that comes up on the screen is a menu, which gives you choices of what language you want the dialogue in, and what language you want (optional) subtitles in. (A neat feature is that the players sold in different regions on the globe will each have a chip that brings up the initial menu screen differently; the "Universal" logo might come up in Spanish, or something like that. Oh wait, that would still say "Universal"...) After you push some buttons on the remote to select your languages, the movie starts.
The movie looks terrific. I don't know the exact specs on things like the number of horizontal lines of resolution, but the picture looks great. Better than LaserDisc, and way better than anything available from a VCR. The video is compressed (with the MPEG-2 algorithm for those who care), but to my untrained eye, I can't tell the difference. The sound is seismic, to say the least, but I personally wouldn't be able to fit five speakers and a subwoofer in my living room. Not that Margaret would let me do such a thing, of course...
There are a few chapter marks that they include with the movie, so you can instantly jump from scene to scene and leave out all the dialogue in the Schwarzeneggar films. The freeze-frame is pretty astonishing; with VCR's, we're used to a lot of distortion in the picture. With the DVD's, a freeze frame is one still frame, with no artifacts. The slow advance will move you from frame to frame in the movie, where each frame is really the 1-30th of a second frame used in the video process. Pretty impressive.
Universal Pictures, and the rest of the movie industry, is banking hard on these things. They're counting on both movie sales and rentals, and will be using the DVDs to replace VHS movie releases. One of the benefits from their point of view is that they won't have to release several different tapes of one movie like they do now (Spanish language versions in South America, etc.) because they all can be included on one DVD. Neat. Apparently, it won't be too much work to put together all the different-language versions of the movie, since the new soundtrack has to be recorded anyway for foreign VHS releases. Also neat.
Can we record on them yet? No, but DVD-R (write-once) and DVD-RAM (erasable) specifications are in the works, as well as DVD-ROM (for computers; just like CD-ROM). There's also a DVD-Audio format planned, but I can't imagine that the record companies would use a format where you can put hours and hours of music on one disc. (Most CD releases only use about half of the available capacity now; I can't imagine that increasing the capacity of the disc will change anything.)
Will I buy one? Not right away - these things are set to hit the market in Japan for about $700, and the price is expected to fall pretty quickly. Although it looks and sounds amazing, there are still a few small bugs to be worked out in the players - things like, where do I plug my VCR if my TV only has one external input? And will the players definitely play my old CD's? (They probably will, but there is some concern that they won't play CD-R discs, which are the write-once CD's that we make at Kodak.) All in all, pretty exciting stuff.
One final detail from the DVD marketing people: The one feature that people like the most about the DVD players is that you don't have to rewind the movie.
Oh jeez...
Stay warm.
Ron "It's better to sound good than to feel good" G
