Models, CGI and outrageous auctions....

[MovieStuff]

I just watched an interesting show about Star Trek props, costumes, models being auctioned off and came to an interesting realization about the dangers of CGI imagery. CGI offers no legacy for future generations. You can't hold it. You can't inspect it closely or marvel at its craftsmanship like you can a model. The Enterprise model from the Star Trek movies sold for something like $250,000 and the Next Generation Enterprise sold for a whopping $500,000! That's half a million dollars for a big old chunk of plastic and wood but it represented something tangible; a physical piece of cinematic history.

I remember that Cinefex used to be a terrific magazine that had behind the scenes shots of special effects craftsmen building models and miniatures and, as CGI took over, you had nothing but more and more shots of guys just sitting in front of computers. Imagine Cristies trying to auction off a CD containing the code for a CGI Enterprise. I wouldn't give a buck fifty for it. What a joke. Pretty soon the back lot will be the byte lot. Sucks....

Roger

[Scotness]

Yeah I agree Roger - I've recently got into playing LP's again - and there's something special about them because of the fact that they are tangible and there is only a limited amount of each pressing - it somehow brings you closer to the artist adn that point in time than an mp3 that can be duplicated and distributed an infinte amount of times.

I guess that's what's good and bad about the digital age. There's something special about the experience of playing a record too - you can't jump up down too much on the floor, you've got to listen out for scratches, you've got to clean the disc and you've got to tend to it when it finishes - whereas playing something from a digital source doesn't really take any extra involvement from you once you've pressed play. I guess records are a bit like sand mandalas - you know they must come to an end!

About models and cgi though - I'd rather look at a good model than good cgi - it should look more realstic!

Scot
[/i]

[wado1942]

it somehow brings you closer to the artist adn that point in time than an mp3 that can be duplicated and distributed an infinte amount of times.

It's a scientifically proven fact that good vinyl is more accurate than a CD, say nothing about MP3s because they SUCK! I sold the Ipod my mom gave me because I can't stand the sound of it. I'm an album guy. I like holding the case in my hands and reading it while the songs play and even when I could download any song I wanted for free, I'd still buy the records I liked because of it. I'm also a nostalgia kind of guy. I like old technologies (obviously if I'm here). I got my first turn-table 4 years ago and my first laserdisc player just last year and YES I have the Star Wars Definitive Collector's Edition and it RULES! But I'm also pickier than most people. I can hear the difference between an album recorded on 2" and one recorded on a computer when my wife say it sounds the same to her.

Anyways, you do have a point about the ability to auction off stuff. Of course it cost more to store NCC-1701A than they got from the auction I'm sure. But my biggest beef aside from CGI looking like crap, and the fact that it's become the first resort, the second resort and if it's completely inplausible......MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, they'll consider using a practical or optical effect, is that CGI is completely and utterly uninteresting. I keep hearing about the breakthroughs in digital technology and how eyelash rendering has made CGI characters "perfect" but you know what? It's old news. It's all old news and has been since "The Abyss". OK, computer, I get it. I don't care if somebody came up with a new line of code that they didn't have in the '80s. It still looks stupid and it's still boring. I read a magazine that went extensively into the special effects of "X-Men" and the only part I found interesting was when the effects guy said he hand rotoscoped one of the effects shots himself instead of using CGI. I'm sure the details are facinating to the guys who come up with the CGI stuff but I like tricks. I like "Eternal Sunshine" because of its use of forced perspective & such instead of compositing. I like reading about making models and overcranked puppet shots etc. But reading line after line of "we made a CG model here, we made a CG background there, with the aid of a computer, the actor smiles in this shot" is just tedious like I'm sure I sound right now.

[aj]

It is the same thing for consumers/citizens. In the future no shoe boxes with letters or photo's belonging to parents or grandparents who are now youths. It takes 50 years of data archiving and moving to modern storage again and again. I expect few will manage that.

[fireflame productions]

yeah. Even though I do a little bit of CGI, I try to use in camera effects.When watching HArry POtter or War of the worlds you can tell it's CGI and it all seems abit silly. It breakes the reality!

[fireflame productions]

yeah. Even though I do a little bit of CGI, I try to use in camera effects.When watching HArry POtter or War of the worlds you can tell it's CGI and it all seems abit silly. It breakes the reality!

[mattias]

It's a scientifically proven fact that good vinyl is more accurate than a CD

don't be silly.

/matt

[wado1942]

Vinyl is molecular resolution while CD only has 65,536 possible output values. Vinyl also has a frequency response up to 50KHz while CD hits a hard brickwall at 19KHz or so. The only problem is noise really. But people can hear detail up to 20dB to 30dB below the noise level in analogue sources while in digital, the noise floor is the absolute floor of detail also. Now I'm not talking about 20-year-old, been played a hundred times vinyl either. I mean fresh, well pressed vinyl. It takes about 20-bit 90KHz to get the percieved resolution of vinyl.

[MovieStuff]

It's a scientifically proven fact that good vinyl is more accurate than a CD

don't be silly.

/matt

Here is a link with some interesting side-by-side comparison information:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/10/8/134958/152

Some interesting highlites:

.....Just because one technology is inherently superior to another in one way or another does not in fact ensure that an application of that technology is superior.

The CD's format has two distinct disadvantages to both cassette and LP, caused by the same shortcoming- its sample rate and to a lesser extent, using only two bytes of resolution per sample.

This was forced by the technology of the time when digital recording was first starting. In the late 1970s when digital recording was born, 44 k samples per second was the best the equipment of the time could do. It was deemed "good enough," since the labels "golden ears" (humans with hearing well above average) didn't hear any noise and the sound of aliasing was something they had never encountered. They knew what hiss sounded like. They knew what a "muddy" recording sounded like. They knew what harmonic distortion sounded like. They knew what clipping sounded like. But aliasing was new, and they didn't hear it- because they could not possibly listen for it, as they listened for the above mentioned distortions they knew.

At a CD's 44 ksps sample rate, the very highest frequency it can reproduce at all is 22 khz. This is well above human hearing- but here, the model fails. Because its 22 khz frequency response is not an undistorted response.

With a 28 ips analog reel to reel, you can record a dog whistle with no distortion, and transfer it to LP, also with no distortion. In fact, these two technologies had become so good, with a frequency response so high, that they introduced "quadrphonics," or four channel stereo, in the early 1970s. It was a complete flop, since a $300 stereo sounded much better than a $300 quadrophonics system. You needed four of everything for quadrophonics, as opposed to two with stereo.

So, with only two sides of a groove in a record, how did they get four channels?

In a stereo record, the up and down motions of the stylis (needle) translate into both channels of the stereo signal. This way an older, monophonic record player could still play a stereo record without losing half the signal.

The right channel comes from the side to side motions of the needle. To get the left channel, the right channel is mixed out of phase with the combined channels, cancelling itself out in that signal, which becomes the left channel.

With quadrophonics, the rear two channels were modulated with a 44khz tone and mixed with the other two signals, then demodulated at the turntable. This illustration is important to highlight the incredible frequency response of the 28 ips reel to reel and the vinyl record. These incredible frequency responses are completely undistorted. Were the supersonic carrier and the signal it carried distorted, when demodulated it would have sounded terrible. In fact, had you enough cash to afford a good quadrophonic setup, you would not have heard any difference in quality between the front channels and the rear channels.

By contrast, at high frequencies, CDs do very badly indeed. The best cassettes were capable of reaching 18khz without distortion, and even modest, affordable cassette players reached 16khz. If you had both the vinyl and the cassette (many people bought two copies of a piece, an LP for home and a cassette or 8-track for the car) you could hear the difference in the responses of cassette and vinyl. They were very striking, and it didn't take an audiophile to hear them.

By contrast, a CD doesn't even hit 15khz without horrible distortion......

Roger

[christoph]

so, how did a thread about Models and CGI become into a "you say tomato i say toma(y)to" thing again?

[DriveIn]

I had a record player reconditioned before christmas so my father could listen to his old holiday albums again. The shop marveled at the record players durability and said all it needed was a good cleaning and grease, plus a new needle. They laughed and thought the turntable motor could probably start a car. One of my fathers favorites are the albums Victory at Sea. The CD version of the albums is poor, not due to one technology versus another, it was poorly mastered for Compact Disc release. He wanted to be able to listen to the albums again. The one thing we noticed right away, was the music sounded more alive on most of the his other albums as well. You felt like you were in the concert hall, versus listening to a tune on the radio like most of his CDs of both new and older music. I was never much for jumping on technology, which may be why I am still involved in film. I went straight from 8 track tapes to the first CD player when it sold to the public. I skipped the cassette revolution completely. The eight track was a convenient way to record albums for road travel music mostly. I still have a working 8 track player in the house, I use the radio function though, not the eight track deck. The CDs have spent more idle time on the shelf than the record albums since we are able to play records again. I think it will be the case most of the time. I am starting to buy a few old albums as I find clean copies that we want. My father built his original record player from a kit. I hope to repair it, it still would work except for a broken spring bracket to control the turntable. It's an interesting piece of history itself. Old is great, new is great, but new does not necessarily mean better, mostly it is just more convenient.

[wado1942]

It was a complete flop, since a $300 stereo sounded much better than a $300 quadrophonics system

And yet I see horrible, absolutely horrible 5.1 systems all over the place that are no where near as good as even my 1971 Shirwood stereo. I finally made my own surround sound system out of Alesis M1s because I couldn't find a store bought surround system that sounded like anything other than complete crap. What's worse is Dolby Digital. I can't even go to a movie anymore if it has Dolby Digital sound. I'd take anything, even optical stereo over DD.

At any rate, you comment about digital being born in the late '70s is inacurate. PCM recording was pioneered in the mid 1960s though the first digital transmition of voice took place in the mid 1940s. In 1967, the first stereo tape recorder was demonstrated using a 12-bit 30KHz incoding. It used a compander similar to DBX NR to extend the dynamic range. The first 16-bit recordings were done in 1976 and the "compact disc" format was finalized in 1980. Even though better convertors were available, the 44.1KHz 16-bit was standardized because Umatic machines could store exactly 6 samples per line at that rate. You're right though, there's a lot of engineers that witnessed the first public demonstration of PCM recording in the late 70s. They commented "we could all hear there was something wrong with it but there was no noise so we were happy with it." Later, they learned about aliasing and it's actually far worse than you think. Aliasing starts to take serious effect at around 10KHz but it creates intermodulation that lives around 3KHz. So it's the opposite of THD, where THD generates harmonics above the distorted tone but in digital, it's like a ring modulator where the interference is both above and below the distorted tone. I must say that the quality of even cheap convertors has improved so much over the last 10 years, those problems are less noticable. The biggest problem now, is PCM itself. The top quality convertors use 5th order analogue filters in front of them but lower end convertors do the filtering digitally. This creates a ringing sound both before and after a given sound instead of just after like you do with analogue filters. I have high hopes for DSD which requires only the most rudimentary analogue filter before encoding and after decoding without any digital filtering. It's still an expensive technology and I fear that 96KHz will win the format war over DSD simply because the inferior often wins over the superior.

[MovieStuff]

At any rate, your comment about digital being born in the late '70s is inacurate. ....

Not my comment. I was just posting some info I had read. See the link....

Roger

[aj]

This evolves into the usual audiophile lectures by people who think they can hear if there are goldplated connectors used or the diameter of the speaker cabling is sufficient. Also these same people think it is important to have teflon circuitboards and more of these over the top ideas. Please do not elaborate.

[low grade moron]

At least 99% of the people of the world have lives which mean nothing, in which they accomplish nothing, stand for nothing, and focus on imaginary religious delusions. The only thing they manage to accomplish is the same thing slugs accomplish -- biological reproduction.

The world is far, far better off without their photos and videotapes and films around filling up landfills and causing chemical and other pollution.

Digital is the perfect consumer format, and should be embraced by the masses. It is exactly the opposite for professional media and artists and any cultural media both popular and fine arts and all blurring distinctions between -- digital is not the medium of origination to be embraced.

In the great expanse of empty nothingness and ill-informed delusion from the board member Moviestuff that has been posted in the past few months I have been reading this board, at last a post with some substance. Congratulations. This is completely unexpected.