touchofevil

There's definitely a move from the theater to on-demand streaming platforms for all movies except giant movies like Star Wars, so I think the author is right that the theatrical experience will see audience attendance continue to drop. Also making movies that can play for audiences around the world does mean that the dialogue has to be very simple and/or reduced. I think Jason Bourne had 50 lines of dialogue total in the latest Bourne movie for this reason. Without dialogue it does get harder for great actors to shine (Chaplin & Keaton excepted). As movies have gotten less culturally specific, they've also gotten less culturally relevant and this minimizes the importance of directors, writers, actors, and movies as art.

The author's inexperience in the industry shows though in this article. Crews are extremely efficient. Movies are made one shot at a time and when you have big crews made up of different departments (art, camera, sound, lighting, vfx) they have to work essentially in very quick shifts. For example, the camera move is set, then the actors step out and the lighting crew lights the scene, then lighting steps out, art dept. steps in and works, then the actors come back in, etc. To an outsider it looks like 90% of the crew is just standing around doing nothing, but it's much more efficient to work that way and safer too. So I think the author is putting too much blame on union crews for inefficiency.

Also, the author completely omits the marketing costs of films which increased hugely once TV advertising was used to market movies. Marketing costs are one of the main reasons that movies have to basically be blockbusters to make money. A TV ad spot for Star Wars costs the same as a TV ad spot for an indie film.

The idea that CG actors are going to replace real actors en masse is not realistic. I work in visual effects and, trust me, it's a lot more work than this author realizes and is not cost effective unless an actor has died in the middle of your shoot.

I also don't see editors getting replaced by A.I. for films or TV/streaming. Maybe for wedding and vacation videos or perhaps as a tool for reality TV editors to help select shots from the massive amount of footage. But film/TV editing is now an extremely efficient process thanks to digital editing tools like Avid or Premiere. A single editor can cut a film almost as fast as they can think at this point (okay a bit slower). Having to screen 50 versions of an edit produced by AI (and then do rounds of editing notes that way) would take longer than having a good editor just cut the movie.

Don't get me wrong, the theatrical movie experience is going to keep going down hard. I think the biggest threat to movies is that for the most part they don't matter much to the culture any more. But this author's lack of experience in the industry makes some of his predictions suspect.

I do somewhat agree with you from a playing standpoint. I often gravitated to combo or control because I didn't want to deal with doing the math on attacking / blocking as it could lead to some awfully complicated interactions. But there were definitely difficult decisions to be made when playing combo or control, since you'd often be facing aggressive decks that put you on a clock. But mainly, I found the deck building and meta game more interesting when combo, control, and creature based decks were all available to players. Personally, I just always thought it was really interesting when a deck would try to do something like generate infinite (or near-infinite) mana in order to "go off". That is an aspect of Magic that I found unique, since most games are so tightly controlled that there isn't possibility of finding an interaction that is "broken", as we used to call it, and can be exploited to create scenarios that are outside of what the game designers possibly intended.

Agreed. I think Wizards made the right call for Standard in terms of attracting and retaining new players. It's good to hear from another person who got in around Ice Age (same here) and enjoyed the complexities of that era of Magic deck building. I think Magic appealed to the "mad inventor" side of my personality, which is why I miss the more diverse possibilities (hard control & combo) that used to exist in Standard. And I remember the Enchantress combo deck! Good stuff!

I got hooked on Magic early and didn't feel much need to branch out to other games. I did play a bit of Texas Hold'em later and thought that was okay. A lot of people in comic shops (where Magic is played) play WarHammer 40K and Settlers of Catan, so you could have a look at those games.

I was just about to post about Shahrazad! Totally agree! Shahrazad: Players play a MAGIC subgame, using their libraries as their decks. Each player who doesn't win the subgame loses half his or her life, rounded up.

This is nowhere near the brainiest Magic has ever been. I've been playing almost since the beginning and it's been disappointing to see how the game has been simplified. It seems like all competitive standard decks now are creature decks, which is a shame because control and combo decks used to be a huge part of the meta game and required a lot of skill to pilot. I think Wizards deliberately eliminated combo and control decks because they often left the opponent (especially new players) with little to do if they were losing. Whereas when two players are playing creature decks, both players (even new, losing players) will get to play some cards, do some attacking/blocking, etc. This makes the game much more exciting for new players, which ensures that they will keep playing. If you want to see some really brainy decks have a look at Cadaverous Bloom (called Pro's Bloom below) https://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/evolution-of-magic-bann... Also have a look at the Bargin deck below: http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/print.php?Article=967

Other interesting decks I encountered over the years: Wildfire https://www.wizards.com/sideboard/article.asp?x=sb20010619a Nether Go https://www.wizards.com/sideboard/article.asp?x=sb20010212a Forbidden Pheonix http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/forbidden-phoenix/ Mono-Blue Stasis https://www.wizards.com/sideboard/article.asp?x=GPTAIPEI00/d... And any of the combo winter decks (Grim Jar, Illusions Donate, Tolarian Academy, etc.)

Also Mythic Rares are super lame. It's a return to the days when you needed the "Power 9" (actually Power 10 when you include Library pf Alexandria") to be competitive.

Sorry for your loss. It sounds like you are depressed and should chat with a therapist. Good luck.

You sound depressed. Have you seen a therapist? If you haven't yet, it would probably be worth a try. Good luck.

I guess I've just always been a little surprised that studios didn't open source more of their internal software. For example, Nuke was originally internal software at Digital Domain before they sold it to The Foundry, I believe. Rhythm & Hues also has a lot of its own internal compositing and 3D applications. And Pixar's Renderman software is also not open source (I know some aspects of Renderman are open source, but the actual Pixar Renderman software is not open source). It just surprises me that more of these internal applications didn't get open sourced. Blender is a good example of one that did. While I'm sure these studios were getting an edge by having their own software in the early days of cg, now I would think the studios would actually benefit more by open sourcing their apps so that other developers can contribute to the project. And the studios that make this software might be able to cut back on their dev teams. Just something I've always wondered about.

Linux is definitely used often at studios. But I don't know of any studios in Los Angeles using Blender as their primary 3D animation application. Alembic gets used, but that's basically "glue" as another poster pointed out. Do you mean Linux when you say that OSS is pervasive at studios?

Yeah, a lot of it comes down to network effects. Studios have to ramp up staff quickly, so they need to be able to find freelancers that already know the software they are using. So the studios have to use the "industry standard" software, unless they want to train artists, which wouldn't make sense since they are constantly ramping up and down their freelancer workforce. The Foundry (makers of Nuke) are surely making a tidy sum off of this situation.

I'm a compositor & motion graphics artist. I've never used Natron, but I've done a lot of compositing in After Effects and a little bit of compositing in Nuke (which is the industry standard for photorealistic vfx compositing). Another free compositing option is BlackMagic Fusion [0]. Fusion is a node based compositor, like Natron and Nuke. Fusion has a free version that has a few restrictions and a paid version that is $1,000.

I've always been surprised that open source software like Blender and Natron has not really caught on at studios. Nuke licenses cost between $4,000 and $8,000 per seat, plus a maintenance cost of over $1,000 per year per seat. These cost add up very quickly and vfx jobs even at big studios generally end up having a razor thin profit margin of 3-5% [1][2] So it's strange that these vfx studios haven't embraced open source software to cut costs.

[0] https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/fusion

[1] https://vfxsoldier.wordpress.com/about/

[2] http://www.ew.com/article/2013/04/05/peter-jackson-hollywood...

Would incorporating your tech company in England instead of the USA protect your company from these patent troll lawsuits? It's extremely easy to start a company based in England, even as a US citizen living in the USA. With the patent trolling this out of control in the US at the moment, would basing your company abroad offer you any protection?

That staff to company ratio is surprising. I did a month at NextSpace.us in Culver City, CA and they really only ever had 2 or 3 staff members on at one time for the whole location.

Thanks for the info. I considered focusing on Javascript and node exclusively, but I'm really only looking to build CRUD web apps quickly, and Rails or Django seemed more beginner friendly for those purposes than node. Of course, I'd still need Javascript for the front-end of these CRUD web apps. I'm still kind of on the fence though between RoR vs Python/Django. I'd like to be be able to create MVPs quickly, so RoR is tempting even though I'd prefer to learn Python rather than Ruby.

I've made a couple of attempts and I'm about to make another attempt to learn to code. I think the problem I run into the most is that a lot of the online learning is not project based, or takes too long to get started on a project. For example, I started the TeamTreehouse Flask Track and it takes a while before their tutorials challenge you to actually start building a site with Flask. I signed up for onemonth.com and I liked their approach much better, where you just dive in and start building something from the beginning. However, the OneMonth Python/Django course that I was taking shutdown right in the middle of the course I was taking, due to problems with the course material. It's also been very difficult to choose a language/framework, but I think I've settled on Python/Django. I'm thinking that I will resume my Flask course at TeamTreehouse and also give Code4Startup.com's new Django course a try.

You should post this on reddit.com/r/iwantout A lot of people there would love this!

Final Cut X was really a huge disappointment to the professional editing community when it was released. It was missing features that made it unusable for professionals. For example, when it was released, it was not possible to export sound as an OMF or AFF (which is the format required for sending sound to a professional sound mixer). I saw it as an indication that Apple no longer needed to cater to the pro market (see also apple dropping Shake and the XServe and the Xserve RAID) now that Apple had the iphone, ipad, itunes, etc.

As for compressing films, maybe GPUs will pick up the slack. But there are still other applications like Maya and After Effects that depend almost entirely on the CPU for rendering, so having dual CPUs makes a big difference.

I don't really mind Apple leaving the pro market. Adobe Premiere has taken Final Cut Pro's place for most people I know. I just use Windows machines now for my video and graphics work.

Macs have never been a good choice for render farm render nodes. The ideal render nodes are something like a dual twin supermicro box running linux or windows. In a 1U rackmounted server like that you can throw in 4 CPUs (and each CPU could have 18 cores if you are using E5-2699v3 cpus, so you'd get 72 cores in a single 1u server).

Apple has been steadily been abandoning the "creative pro" market for a long time. The two most recent indicators were dropping Final Cut Pro 7 for Final Cut Pro X, which was not ready for professional editing at release. The new Mac Pro confirmed the move away from the pro market, since it only supported one CPU. For compressing feature films, dual CPUs are a must.

The Meadow team seems to be doing a great job. getMeadow.com is really well done and their move into dispensary inventory management software and a POS system is impressive. I have been following them closely and I was wondering if their move into inventory management might have been due to dispensaries not being that interested in a grubhub style ordering service. I am curious about this because I have been working on a "grubhub for cannabis" site of my own and I have found dispensary interest in this SaaS product to be tepid.

Wow, what an incredibly, obviously bad idea. I spotted this last night and immediately realized how this would go down. If you have 900 million users (as gmail does) and you add a button right next to the send button that also has the word "send" on it, you are going to have a significant numbers of users send emails using that button! AND it adds a gif AND it archives the email thread AND those features aren't explained when you hover over the button! I have a feeling the vast majority of gmail users don't know how to find their archived email threads, so those users will never see the replies to the email they sent. The gmail team was asleep at the wheel on this one.

I work in the vfx/animation industry and I have to say that I find Adobe's Creative Cloud billing is horrible for studios. The idea that you have to commit to a year is terrible for post-production companies because they scale up and down wildly. Need 10 artists for one week? Sorry, you'll need to commit to renting 10 licenses of Creative Cloud for a year! Other software that is even more expensive than Adobe's Creative Suite (like Autodesk Maya) have also moved to a subscription model, but Autodesk allows you to rent Maya by the month, if you want. Adobe is getting the best of both worlds here by not allowing you to own their software and at the same time not giving you flexible rental options. Linux support at least for After Effects would be nice as well, if you're reading this Adobe!

I've come to the conclusion over the last several years and specifically after spending a bit of time in India, that corruption is the #1 challenge facing humanity.

In the past I believed that poverty was largely due to a lack of resources (food, housing, etc) but I've come to believe that corruption is actually the source of this "lack of resources" -- the resources are most likely not lacking at all, they are probably just being distributed in a massively improper way due to corruption.

When you see the amount of poverty on the streets of Mumbai in person and realize that the government is involved in just ONE scam with a value of up to 22 billion pounds, it really brings things into focus. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/16/india-corruptio...

And parts of the developed world, like the US, are just as corrupt (or more corrupt) than India, only in different and potentially even more damaging ways, like having an election system captured by corporations.

Until corruption is tackled, I don't think we're going to solve issues like poverty, hunger, and climate change. But corruption can only thrive in the dark and my hope is that the internet will allow a light to be shined in the dark corners of both developed and developing nations.

Maybe the ultimate question we should ask is why individual people feel the need to accumulate enormous sums of wealth, at all. My opinion is that it is the result of deep-seated fears about "losing everything" and ending up impoverished. Until societies can guarantee EVERY citizen a right to food and shelter, regardless of the ability of the person to create income, the citizens of that society will manifest their fear in the form of hording and, sometimes, corruption.

I have no problem with people like Bill Gates earning vast amounts of money by adding value to the world, but we can allow individuals to accumulate that sort of wealth while still proving a safety net for every individual in society. Perhaps this safety net will assuage the fear that, I believe, ultimately inspires at least a good portion of corruption.

Despite all of humanity's achievements, we are still living like animals, ruled by fear, where the law of the jungle still reigns.

I had planned to give additional details via email. I just thought I might bump into someone in these comments that was also interested in working on something related to PH. However, that doesn't seem to be what I've found here...

I actually created a site using telescopeapp.org in the past! When reddit's AMA section went on strike, I created Skhool.me Telescope won't work for my current project, unfortunately.

Of course.

Yeah, I guess there's no way for non-programmers and programmers to work together to create a startup.

You mean, like a band?

...I'm learning to code...(sound of pitchforks rustling)