Tag Archives: ipod

The Weekend numbers explosion

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According to a post at the Long Tail, it would seem that Hollywood is doing its best to hide the fact that blockbusters are few and far in between.

I first posted about Hollywood’s plans to produce fewer movies last year. Now it seems they’ll also be massaging the numbers as well.

According to post (a reader who requested anonymity said):

I happened to be riding to work with an exec from one of the major studios this morning, and he mentioned that the studios are increasingly making deals with theaters to inflate opening numbers. In particular, they will give the theaters very high revenue share for the first X days of the movie (he mentioned 100% for the first 3 days), incentivizing the theater to maximize the number of screens the movie’s shown on, inflating opening numbers.

The particular example of Superman and Pirates were actually the ones he brought up – that Superman’s decline was partially due to the theathers’ incentive period running out.

I have no idea how true or prevalent this is, but something you might want to look into. This would be done for movies which the studio considers potential “hits”, increasing discrepancy between them and normal movies.

Funny, I don’t think I heard Bryan Singer mention it in his Superman interview.

I’m still hopeful that the explosion of user-generated content will severely erode the blockbuster’s share of the pie. Remains to be seen if Google Video will finally launch their marketplace for indie producers.

Producing video for iPod

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iPod videoOn October 12, 2005, Apple announced the fifth-generation iPod, a.k.a. video iPod, which featured the ability to play video with resolutions of up to 480 x 480 and 320 x 240 (videos purchased from the iTunes Music Store are limited to 320 x 240.)

Is the video iPod (and handhelds in general) a viable platform for indie producers to distribute shorts and features? As I’ve said in my iPod video review, you won’t be able to play Lawrence of Arabia on your iPod any time soon.

IMAX movies aside, let’s take the U2 iPod video as an example of what you can play on an iPod and make it look great.

Video iPod – Encoding Video

iPod videoThe video iPod plays MPEG-4 and H.264 video – this is all good news as both codecs are very efficient which results in very high-quality video.

When one considers the target resolution, even files encoded at the highest resolution (230,400 pixels) usually end up about 15MB per minute of video.

Most feature-length videos will be between 1GB and 2GB. If you encode them at 320×240, they’ll be in the 500MB range probably. In other words, even the 30G iPod will store 10+ movies.

Video iPod – Screen and Battery

iPod video It has a 65,536 color screen with a 320 x 240 (the pixel count is 76,800) QVGA transflective TFT display. The iPod is also able to display video on an external TV via the AV cable accessory (that’s the only reason to encode at the higher resolution).

16-bit color is OK but definitely not great when you need a dynamic range. Most gradient backgrounds will form strips instead of one smooth transition. Reflections or overexposure create similar patterns. As you can see in the screenshots from the U2 iPod video, there are 3 rules:

  • Rule #1: Underexposure
  • Rule #2: Silhouettes
  • Rule #3: Solid Colors

iPod videoHigh-contrast could be put on the list but it would be a bit misleading. For example, a film noir is high-contrast but it might have too many grays for the display to handle.

Practive makes perfect. However, before you rush out with your new HD camera, you should download a few torrents for your iPod (already encoded) and see what works and what doesn’t.

I’ll return to the subject tomorrow when I’ll review how to convert videos for iPod.

Hollywood’s Xmas vows: fewer movies

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With DVD sales flattening, Variety re-examines the big studios. Most of the executives interviewed requested to remain anonymous, a clear sign it’s time to face some unpleasant realities.

Wedding Crashers - one of the few movies in the 30-70M range that made a profitDVD sales have been the engine for studio growth in the last 5 years but in the last 12 months the DVD market is flattening. There’s some new distribution channels on the horizon: like Sony’s Blu-Ray DVD (or Toshiba’s alternative HD-DVD) and even the new video iPod (limited to tv series or ipod torrents). These new markets are not mature enough however to compensate the overall decrease in revenues.

Although the major studios are facing different problems, the majority of studio executives agreed on several points:

  • Limit movies in the $35 million to $70 million range
  • Financial partners are no longer an option — they’re required
  • Trim marketing budgets
  • Make fewer movies

In terms of the mid-budget movies, Variety quotes a COO at a major studio:

If you look at the $40 million to $70 million budget film, they are so difficult. They rarely have top box office stars, and they’re such risky territory because you have to spend $25 million on P&A, so it’s a huge investment. It’s really hard to get that back.

It’s still debatable if this spells GOOD news for indie producers. If the market continues to contract in the next year, studios might need to find ways to market smaller and cheaper movies. They could plagiarize the NASA motto: faster, better, cheaper.

A few examples that Hollywood could take to heart: Russian-made The Return (Возвращение) was produced for under $500,000 and made over ten times that. Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation also resulted in 1:10 ratio: a budget of just $4M resulted in revenues in excess of $40M internationally. Of course, a profit of a few million can’t plug in the holes made by a disaster like Zathura…

Vodcasts for filmmakers

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I still haven’t tried podcasting and the latest fad walks right in. VODcasting is a term coined recently to describe a video-on-demand (broad)cast. In essence, you start posting videos instead of posts consisting mainly of words and photos.

So how is this helping filmmakers? Let’s look at Peter Jackson’s production diary for King Kong. Instead of HTML pages linking to videos, he could’ve uploaded the videos to a server, saved an XML file, and asked you to sign-up for his vodcasts. Once you’re subscribed to his production diary vodcast, iTunes will start downloading videos as they become available.

Most vodcasts will probably be low-rez, mainly for bandwidth reasons. You should be able to view them just fine on your new video iPod while driving to work… Wait a minute! I meant while riding the Tube to work.

There’s a simplistic, yet useful step-by-step guide to vodcasting published at Playlist’s site.

Update: You can read my tips on producing video for iPod.

New iPod plays everything BUT movies

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iPod videoLooking at the new iPod, I start wondering why Apple claims it plays everything… but movies. Apparently, Apple made Hollywood a proposal they couldn’t resist, yet somehow Hollywood did resist it. I wonder why.

For starters, let’s look at the tech specs: it sports a 2.5-inch LCD display (320 x 240 pixels) that supports 260,000 colors. That’s good enough for downloadable porn but I don’t think it cuts it for movies. It’s not widescreen (being 4:3 instead of 16:9) and there’s limit on the resolution of the movies that can be imported (480×480).

Just consider that Sidney Pollack brought a lawsuit against a Danish TV station for the use of its pan-and-scan (4:3) showing of his film “Three days of the Condor”. The court ruled that the pan-and-scan was a “mutilation” of his work and a violation of Pollacks ‘Driot Moral’, his legal right as an artist to maintain his reputation by protecting the integrity of his work.

As an even more extreme example, imagine you somehow get “Lawrence of Arabia” on your new iPod. How long would you wait until you see the black speck that Omar Sharif is in the famous scene? It takes a while to spot it even on the DVD edition.

Despite its shortcomings, the new iPod sets a trend that might eventually lead to an alternative means for distributing “pocket” movies. This could enable indie producers to distribute their movies cheaply and easily. Even now you can find plenty of sites that have torrents for iPod.

The Zen Vision from Creative Labs already sports a 640×480 LCD. I’m hopeful SONY will have the last word on this one. I love the LCD on my SONY VX2000, I’m sure I’ll be able to find Omar Sharif in under a minute if I manage to play it there.

Update: You can read my tips on producing video for iPod. A must-see for your video iPod is Steve Ballmer’s Developers video.