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I was thrilled to see a preview screening of Star Wars Episode III this afternoon. I had to take a 1/2 day off work but it was worth it.
I'd go along with a lot of what has been written in the favorable reviews, and also some of the negative ones.
The only thing left to say is the bits that I noticed that I hadn't read about already. Don't read any further if you are avoiding spoilers!
My feeling is George Lucas did not wimp out as much as I expected him to. He's bridged the two trilogies amazingly well, and ultimately it was about as good as it possibly could have been.
He also seemed to expand his own range, managing to intermix truly political observations with farce and physical humor.
I heard that Steven Spielberg cried at the end, and in a different setting i might have come close myself. Certainly the film made me sad. I knew a lot of Jedi weren't going to make it, but I wasn't ready for most of them to be summarily shot in the back. I also hadn't considered that there are Jedi kids at the academy.
Lucas' dialog is as bad as ever, I now like to think that in fact
they didn't speak English a long time ago in a galaxy far far away,
so in fact everything spoken in the film has been translated at
least once, possibly many times. In fact, once you accept that, the
dialog makes absolutely perfect sense. One day maybe someone will
fix it, with an idiomatic overdubbing, but until then we must make
do with flat computer generated dictionary speak dialog. It's a
small price to pay.
posted at: 22:22 | path: /films | permanent link to this entry
I'm now on my second high-def movie editing project.
I am starting to understand how it works a bit better. The slowness during importing is not because my laptop can't receive the data in real-time from the camera. That's no problem at all, as if you watch the LCD on the camera you see the footage replaying smoothly. Instead it seems to be the transcoding from HDV format (http://www.hdv-info.org/) to Apple Intermediate Codec format, since even after the tape stops, the laptop spends several more hours churning away doing something.
The first time I realised this is how it works I not only pressed stop on the camera as soon as the footage finished, and then disconnected the firewire cable so I could put the camera away (it's not something I like to leave out where it could attract Lucy's attention). Unfortunately, soon after this the laptop noticed the disconnect and killed the import operation retaining only the footage it had finished converting. This seems like a bug to me!
Not wanting to splice together two sections of footage from the continuous source, I deleted my project and reimported. The second attempt wasn't anywhere near done by 11.30pm so I left it running overnight.
The next morning, I came down to find the laptop hard drive near full, with the films clips totalling about 35 minutes - not the full 40 minutes. iMovie HD seems to graciously refuse to take the hard disk to 100% full, instead leaving a few hundred megs out of my original 25GB or so free space.
Editing a large file like this which used up nearly the last few megs of the drive is where even iMovie starts to breakdown. It turns out that the raw filesystem performance for that file can get down as low as 1-2MB/s as observed in the Apple "Activity Monitor" application. This causes iMovie to give up trying to replay the video, so editing becomes near impossible. I was forced to move the files to my external firewire hard drive, which isn't that fast, but is massively faster when it has 50GB free on it than my laptop drive with 500MB!
I eventually struggled through this project on my laptop, but it's clear I'm going to need some serious hardware!
posted at: 22:20 | path: /movie-making | permanent link to this entry