capture

Producer Jon Landau introduces 'Avatar' on Blu-ray

Jon Landau, executive producer of James Cameron's phenomenally successful film Avatar and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, recently hosted a press day introducing the April 22 release of Avatar on Blu-ray--participating in one-on-one interviews with selected members of the press, as well as roundtable discussions. Although, there wasn't much in the way of food, they did have a bar where the Avatar blue martini was the house special. The following is a snippet of the roundtable conversation as well as discussions I had with James Finn of Twentieth Century Fox.

Q: Do you think 3D is here to stay, and should everything be made in 3D? Landau: Moving forward, Jim (James Cameron) wants to do everything in 3D. Had digital 3D been available a dozen or so years ago when he shot Titanic, he'd have used it, but he didn't have it at the time. And now that we have the technology we intend to do Titanic in 3D. It will take one year to 18 months and Jim will be involved in it. We see in 3D everyday--we've always seen in 3D, we just never knew how to (theatrically) capture it until now.

And should everything be made in 3D? Depends. Remaking classics, we'll use Citizen Kane for example, I would not support that because Orson Wells isn't here. Now if you want to go and do ET and have Steven [Spielberg] involved in it. I think that would be great. I think if you want to do Star Wars and I think George [Lucas] is interested in doing it. Lord of the Rings... Again, to have someone come in and interpret what [the director] wants, I think that's where we get into trouble. It becomes exploitative and not creative. Right now the desire to make movies in 3D must come from the filmmaker and not the studios.

What can we expect to find on the Blu-ray release of Avatar on the 22? Landau:The way we've approached this initial release is all about the quality of the presentation. So there is no additional content on the disc. There are no trailers, no commercials, and no director's commentary because that takes away from the bit-rate that you can apply to the movie. We went with very simplistic menus again because [to elaborate on the menu] meant you have to do nine different versions and you have to do it in French, in Spanish, and do all this different branching. It [would have taken] up enough space that you'd have lost something off of the picture quality. Jim Cameron spent a week with our color timer, who did the movie doing a special color grading for the home entertainment release. Normally, the quote-encoding process takes two weeks. We spent five weeks doing it. We had people involved from Lightstorm throughout, where we made sure everything was right. We think the quality that we are going to present on the Blu-ray is pretty remarkable.

So this is just the movie with no frills. How much of the Blu-ray disc are you using then for the movie? Landau: Well, I wouldn't say "no frills" [chuckles]... We are actually using 100 percent of the disc.… Read more

MPEG-4 for XP

CyberLink PowerEncoder MPEG-4 AVC Edition is a long name for a "video capturing and file conversion application for converting video into high-quality compressed files using the MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) standard," with a long description, but what it boils down to is a tool for encoding video as MPEG-4 files. This is necessary step for posting video online in streaming media applications, especially at low bit rates. It supports playback via a plug-in for PowerDVD 6 and also is compatible with Windows Media Player on PCs that have the developer's MPEG-4 codec.

The program's sleek interface … Read more

Creative captures

There are plenty of times that screen captures come in handy; sometimes it's for something practical, like capturing an error message while you're in the process of troubleshooting, and sometimes it's as simple as wanting to share something funny with a friend. Aviary Screen Capture is an extension for Chrome that makes screen captures incredibly easily, and it boasts some pretty impressive extra features as well. This is by far the best image-capture utility we've come across.

The extension appears as a small icon to the right of Chrome's address bar, and taking a screen … Read more

Capture that screen--David's iPhone tip of the week

Here's a feature you'll like for capturing screenshots on your iPhone. You can use it to capture displayed error messages, images, or practically anything you see on your iPhone's screen.

Simply press the Home and Sleep/Wake buttons simultaneously and immediately release them. The screen will momentarily flash, and the iPhone's current screen contents will be saved to your Camera Roll.

Even more interesting is the fact that when the app or screen you are in supports the zoom feature you can simply zoom to the desired depth, then trigger a screen snapshot using the same … Read more

Focus on the task at hand

OmniFocus is a high-powered, flexible, feature-filled task-management app that's based on the widely used Getting Things Done (GTD) productivity method, but it's designed to accommodate a variety of work styles. OmniFocus uses a GTD-esque approach ("Capture, Organize, and Do") to handle actions, projects, and contexts. You work in a relatively clean, two-pane interface, with folders and projects in the sidebar and grouped actions in the main outline (where you add, edit, and check off actions).

Within this interface, it's easy to set up versatile contexts for your actions, distinguish between sequential and parallel actions within … Read more

Not-so-easy screen capture

Easy Screen Capture And Annotation takes shots of open windows on your computer. You can save the screen shots as virtually any type of image file, resize them, and add text, shapes, and other highlights.

Easy Screen has a clean, visually appealing interface. The program includes many useful features, such as the ability to e-mail screen shots directly from the interface. There's a highlight feature in which you can drag a box over parts of the capture for emphasis. You also can add text boxes and balloons to your captures. You can save your captures as JPEGs, PDFs, and … Read more

Frustrating recording tool

I Screen Recorder is a confusing program that allows users to capture screenshots and videos of their onscreen activity. Although the program works, its poor design makes it frustrating to use.

The program's interface seems at first that it will be intuitive, with buttons for Screen Capture, TV Capture, DV Capture, and Other Devices. However, the main frame of the interface features a bizarre infinite regression of whatever is on the screen at the time, which didn't make much sense. Actually recording a video was fairly easy; we clicked Start, went about our business, and clicked Stop, and … Read more

GE inks deal for 'cleaner coal' in China

General Electric on Tuesday said that it has reached an agreement to deploy its coal gasification technology in China, a move the company says will advance underground storage of carbon dioxide.

The energy giant announced a set of agreements in a ceremony in Beijing, including deals for GE's high-speed rail and hybrid locomotive engines. The activity comes the same day that China and the U.S. announced a number of energy-related research initiatives in coal, electric vehicles, and smart-grid technologies.

GE and coal power plant operator Shenhua Group signed a memorandum of understanding to create a joint venture to … Read more

Must-see 3D

For gamers, video performance is everything. They extract as much power from their graphics cards as possible without melting down their motherboards, all to enhance in-game realism. They require accurate, in-depth, real-time data on graphics performance. That's where D3DGear steps into the picture. It's a free DirectX and OpenGL utility that automatically measures and displays the 3D frame rate of your Windows-based games and graphics-intensive applications. It's also a screenshot capture tool that can record multiple frames and save it in AVI video, even as you play, or copy any screen image and save it as a … Read more

Screencap for words

TextCatch pulls words from any document or Web site, operating very much like a screenshot tool. With simple controls and excellent results, this program is great for anyone needing to copy text.

We were pleased with the program's interface, which is a single screen containing only a few intuitive commands. The topical Help file was only useful when we were performing the more technical duty of specifying input. Since we'd used screenshot software before, this program felt instantly familiar. We were given the option to choose a whole screen capture or to draw our own box. In each … Read more