I have always wanted to see new Star Trek shows that were set in the universe but weren't about a Federation crew having a new adventure each episode. Follow a merchant crew. Follow a colony. Deep Space Nine was an excellent idea, but that show had a really slow start before it finally got good, and then it only stayed good for a season or so before it kinda fell apart again, probably because they were hemorrhaging viewers due to the previous couple of seasons being sorta "meh" and they felt like they needed to start blowing shit up. Or something.

I really liked the idea of Voyager. They get thrown out into some completely alien section of the galaxy where nothing at all is recognizable and predictable. You could have done pretty much anything at all with that show, inventing new races and new worlds and letting the writers some up with all kinds of crazy and exciting things. And then they fucked it all up and turned it into Little Ship Fights The Borg: The TV Show. Fuck the borg. The borg would have been great if TNG had forgotten about them after that one Q episode. They are possibly the worst thing to ever happen to star trek.

If the bubble does pop in a few years or a decade, I'd like to think that the availability and quality of consumer-grade film-making gear would play some part in that destruction. Surely they will factor heavily into the reconstruction of the new paradigm. There are guys out there now shooting movies on these shoestring budgets of $100K or $50K. In five or ten years, you'll be able to outright buy all the gear you could need for maybe $20K and just go and shoot movies. Hell, you can already kinda do that now, so long as you're willing to make a few compromises and willing to do a bit of clean-up work.

Film making is getting to a point where it could feasibly become a weekend hobby.

Softer image as well. You could probably shoot some footage with the phone and hide it in a movie and most people wouldn't know the difference. I have a pocket camera and the only thing that really kills it - aside from the auto exposure which the iPhone can apparently turn off - is the rolling shutter. Shooting at 720p60 helps that quite a bit, tho. I'd like to see how the phone handles movement.

They named it that because of the blue laser, which you know, but what kinda baffled me were how many people thought HD-DVD didn't use a blue laser itself. It did. The bluray people just had better marketing, I guess. Aside from the storage capacity per layer and the neat scratch-resistant coating on blurays, HD DVD was a far superior format in pretty much every conceivable way. I still use mine. You can get the discs now for pennies.

I bought a Roku a little while ago, and I too find these devices to be awesome. I can't use handbreak, tho... It overheats my PC and shuts it down. It is the only app I've ever used that does this. I dunno why, but after a few attempts to correct it, I just use VLC now. A bit slower, but quality is still decent, so meh.

Sucks about the subs, tho. I've not tried that on the Roku yet.

Actually, the only thing I ever encode are web shows and downloaded videos that I want to keep copies of. The fact that I can play them on the roku is just a nice bonus for me.

I used to dream about having a PC hooked up to my TV so I could play movies and surf the web and stuff. These little boxes are probably the next best thing to that.

Pan's Labyrinth kinda hurt me cause I love that movie and it was universally panned in the commentary. It was still entertaining and funny, tho, and they made some really good points about the film's negative aspects and they discussion about possible ways to fix it and different takes on what could have been done with the idea was interesting. I'd say you should watch them, cause there's probably a lot of general talk in them that's interesting but doesn't actually have much to do with the movie. A lot of the derailed conversations are interesting.

I haven't done a few of them simply because I don't have the films on DVD and netflix doesn't stream them and I'm too lazy to download them and I'm too cheap to buy them.

Yes. Get some 1930's and early 40's flicks on bluray sourced from good prints and just look at them. Stuff shot in the 60's and 70's on cheap cameras are gonna look kinda crap no matter what format they're on. Stuff shot on really good equipment and converted from a really good print? Gorgeous.

Well, in Episode 1 you've got pretty much every exterior shot on Coruscant which makes it look like a planet made up of borg cubes with the occasional copy/pasted tall building, the battle scene with the Gungans at the end, the umpteen CG speaking characters that look like cartoons rather than actual species...

In Episode 2 there's the tour through the cloning facility, a lot of the bug arena shots, the sand dune Padme lands on, frolicking in the prairie on the CG pig-rhinos or whatever they are, the robot factory, the asteroid scene with Jango Fett shooting at Obi-wan...

In Episode 3 many of the shots on Grievous' ship - especially in the corridors, the shot where Obiwan jump down to confront Grievous and is surrounded by CG, the fight over the lava (the part when they're both on those little floating droid things especially), the "NOOOOOOO!" scene where Vader crushes shit with his brain...

In all of them there's a lack of interaction between anything CG and anything real. There are only a few sequences where the live action characters ever touch or grab or are touched or grabbed by anything that's CG. The light saber fights mainly just involve the jedi swinging their glow sticks around at random and having animators put droids or lasers in there for them to swing at. They rarely ever look at what they're attacking. The movies are just a really expensive version of those Star Wars Kid effects videos where people would have him deflecting blaster shots and killing little droids. The first movie has some insane bloom going on around all the windows.

There are good things, tho. In all of the movies there are a lot of good Tatooine shots, traveling through the planet core with the giant fish things looked really good, all of the evening and night shots and pretty much all of the space shots look great and the later shots of Coruscant look better than they did in the first movie. I'd say that the best shots in all three movies are the ones that are the darkest with interesting shadowplay going on. Most of the time, tho, those are shot on a complete or mostly complete set and the mattes just consist of lights in the background that get blurred.

I think the thing that throws me off the most throughout the entire series is how sterile the environments are. There are shots on Coruscant in Episode One where you see people walking around on platforms going places, only the scale of everything is so massive that they'd have to walk several miles over flat, perfectly pristine, lifeless pavement before they ever got anywhere. The lack of even potted plants is kindof crazy. How do they generate oxygen? And the planet is littered with giant, mildly stylized statues of naked, sexless people that all seem to have been created by the same guy.

I mean, they mostly look good I guess. I can't really complain about how well that stuff is rendered, but it just looks fake and wrong. The environments are all so vast in scale and yet so sparsely populated, and so well manicured. There are cracks and some wear here and there, but it's just so unsettling and bizarre that it doesn't matter how well it's rendered. It will always look fake.

Compare it to the shots of Rome in Gladiator. Huge scale, but loaded with people of all shapes and sizes and dress doing all sorts of things. A lot of the shots there are just as fake as anything in Episode One and it was made around the same time, but feels a lot more real. You look at the exterior shots on Naboo in Episode One and it kinda feels like they forgot to add characters to them.

And the animation on a lot of the CG characters kills the effect as well.

I dunno. Not much more to add, really. I, myself, couldn't have watched those movies much even if they had been decent or good. There's too much stuff in them that visually doesn't work for me. It's like the Rancor in Jedi. That thing has never worked for me, but it doesn't matter cause I only have to sit through it for that one scene. I can let it slide, even tho I don't fully buy into it. With the prequels it's like that for the entire movie and I can't let it slide.

Hopefully they replaced the Wil Wheaton puppet with a CGI Wil Wheaton.

For all you space nerds out there.

Also, in case anyone else needs convincing that we did, in fact, land shit on the moon. Of course for those people, any evidence short of taking them up to the moon to have a stroll is probably not going to convince them...

when they announced the Qwickster thing, they also said that at around the same time they would have a 'substantial' increase in the number of streaming titles.

frankly, tho, Netflix streaming is great for my needs. They don't get every brand new hollywood release as soon as they come out, but they do seem to get a lot of the smaller and foreign flicks pretty close to release date. I tend to watch more of that than anything else, so it's pretty much perfect for me. That and I love cheesy bad movies, which they also have a lot of.

Not even the same thing. I know that's the catch-phrase (is it even a phrase? it's one word...), but it's pretty much the most annoying thing about the chipmunks. It worked back in the day because all you had was audio. It was just you listening to the chipmunks, Alvin would fuck up, Dave would yell at him. You don't really need to do that when you've got a plot, an actual character and moving pictures to go along with the audio.

I'm just adapting the property to the intended medium. There are a dozen ways you could visually get across that Dave is super pissed and frustrated at Alvin, and any of them would be less stupid than just having him yell like a psychopath.