Cinema goers in Beijing, China have been banned from taking video cameras into theatres in an attempt to clamp down on the sale of pirated videos of top line movies. Copyright officials estimate that more than a fifth of videos sold locally have been copied illegally. The quality varies; poor focus, film incomplete and peppered with coughing and laughter from the audience.
Texas Instruments claim they have developed technology that will allow them to build the smallest ever transistor that could lead to products such as hearing aids that could be implanted in the inner ear, and wireless video phones. The technology will enable the manufacture of transistors so minuscule that more than 400 million would fit on a single chip the size of a fingernail.
The following is the opening paragraph of the American Museum Of The Moving Image's Behind The Screen study guide.
If we could see beyond the borders of the movie and television screens - if the camera pulled back to reveal the director just outside the frame; the roofless set on a sound stage where tons of equipment are tended by dozens of technicians; the film lab and the cutting room or control room with it's banks of video monitors; even the offices where the deals are set, the budgets approved and the posters designed - we would find a complex collaborative business that manufactures a product - films and TV shows - in an industrial system different from, but no less elaborate than those that bring us cars, aeroplanes and corn flakes.
Well that really puts anyone with pretensions about the importance of working in movies and TV right in their place!
According to a report by Jeannie Williams in USA Today, Kelsey Grammer, star of TV sitcom Frazier will show his love for his wife, Camille Donatacci, on her 30th birthday with gifts of a $200,000 white Rolls Royce, the deeds to a love nest in Hawaii, and 30 days of spa attention with fitness guru High Voltage at $10,000 a week. All this plus a party for 400 guests in a specially built disco.
Wonder what the sound crews on his shows are buying their wives for birthdays?
The landlord of a pub in Wales has rigged up a water sprinkler, drums and strobe lights to fake thunderstorms as a way of convincing customers to stay longer.
You thought digital editing frame rates were a problem? Then read on...
Professor Borcheros (38) was commended for initiating a whole new field in the study of algebra, called Vertex Algebra, which allowed him to prove the moonshine contestures about the monster simple group. He worked on the rotations of a theoretical snowflake in 196,883 dimensional space. He found that the total rotations are about equal to the number of atoms making up the earth.
Is that understood? Then read on...
Professor Gowers (34) was honoured for spectacular applications of new combinatorial methods to solve problems in Basnach Spaces and Probabilistic Number Theory. He has solved the seemingly intractable hyper plane problem and the homogeneous spaces problem, with new proof of a theorem by Hungarian mathematician Enore Szemeredi, that a sufficiently dense set of integers must contain arithmetic progressions of all lengths
If you understand all that and what it does for mankind then why the hell are you having problems with frame rates?