theMediaman.com

I have been zinged by Reg (The One Who Must Not Be Linked To) on my lack of updates over the last few months. I’ve overcome the urge to Ratbert him and instead decided to brainstorm a couple ideas of ways to maintain this site.

Until recently, writing during my lunch break worked well. I could compose a fairly good length entry in an hour while reaching over my teriyaki chicken. I was also posting two, three or more times a week.

My typing skills have since suffered. I type like a dyslexic speaks. While I’d like to consider myself the next General Patton, I know that it’s really just a lack of practice. My fingers are still fast, just not as dexterous.

Evenings aren’t that good of an idea, since I’m back in class at Ryerson, and I’ve been studying whitepapers on MPEG, VC-1 and AVC video compression as well as DVD, HD DVD and BD DVD formating. I’ve also gotten my hands on a package of screeners from Maple Pictures. There are some truly horrible films in this screeners pack, but I want to see if I can reverse engineer them and extract the unique properties.

Fun stuff!

There’s also the movies that I watch every week that require my attention. I estimated around 1000 unique movies watched between 20 years old and my last day as a 29 year old (which was the Steve Martin Pink Panther movie). I hope to at least match that in my next decade. It’s a lot of hard work to be a geek.

However, there really isn’t a lot of time that I can schedule my updates, so I plan to update at least twice a week. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays are the most reliable days right now that don’t have anything specific happening. However, there’s always spontaneous trips to the pub or last-minute homework for my Wednesday night class.

So that’s my plan. Basically, when AlienLovesPredator.com updates, I should also be updating.

If I can pull this off, I may turn to webcomics next!

Additional note: Writing while watching Japanese subtitled movies is very difficult.

So, now I’m using Blogger Beta. The entry window looks the same, so I’m confused. It seems like it will still lose my entry if Blogger or my Internet connection get screwed before I click on “Publish Post”. Once they figure out how to incorporate the Gmail interface, THEN I’ll be impressed. Until then, Blogger is still a lazy man’s alternative to writing something custom that works much better.

Before you point it out, I’m aware of the hypocrasy of writing that in a Blogger entry.

I finally saw “They Live” yesterday. Pretty standard John Carpenter fare, but I have been looking forward to watching this movie for most of my life. I grew up a WWF fan then lost interest by the time I hit high school. Before high school, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper was one of my favourite wrestlers. Even though I was regularly visiting video stores through most of my adolecence (and well into adulthood) I rarely saw the rather unpopular video on the shelves.

Back in 2001 I found a Rogers Video that had a lot of old VHS stock for rent. I was very pleased because I was living on my own, had an income, and was obviously old enough to rent R-rated movies. Through the mix of films I watched, I never got to see “They Live”; either because it wasn’t in stock or because something else caught my eye.

(Side note: I’ve fallen into the same trap my brother did with “The Untouchables”. He rented the movie six times before finally finishing it. I’ve rented it twice and it still hasn’t darkened the inside of my entertainment system)

One of the attractions to Rogers Video Direct (DVD rentals by mail) is the extensive catalog. I’ve knocked a few hard-to-find movies off my list. When video stores started replacing VHS stock with DVDs, I worried. I didn’t think that small, crappy movies that I had never had the chance to see would be updated to the DVD format. Why would you waste time and resources on the dime-a-dozen horror flicks from the 80’s just to sell a few discs?

The moment I saw “The Stuff” at an HMV for sale, I knew that my biggest fear about the new defacto video format had been quelled. But I’m still waiting for “Blood Beach” to come out on DVD.

So, how was “They Live”? Like I said at the beginning, standard John Carpenter fare. Certainly not his worst, but again, that’s not why I wanted to rent it. It’s more a matter of closure.

Next on the list, “Shocker“.

I’ve got 3 hours of footage to compress for DVD, and I’m on my lunch break. It should be safe enough to write.

My dexterity and general typing skills have really suffered since I’ve cut back on my blogging. Without regular comprehensive typing, even the short emails or IMs I send out result with almost as many hits of the [Backspace] key as there are words in the message. Mavis Beacon! Save me!

Just coming off of four weeks without free time in the evenings as a result of a particularly challenging video editing and DVD authoring project, I’m still in the same mode as I do research into DVD watermarking. There are some clever techniques involved. Some are obvious, like going to grayscale video with “For Your Consideration” superimposed. Some techniques involve the use of inaudible frequencies to give the copy a unique ID. Pretty fascinating stuff.

There’s only two watermarked videos I’ve ever seen. One was a video store copy of Speed 2 on VHS, and another was a copy of The Two Towers, clearly watermarked for Academy Award consideration. I’ve since bought the Two Towers, and I remember deciding while it was in theatres that I would wait for Speed 2 to be broadcast on network TV. I suppose no one was hurt by those two run-ins with watermarked video, but that could just be justification on my part to make me feel better. I’ll apologize to Sandra Bullock if I ever meet her.

Most other “not quite legal” movies I ever watch are DVDs I pick up at First Markham Place. I don’t buy the illegal bootlegs, but I do have a soft spot in my heart for movies I simply can’t get in Canada. They finally released the other films in the Japanese “Ring” series, but I’m the only person I know with a full-quality DVD of the Korean adaptation, “Ring Virus”. Similarly, there’s no legal distribution of Battle Royale in Canada, so I was happy to get my hands on that masterpiece.

However, I could have gone to my grave never having seen Battle Royale II.

Last night I watched “Phone“, a Korean horror that follows a frequently reused template set forth by “Ring”. Every rehash I’ve watched always brings something new to the mix. By ‘new’, I don’t mean the fact that it’s a cell phone and not a videotape. That’s covered in the logline. But in this movie there was a young actress (about 8-10 years old?) who put together the most terrifying little child performance I’ve seen in years. She just looks EVIL!

The rest of the movie is the same Asian horror we’ve seen done over and over and over since “Ring” in 1998. (See my comment on “The Host”)

I’m not yet sure where this watermarking research will take me. It’s clever stuff, and reminds me of cryptography. Now I’m just cleaning up my rudimentary knowledge of NTSC signal so I can see if there’s anything invisible to the naked eye that would also carry an ID signal. Maybe I can find my LotR:TTT SVCD and reverse engineer it to find the signal.

Definitely fun stuff!