Monday 23 January 2012

I Lost

Or won, depending on who you ask. I sales person called me the other day and said that it was time to renew my mobile subscription and data plan. Well, he wasn't quite as obvious about it but as a gadget geek I'm rather susceptible and my immediate question was "what kind of phones can you offer me as a part of the deal?"

"What kind of phone do you want?" was his reply.

I thought about it and realised that I want to try an iPhone. Yes, I know, you can't get anything more locked down than an Apple product, but I tried my daughter's and liked it. The interface leaves the HTC Desire's far behind and I think the alternative I've been thinking about, the Samsung Galaxy, feels like a fragile piece of plastic. And I've already tried a couple of other Android devices (including my work phone, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro, that is the worst phone I've ever had the misfortune to use) but no iOS one.

So an iPhone 4S it is, for me. It's supposed to arrive today or tomorrow.

Saturday 21 January 2012

Digital Movie Subtitles and XSLT

Turns out that digital movie subtitles are kept in an XML file. There's time code, a couple of font elements, and there's a subtitle element that contains the text. ghastly, but I suppose it works.

Well, most of the time. Something had happened with the English subtitles to the festival opening feature, Avalon. A test run revealed that every subtitle was included twice, one set with Font Id "Arial" and another with font Id "Arial0".

Fixed this with an XSLT script, marking the first time I've used XSLT in my work as a projectionist.

Friday 20 January 2012

Digital Shows, FML and XML

Ran my second DCP show at Draken, earlier. The film is stored and handled by a Dolby server running a modified Debian Linux with XCF as the window manager producing a lightweight interface with only the bare necessities, but very, very functional necessities. There is drag and drop to handle show components, there are ready-made cues, and it's all reasonably well designed. Every time I use the touchpad/keyboard combo to build or run a show, I'm struck by how similar to my Film Markup Language concepts everything is. I presented my ideas at XML Prague in 2010 but after that, I couldn't make much headway with the hardware so the project sort of died.

Supposedly, the shows are indeed handled using XML files. I was planning something very much like Dolby's interface so I'm dying to know if their XML is anything like my DTD. The components are all there so I'm half hoping it is. I bet they don't use XLink, though.

Digital Images

Draken, the home of the Göteborg International Film Festival and my frequent point of existence, finally got a digital Barco projector and a Dolby server for handling digital features. As you may or may not know, cinemas around the world are moving to digital images while industry icons such as Kodak are crumbling, and in a matter of months or perhaps a year or two, 35mm film projection will only happen in film archives and art houses.

And, perhaps, film festivals. As I write this, only a week remains to the opening night of the 35th annual Göteborg International Film Festival, and at least half of the features I will screen there will be in DCP format. Yesterday, I ran my first all-digital show with the new equipment and today will be the second.

To people like me, this feels like the end. I'm hoping it's not but I can't help thinking that as a projectionist, I now belong to the museum together with the 35mm projectors and old cinema sound processors.

Tuesday 10 January 2012

HTC Desire

I've been using my daughter's HTC Desire, now that she's moved up in the world, to an iPhone. I have to say, the Desire is a significant step up from my previous mobile, the Nokia N900.

Don't get me wrong, the N900 is a fabulous device. It's not a mobile at all, really, it's a Debian Linux box that happens to have some phone functionality built in, the ultimate geek toy for the smartphone age. The hardware is superb and the software could have been amazing, had it not been for the fact that Nokia abandoned the product and its users twice (first, by moving from the Maemo OS to Meego and then from Meego to Windows Mobile). It's a supplier error and what could have been a great, great product became another footnote in communications history.

For this reason, I will not buy a Nokia again, not because they don't know how to make phones because they do, but because who knows when they'll decide to abandon their customers again?

The Desire, according to my daughter who knows all about this stuff, is an old phone. It's OK but seriously uncool and nothing when compared to an iPhone. Not knowing better, I think the Desire is user-friendly to a degree that I haven't witnessed in a while. Also, I'm not really an app kind of person, but there are enough of them available to keep me busy for a while.