[Kieran]

If adobe disclosed the information, which they did, and you revealed that and no more, they would probably be estopped from enforcing the NDA.

[Kieran]

The legal position is that anyone who hasn’t signed an NDA and saw the demo can say anything they want about it. People who signed the NDA and weren’t at the demo are still contractually obliged not reveal anything until the NDA expires. People who were at the demo and under an NDA are in a greyish area, but I’d err on the side of caution and keep my lips sealed.

[Kieran]

You’re probably right about driver problems. And I suspect that the intel-OSX that does ship will be a little more robust that the beta. Equally, if limitations do exist at the software level then short of Apple abandoning its business model, running OSX on a PC will require means of a dubious legality.

So bad news for PC users. But another interesting question is what Apple will allow to run on its Intel boxes. And there has been speculation that they won’t make it impossible to install other OSes on their boxes.

I am hoping though that Apple eventually decides to release a cross-platform (if there is more than one platform) OS.

[Kieran]

I agree with Ron. The new Intel-powered Apple Macs, it seems, will have much more in common with PCs than their predecessors. Indeed, nefarious types have managed to alter an intel-optimised OSX so that it would run on a PC – the implication being that the limitations are no longer in hardware but software. This should make it a lot easier to port applications (maybe even make dual system versions?) at which point you would have to question the financial incentive for not supporting macs.

[Kieran]

If you plan it right it doesn’t need intense rotoscoping. If you can isolate a colour then you can just garbage matte the rough area around that object and use the leave colour effect, then adjust the hue on the result if you want to alter the colour some more.

Some of Sin City, particularly Nick Stahl’s yellowness, was done with keying; by painting him blue, which doesn’t have any green tones, they could key him independantly of the greenscreen and then shift the colour to yellow.

[Kieran]

This was screened on BBC4 last month. It’s pretty good (not that there’s much competition) but it’s essentially a collection of anecdotes interspersed with a whistlestop tour of film history. It’s not that the anecdotal stuff isn’t interesting, because it is, just that it’s suited more to people who like films and don’t know much about editing, rather than people who are interested editing to begin with.

The only bit I didn’t like was the horribly self-conscious cutting deployed during the new-wave section. Because – get this – that’s what new wave film-makers did. It does raise an interesting question as to how you should edit a film about editing though..

[Kieran]

I wonder if Avid is going to lose out in the long run.

First of all, Avid has fragmented its market far more than Apple. This isn’t so much of a problem when there is a required difference in hardware. But recent history suggests two things – that almost anything absolutely requiring hardware will eventually be done in software (see mpeg encoding, or outside editing, VOIP etc) and that consumer hardware will catch up with pro hardware. This is a pretty big problem for Avid, because if it wants to keep its neat partitions it has to provide some value added between them. Apple doesn’t have that problem, as Final Cut Pro is its top end, and so it can put top end features into Final Cut. When this happens Avid will respond by adding things to XPress Pro, but they’re eroding the value of their high end suites in doing so. The avid-monopoly over features has been questioned now that Walter Murch has demonstrated that you can edit a big-budget feature film on Final Cut. And if Apple keeps adding features, and with hardware improving, Avid’s current business model is going to be unsustainable.

Moreover, it has been rumoured that the new intel macs are essentially apple PCs. And recently Apple’s rewritten OS was successfully (it was claimed) run on a PC. If this is true then Final Cut might start to compete more directly with Avid whether officially or not.

[Kieran]

I complete agree with Chris. If you check out the night driving scenes in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet you may be surprised to find out that they were also shot in a stationary car – with Lynch’s crew running past the car with lights to simulate road lighting.

And Chris, I hope you took the Bay-look all the way with an ever-present (and mostly unnecessary) sunset grad filter.

[Kieran]

It’s probably a combination of several techniques. But it’s certainly based around a stills photography technique. You set the camera to have a long shutter speed (30s+) and then draw in the air with a torch, then detonate a flash before the shutter closes. This will expose the shape you drew with the torch’s light and the rest of the scene will be exposed normally for a fraction of a second by the flash. If you do this with multiple stills cameras, arranged in a circle around your subject, then you can create a dolly move in post (a la matrix – though Gondry’s brother Michel had in fact done the effect before then).

Because it’s a Gondry though, the technique is being used with several others. Obviously he cannot be using solely stills cameras because people move, yet he has the same slow shutter effect in motion too. I’d say that the start is done with stills cameras – as the people are frozen. The parts where people are probably shot on a film – my guess is the band’s on a turntable. The middle parts would use video/film cameras in a circle on slow shutter speeds (though you can’t really slow the shutter that much) and so the extreme motion blurs towards the end are – I guess – using a circle of stills cameras going off in relay.

All of this is guesses. Also, I’m fairly certain it’s not CG, as the Gondrys prefer using in-camera techniques to do things – and the light swirls at the start have flares on them, which suggests they were drawn live, rather than in post.

[Kieran]

They’re by Bob Sabiston, who’s the guy who did the same thing for waking life. And while there’s not a plugin solution (you need a firm grasp of animation technique), he is aided by Rotoshop, the software he designed for the task (and may one day release).