Terminator 1 & 2 - Page 10

Re: Terminator 1 & 2

What link, Jacob?


V

Re: Terminator 1 & 2

Friends, there is a reason that the TAF story is down... I asked that it be removed. Let me tell you why... it may have effectively killed some of the features that were in the planning stages but were not in any way confirmed or committed, especially ones involving the participation of some of the original cast and crew.

I asked the head of the TAF website to take down that story because it will likely have a large and negative impact on all of the hard work I and many others have done to try to bring something special to the next release of this title. We were still in the process of trying to get firm commitments from many of the participants, and there are (as always) many legal hurdles and rights issues involving shooting locations and material clearances that may not happen and are less likely to happen now that they've been "committed" without their consent. The studio needs clearances before they will allow things to be included on the disc, and it sets back our ability to secure those clearances to have someone put out information (accurate or not) that insinuates that we are moving ahead with things.

While we are always thrilled and grateful that folks are excited and want to know about what we're doing, it is VERY important to understand that putting this kind of information out there --be it speculative or told in confidence-- damages the project by making it seem to those we are trying to commit to participate that we consider their participation a fait accompli.

It's like being in the middle of negotiations with an actor to do a movie and going out with a premature press release saying they've signed on... because that actor (or his/her agent) are then less inclined to do it because they feel pressured... or just on principle. In the case of DVD special features, participants do NOT get paid to do interviews or commentaries; studios cannot afford to do so, because if they pay one, they have to pay them all, and subsequently would have to raise the price of the discs you buy in order to justify that payment. Actors and main crew get residuals (small royalty payments) for each sale of the film (be it cable or DVD or theatrical run), so it is considered by the studios to be part of the promotion of the film to have special features... which can help drive sales of the movie on disc. Since we cannot afford to pay the participants in the special features, we have to get them to do it for free if we want them to be in them. While some folks are happy to do an interview or commentary for free (since they know that anything they can do to help sell more discs will help them get more in residuals), others feel differently... and are more than willing to walk away if they feel like they've been taken for granted (Ever wonder why David Prowse was not in the SW "Empire of Dreams" doc or William Sanderson was not in the "Blade Runner" doc? I'm just saying).

I'm sure we all understand the power of expectation and the importance of setting such expectations realistically... which is why Will's note about his expectations being through the roof kind of bums me out. As a disc producer, I am always trying to give the fans what they want, and more... because I'm a film fan myself. But what's a wishlist and what's reality are invariably two different things, and a lot of these wishes only come true through a lot of hard word, respect, and trust... from all sides.

Fortunately, these are traits shared by Randy at the TAF website, and he took down the story. The last thing I need is the studio coming down on Jeff Dawn (who is a great guy and a great interviewee) by telling me that I can't use any of his material on the disc. Or for Jim or Arnold or anyone else to choose not to participate because it sounds like we jumped the gun. That only hurts the disc and the fans. I fear we have already lost one or two major participants. Thus endeth the lesson.

V

PS: Ray and David, I'm going to do everything I can to get them to include the original mono mix on the next T1 release, and in lossless if I can. As for the other two films, they are all in the queue, pending Cameron's review of the most recent transfer masters... once he signs off, Fox can put the titles on the schedule and plan the extras... and hopefully, they'll let me take a crack at them. No guarantees, of course... I believe they have brought in someone else to produce the "Avatar" disc.

Re: Terminator 1 & 2

Wow, Chris, nice to know that security in the UK is being focused on trains and planes and not discs!

I reckon you got a hold of the Region B UK/France/Germany disc from someone inside Optimum Releasing... just curious: was it a replicated disc or a BD-R? I'm not going to bust you or anything... I'm just interested in knowing if what you watched was an early test build or the final product.

Alisdair, we do definitely consider load times when designing BD-Java stuff... the challenge is that there are TWO issues: load time and actual run speed. Both are hugely affected by the processors in the player, and frankly, it's sometimes difficult to strike a balance when the difference in processing power between the PS3 and everything else is so vast. Load times (and load frequency) are based on the fact that the BD-J spec has a buffer limitation of some 48Mb, period. Profile 2 players technically have a sligtly larger one (64Mb), but few studios take advantage of that additional space because most players aren't Profile 2 (yet). More and more, we try to have the disc do some form of player benchmark tests upon insertion to try to determine the level and speed of the player, then enable or disable certain elements as necessary to try to maintain some semblance of performance on slower players. Sadly, these are not perfect, and efficiency can always be improved. Because of the buffer size limit, the more space your graphics take up, the slower it will run and the more often you have to reload the buffer. The PS3 is a graphics engine first and a BD player second, so its ability to handle BD-J apps and graphics is like a thousand times faster than a normal settop BD player... which is why I recommend it as a BD player.

Note that one of the most frustrating things for me about the BD spec is that (unlike HD-DVD, apparently) you cannot do incremental loads and swapouts of the buffer while running other parts of it. This means that when you switch from say the BD-J menu application to the BD-Live application, it completely dumps the former to load the latter, which takes time. If you want to toggle between the two apps, it will dump and reload each one every time. Since this is a spec limitation, you can only get around it by A) really minimizing your graphics and programming, or B) try to make the players have better processors and such to compensate. I believe that the way to do it is to design for it to work on all players, but make it work really well on the high-end players to encourage the manufacturers and consumers to push for better hardware... it's a better choice than dumbing down the usage (which just makes them think their hardware is adequate as is) or expecting the BD spec to change. I'm thinking the latter may happen when 3D in the home really comes around, but until then, we have to deal with what we have.

As a rule, efficiency is a tradeoff of size versus complexity... for any given design, you can be very efficient in fitting all of the graphics within the buffer but sometimes at the expense of more complex programming... and different players handle these two things differently. For example, if you do the menu button text as a graphic, you take up more buffer space with all fo the graphics for multiple states and languages (which increases load times but simplifies programming and processing speed), but if you use text character strips (which means saving each letter of the alphabet as a separate tiny graphic), you can massively save on buffer space usage since each letter is only stored once and just referenced many times... but you now have complicated the programming and slowed down the processing time because you're now having to keep track of sometimes hundreds of individual letter graphics just to form a detailed menu.

I could go on about this, but you get the idea. ;-)

V