BLOG 11 (GREEN SCREEN)

BLOG 11 (GREEN SCREEN)

As technology advances so does our movie making abilities. The “Chroma Key” (Green/blue screen) was developed in the 1950’s to allow the layering of two images or videos at once. Chroma Key, Chroma meaning color range, easily allows for the removal of a background. However, the technique was did not become widely used until the early 1990’s due to technological limitations. Chroma Key works by using a solid color as a background that can easily be made transparent enabling the ability to add in a second image or video. Some common uses for Chroma Key is showing the weather on the news and movie/TV special effects. 

My favorite move that uses chroma key is Avatar. First of all, that movie ROCKS! and if you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it. But, in regards to chroma key, that movie took it to an extreme. Chroma Key was used throughout the movie enhancing the movies amazing alien planet scenery. 

Here is a amazing clip. Can you pick out where the green screen is?

YOUTUBE URL

BLOG 10 “THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY”

BLOG 10 “THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY”

What A great old film. This video had shootouts, hostage situations, chases, and lots of crazy organ music!

Although this wasn’t the most entertaining film i’ve seen (mainly because of the crazy background music) it most certainly was very fun to see what one of the oldest American movies in existence looked like. This must have been so high tech stuff back in the early 1900’s when it was released. For the technology they had available at the time and the length of the movie, they really did a great job telling the story of the robbers stealing items from the train, running into some close calls and then getting chased by what seems to be old fashioned law enforcement. 

youtube link:

BLOG 9 (Best Movie Rental)

BLOG 9 (Best Movie Rental)

The Blue Store VS red box VS digital movie debate has been ongoing in my house for several years now. My family love to watch movies as do I. 

About 10 years ago we did nothing but rent movies from blockbuster. At that time (before REDBOX and digital movies) Blockbuster was the king of movie rentals. But, now days most Blockbusters have gone out of business and rightly so. The creation of digital movie streaming and REDBOX has revolutionized the way the people RENT and BUY movies at home. 

Lately my wife and I have been renting movies from Amazon Prime. The reason for this is that although REDBOX is usually only .99c for a 1 day rental, it is very inconvenient to go to the store, buy the movie while standing in the cold, then watch the movie that same day and return it as quickly as possible before you get charged and arm and a leg. 

With Amazon Prime, its usually 3X or 4X more expensive than REDBOX but, your paying for convenience. 

Yes, I can understand some people reading this may think I am crazy for paying more than I have to for movie rentals but… anytime I think that I am paying to much for a rental, I just think about the price of movie rentals 10 years ago, which were about $4-$6 dollars. Yes, movie rentals have actually gotten cheaper. 

So, right now my choice is Amazon Prime. 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/prime

BLOG 8 “OLD TIME RADIO”

BLOG 8 “OLD TIME RADIO”

This was a fun one for me. I have always been a fan of the show The Twilight Zone and the old time radio show I chose to listen to was a Sci-Fi called 2000 plus, from the world of tomorrow “A Veteran Comes Home”. 

This story was about a man who fought 5 years in a war on mars and comes home. It was amazing to me home much detail the put into the radio shows. I felt like I was watching Twilight Zone but was just missing the TV picture. I kept the show playing in the background while doing some homework and it wasn’t too bad to listen to. I don’t think this is something that I could listen to for a long time though since it can be a little annoying over a long period of time. Although a lot of effort was put into the show, I think I would still rather watch TV. But, I can imagine that before TV, this would be a great way to be entertained over the radio. In all, this was very fun to experience a radio show like they they did before there was televison. 

Below is a link to the radio show I listened to if anyone is interested:

http://www.radiolovers.com/shows/0-9/2000Plus/2000PLUSxxxxxx32-22-m28m10sAVeteranComesHome.mp3

BLOG 7 “NAPSTER VS ITUNES”

BLOG 7 “NAPSTER VS ITUNES”

This is going to be a tough for me to remained unbiased since I am an app developer and create apps for the iTunes app store. But, I have done my best to formulate an unbiased opinion and here it is.

I choose iTunes. But, before you think I made a biased decision please hear me out. 

Here is 4 subjects that helped me to make my decision:

Price: Its obvious that Napster is generally cheaper than iTunes. Napster allows you to purchase a monthly rental plan for $10 a month and iTunes is normally .99 cents a song. Yes, in price Napster wins but, ill explain why that didn’t mater for me later on in this blog. 

Ownership Rights: With iTunes, you pay for a song or album, then they are yours forever.  With Napster, thats not the case. Napster is a monthly service that allows you to listen to the songs but you don’t own them. Then, for .99 (plus the $10 a month) you can actually pay for the song to own it and then listen to that song later if you decide you don’t want to pay the monthly fee. 

Music Players: I am an iPhone, iPod and iPad user. I have to be since I make apps. so, its much easier for me to just use iTunes to get songs and to stick them right on my devices. With Napster, you can listen to the rented music but you have to use their app or pay the extra $$ to actually buy the song. Then there is the added effort of transferring songs and figuring out formats. 

Song Availability: Napster looses big time in this category since they offer much less in song availability. Thats very understandable to me since artists want to make more money. iTunes has more users and charges a little bit more. If an artists makes the same profits as an app developer, their profit is 70% of .99c. so, .70c which isn’t the best but, its not bad when you can have 10,000 downloads a day of 1 song. 

so, there you have it :) 

I am very interested to see what others think about my decision. 



Here is link to a decent review comparing the 2 

http://blogcritics.org/scitech/article/itunes-vs-napster/

BLOG 6 “THE DEATH OF THE NEWSPAPER”

BLOG 6 “THE DEATH OF THE NEWSPAPER”

This has been a topic of debate for years since the inception of E-reader devices. An E-reader is a device that can display digital images of books and magazines. These readers can come in many shapes, sizes and formats. Some of the more popular readers today for reading magazine are called tablets. These tablets primarily have either Android or Apple operating systems on them and are basically flat portable computers. 

I agree John Temple (former editor and publisher of The Rocky Mountain News) (see video below) that the news paper will not die out. But, I believe it has significantly lost revenue and its reader base in the last 5 years and will slowly continue to do so. At a minimum, it will slowly continue to loose its “paper format” readers. I believe there is 3 reasons for this: competition, price, and convenience. With such a large amount of web users and tablet users, the digital newspaper is slowly taking over and because of the simplicity (compared to printing) of creating digital newspapers and magazines, there are many more people in this field creating mediums for reading the news. This is reducing the number of people reading the larger newspapers news and is also driving down the price of the newspaper itself. If you look at the iTunes app store, there is now a section just for news papers and news. That section has thousands of news mediums and the cost is incredibly cheap. 

In order for the large companies to stick around, they need to be competitive in the digital market. And, thats exactly what they are trying to do. evolution is important for any business but right now, the newspapers are really needing to evolve fast or they could possibly go out of business. 

BLOG 5 “BANNING BOOKS FROM SCHOOLS”

BLOG 5 “BANNING BOOKS FROM SCHOOLS”

I wanted to start this blog by saying schools banning book is completely ridiculous! Maybe the school hasn’t heard but there is a new thing out there called the internet. So, even if the school has a very good reason (although I can’t think of any) to ban a book, the student who wants to read it can turn use their smart phone to find the book in a matter of seconds. Oh and by the way, since they are banning books, they should ban the internet. Actually, if they are going to ban the internet they really should start with TV since their is much worse content on many prime time TV shows than there is in a dictionary. Anyone who has watched a prime time TV show (The Office, Parks and Rec, Modern family, to name a few) has probably learned about SEX, heard hundreds of foul words, and been exposed to extreme violence or adult situations. But, the fact that a student can find the book anyways isn’t really the main topic of discussion here so i’ll save that for another day.

That felt more like a rant then a blog post but hey, someone needed to say it :)

To provide you with a little bit of information on why books are banned, here is what the Office of Intellectual Freedom has listed for the 3 primary reasons for ban requests:

Quote:

Often challenges are motivated by a desire to protect children from “inappropriate” sexual content or “offensive” language. The following were the top three reasons cited for challenging materials as reported to the Office of Intellectual Freedom:

1. the material was considered to be "sexually explicit"
2. the material contained "offensive language"
3. the materials was "unsuited to any age group"

I actually don’t disagree with the concept. Its good to want to protect our children. I have 2 children and its a continuous effort to ensure that they don’t learn anything too adult until they are old enough. 

My concern lies in the reasoning and motives of the people asking to have the books banned and then the schools who agree to do the banning. If its a book about Karma sutra, lets ban that thing. But the dictionary??!! hmmm. seems kinda silly. 

If its really that much of a concern, a modified version of the book needs to be produced and distributed in lieu the original. 

That would be my suggestion.