I really wish Steve would set up an in-house division to produce a "C-Class" line of boxes that would compete dollar for dollar with these cheap P.C.'s. He could even leave the Apple logo off the hardware. It would seem that a Mac Clone division of Apple could easily turn a profit. Of course, the necessary trick would be in not erroding the real Mac's marketshare. But, if the in-house clones could be used to increase market share for the OS, the division would then only need to break even.
<strong>Your have your American blinkers on. We in Europe have anamorhic TV broadcasts, anamorphic TV's and our DV cams record in anamorphic mode.
...
Apple and those in the US just don't get it. 4:3 is dead and dying.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Ah, yes... i was wrong. I forgot about the anamorphic formats in europe and parts of asia and africa. Although, I wouldn't really call these American blinders... most of the world uses non-anamorphic 4:3 and pretty much everyone still uses analog 4:3 broadcasts.
I sympathize with users living in regions that use anamorphic widescreen. It definitely is a shame that apple doesn't make iMovie more convenient for these users. This omission may be a reasonable business practice for apple. I'm sure they haven't left out the anamorphic support simply because they haven't thought of it. I'm also sure that they haven't omitted this support to slight european users. It?s just a fact of life that companies get products to market quicker in their home markets.
As to the future of aspect ratios, 4:3 is neither dead nor dieing. Recent trends have been slightly misleading. The cinematic aspect ratio was first developed around the time that 4:3 televisions appeared. The motion picture industry wanted a way of differentiating the theater experience from the new and widely popular medium of television. One of the easiest things to do was to make efficient use of the entire front wall of a theater. In most auditoriums, there was space to either side of the screen but little above and below. Holywood accompanied the new format with a marketing blitz touting the aspect ratio of human vision as paramount.
However, the shape of our field of vision is not the only criteria for determining an optimal aspect ratio for consumer media standards.
Manufacturing costs and aspects of a typical viewing environment are also important. It is currently much cheaper to produce CRTs in aspect ratios closer to 1:1. It is also much cheaper to produce projection systems with radially symmetric lenses. I'm not sure if 1:1 ratios are cheaper or more expensive with LCD and plasma displays.
In the majority of _home_ viewing environments, the area available for a display more closely matches a 1:1 ratio than a widescreen format. In my home theater, I have tons of left over vertical space, mostly above the screen. Widescreen lets much of the available space go unused. If maximum screen size is your most important criteria, than 4:3 gives you the most screen area for the typcial space available in homes. All of the mongo-size screen formats like IMAX are closer to 4:3 than 16:9 or any of the other widescreen formats. This is because, it is the shape which fully occupies the wall in front of IMAX viewing stands. Typical IMAX theater have much higher ceilings than the normal movie theater.
Similarly in most homes, people have only one level of seating, meaning that viewers are dispersed in a horizontal line parallel to the screen. Everyone is roughly the same distance away and at the same vertical elevation. In these environments, additional space on the top or bottom of the screen can be added without it being to far from any viewer. Wider aspect ratios create a deeper depth of field, making viewing distances drastically different for different viewers and for different parts of the screen.
Many movies are shot on 4:3 stock and then cropped down to widescreen. Some 4:3 DVDs of movies are pan and scan while others actually let you see more of the original film stock than was shown in the theater. Check out the different versions of 5th Element for an example of this. The full screen version shows more than the widescreen.
4:3 is far from dead. In fact, it is the future. Widescreen for the consumer market will die when everyone can afford screens large enough to cover as much of a particular wall as is convenient for their furniture arrangement. Go home and look at your walls. Is the largest non-obscured rectangle closer to 4:3 or 16:9?
Don't believe the hype, widescreen isn't inherently better.
<strong>still, it doesn't matter how sheap it is, it doesn't run macos. so it's a waste of money.
but again if you have money to burn and love to spend money to things you love to hate it's a great investment. (wow, it's even infested by microsoft's windows XP, trash it)</strong><hr></blockquote>
So? You can buy it and run Linux. <img src="graemlins/cancer.gif" border="0" alt="[cancer]" /> <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" /> (Assuming there are DVD-authoring tools for Linux, and I think that they are out there...)
<strong>The feature I value most in my computers is Mac OS X. That p.o.s. Sony will never run the Mac OS.</strong><hr></blockquote>
While I hate using Windows, if the authoring software is OK, and this is your second machine so you're only using this for DVDs, no games, no upgrades, ect., it would probably work.
If you want a AIO (in function, not in physical form), then there is NO Windows machine that competes with even an iMac.
<strong>Two words, "Windows SUCKS". Yea I'm a switcher, and I didn't switch because macs look so sweet (they really do). I switched because I got fed up with Microsoft B.S. OS X is the best OS I have seen. As soon as Apple gets faster chips all the linux geeks will switch over. I know some that have already.
The muxed mpeg thing bothers me also. I have a ton of mpegs archived on CD (took forever to get them all off the zip disks). I found one program that will split the sound and the video but imovie won't import the pieces and quicktime pro won't save them in a different format. If I could only play movies from quicktime to my zr50 I could convert them all, but I don't think that is possible.
Sure you can get a cheap PC, just goto pricewatch.com and buy the pieces and put it together yourself. If you load FreeBSD it will make a decent server but its no mac.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I TOO HAD many Mpegs... I needed them to go to movies... spent FOREVER trying to figure out how to effectively demux them... then I found out about CLEANER (6)... you just configure your settings, drop the mpeg into the window and click go... it will export it to a .Mov ... or any other file for that matter.... just food for thought!
Manufacturing costs and aspects of a typical viewing environment are also important.
It is currently much cheaper to produce CRTs in aspect ratios closer to 1:1.
A couple of considerations though dfiler:
Apple's iMacs and LCD "Cinema" displays are in 16:9 format, Apple touts their DVD playback functionality ("watch it in widescreen format"), and Apple has declared the CRT dead (though Apple "resurrected" the CRT for eMac and the AIO education market).
Given these points, why NOT have the iMovie software, which runs on machines with widscreen LCDs, capable of editing DV in the 16:9 format? It seems like thorough hardware/software integration to me.
<strong>psst, a little fyi, 16x9 is NOT anamorphic. anamorphic is closer to 2.1x1. And camcorders do not record in a true 16x9 image when you set it to that mode, the image is simply cropped and stretched before being written to the tape, and losing resolution when doing so.</strong><hr></blockquote>
This is a stupid comment. If I send you a DVD made with iDVD and my DV video camera and you play it on your 4:3 TV the film will look tall and thin. If you play it on a 16:9 TV it will have boarders to the sides and look tall and thin.
In Europe 16:9 TV's are now the defacto standard and all TV broadcasts are changing to this format as they move to digital. I don't think this is a deliberate policy of Apples just a mistake, they simply don't look beyond their home market. The population of Europe is bigger than the US and so the potential market is actually greater.
No Addison what he's tryint to say is Anamorphic doesn't mean 16x9. People are starting to confuse the two. Most Camcorders have a Widescreen function but this simply masks the picture. True Anamorphic Cams support Anamorphic capture at the CCD. These are spendy and surly Joe Bob consumer does not have one in his possesion.
<strong>No Addison what he's tryint to say is Anamorphic doesn't mean 16x9. People are starting to confuse the two. Most Camcorders have a Widescreen function but this simply masks the picture. True Anamorphic Cams support Anamorphic capture at the CCD. These are spendy and surly Joe Bob consumer does not have one in his possesion.</strong><hr></blockquote>
How the data is storred/capturered on the tape is irrelevent. When you extract that data from the DV camera you recieve an anamorphic TV image, you do not get a letterbox 16:9 image. Consequently iDVD is useless to most people in Europe which is a shame as I am sure it is a monor issue to encode the widescreen flag.
How the data is storred/capturered on the tape is irrelevent. When you extract that data from the DV camera you recieve an anamorphic TV image, you do not get a letterbox 16:9 image. Consequently iDVD is useless to most people in Europe which is a shame as I am sure it is a monor issue to encode the widescreen flag.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yes US cameras at a certain pricepoint have this feature however You MUST have 16x9 CCD's to keep full resolution. Yes the data is encoded on the tape in a "squeezed" fashion but an Anamorphic CCD will retain ALL the quality the CCD can provide. Currently what you have is masking in which a portion of the CCD is masked causing a drop in resolution.
Comments
<strong>Your have your American blinkers on. We in Europe have anamorhic TV broadcasts, anamorphic TV's and our DV cams record in anamorphic mode.
...
Apple and those in the US just don't get it. 4:3 is dead and dying.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Ah, yes... i was wrong. I forgot about the anamorphic formats in europe and parts of asia and africa. Although, I wouldn't really call these American blinders... most of the world uses non-anamorphic 4:3 and pretty much everyone still uses analog 4:3 broadcasts.
I sympathize with users living in regions that use anamorphic widescreen. It definitely is a shame that apple doesn't make iMovie more convenient for these users. This omission may be a reasonable business practice for apple. I'm sure they haven't left out the anamorphic support simply because they haven't thought of it. I'm also sure that they haven't omitted this support to slight european users. It?s just a fact of life that companies get products to market quicker in their home markets.
As to the future of aspect ratios, 4:3 is neither dead nor dieing. Recent trends have been slightly misleading. The cinematic aspect ratio was first developed around the time that 4:3 televisions appeared. The motion picture industry wanted a way of differentiating the theater experience from the new and widely popular medium of television. One of the easiest things to do was to make efficient use of the entire front wall of a theater. In most auditoriums, there was space to either side of the screen but little above and below. Holywood accompanied the new format with a marketing blitz touting the aspect ratio of human vision as paramount.
However, the shape of our field of vision is not the only criteria for determining an optimal aspect ratio for consumer media standards.
Manufacturing costs and aspects of a typical viewing environment are also important. It is currently much cheaper to produce CRTs in aspect ratios closer to 1:1. It is also much cheaper to produce projection systems with radially symmetric lenses. I'm not sure if 1:1 ratios are cheaper or more expensive with LCD and plasma displays.
In the majority of _home_ viewing environments, the area available for a display more closely matches a 1:1 ratio than a widescreen format. In my home theater, I have tons of left over vertical space, mostly above the screen. Widescreen lets much of the available space go unused. If maximum screen size is your most important criteria, than 4:3 gives you the most screen area for the typcial space available in homes. All of the mongo-size screen formats like IMAX are closer to 4:3 than 16:9 or any of the other widescreen formats. This is because, it is the shape which fully occupies the wall in front of IMAX viewing stands. Typical IMAX theater have much higher ceilings than the normal movie theater.
Similarly in most homes, people have only one level of seating, meaning that viewers are dispersed in a horizontal line parallel to the screen. Everyone is roughly the same distance away and at the same vertical elevation. In these environments, additional space on the top or bottom of the screen can be added without it being to far from any viewer. Wider aspect ratios create a deeper depth of field, making viewing distances drastically different for different viewers and for different parts of the screen.
Many movies are shot on 4:3 stock and then cropped down to widescreen. Some 4:3 DVDs of movies are pan and scan while others actually let you see more of the original film stock than was shown in the theater. Check out the different versions of 5th Element for an example of this. The full screen version shows more than the widescreen.
4:3 is far from dead. In fact, it is the future. Widescreen for the consumer market will die when everyone can afford screens large enough to cover as much of a particular wall as is convenient for their furniture arrangement. Go home and look at your walls. Is the largest non-obscured rectangle closer to 4:3 or 16:9?
Don't believe the hype, widescreen isn't inherently better.
<strong>still, it doesn't matter how sheap it is, it doesn't run macos. so it's a waste of money.
but again if you have money to burn and love to spend money to things you love to hate it's a great investment. (wow, it's even infested by microsoft's windows XP, trash it)</strong><hr></blockquote>
So? You can buy it and run Linux. <img src="graemlins/cancer.gif" border="0" alt="[cancer]" /> <img src="graemlins/lol.gif" border="0" alt="[Laughing]" />
<strong>The feature I value most in my computers is Mac OS X. That p.o.s. Sony will never run the Mac OS.</strong><hr></blockquote>
While I hate using Windows, if the authoring software is OK, and this is your second machine so you're only using this for DVDs, no games, no upgrades, ect., it would probably work.
If you want a AIO (in function, not in physical form), then there is NO Windows machine that competes with even an iMac.
<strong>Two words, "Windows SUCKS". Yea I'm a switcher, and I didn't switch because macs look so sweet (they really do). I switched because I got fed up with Microsoft B.S. OS X is the best OS I have seen. As soon as Apple gets faster chips all the linux geeks will switch over. I know some that have already.
The muxed mpeg thing bothers me also. I have a ton of mpegs archived on CD (took forever to get them all off the zip disks). I found one program that will split the sound and the video but imovie won't import the pieces and quicktime pro won't save them in a different format. If I could only play movies from quicktime to my zr50 I could convert them all, but I don't think that is possible.
Sure you can get a cheap PC, just goto pricewatch.com and buy the pieces and put it together yourself. If you load FreeBSD it will make a decent server but its no mac.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I TOO HAD many Mpegs... I needed them to go to movies... spent FOREVER trying to figure out how to effectively demux them... then I found out about CLEANER (6)... you just configure your settings, drop the mpeg into the window and click go... it will export it to a .Mov ... or any other file for that matter.... just food for thought!
It is currently much cheaper to produce CRTs in aspect ratios closer to 1:1.
A couple of considerations though dfiler:
Apple's iMacs and LCD "Cinema" displays are in 16:9 format, Apple touts their DVD playback functionality ("watch it in widescreen format"), and Apple has declared the CRT dead (though Apple "resurrected" the CRT for eMac and the AIO education market).
Given these points, why NOT have the iMovie software, which runs on machines with widscreen LCDs, capable of editing DV in the 16:9 format? It seems like thorough hardware/software integration to me.
<strong>psst, a little fyi, 16x9 is NOT anamorphic. anamorphic is closer to 2.1x1. And camcorders do not record in a true 16x9 image when you set it to that mode, the image is simply cropped and stretched before being written to the tape, and losing resolution when doing so.</strong><hr></blockquote>
This is a stupid comment. If I send you a DVD made with iDVD and my DV video camera and you play it on your 4:3 TV the film will look tall and thin. If you play it on a 16:9 TV it will have boarders to the sides and look tall and thin.
In Europe 16:9 TV's are now the defacto standard and all TV broadcasts are changing to this format as they move to digital. I don't think this is a deliberate policy of Apples just a mistake, they simply don't look beyond their home market. The population of Europe is bigger than the US and so the potential market is actually greater.
You can get an eMac for 1299. The sony will be 899 with a monitor. I would still take the emac. No doubt about it.
<strong>No Addison what he's tryint to say is Anamorphic doesn't mean 16x9. People are starting to confuse the two. Most Camcorders have a Widescreen function but this simply masks the picture. True Anamorphic Cams support Anamorphic capture at the CCD. These are spendy and surly Joe Bob consumer does not have one in his possesion.</strong><hr></blockquote>
How the data is storred/capturered on the tape is irrelevent. When you extract that data from the DV camera you recieve an anamorphic TV image, you do not get a letterbox 16:9 image. Consequently iDVD is useless to most people in Europe which is a shame as I am sure it is a monor issue to encode the widescreen flag.
Haven't tried it yet, so don't know how it works, but you could always give it a shot.
<a href="http://www.cis.rit.edu/~jerry/Software/iMovie/"; target="_blank">http://www.cis.rit.edu/~jerry/Software/iMovie/</a>;
<strong>
How the data is storred/capturered on the tape is irrelevent. When you extract that data from the DV camera you recieve an anamorphic TV image, you do not get a letterbox 16:9 image. Consequently iDVD is useless to most people in Europe which is a shame as I am sure it is a monor issue to encode the widescreen flag.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Yes US cameras at a certain pricepoint have this feature however You MUST have 16x9 CCD's to keep full resolution. Yes the data is encoded on the tape in a "squeezed" fashion but an Anamorphic CCD will retain ALL the quality the CCD can provide. Currently what you have is masking in which a portion of the CCD is masked causing a drop in resolution.