Archive for July, 2005

Digital cinema: one step closer

Published by Peter on July 31, 2005 in digital cinema. 3 Comments


Digital Cinema Initiatives, LLC (DCI) - founded in March 2002, as a joint venture of Disney, Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros. Studios - just released its “FINAL OVERALL SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS AND SPECIFICATIONS FOR DIGITAL CINEMA”:

(Hollywood, CA - July 27, 2005) Digital Cinema Initiatives, LLC (DCI) has completed the final overall system requirements and specifications to help theatrical projector and equipment manufacturers create uniform and compatible digital cinema (…)
(from dcimovies.com)

The specification is available at dcimovies.com (1MB - PDF).

OVERVIEW

These are the stages in the flowchart of digital cinema:

DSM (Digital Source Master)

the end-product of the ‘feature postproduction’.
FORMAT: Defined by producer (color space and bit depth, resolution, fps, …)
SECURITY: Defined by the producer

DCDM (Digital Cinema Distribution Master)

this is the version ready to play on a digital cinema projector.
CONTENT: combines video, audio and subtitle data, based on SMPTE standards, the equivalent of an (unencrypted) DVD
FORMAT:
RESOLUTION: 2K (2048 x 1080), 4K (4096 x 2160 pixels)
FRAMES PER SECOND: 24 fps or 48 fps (only possible for 2K)
COLOR DEPTH: 12bit/color = 36 bit total for RGB (68 billion colors)
IMAGE FORMAT: MXF (Material eXchange Format)
IMAGE BANDWIDTH: maximum 250 Mbps which is 112 GB/hour
AUDIO FORMAT: up to 16 channels of 20-bit 48 KHz or 96 KHz WAV
SUBTITLE FORMAT: PNG files or Timed Text
TOTAL MOVIE SIZE: between 45 and 140 GB/hour
SECURITY: not encrypted - should be ready to play

DCP (Digital Cinema Package)

FORMAT: compressed, split up in ‘reels’
SECURITY: encrypted using 128-bit AES

MASTERING

The Digital Source Master (DSM) is created in post-production and can be used to convert into a Digital Cinema Distribution Master (DCDM). The DSM can also be used to convert to a film duplication master, a home video master, and/or a master for archival purposes.

TRANSFER

A DCDM is created from the DSM, and then prepared for shipment in a DCP. The DCP is shipped to the actual cinema venue, where the content is decrypted and decompressed into the DCDM format again, ready to be projected. Since an uncompressed movie will be something like 100GB to 500GB of data, the compressed version maybe 5 to 10 times smaller, the shipping of the remaining 10-100GB could be done with a Blu-Ray disc, a DLT tape or a simple portable hard-disk. Even an iPod might do the trick. Jim Rygiel used those for shipping draft versions of Lord Of The Rings, as he mentioned on IT Conversations.

PROJECTION

Most systems work with the Texas Instruments DLP (Digital Light Processing) technology: a chip with thousands of little mirrors that can be flipped electronically at very high speeds. They enable 1024 levels of gray for each of the RGB colours, which would amount to 30-bit - or 1 billion - colours, were it not that all documentation talks about ‘more than 35 trillion colours’.

1. A digital projector based on DLP CinemaTM technology transfers the digitized image file onto three optical semiconductors known as Digital Micromirror Devices, or DMDs. Each of these chips is dedicated to one primary color-red, green, or blue. A DMD chip contains a rectangular array of over one million microscopic mirrors.
2. Light from the projector’s lamp is reflected off the mirrors and is combined in different proportions of red, green and blue, as controlled by the image file, to create an array of different colored pixels that make up the projected image. (…)
3. The DMD mirrors tilt either toward or away from the light source thousands of times per second to reflect the movie onto the screen. These images are sequentially projected onto the screen, recreating the movie in front of you with perfect clarity and a range of more than 35 trillion colors.
(from: Digital Cinema 101 - Texas Instruments)

These projectors - like the ones from Digital Projection and Barco - get their input through a DVI-D, SMPTE 292M or BNC connector. (Overview of video connectors on utram.com)

OBSERVATIONS

  • The 2K standard translates into 2.2 megapixel images and the 4K standard into 8.8 megapixel. So 4K Digital Cinema uses a resolution most commerical ’still’ camera’s don’t have yet.
  • If you project a 2K image on a screen 15m (50 feet) wide, each pixel is 15000/2048 = 7.3 mm wide. At 4K: 3.6mm wide. If you would project a DVD (720×480 pixels), a pixel would be 2cm wide.
  • Texas Instruments already has a 2K DLP (DC 2K DMD) chip, but there is no 4K chip yet. Sony, however, announced their first 4K projectors.
  • The Sony SXRD technology has a 16:9 aspect ratio (1920/1080), the JVC DLA-QX1G projector has a 4:3 aspect ratio, but the new standard has a very unusual 19:10 ratio. No idea why that is.
  • The DCI announcement was also covered on cinematech.blogspot.com, docbug.com, ofview.com and blogs.mercurynews.com. Some good articles on DLP: whatsonhdtv.blogspot.com.

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‘Moroccan Blue’ Leads Top Fashion Colors (RGB)

Published by Peter on July 29, 2005 in color and webdev. 1 Comment

Moroccan Blue topped the list of colors at New York Fashion Week’s Fall 2005 collections, according to Pantone, Inc., the global authority on color and provider of professional color standards for the design industries.
Each season, Pantone surveys designers showing at New York Fashion Week and collects feedback on prominent collection colors, color inspiration, color philosophy and each designer’s signature shades. This information is used to create the PANTONE Fashion Color Report.
The top 10 most directional women’s ready-to-wear colors for Fall 2005 (along with printing values) are
(converted by me to RGB):

Color Name Pantone RGB
Moroccan Blue PANTONE 19-4241 #004D7A
Glazed Ginger PANTONE 18-1154 #BA5D00
American Beauty PANTONE 19-1759 #BF0000
Ruby Wine PANTONE 19-1629 #730028
Atmosphere PANTONE 16-1406 #B2A68F
Burnt Olive PANTONE 18-0521 #466900
Gloxinia PANTONE 19-3022 #5600A6
Rattan PANTONE 14-1031 #DACE3D
Moss PANTONE 16-0532 #9DA600
Burnt Orange PANTONE 16-1448 #ED7700

from creativepro.com

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Bentzon Brotherhood: Rapper’s New Delight

Published by Peter on July 17, 2005 in music. 2 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, at a party in Maastricht, I heard a new version of Rapper’s Delight (Sugarhill Gang), a 15-minute funky jazz version with a kick-ass bass. I went to the DJ booth and turned my head at 45RPM so I could read the name of the artist: “Bentzon“. Back home, some elementary Googling later:

Nikolaj Bentzon is Denmarks finest Keyboardist and has played alongside David Sanborn, Van Morrison & Joe Henderson amongst many others. For his debut release on Freestyle Records he teams up with the rhythm section from The Headhunters: Paul Jackson on Bass & Mick Clark on Drums and pays homage to the genius of the Sugarhill Gangs debut release Rappers Delight.
from kudosrecords.co.uk

Or here:

Listen to Rapper’s Delight (through Webjay)
A real head-turner, this one. The Bentzon Brotherhood, working around Nicolaj Bentzon’s slick Rhodes and Clavinet manoeuvres, take the Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’ and go all funky and jazzical on its ass.
from tunes.co.uk

It is released on a record label without a web site: Freestyle Records:

Freestyle Records is the new label from DJ & promoter at the world famous Jazz Café venue in London, Adrian Gibson

Hear a sample via jazz-network.com (RAM) and beatstreet.ca (MP3) or fatcity.co.uk (MP3).

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Online software development: the WikiRAD

Published by Peter on July 15, 2005 in internet and webdev. 7 Comments


I love the idea of social software. Specifically, while it has been several years since I first encountered the wiki concept (Ward Cunningham’s c2.com), and I have been a Wikipedia contributor for a while, it is only since I checked out the emerging wiki hosting sites (see Google and social software: wikis) that I realize that wikis are becoming mainstream. Sites like Wikispaces, JotSpot and PbWiki are providing anyone with the tools to safely and effortlessly develop a body of knowledge.

On a seemingly unrelated point, I am currently developing some stuff in PHP (codeword ‘photcasting‘ but more on that later) and I realise my development environment is so amateuristic: I use a text-editor with FTP support (the last couple of years it has always been Editplus), and everytime I save some code, I overwrite the older version on the ‘live’ server. I also develop on different PCs in a typical week (easily 3) and so I don’t have 1 development PC with PHP running where I could stage everything before I deploy it to my ‘production’ site. With a bad broadband connection, when a ’save’ operation goes wrong, you end up with a ‘crucialstuff.php’ script file that is empty (0 bytes) and brings your whole site down. Unfortunately, I know this from (repeated) experience.

Earlier today, I was thinking about these 2 issues one right after the other and bam: they collided. I have a new development paradigm: the WikiRAD.

‘WikiRAD’ development

WRITE CODE

  • you write your code with your browser in a Wiki-style editor, with syntax colouring added (haven’t seen that in a Wiki editor yet). The code resides on a WikiRAD server (with RAID5 disks, daily backups, …). You need no other software on your PC to be able to develop software.
  • the Wiki system takes care of version management and comparing of sources (Wikis already do this). Check in, check out, rollback, branching, merging, several developers on 1 codebase, … all possible!
  • you can search your whole codebase for certain keywords, jump to class definitions - just like normal IDE
  • when you look at your code, the names of classes, templates, libaries, .. become clickable, just like in a … wiki!
  • there are tools to make writing code easier (class wizard, sample code, forum for questions)
  • there’s a Google-like crawler that indexes code so it becomes available for other developers - this is real “open source”!

COMPILE AND RUN

  • the WikiRAD server lets you develop in a ’stage’ mode (separate from your real system) and lets you deploy it to ‘production’ once you’re sure. The production server can be your own server, with deployment via FTP or SSH.
  • for the most popular languages, you also have a lint system that can detect obvious errors in your code before compiling.
  • if the language you write in requires compiling (like C++, C#, VB.NET, …) the server takes care of that - probably faster than on your own Pentium III.
  • you no longer need to set up a ’similar’ server to test your software, it will run on the same kind of system, behind the same combination of routers and firewalls, with the same libraries installed.
  • you can add breakpoints, see the console output, view values of variables, …

So take Sourceforge, drop in a Wiki system for writing the code, a system for online debugging and profiling and tada: life has just become so much easier for a programmer.

All remarks are welcome!

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Amy Cross spamming Technorati

Published by Peter on July 8, 2005 in spam. 2 Comments

If you look through the posts under the Technorati tag ‘Adsense’ you find most posts are from a blog “Adsense For profit” or “holy grail of adsense dot com” (No, I won’t link to it, I don’t like their kind).

When you click the link of the post, which typically links to a http://www.holygrail__.com/ archives/ $number, you are redirected to the site of a hosting provider spagack dot info. When you click the name of the blog, you don’t see a blog, but a classic badly designed, keyword infested, get-rich-quick spam page for a handbook on Adsense advertising ($80).

Why would Technorati include a spam page, you say? Well, the web site is actually built on a WordPress blog software, but with a firmly modified template: in the HTML there are some <div> tricks to push the blog-generated content out of sight and throw the spam page in your face. When you check the actual contents of the blog feed: it’s some kind of automatic re-post of Adsense related articles, but with the links (anchor tags) modified to <ab href="http://...">...</ab>, so they do not get picked up by crawlers like Google and Technorati.

Who is responsible for this stuff? The DNS registration shows it to be a certain Amy Cross from Texas, who’s also behind the spagack hosting site. The address she uses is a mailbox in McCamey, TX 79752, which I first expected to be a phony mailbox just like they used in the DRA scam, but there actually is an Amy Cross registered in McCamey. Amy has already been outed as a spammer on www.blogherald.com (Apr 2005). She actually responded to it:

I guess I’ll just leave it alone. I can learn to handle any insult from any small minded nit as long as it gives me the exposure and reach that you have given me.

I guess she’ll be delighted with this post then.

Other blog posts on the issue of Technorati spam: johnaugust.com

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European Patent Law Rejected

Published by Peter on July 7, 2005 in copyright. 0 Comments


I was first made aware of the ’software patent’ issue when Tobias Oetiker changed the front page of his MRTG site to protest against it. It now seems the European Parliament did the wise thing and kept its hands of the issue.

The European Parliament on Wednesday rejected a proposed law to create a single way of patenting software across the European Union, a blow to big companies who had pushed hard for its adoption.
The so-called software patent directive, rejected by a 648-14 vote with 18 abstentions, would have given companies EU-wide patent protection for computerized inventions (…).
But lawmakers said the measure would stifle enterprise and did not promote innovation, and that human knowledge can’t be patented. The move kills the legislation since the EU head office, which had drafted it, does not plan to set forth a new version. (…)
Companies such as Nokia and Siemens fought hard for adoption of the bill, saying patent protection would give them incentives to invest in research and development. Open-source advocates campaigned against it, saying that individuals and small businesses could be bankrupted by expensive legal battles with software giants over fuzzy patent law.
from European Patent Law rejected(Wired)

What kind of laws would give a fictional HugeCorp Inc even more ‘incentives to invest in research and development’:

  1. every thought an employee has at HugeCorp Inc, belongs to the company. Practically this means that, if ever an employee wants to claim an idea as his, he has to be able to prove it was conceived of in his free time.
  2. if an employee, certainly someone from the R&D department, leaves the company, he should sign a non-disclosure/non-competition contract. If HugeCorp Inc has doubts about the person’s willingness to shut up and do absolutely nothing with the knowledge that was gathered while working at their premises, the former employee’s memory can be erased, either chemically or with a hammer.
  3. whenever a new product or technology is developed at HugeCorp Inc, consumers can be forced to buy it. The normal process of customer adoption allows for inventions to be unprofitable because of such silly reasons as: too expensive, too user-unfriendly, no demand, better substitute available. This makes R&D riskful and should be eliminated.
  4. it is forbidden to reverse engineer anything that was developed at HugeCorp Inc. This includes decompiling software code, performing input/output analysis or disassembling electronic or mechanical devices. Replacing batteries in a watch, changing a tire on a car and decoding an imperfect DVD-encryption are therefor forbidden, except by persons explicitly accredited by the manufacturer.
  5. whatever inventions are developed at universities or other academic institutions may never be commercialised or released on a free basis to the outside world. They should be handed over to HugeCorp Inc for a symbolical sum (let’s say, a 19″ flat screen for the supervising professor, and free drinks for anyone involved in the development), where it will be prepared for commercial purposes (i.e. DRM and licensing mechanisms will be built in). If the product sells really well, a new wing will be donated for the department that inspired the development, and it will get a name like “HugeCorp Research Institute“.
  6. the “open source” movement is too large to be killed silently, but it should be possible for HugeCorp Inc to have some of its employees interfere incognito in the development process and introduce bugs, annoyance and controversy. Traditional practices like defamation, bribery, blackmail … can also be used to discredit open source personalities.
  7. any invention that has, could have, could be thought to have or eventually maybe might slightly have, a negative effect on the balance sheet of HugeCorp Inc, and that was not developed by HugeCorp itself, cannot be commercialized or released publicly. The person(s) responsible for its conception can be sued for that act, or under some other pretence, can be rendered life very difficult. Unless, of course, they work for EvenHugerComp Inc, in which case HugeCorp just keeps quiet in the hope not being sued themselves.
  8. The company cannot be held responsible for any personal damage its employees would suffer while researching and developing. If the employee does not like that, he can always resign and go work somewhere else. (In which case rule #2 is still valid)
  9. The company cannot be held responsible for the detrimental effects of its inventions on the environment, the market or its customers. If any damage is done, some other company can step in and sell the service of fixing it.
  10. The company cannot be held responsible for the actions of its employees, except if these actions would have a positive impact on the balance sheet.

GEZOCHT: medewerkers voor brussel.blogt.be

Published by Peter on July 3, 2005 in Brussel and NL. 1 Comment


(post in dutch)

AANDACHT, AANDACHT!

Ik ben op zoek naar enkele partners in crime om een brusselse stadsblog op te zetten, de tegenhanger van de excellente gent.blogt.be en mechelen.blogt.be sites.

OEVER WA GOET ET?

  • een groepsblog door en/of voor brusselaars, waarmee bedoelt wordt: zowel zij die in Brussel wonen als zij die in Brussel werken, geboren zijn, school lopen of tout court in Brussel geinteresseerd zijn.
  • met daarin: een mengelmoes van actualiteit, cultuur, politiek, parkeertips, interviews met lokale (anti-)helden, fotografie, poezie, cafépraat, essays - geschreven door een bende vrijwilligers
  • in eerste instantie nederlandstalig (het heet dan ook niet bruxelles.blogue.be)

WIEN MOENIK HEMME?
Als je een paar van de volgende criteria kunt afvinken, neem dan zeker met mij contact op:

  • een goeie pen (wat ervaring als blogger, journalist, redacteur van de schoolkrant helpt zeker; het gebruik van zinnen als ‘de geïmplanteerde gedragingen in zijn niet-geseculariseerde santenkraam‘ is er wat over)
  • een passie voor Brussel: je identificeert je met Brussel, je bent trots er te wonen, of er geboren te zijn. Als er vrienden op bezoek komen, laat je ze enthousiast de tofste hoekjes zien, en je kent het verschil tussen het Justititiepaleis en de basiliek van Koekelberg (de laatste is die met het kruis op het tsjoepeke).
  • tijd en goesting om stukjes tekst te schrijven en een licht maar onmiskenbaar genot om uw eigen werk gepubliceerd te zien
  • een originele invalshoek: elke week een gesprek met een Brusselse barman, een interview met een beginnend muziekgroepje, een brusselse versie van TV Touché maar dan geschreven, een foto van de afgrijselijkste graffiti, …
  • je hebt een eigen mening over wat er gebeurt in ‘t stad en je wil die graag delen
  • je komt regelmatig met mensen in aanraking die wat te vertellen hebben over Brussel (over den oorlog, of den skieven architekt, of het verkeerscirculatieplan) en je zou het leuk vinden om daar iets van op papier (scherm) te zetten
  • je hebt een goed excuus nodig om de ganse avond op cafe te gaan en met wildvreemden te beginnen praten (”Zaade gaa van dees cotee?“) en vindt het niet erg daarna, na 2 Perdolans en een kop koffie, iets over te schrijven.

Ik zou willen starten met een groepje van 5-10 redacteurs, die een of meer keer per week iets uit hun mouw willen schudden. Streefdatum is 1 september (of vroeger, als we volk genoeg op de wagen hebben). Je kan me bereiken op brussel@forret.be.

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Adwords generator tool

Published by Peter on July 2, 2005 in tool. 0 Comments


I just finished another webpage for my forret.com tools collection: the Adwords Generator tool. Inspired by seeing a colleague losing his time with Excel trying to create a full list of keywords for his Google Adsense campaigns, I created an easy web interface to do just that: give in lists of keywords of key phrases, and let the Adwords tool create all the possible combinations.

You would use it in this way: say you want to promote a podcast client application for Windows (like the new Doppler 3.0).

  • you would use the 1st box to list ‘podcast’ and all its synonyms:
    podcast, audioblog, mp3 blog
  • you would use the 2nd box to list all synonyms for ‘client’
    client, podcatcher, aggregator, downloader, viewer
  • you could use the 3rd box to list the versions of Windows your software runs on:
    Windows 2000 (or Win2k), Windows XP (or WinXP), Windows 2003 (or Win2003)

Combining everything together gives you a list of 90 keyphrases: Adsense keywords for a Windows podcast client. You can even add the “phrase matching” or [exact matching] options (see adwords.google.com for more info).

You can also look up suggestions for new keywords through tools from Google Adsense and Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture). A nice addition to my toolbox!

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