I hope pixar will soon release their back catalogue in Blue-ray. I just bought a package deal of Ratatoo... taratuill.... the new one*, bundled with all the Shorts so far, and I watched the latter today. It looks great, and I was on the floor watching the newest one, "Lifted" from 2007, about a very sound sleeper and the aliens trying to abduct him. Priceless stuff. One small, cute detail: the error beep that the alien's huge computer makes is the "hero" sound on Mac OS X. :)
I'm looking forward to The Incredibles and Monsters Inc coming on Blue-ray.
*Update: the design and rendering on Ratatouille is amazing. For example, one of the human characters fall in the river, and for a while afterwards he is wet, and he is really wet. His hair, his skin, his clothes, all of it radiates wetness. It's clear they made a major study of how wet things look, and how to replicate it in CGI.
In fact I think they now can make environments and some animals which are very hard to distinguish from live action. I am wondering how long it takes before this includes human figures. How long until they can insert at 100% CGI-created scene into a movie, and nobody notices?
(Update: in fact, when watching Ratatouille, I sometimes really feel like I'm watching live action, especially the scenery. This is the first time ever this has happened. It's very impressive.)
I also greatly admire Pixar for setting the movie in Paris. After all the survival of the company depends upon American sales, and the movie was planned about three years ago (four?), when American anti-French sentiments were high. Very gutsy move.
... OK, I looked it up, actually the genesis of the film was in 2001, but they still chose to follow through on it.
Update 19/3: Once again I have to comment on how embarrassingly immature the high-def format is, even in 2008. This morning I've spent ten minutes (so far!) trying to start up the Ratatouille disk and find the place where I left off last night. (I can't leave the player off, the danged thing shuts down after a few minutes.) Copyright warnings, Disney trailers and promotions, same for pixar, menu animations, multi-second delays before the machine reacts, buttons that sometimes work and sometimes don't, cryptic labeling, mysterious stalls with black screen, a top menu suddenly appearing without any buttons on it, multi-minute wait times for the disk to load, and then multi-minute waits again after the trailers are laboriously dismissed one at a time... Frankly, this disc/player combination have passed beyond simply Embarrassing and entered solidly into Infuriating territory.
Seriously, what the h*ll? I realize it's pretty new technology, but even ten years ago, DVD players were never this bad or slow, and high-def is basically just DVDs at four times the resolution.
If you wanna wait until 2009 to invest in Blue-ray, I won't be the one to blame you.
hello eolake, i enjoy this blog. are you still into silvia hartmann? there's a newish PS writing group i like a lot. if by any chance you're going to the et workshop next month, i'll see you there, which i'd enjoy. nan
ReplyDeleteNan, after I started reading A Course In Miracles and The Disappearance Of The Universe by Gary Renard, I have been neglecting Silvia's work.
ReplyDeleteDoes your player have 'bookmarks' or some similar feature.
ReplyDeleteI bought a Playstation3 which I use as a Blu-Ray player and that 'remembers' where you got to in a movie, so you can stop it, eject it, turn the thing off, then turn it on, bung in the disc and carry on watching where you left off. I thought most players did this, so perhaps you've turned off an option somewhere?
I agree that they can be overly complicated when all you want to do is watch the danged thing!
It does it for DVDs. I'll have to peruse the manual (not supplied in English) to see if I have to do something extra to make it work with Blue-ray. (My HD-DVD player does it only half the time.)
ReplyDeleteLooked it up: it is supposed to Resume at last point played automatically under normal circumstances, unless the disc does not permit it.
ReplyDeleteSee, why would they want to program a disc to not permit Resumed play?
Eolake said: "... high-def is basically just DVDs at four times the resolution."
ReplyDeleteNot really. There other changes that result in Blu-ray having practically nothing to do with DVD (except maybe the flat round outer appearance). Quoting from Wikipedia:
"Java is used to implement interactive menus on Blu-ray Discs, as opposed to the method used on DVD video discs, which uses pre-rendered MPEG segments and selectable subtitle pictures, which is considerably more primitive and less seamless."
Now, anyone who has dabbled in computer science knows that Java is the last technology you would want to use to implement interactivity in a consumer oriented video player. Not only does Java suck in general, it is a fantastically inappropriate choice for something like this.
It would really seem like it.
ReplyDeleteAnd stupid, since there's no demand for platform agnosticism in this case.
Java also uses techniques like Garbage Collection which causes the virtual machine to randomly stop to dispose of any unused objects in memory. I can not say that the stalls you are seeing are caused by this but I wouldn't be surprised if they were.
ReplyDeleteI suppose it is also loading Java class libraries one by one, as needed, from the disk -- each time having to seek to the place on the disk where they are stored.
"why would they want to program a disc to not permit Resumed play?"
ReplyDeleteTo force anyone inserting the disc into a player to view the mandatory copyright notices. Shakespeare was right: "First, let's kill all the lawyers."
Those Pixar shorts are great. I like the alien abduction one. That and Luxo Jr are fab...
ReplyDeleteThe documentary is pretty interesting, they mention the average cell phone has 100X the compute power/memory of the original Pixar rendering hardware.
I lent out my Pixar Shorts, but I don't remember who to. :-(
One of these days I'm going to submit a resume/CV to Pixar with my correct e-mail address on it. The last one I put the wrong address on it :-o (Logitech found the mistake, but still phoned me.) Pixar would be an easy commute and a fun gig.
Oh yes.
ReplyDeleteIn the documentaries about Ratatouille, there's a female animator who is just gorgeous. Oh man.
Pixar is a cool company. I was their customer in the 1990s. Back then they couldn't make up their mind whether to be a software and animation company or just an animation company. In the end, extracting software out of them was like pulling teeth.
ReplyDeleteIt was this photo of a Pixar employee that originally gave me the impulse to get myself a standing desk.
Hmm, I got the impression from a documentary on the Shorts DVD that they were a hardware company?
ReplyDeleteI thought the Documentary said they were a HW company, however that sort of HW needs custom SW.
ReplyDeleteThey did the first movies for show and tell at the conferences.
They then found that they like making the movies and there was competing HW coming along. They then had to make a choice.
That was the time TTL is talking about.
I am talking about early 1990s. This was before Toy Story. Their main software product is called Photorealistic RenderMan (PRMan for short).
ReplyDeleteThey did hardware when they were still part of Industrial Light and Magic. After Jobs purchased the group, I think they concentrated mainly of software. (But I may be wrong here.)
ILM would also be a cool place to work, but they are over in Marin County, and I'd have to commute over the Richmond Bridge, passing all the UC Berkeley and San Francisco traffic. Pixar in Emeryville is so much closer to home.
ReplyDeleteI can never get chronology right. I was thinking it was around the time of the bee movie, after Luxo Jr. Way before Toy Story.
alex said: "I can never get chronology right. I was thinking it was around the time of the bee movie, after Luxo Jr. Way before Toy Story."
ReplyDeleteNo, you are quite accurate in your chronology.
I only mentioned Toy Story (1995) because it was the first feature film done using PRMan, and something everyone knows about.
The movie about the bee (their first) was in 1983 or 84. The famous lamp movie was a couple of years after that.
ReplyDelete"In fact I think they now can make environments and some animals which are very hard to distinguish from live action. I am wondering how long it takes before this includes human figures. How long until they can insert at 100% CGI-created scene into a movie, and nobody notices?"
ReplyDeleteIn Shrek (I think I got this from the extras on the DVD), they had to seriously downscale the rendering of princess Fiona, because she didn't fit at all in the cartoon scenery...
That's officially "rat-a-too-ee".
ReplyDeleteWeez whiskeurs and a le chef's hat.
"How long until they can insert at 100% CGI-created scene into a movie, and nobody notices?"
It's practically a matter of budget already, you know.
I mean, take Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within. Now imagine they had motion-captured the movements and facial expressions of real actors, with just that kind of graphic finesse. Now think about the same thing today. I rest my (brief-)case.
Or should that me my attache-case? What do Pixar executives use these days?
Aah, I'm anticipating the day when live porn actors become a thing of the past. Maybe very soon, given what you and I can purchase today for a home PC: http://www.virtualhottie.com/v2/euro/index.html.
I'm all for the joys of sex, but porn and prostitution? No thank you. they're an insult to the beauty of the thing. The sooner they're extinct because of "perfect" virtual porn and sex doll animatronics, the better.
..."how embarrassingly immature the high-def format is, even in 2008"
How well does the PlayStation3 Blu-ray movie work, any such dumb problems? And did the now recently defunct HD-DVD have the same level of short-circuit-comings?
I know, it would be faster to check on Wikipedia, but I'm composing offline. The rest of the family needs to use the phone line for phone calls at times... I hear you, "how quaint and passé". Modern-day Lebanon...
"why would they want to program a disc to not permit Resumed play?"
To force anyone inserting the disc into a player to view the mandatory copyright notices.
I know of ONE guaranteed way to be rid of those incredibly annoying annoyances:
They are usually removed by the hackers who make pirated copies of the movies!
Otherwise phrased: those mandatory copyright notices probably ENCOURAGE piracy simply in reaction to their irksome imposition. :-P
Shades of gray, everywhere I look...
Alex said...
"I lent out my Pixar Shorts, but I don't remember who to. :-("
That'll teach you to listen to the law. The near-immediate sanction is, when you lend stuff you often don't get it back.
Happened to me with one of my Tintin albums: my cousin borrowed it to read it, then she lended it to a friend of hers, and that one was lost for good!
I mean, sh*t, isn't a borrowed object like a trusted deposit? Who in their right mind and properly educated would lend something that isn't theirs to entrust? (Except banks with money, naturally. Anybody want to contract a sub-prime loan?)
"Pixar would be an easy commute and a fun gig."
Oh yes, yes-yes-yes! (^_^)
How cool it would be for me if I could say "Hey, I know personally that Lego-Man who works at Pixar".
Now I REALLY want you to succeed. Call me selfish. ;-)
And it would be TWICE cooler with my little nephews if I could tell them that Pepper Roni delivers yours pizzas.
"In the documentaries about Ratatouille, there's a female animator who is just gorgeous."
Aaargh! Curse you, Eolake Stobblehouse! Now I just HAVE to watch it!
While I'm at it. I'd also like to thank, I mean curse, Peter Pan, Johnny English, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Batman, Green Hornet, the Lone Ranger, El Zorro, the Black Adder, that dashing fox named Robin Hood, Barry Bee Benson, [TEXT TOO LONG - DISGRUNTLED VILLAIN'S RANT WAS CROPPED BY BLOGGER SERVER]
"And did the now recently defunct HD-DVD have the same level of short-circuit-comings?"
ReplyDeleteYep!
"those mandatory copyright notices probably ENCOURAGE piracy simply in reaction to their irksome imposition."
No kidding. Especially the UK ones: they have this fast-paced, MTV-style promo with noisy rock music, telling you "it's a crime". It is extremely irritating.
"Noisy rock music"? You're right, that IS a crime.
ReplyDeleteEven in the Guantanamo, um, "interrogations", it's been declared illegal. Granted, it wasn't just ANY noisy rock music. It was (gasp!) BRITNEY SPEARS! Oh, the humanity!