Delivering 8K VFX Shots For the Dark Knight 263
agent4256 writes "Barbara Robertson over at Studio Daily put forth this article featuring the technical background for the production of The Dark Knight. With most of the film shot with IMAX cameras (producing a theoretical resolution of 18k), the studios could not handle the size. Instead, they cut the resolution by more than half, down to 8K, the maximum resolution for scanned film. 'A single 8K frame requires 200 MB of data,' Franklin says. 'So we had to upgrade our whole infrastructure. We needed faster network speeds to move data around, massively beefed up servers, and — the most important thing — a new compositing solution.' To give you an idea of how far technology has taken us: 'In 1999, when we worked on Pitch Black [released in 2000], we needed to access 2 TB of data,' Franklin says. 'This show used over 100 TB of data.'"
Pitch Black? (Score:5, Funny)
"I said it looked clear!" "Well, what's it look like now?" "... Looks clear."
18k? 8k? (Score:2)
What is the meaning of these "k's" they are referencing here? I'm thinking it's not "kilo" in this case if 18k of them takes 200 gigs to store, unless they are using some kind of anti-compression on the data.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Note that the poster that you replied to already said kilo, and I'm pretty sure every person on this website knows what the prefix for thousand is. What we want to know is what the K is specifically, there are eighteen-thousand _______ per frame, and we want to know what the _______ is.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:18k? 8k? (Score:5, Informative)
K = thousand, and they're referring to lines of resolution.
For comparison, 1080p HDTV has 1080 lines of resolution. That IMAX camera records around 18,000 lines.
Re:18k? 8k? (Score:4, Interesting)
With 1:1 pixels, 1080p*16/9 = 1920 horizontal. But if you're buying a camera, many "1080p" cameras record in 1440x1080 stretched to a 16:9 frame. Not that it's the big difference but was a little disappointing to find out (but I knew before purchase).
Re:18k? 8k? (Score:4, Informative)
Either way, IMAX resolution FTW.
Re:18k? 8k? (Score:5, Informative)
Film has a resolution, even though it isn't in the form of nice sharp-edged pixels. It's a question of how close together two objects can be and still be distinguished -- the distance is called the circle of confusion, within which the two objects are not fully distinct. Lenses, film, and printing process all play a role in the resolution of the final product. For test work, one usually uses a printed image with a very fine array of slowly converging lines, and you look for how close together the lines can get before they become indistinct. As a result, the number of (distinguishable) lines you can fit on the film is the natural way to measure its resolution. So film really does have "lines" and though they're not quite the same as in a digital system, they're remarkably close.
(Be aware there's a factor of two in there for Nyquist; a 1000 pixel wide display can only show 500 lines, obviously, and the same effect applies to analog systems.)
Of course, with better digital sensors (ie lots of megapixels), the lens quality becomes the limiting factor, and it would again make sense to speak of the imaging system in terms of lines of resolution rather than megapixels. There's a reason cheap cell phone cameras don't produce as sharp an image as a real camera with a good lens; if you want to measure the quality of the entire imaging system, you end up back with old-fashioned analog lines of resolution as one of the fundamental metrics. (Of course, there are plenty of other attributes, like various forms of noise and distortion.) If you read a good review of a digital camera, they'll point it at a test piece and measure available lines of resolution, just as they would for film.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
A 1000 pixel display can display 500 line pairs, which is 1000 lines.
Re:18k? 8k? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because there are no physical "pixels" in analog film, you could cheat and just show a piece of film that is all black and say that it has some astronomical resolution because it is showing millions of black lines all next to eachother and even that it's resolution has a dot pitch of one molecule, but that's just engaging in pointless arguing. (I forget the logical fallacy, ad-something...)
Either way, the original point stands. No matter which of our misinformed resolution measurements we're using, IMAX is still a shockingly higher resolution than full HD; and if you've ever seen full HD up close, that's something to think about.
I guess...
Re: (Score:2)
Re:18k? 8k? (Score:5, Informative)
The 'k' refers to the horizontal resolution. The vertical resolution is a given since the aspect ratio is a fixed 1.34:1.
18K means a 18000 x 13433 resolution frame.
Re: (Score:2)
Sheesh, thats 241 megapixels
I couldn't imagine trying to edit that on anything less than a late model cray system.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
an open source image editor Cinepaint [cinepaint.org] is in the middle of a rewrite to convert from GTK to FLTL, Fast Light Toolkit [fltk.org] to free up some memory and CPU cycles by using a more spartan interface. The pro's want they work to be pretty, not their software.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, this isn't correct. A 1080i signal can vary between 1920, 1440, 1280, etc. horizontal lines of resolution while still being 16X9. This is, of course, in the analog realm.
Obviously in the digital realm, things are far more fixed.
Re:18k? 8k? (Score:5, Informative)
You have to look at the diagram in the wikipedia article you linked. The terms 2K and 4K as used in the visual effects industry refer to frame width. 2K is 2048 wide and 4K is 4096 wide.
It is different than the terms used for HDTV, where 1080p means 1080 vertical.
(I've worked in a VFX shop)
Wake up, mods! (Score:3, Informative)
No, GP had it right. "2K" is ~2048x1080, with some variance. With 1080 horizontal lines, and approximately 2000 (2k) horizontal pixels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Vector_Video_Standards2.svg [wikipedia.org]
http://www.dcinematoday.com/dc/features.aspx?ID=16 [dcinematoday.com]
http://campustechnology.com/articles/45435/ [campustechnology.com]
Re:18k? 8k? (Score:5, Informative)
2k, 4k and 8k, when referred to film, are the horizontal resolution.
720p and 1080p when referred to TV sizes, refer to the vertical resolution.
Look at the image in the middle with the coloured blocks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_cinematography [wikipedia.org] [wikipedia.org]
It shows 2K being just slightly larger than 1080p. If 2k referred to the vertical size then it would cover 4 times the area
It's horizontal resolution: (Score:2, Interesting)
5.6K = 5616x4096
8K = 8192x6144
Re: (Score:2)
8K plates are typically 8192x4320
At 16 bits per channel, it's 71MB per channel.
That'd be 212MB for the color plate alone, not to mention the shadow, specular, and reflection plates.
100TB! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:100TB! (Score:5, Funny)
I shudder to think of what 8K porn frames would be like.
Some things are just best left blurry.
Re:100TB! (Score:5, Interesting)
Producers are taking steps to hide the imperfections. Some shots are lit differently, while some actors simply are not shot at certain angles, or are getting cosmetic surgery, or seeking expert grooming. "The biggest problem is razor burn," said Stormy Daniels, an actress, writer and director. "I'm not 100 percent sure why anyone would want to see their porn in HD."
Storage? (Score:2)
Besides consuming 100TB, anybody have any better ideas on a) how this stuff was stored and b) how it was backed up? SAN/NAS or internal disk on the servers?
Re: (Score:2)
If its anything like LOTR was, its on a huge SAN, and most likely fiber optic.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
100T isn't much by storage standards. It translates to roughly 2 racks of hardware for high-speed/low-latency serving plus roughly half a rack for archival. I'd say $150-$200k ballpark which is a drop in the bucket for hollywood. So, serving the stuff at 4 Gbit/s ain't so hard, *processing* it at that rate is a different story.
Re:Storage? (Score:5, Informative)
We at the StereoLab in the National Film Board of Canada have an infrastructure set up specifically to manage a number of simultaneous 3D productions, several in "Large Format" (i.e. Imax) resolutions and the rest in various HD and 35mm formats. It's been to make over a dozen 3D digital films in the last few years or so.
In practice we use about an equal mix of internal data server drives, SAN, NAS, and a pool of bare drives with a stack of empty shells. Often people drop a drive in a shell and attach it (via eSATA, FW800 or USB in that order of preference) to whatever machine they need it on, because it reduces network load. This technique works especially well for intermediate data that is output, reinput, and then discarded.
Not to be pedantic... (Score:2, Informative)
...but only about 25 - 30% of the film was shot in IMAX, at four times the cost of regular the anamorphic process used for the rest of the film.
Digital is dead! Long live film!
Re:Not to be pedantic... (Score:5, Interesting)
Darren,
In the Good Old Days of photochemical process work, say on Star Wars, it was not uncommon to shoot the visual effects shots on VistaVision and the rest of the movie at normal film resolution. The idea was that the process work at the time added significant grain, blurriness, and reduced contrast to the image, so starting from a larger format with less grain helped make the visual effects shots blend in somewhat more seamlessly.
Doing the process shots on IMAX is a bit of a step up from VistaVision (ok, maybe two steps up!) but it makes some sense. Modern film stocks are much better than what was used on Star Wars, but there will always be something to be said for having more film acreage to work with.
That said -- there is a bit of "because we can" here as well. When they made The Dark Knight, they apparently didn't want to compromise in any way.
[disclaimer: I'm VFX supervisor for a film in production right now, with some 1000 shots...none of which we are doing at 8K]
2TB - 100TB (Score:3, Insightful)
So it's a factor 50 in 10 years ? And we're supposed to be impressed ? That's doubling only every 7 quarters.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Wait, does that make sense? The math (Score:5, Informative)
-A single 8K frame requires 200 MB of data.
-The Dark Knight is officially listed at 2hrs 30 minutes (150 minutes= 9000seconds)
-Total usage 100 TB (5 frames a Gig, 5120 per T, 512,000+ frames)
Minimal frame rate [wikipedia.org] is ~24/s.
200 MB/frame x 9,000 sec/movie x 24 frames/second = 43200000 MB=42187.5 GB = 41.2 TB.
If the frame rate was 60 frames/second then that would be the whole film (no retakes, extras, bloopers etc).
I never realized the sheer amount of compression that is going on between the raw footage and getting it into a DVD.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
The data set for a show in a VFX studio includes several revisions of every shot, data such as models and textures (in this case a centimeter scan of an entire road), and thousands of revisions of project files, compositing data, etc etc etc.
IMAX (Score:3, Informative)
Some IMAX is 48 fps. 3D IMAX can be 96 fps.
Re:Wait, does that make sense? The math (Score:4, Insightful)
I never realized the sheer amount of compression that is going on between the raw footage and getting it into a DVD.
More impressive is the IO bandwidth necessary to play back the uncompressed source in realtime.
most of that isn't making it onto a DVD (Score:3, Interesting)
That's 8k resolution. DVD only supports 0.7K resolution.
So one of steps is to cut the image down by a factor of 10 IN BOTH DIRECTIONS.
That means 99% of the pixels are thrown away before the compression even starts.
BluRay would keep 6% of the pixels, which is a lot more, but still nothing compared to the original.
And remember the theoretical resolution of IMAX is about 5x as much again (2.3x more in each direction).
Re: (Score:2)
That is a very big space savings, before any compression is applied. The article summary mentions that they reduced the Imax frames to 8000 lines. Reducing that down to 1920 (someone said the 8000 lines corresponds to horizontal resolution; not sure if that's true, but if so, corresponds to the 1920 in 1920x1080 HD resolution), which corresponds to an approximate downscale of 1/4 *in one axis* when converting to HD, which gives us a total size reduction to 1/16 of the original frame size (1/4 horiz * 1/4 ve
Thought it would be more, actually... (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the mists of time, I wrote the database for the content management system that Lucas used on Star Wars I (the Phantom Menace). For reasons I won't go into, it was called 'Cakes [digitalcon...oducer.com]', but ILM rebranded it internally as Media-DB.
At the peak of filming, it was coping with 40 DTF tapes/day being ingested. A DTF held 120GB back then (I think), and they were filming for ~3 months. At the same time as ingesting, it had to stream low-res proxies of all the footage to multiple destinations (some local, some not), and deliver high-res frames across the internal network to the animators etc.
Now, I doubt it was doing 40 tapes/day solidly - it'd depend on filming, but even taking 20 tapes/day, over 3 months that comes to ~160TB (assuming a 22-working-day month).
I do have fond memories of doing the James Bond intro-sequence (The world is not enough) with Smoke & Mirrors in London. When there were thousands of frames of nearly-naked highly-attractive women having oil poured all over their bodies, the visualisation tools became... significantly more advanced at a rapid rate :-)
Simon.
IMAX - not so much (Score:3, Interesting)
TFA says:
Wikipedia says [wikipedia.org]:
TFS says:
I went to see this in IMAX, a three hour drive from here. Don't waste your time if you're thinking of doing it. It looked no better than Iron Man, which I saw in a nice new theater, non-IMAX. This wasn't IMAX at a major science center, like in NYC or Baltimore, where the screens are massive - it was in a shopping-mall IMAX where the screen was no bigger than any other in the complex. Smaller, even, I think, then their best theatre. It had a very minor curvature, I think: this isn't fill-your-visual-field like I was expecting.
Sure, the sound was punchy. But I was expecting a 60FPS 70mm 4-story extravaganza, and got a simply nice theatre, but with plenty of flicker, 35mm presentation, and no discernible benefits. It seems IMAX is following in the footsteps of THX. Moral of the story: not all IMAX theatres are created equal - check first.
I hope this will save somebody else some gas.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Doesn't this mean it's not worth driving to your IMAX theater for any movie; not it's not worth driving to any IMAX theater for any showing of the Dark Knight?
As I understand it, 'real' IMAX movies (the relatively short documentaries, typically) are presented in the high-quality format. The IMAX.com website is hard to dissect.
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry to hear you had such a bad experience, but as I posted here [slashdot.org], they are going to replace it with something even worse soon, so if you can make it to one of those large installations in a major city like you mentioned, you should. This could be your last chance to see anything like this.
Also, according to this [ascmag.com], about 30 minutes of the movie was shot in IMAX,
200MB per frame ? (Score:2)
At 24fps = nearly 5GB/sec for playback.
That's a mighty impressive I/O subsystem (at every level).
(Assuming realtime, of course, which I doubt happens.)
See it NOW, before digital projection ruins it (Score:5, Informative)
The IMAX company is currently still running most of their theaters on the 15-perf 70mm film systems, so you can still see the full 8K image to day if you want to. The problem is, they are planning to install DLP-based systems [forbes.com] that will reduce the resolution to 2K x 2K (although the article doesn't mention that). Once those are installed, you will not be able to see images like we're seeing today. The resolution will be far lower.
Even if Nolan and his team go for these kinds of high resolution images again for the next movie, there might not be any place to see it that can do it justice.
Now I know someone is going to chime in and say that film is analog, so anything digital is automatically better, but ask yourself: Would you replace a high quality analog sound system with 4-bit digital sound? That's approximately what we're talking about here. If the IMAX company were planning to tile a bunch of 2K x 2K images on the screen to produce an 8K image, or maybe use some other technology to achieve the kind of resolution they have today, then it would be a different story. But they aren't.
See it now, before they take it away.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
DLP is always 2K or less.
From TFA (Score:2, Interesting)
Matte painters worked in 8K resolution, and the artists painted texture maps in either 8K or 16K resolution, depending on the view. âoeThat was a bottleneck,â Franklin says. âoePhotoshop doesnâ(TM)t handle images above 4K very efficiently and itâ(TM)s a closed tool, so we couldnâ(TM)t get in there and add stuff to it. Working with Photoshop was possible, but slow. It took three or four times longer than usual to paint the textures.â
I doubt the GIMP would have been able to do it either, but I wonder if in the future, it might get used for a project similar to this because it is open source and can be modified for special use like this.
Re: (Score:2)
The horizontal resolution. The vertical resolution is a given since there is a fixed aspect ratio of 1.34:1.
18K means a 18000 x 13433 frame.
8K means a 8000 x 5970 frame.
Re: (Score:2)
8K is the width, in pixels. Digital film work always talks about picture width - because the picture height is variable, depending on what aspect ratio is being used.
I'm not sure of the exact format that was used on that picture, but roughly speaking, we're talking 8192 wide x 4096 tall x 3 components (RGB) x 16 bits per component - or 192 MB per frame. That's 4.5 terabytes per second.
As far as "theoretical resolution" being 18K - only if you want to see individual film grains. No commonly available scanner
Re:8K? 18K? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
So, most computer screens are in the 1-2K range. The film was shot in 18K, so about nine screens across.
Re:8K? 18K? (Score:5, Informative)
The reference you quote does make it clear, but you've drawn the wrong conclusion:
> 5.6K: 5616x4096; A full 5.6K was actually...
> 8K: 8192x6144; approximately ....
Thus 8K is 8192 pixels wide (not lines per frame) and 6144 pixels high. We commonly also use 2K's (2048 x 1501), 4K's (4096 x 3002), etc.
Also note that the digital professional cinema (not HDTV) industry (the world of DCI) also always uses image width rather than height to define resolutions (2K = 2048 x 1080, 4K = 4096 x 2160).
[/me = Technical Director on several digital 3D Imax films back through the late '90's -- these Hollywood guys are just now discovering stuff the rest of us have known for ages]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You forgot a few zeros... 100 000 000 MB / 200MB = 500 000
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
So, 500,000 frames in the movie. 70 fps for 120 minutes.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
new mod: (-1 can't do the maths)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
actually I do say "arr-pee-ems" when speaking that acronym, along with most of the population ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Check your math on a Terrabyte being 1,000 Megabytes.
Also, check your math on the 100 hard drives as well. Add in the infrastructure for those hard drives, spares for RAID arrays, the network infrastructure to handle that data across all of the computers, and the computer hardware to be able to handle that much data for editing. After all, I doubt they are just copying files across a USB cable.
Re: (Score:2)
I'll bet you never make a math mistake again now!!
20 responses (give or take) correcting you in less than 12 minutes!
Whoo hoo for not having anything better to do.
Re:200MB? (Score:4, Funny)
Hey, you! Did you know that you got your math wrong? I know that errors like that usually go unnoticed around here, because pedants generally don't hang out around here.
Re: (Score:2)
Seriously, i just yelled "gah!" out loud after reading 15 of the "UR DOIN' IT WRONG!" posts in a row.
Ritual seppuku is the only option left; for anyone who corrected his math AFTER the first two people.
I'll expect your guts on my desk in the morning kthx.
Re: (Score:2)
Let's just assume the 100 TB figure is right: 100 * $150 = $15,000 (USD). Don't studios spend millions making movies?
Real Storage (tm) isn't a RAID0 of cheap & nasty SATA drives bought with mail-in rebates.
Re: (Score:2)
100TB ~= 100,000,000MB
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:200MB? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
And thanks the gods for that.
Re:A right-wing movie (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? You want a cookie for figuring out that the Batman is a reactionary?
-Peter
Re: (Score:2)
Hey mi, thanks for making Spider-Man laugh.
Re:A right-wing movie (Score:5, Funny)
Except Batman doesn't inexplicably throw thousands of Robins at Catwoman after the Joker does something bad, while he sits back doing nothing
Re: (Score:2, Redundant)
That would be pretty entertaining, though.
Joker: "Batman is rich and smart. You aren't. Why do you think YOU can stop me, Robin?"
Army of Robins: "Zerg rush! KEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKE!"
Catwoman: "AIEEEEE!"
Joker: "...That would be pretty scary if he was actually rushing the right person."
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
If there was a God, I'd thank him that I'm not you.
Re: (Score:2)
Batman is a paean to Bush
You couldn't be more right. [indecision2008.com]
Re:A right-wing movie (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, no, just no. That's idiotic and is looking for deeper meaning then the meaning that is there. Have you seen the movie?
*****SPOILER ALERT***********
1. Harvey Dent attempts to torture a captured underling to get information out of him, Batman stops this, pointing out he's not going to get anything useful out of him. It was russian roulette torture, not waterboarding, but the connections should be obvious
2. Some city-wide cell-phone based surveillance system is set up by batman, and while it does work the movie makes the point that batman can't be trusted with it, he gives it to the CEO of Wayne enterprises and it gets destroyed right after the joker is caught. Again, they don't actually call it the patriot act, but the parallels are not easy to miss. Bush isn't giving the patriot act to France with the string that they destroy it once osama is caught.
3. While Batman does operate outside the law to get things done, he doesn't make that excuse to duck punishment. At the end, he actually takes on blame that shouldn't be his.
4. Batman uses his own money to fund his fight against the joker, wheras Bush spends my tax money and gives his friends tax breaks.
5. Batman refuses to kill villians and instead turns them over to the justice system. Bush attempts to kill terrorist sympathizers, and refuses to give terror suspects due process.
Re: (Score:2)
1. Harvey Dent attempts to torture a captured underling to get information out of him, Batman stops this, pointing out he's not going to get anything useful out of him. It was russian roulette torture, not waterboarding, but the connections should be obvious
He won't get anything useful out of him because the guy is mentally ill, not because torture is ineffective. Batman uses torture. Remember the bit where he's "counting on" the fall not killing Sal?
3. While Batman does operate outside the law to get things done, he doesn't make that excuse to duck punishment. At the end, he actually takes on blame that shouldn't be his.
No, Batman becomes the scapegoat. He does things that need doing, whether or not they are in the law. Gotham needs for Harvey to be remembered fondly? Batman takes the fall. Gotham needs the Joker to be put down? Batman engages in wide-scale, highly illegal wiretapping.
He may have taken blame that didn't be
Re: (Score:2)
That's a good point and is true, but I was meaning more along the lines of "batman doesn't defend himself while bush has a press secretary."
Not a perfect example, because of course Batman does run from the law which is somewhat equ
Re: (Score:2)
I can agree with just about everything but the below:
Still, running from the law to get away with vigilanteism is substantially different than spinning the press to get away with war crimes. Batman needs to break the law to save it, then he runs from the cops so he can save more lives. Bush breaks the law ostensibly to save the country, and then lies about it to save face.
The truth is, one man's vigilante is another man's crusader. It's not hard to justify stopping atrocities. The hard part is getting everyone to agree to the definition of that word. You'll find people praising Bush for liberating Iraq--not because the media is spinning things, but because he toppled a dictator who actually was doing bad stuff. You'll also see people blasting him because he didn't follow UN guidelines. Honestly, it sounds a lot like w
Points are Incorrect (Score:5, Insightful)
Some problems. . .
1. Batman stops Harvey Dent, but then tries to extract information from the Joker by force.
2. Bush has claimed that warrant-less wiretapping was authorized by congress as part of the war effort, therefore such an authorization would end with the war.
3. If Batman doesn't duck punishment, then why doesn't he turn himself in?
4. Batman used the police force in his trap that ultimately caught the Joker, so he is not above using government money to achieve his goals. He also depends on commissioner Gordan to get leads and prosecute criminals.
5. Batman did, in fact, kill Two-Face, so he does kill villains. The Joker predicted this in the interrogation room (you'll have to break your one rule), and it is a key part of the movie.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No, Bush has claimed many justifications for warrantless wiretapping; he has argued, among them, that it is based on inherent Presidential powers over foreign affairs and security over which Congress has no authority whether or not there is a war; he has also claimed that if he had needed authorization for it, which he did not, the authorization for the use of military force also implicitly authorized it. He h
Re: (Score:2)
It is hard to make the case that this program will end. But it may be the only way to catch the Joker, so to speak. In the movie, it's easy to destroy the machine and do the right thing. What will happen when the Joker escapes, though? Will we be seeing the machine again? I don't know what to tell you.
The movie's point is valid, we will never know where the terrorists are without this system. The government can not wait for them to strike and then pick up the pieces (the public won't stand for it). T
Re:Points are Incorrect (Score:4, Funny)
I think the writer's thoughts on the subject of spying on citizen's is actually voiced with Morgan Freeman's concerns, which is decidedly anti-surveillance.
Plus, Morgan Freeman is the only one who can be trusted with it. I'd be okay with wiretapping if Morgan Freeman had sole discresion over it. Those who set up the system (Batman here) and the enforcement (again Batman) should not be the ones in control of it.
The writer is explicitly saying we should not be wiretapping or spying on citizens, and is saying even if we did need it, we can only trust it to Morgan Freeman... or at least not Bush, congress, or law enforcement.
Re:A right-wing movie (Score:5, Informative)
Anyone thinking Batman has a simplistic right-wing message is naive or hasn't seen the movie. The message is pretty complicated, and there's been a lot of discussion about this in blogs this week.
One of the better analysis, and some discussion which references the comic books:
http://www.cogitamusblog.com/2008/07/the-dark-night.html [cogitamusblog.com]
Re:A right-wing movie (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it possible that not every element of a Hollywood blockbuster (and perhaps not any elements of some) is intended as political/social advocacy?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, Klavan is comparing the box office success of a comic book-based action movie that can be read in a strained way as political allegory with the returns of overtly political films and trying to read into that that the political position that the former can be stretched into an endorsement
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps, you should've, uhm, dare I suggest it, read the article?
Re: (Score:2)
I did. Klavan argues exactly as I described, and, beyond that, that the whole reason that the supposedly-Bush-praising Dark Knight and supposedly similar films have to be metaphorical (despite portraying supposedly more compelling, resonating political/moral values) while liberal films are literal (despite portraying supposedly less compelling political/moral values) is a supposed conspiracy of the "artistic community" that makes it so that "H
Re: (Score:2)
where he is currently polling under 30% with a 40% disapproval-approval spread.
And The Dark Knight has a 95% [rottentomatoes.com] approval rating. The other 5% must be the same people who think Congress is doing a good job [rasmussenreports.com].
Re: (Score:2)
Just to add a bit of fun to Batman vs. Bush:
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/790644/ [ebaumsworld.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Quantifiers (a.k.a. "small print") would not fit into Slashdot's limits on signature's overall length. At least, you aren't demanding, I quantify the words "mean" or "occupation"...
That said, I doubt (although don't completely rule out) there exists an Arab in the world, who means anything else by the term "occupation" in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Re: (Score:2)
This assertion is patently silly at best, and offensive at worst. You don't think a single member of the Arab race is a Zionist?
Say "Palestinian sympathizers" if that's what you mean. I promise it will fit into the character limit. Maybe then your rhetoric will sound less like thinly-veiled racism.
Re: (Score:2)
Even if there is a thousand of them — that's not enough to justify a qualifier.
Golda Meir called herself "a Palestinian". There is no such people [worldnetdaily.com] — it is not a tribe or a state, it is a piece of land. Of all Palestinians (Jewish, Arabic, and others) and their sympathizers a far bigger percentage reject the discussed
Re: (Score:2)
Do you see how these two sentences reveal a certain disregard for the truth of your assertions? You are still playing fast and loose with group memberships, and it's evident that you don't care if you misrepresent some people because of that.
Your problem is not with "Arabs" but with "Opponents of Israel." Regardless of how many members they may have in common, these are two di
Re: (Score:2)
One. I calculated it again myself and the math checks out.
Re: (Score:2)
I've made similar observations. Even with the latest hardware, PNG compression is slower than saving raw 24-bit BMP files across a Gigabit network; this despite the fact that PNG reduce the file size with about 70 to 80% (on images of scanned text).
That said, large Jpeg files are indeed slow to open, but this may be partly due to the software used to open them. Not that I know, but the algorithms might make assumptions that fail on large jpeg images. I've at least noticed that "good" PNG compressors not onl