DVD Format Changing Movie-making 297
rgmoore writes "The Los Angeles Times is running an interesting article on the impact of DVDs on the movie making process. They briefly mention the possibilities of end-users being able to re-edit the movie (with a veiled reference to The Phantom Edit) but focus more on the way that it's starting to influence directors and producers during the course of making the movie."
DVD & It's potential (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm also going to guess that movies will move on to something different. I haven't personally used a DVD-Burner yet, but I would assume that it's just as simple now to copy a DVD as it has been to copy a music CD for the past few years.
The movie industry likes money..... I think they'll move on to something they can have a stronger grip on and get more out of (bigger is always better, anyways, right?).
-kwishot
I dunno if the article mentions this (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course now the "commentary" track is being ruined. Take Eye of the Beholder: Ewan McGregor[sic], Ashley Judd, Nonsensical everything, Shittiest movie Ever. And IT has a director's commentary track. Wild Things. Battlefield Earth. WTF? Are they STILL trying to snowjob you? Not like they need to after you shelled out 24 bucks for the DVD. At least if they were fucking honest on them.
Director: Now Ashley Judd starts crying here. [Puffs on cigarett] You know, I must have blacked out here 'cause I don't know what the hell I was thinking...
Instead it's like this:
Director: You can really see Denise Richards reach deep for that emotion. People say that she's just a hot piece of dumb ass but I really think she made a statement with this film...
Goddamn and Goodfellas DOESN'T have a commentary track? AND it's on a two sided DVD?
Kurosawa would never talk about his own movies. That wasn't his business. Let the scholars talk about them. What would he respond when people would as him what his favorite movie was? "The one I'm currently working on."
Says a lot (... damn, Eye of the Beholder!!! Now I'm in a really bad mood. Damn, Slashdot...)
Re:GREAT! (Score:3, Insightful)
Amazing isn't it (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow - what a concept!!
To bad the movie and music industry still don't understand this.
Its changed FOR THE WORSE (Score:4, Insightful)
Its changed the Movie Buying experiance all right.
THEN: I just went to blockbuster and grabbed a movie on VHS and bought it.
NOW: go on internet.. search sites.. Collecters Edition has X amount of footage, Directors Cut has Y amount of Footage and comments. the SuperBit version has Better footage but no Z and no Y. and of course finding a review that says EXACTLY what one has over the other is hard to find.
and obvisoly i go to the store and they dont have that version i wanted.
Interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
"New low-cost digital technology gives enthusiasts the chance to be desktop filmmakers, shooting new footage and combining it with existing movies. While DVDs are encoded to safeguard against piracy and copying, and the studios vigorously pursue civil and criminal proceedings against people they catch, more sophisticated computer users still find ways around that. With DVD-writing software, and illegal but fairly easy to find encryption decoders, not only can adventurous viewers reedit movies like "Star Wars" on their computers--removing "characters from a movie that they don't like," as Coppola suggests--but there's the possibility of creating entirely new movies from existing ones."
Couple interesting things here. In this article we are not criminals, we are sophisticated computer users.
And number two, it seems to me that there is support for this behavior by the directors of these films.
Maybe they realize that this is not a crime, it is simply our fair use right when we buy the dvd.
- Just my 2 cents.
Why I buy DVDs (Score:4, Insightful)
The back end of my twenty year old VHS collection is crumbling away. In another twenty years the front half will be gone too. But in 100 years all my DVDs will play with the same quality they do today. You never really own a VHS tape. You're renting it from a decaying universe, and every 15 or 20 years you have to make the rent payment again or you lose your lease.
Wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand, the porn industry threw their support completely behind Open DVD (just like they did for VHS), and you can see where the state of things are today...
Now if I can only get... (Score:3, Insightful)
Too many movies are chopped and edited for home release. I liked Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I loved the tearing up of the garden. The obsession of enhancing the train layout is missing. The finished hill looks nice and all, but they needed to keep in driving the wife crazy getting all that dirt into the living room. Too bad they chopped it up for home release to add the extra footage at the end.
Disney is doing this way too much. I loved the scene in Pete's Dragon with the song Candle on the Water sung at the top of the lighthouse. Don't look for it in the home tape version, it was chopped. They cut the beautiful sensitive moment. I think the song ran in the closing credits, not in the movie. Some Disney movies are even released with a new title for home release. The Unidentified flying Oddball and A Spaceman in King Arthurs Court is one example of one movie with two titles.
I am not buying these on DVD just to see if these scenes are back in the movie. When you buy a home verion of a movie, It's like a box of chocolates, you just don't know what you are gonna get.
Re:Good (Score:2, Insightful)
** SPOILERS **
...
...
Order in which items entered the anomaly:
1. Chimp
2. Chi...Marky Mark (soon after Chimp)
3. Big Ship (an hour later?)
Order in which items left the anomaly:
3. Big Ship (it's occupants populate the Planet)
2. Chi...Marky Mark
1. Chimp
The anomaly reverses the order, so that First In -> Last Out.
At the end of the movie:
1. Marky Mark enters the anomaly
...time passes
2. Tim Roth enters the anomaly, the human uprising being thwarted, he escapes his prison and has his craft legion of human slaves repair Marky Mark's original ship, or mayhap another vehicle that crashed inside the orbiter
THEREFORE:
2. Tim Roth gets to Earth anywhere from 1 to 30 years before Marky Mark does, siezing control of Earth.
1. Marky Mark arrives on Earth and says, "Woah."
Ironic truth (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean, by empowering end users and thus driving further sales of things they would otherwise not buy? Oh, yeah, I guess it's true. Exactly the same way the VCR "killed" Hollywood.
It disturbs me to see such a misreading of the actual trends (hmmm: Napster peaks, CD sales soars; Napster shut down, CD sales contract) slipped so quietly into an article about something else.
Um, why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Aah, the usual argument from an elite that feels the ground slipping out from under it. (Believe me, I don't despise elites... just ones that can't provide enough extra value to maintain their survival). "Demystification" is a tired rallying cry used by people defending the status quo... It boils down to, "I can't tell you why I am an expert and you are an uninformed boob, but it's just so. Now listen to me!"
Again, we see that a major concern of the Content Cartel is not preventing illegitimate copying or even maximizing profit. It's about maintaining control. It boggles my mind that in a culture that purports to embrace individuality and democracy in politics, we suffer the arrogance of people who despise that impulse in art. If art is about universal human truths, maybe actual humans should have a say.
Coppola points out the impetus behind things like CSS and the proposed CBDTPA:
'Cause as my man Cosmo said, "It's about who controls the information... what we see and think".
Re:Why I buy DVDs (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm a former VHS collector turned DVD collector now, and I have over 200 VHS tapes that are crumbling away into nothing as the years (not many) slip away since I've purchased them.
However, I have over 100 DVDs now (and purchased that number in the last two years) and each and every one is just as pristine and enjoyable as the minute I brought it home.
VHS stretches over time and quality degrades to the point where a movie is no longer even enjoyable (at least, once you've seen the DVD of it, the VHS version is sub-par). As well, the MPAA trying to squeeze every last dollar out of VHS consumers by tacking on extra footage and other stuff at the END of the tapes, so you have to fast forward to the end. I think one of the other main selling points for DVD was the instant chapter access.
How many times have you wanted to see one part of a film and couldn't remember the exact HH:MM:SS of the spot? It will only get better with director edited cuts on DVD too (perhaps even a guide that shows certain extra things you might not notice on the disc - but with timecodes so you can actually LOOK for yourself)
Bravo to those who have championed DVD in the past and who will in the future - just make the next format's player backwards compatible - or I'm going to be really pissed.
Re:My (stalled) project (Score:3, Insightful)
I think this is a terrible idea. The "bad content" of movies are, 99% of the time, important to the plot.
My experience is completely opposite. 99% of the language, nudity and gore is completely irrelevant to the plot. It's so blatant that I frequently think they finish up a movie, look at the result and say "Damn! That's gonna be PG! We need to spice it up a little so that it will sell. Gotta get a PG-13 rating at the least, better yet an R." That, plus I think some directors get their jollies by making pretty young actresses strip for them on-set.
However, I do think that some "objectionable" material is important to the plot, which is why I want to tag possibly-offensive material with plot relevance descriptors. For example, if you dislike nudity, chances are you do not find offensive the scenes of the naked Jews running for their lives in "Schindler's List". More precisely, you probably find them extremely offensive and horrifying, but that's not only important to the movie, it's the *main point* of the movie. The scene where Schindler has sex with one of his workers is also important to the movie (though less), but the nudity there is not.
DVD Unleashed (Score:2, Insightful)
DVDs are just like anything else in the computing world. You have to program it. You have to say what happens when you press whatever button at whatever time.
Also something to keep in mind is that video at this resolution is really freakin big. Video is anything from 6 - 9 Mbps. Imagine a 4 hour movie with maybe a half hour of "extra footage" plus menu screens. That's maybe 9 Gigs of Data if encoded at 7 Mbps.
Needless to say I can no longer really enjoy DVDs for the content. I was blown away by the Zoolander DVD. Not because of the movie, extra stuff, or commentary but because of the freakin cool way they programed the DVD.