Sony G90 manual Sion? In Understanding Media, McCluhan

Page 22

audience for the first time. There are always surprises. Things

you worried were unclear the audience tracked perfectly;

things you never imagined would be a problem turn out to

require a lot more thought and work. Previews were useful for

studios, too, helping them determine the kind of movie they

had, the more effectively to market it.

But in our marketing-obsessed age, where high among the

Monday morning headlines, even in Podunk, USA, are the

weekend grosses of the latest movies, the principal function

of previews now is to let the marketing people tell the film-

makers how to “fix” their movies to make them easier to mar-

ket. One of my favorite minor spectacles of our time is watch-

ing rich, powerful studio executives and movie producers

hang on the every word of teenagers in focus groups for some

scrap of a clue as to anything objectionable that might make

the movie under discussion unpalatable to the 16-25 age

group. They pay slavish attention to witless comments built

around words like “rad,” “awesome,” or “icky” as they bring

the common denominator lower and lower.

The studios don’t care about older moviegoers any more,

and you have only to look at the latest products – this is being

written as the summer approaches – to see where their sights

are set. Previews have become a degraded and degrading

process that only the most powerful or committed of direc-

tors can withstand and prevail against. It’s the only part of the

editing process that I actively hate, and every editor and direc-

tor I know feels exactly the same way.

Most movies are now cut on computers, rather than on film

itself, and only assembled as films relatively late in the process.

Does this affect the way movies are edited? I suppose it must,

but when I look at my work before and after Avid, I don’t see

any differences that I can attribute to the technology alone.

When Avids first appeared, you did see a great many more dis-

solves because, unlike film, the computer lets you see the dis-

solve immediately.2 A far bigger influence than the tools them-

selves is the whole home-video market.

Fifty years ago, Jack Warner used to say that the life of a

movie was basically three months, which may explain why

the studios were so careless in handling and storing the mas-

ter negatives once movies had their theatrical runs. But the

video market has not just given theatrical movies a whole

new lease on life, it has practically become their life. Most

people now see movies on video, whether via cable or

through rentals. (The best single thing about the advent of

DVD is the hope among many of us that it will supplant

videotape as the preferred viewing medium, so that home

viewers will have decent picture and sonic reproduction.)

This cannot help but affect the way movies are made. I

can’t recall that I’ve ever cut with anything other than the-

atrical viewing in mind, but just the other day something

happened that gave me pause. I wanted to end a particularly

intimate scene by dropping back to an extreme long shot

that Ron Shelton had filmed. I use big screen (30”) monitors,

but when I cut in the long shot, I realized I couldn’t even see

the two actors. For all I or anyone else knew, I was cutting

to a different scene or I was doing a time cut. The actors

completely disappeared, and I thought that when the movie

shows on television this is exactly what will happen there as

well. And because the medium I was using to cut the film is

video, it was driven home to me more forcibly than before. I

2 In computerized editing, the movie is only edited in the video/com- puter domain; the final product is still film, which is assembled from a cut-list generated by the computer with numbers corresponding to each piece of negative.

made the cut anyway, because I knew it would

be effective in the theater, and we continue to

make movies for viewing in the theater.

Peckinpah, old theater man that he was,

always believed that one of the most

important aspects of moviegoing was

leaving your house, joining other peo-

ple, and seeing the movie as part of a

large audience: in other words, the

communal aspect of the experi-

ence, and also, of course, the

giving of your full attention to

the movie that being in a the-

ater demands. But this is not the

way most movies are watched

these days, and it is sobering to think

through the implications of this from the

editorial point of view. Do most people who

watch movies at home actually set aside time

and watch the movie? Do they turn off the tele-

phone or at least silence it? Do they watch the

movie as an integral, unbroken experience? Or

do they, as I suspect, treat it as a social occa-

sion? In Understanding Media, McCluhan

argued, correctly, I think, that a televi-

sion in the home becomes rather like

another person in the house, its

content less important than its

presence as an electronic

device with sounds and

images of its own that it

brings to the party. Peo-

ple talk, go to the

refrigerator, pause

the movie for any

number of valid

and invalid rea-

sons. This is the

reality of what the

movie experience

has become after a

hundred years during

which it was hailed as the great art form of the

Twentieth Century.

Why, then, in making a movie do we

continue to lavish such care on pace, on

tempo, on rhythm, on timing, on conti-

nuity of performance, story

through-line, narrative clarity, and

all the rest? If through the medium of

television, a movie becomes just

another member of the household,

merely one of the party, with no more

claims to our attention than anyone or any-

thing else, what becomes of the art of film or, indeed, of the

film experience itself?

I haven’t any brilliant answers right at hand. But when

I contemplate the future of movies as the technology

of home video becomes ever more sophisticated

and widely available, I do find myself feeling

rather like Dorothy after the tornado has car-

ried her far, far from home. Whatever else,

Toto, this really doesn’t seem to be

Kansas any more.

Image 22
Contents Sony G90 Size Does Matter Experience before he finds a little of It Ingly just beyond reachThan ever we needed in strange, dark caves Sound and vision at the same time every timeKubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut HP Bergman’s The Seventh Seal DVDFollies & Frolics Barco Vision WatchII Janet’s Index Editors will respond next issueCan All That Counts Be Counted? a Forum Begins EditorTargeting 14-Year-Old Boys? Problem with DVD Digital ArtifactsIf The Perfect Vision is to push At all. So it doesn’t take Hdtv or Down Primrose Path Toward Perfect Vision Forever?Azine Widescreen Review perhaps? John Eargle Lossy Data Compression & DVD Sound What Not To See on DVDDigital Cinema The Good Bad of It TV Is TVI L L E R Series such as Star Trek The Next Generation . EachDVDs Gaining Momentum Movie TriviaE G S I C & M U L T I M E D I a E G S a N D O WViaTV VC 105 Videophone Panasonic DVD-L50D PalmTheaterM M a R T I N R R Y R a W L I N S O N EncounteredInfocomm World of displays Significant New Products and TrendsReport Light projected on the screen. These considerations have To recreate the theater experience in the homeOgy near its limit and its days are numbered. The display Tunately, there are trade-offs for the small size of ultraAn Ideal Cinema? Moviemaking crew comes with its special privi Real movie where there was none before, or at leastOmetimes I think that every position on a Leges, its perks, as it were. If you’re the script superAssistant directors, service people, One way or another when it comes to working withIty between when they are and when FootageLikely to get you Certainly a serviceable way to editMovies Directors seem to trust me to use my Into any troubleIt’s a funny thing about matching in editing. Most lay Allowing for camera setups, lighting, and rigTakes and setups meaning the master Enjoy prelaps to pull the narrativeSion? In Understanding Media, McCluhan Sonic Flavors To Slake Every Thirst Lexicon MC-1 ControllerR L E Y Lexicon’s Music Surround Modes Logic 7 Digital Signal Processing for Movies and MusicListening to Movies Listening To Music Surround Conclusion Ing the Denon Anechoic Orchestral Music Recording CDControllers Surround Decoding and Digital Signal Processing DSP Two-Channel Bypass ModeDSP and the Future-Proof Controller THX-Certified Controllers Bass ManagementRadical new path to High-Resolution Digital Audio…the controller represents Future…After DSP Digital to Analog Conversion InterFacing the UserMeet My Enemy Revel Ultima Speakers From 2 to 7.1 ChannelsEpisode One The Ancient Enemy M M I I L L E RDeploying the Troops RPG Room Optimizer Software 59 byYou wanted to cross over your subwoofer at 40 Hz Revel Ultima Salon Noble WarriorStart and go get a beer, or two Tion coefficient for the surfaces that is comparable toEssary to achieve the Revel design team’s led by Kevin Our noble warrior against the ancient enemyLikewise for the 15-inch woofer in the Sub-15 Research effort to quantify in-room speaker behaviorNal processing in controllers hadn’t made subwoofer Direct radiator to bloated. The Salon’s soundstage comBy Keith Johnson for Reference Recordings Speaker? Removing the bottom octave from the Salon’sCians often use emphasis in the intensity Woofer, when it is well integrated with your main speakersFormance. Orchestral music, for example, is performed Episode Two a War On Two Fronts Cy, phase, and time. 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This was an elaborate joint See review, this issueQuering technology issues, Moorhead says. Most of our Computer and TV combinedOriginal, so they’re not going to fake it for DVD Made for DVDStars. God, was I skeptical To Turandot’s collection the Chinese nation, ruled by an Dramatic confrontation, in the second scene of Act TwoMust answer three riddles. If his answers are correct, she Ple either turning cynical, or lusting for more bloodTucks into a tiny corner of the staging. Hordes of Chinese Turandot. And why would there be? 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In practice, these, to Musical scoreMaybe, succeeded by metallic effects That, while Otto is allegedly creating syntax by movingMents of a Clockwork Orange What Ever Happened to Baby Pop With a TwistB G E N D R O N Performance we see on DVD begins with a filmSon’s Dead to the World. Nope Perfect timing and careful choreographyBelow-average vocal performance Horizon, probably to his death. It is a scene that demandsInsignificance of the media and with a DVD, with its digitally clear resolutionTabloid, because of its sensational pur Ly slurs the tune’s climactic line,WhatDent films Gods and Monsters, Cookie’s Fortune that Godzilla, Armageddon, Instrument is better thanWith 1991’s In on the Kill Voices of Light/The Passion of Joan of Arc Close EncounterD R E W Q U I N T Special presentation of Voices of Light/The Passion of Joan Each other. Seen together, they seemed inseparable yet Obvious. The movie is about as complete as it can be.Other instances, were not merely happy coincidences, nor By much of the sound reinforcement heard in BroadwayPhysics of Color An Introduction to Digital VideoPart 2 Video Color Concepts Human Color PerceptionLuminance ColorblindnessColor Concepts for Video Additive Color Hue and SaturationCIE Chromaticity Diagram Display Color Accuracy RGB Primaries The Color TriangleGrayscale Color Temperature White Reference Color TemperatureColor Measurement Color Bars Are used in some circumstances Other color signals will alsoColor errors. 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The TurboscanLook and Feel Pioneer Elite DVL-91 Combination CD/LD/DVD PlayerL L C R U C E Up menus allow you to configure such things as onscreen lan Meaning clearLy, the remote of the DVL-91, like that DVD PerformanceLD Performance Wrong one in the darkDvdo iScan Plus Line Doubler Celebrate Film Classic Comedy’s Second Coming Roberto Benigni L M & M O V I E SThough a number of films in which Benigni Quently escape was Benigni’s first American and EnglishRoberto on the Internet Sound Cute cameo which perhaps hints at a sequelAspect ratio and running time incorrectly Original Pink Panther film go figure. Sad to sayNo thanks to Warner’s folks Small wonder Special Editions Kubrick and The Space MonstersFirst wave of anger and incredulity. The DVD set was Set consists of Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001 aBoth Clockwork and Full Metal Jacket exhibited pinkish Special Editions Few Weird Thoughts What Dreams May ComeWorth a Look Relatively Recent Arrivals Navigator a Medieval Odyssey, the other is Map Human HeartTo say that the film is developing a cult following some How beautiful she was when she was married to RogerMovie would have had the solid foundation it needed Smooth as could be and given the importanceBiopics Three British Royals Love.1 AsOtranto Man in the Iron Mask 1939. But it is his Old Dark House 1932, The Invisible ManHP Comments Mon with The Shining than with any other Kubrick opus Ic in this context in cloud cuckooland, with theirYou have an idea of what’s really going on in the film Food-storage roomFrom Art to Cult N a T H a N V a L I NNot content to present us with an allegory of the eternal Only later goes on to give them human dimensions. EvenSuch blatant symbolism can sustain an entire movie Face the questions that vexed and hauntedIssues 111 Letters to the Editor Back Issues Website Change of AddressQuestions About Your Subscription Editorial SubmissionsA S S I F I E D a D O R D E R F O R M Name Company Address CITY, State , ZIPVision Watch