ChainsawAsh

Hey, I like 2010.  You just have to go into it not expecting it to be 2001 - it's great sci-fi in its own right, but it doesn't come close to touching the greatness that was the original.

And 2001 looks so fantastic because it was shot on 70mm.  Oh, what/who I would do to get to see a 70mm screening of 2001...

The mono remasters are absolutely fantastic.  They're the only way to listen to Please Please Me through Sgt. Pepper in my opinion (second to the original mono vinyl pressings, that is).  Same goes for all the singles that were mixed in mono.

Oddly enough, I still prefer the White album in stereo.

C3PS, the Series 5 Dalek story you speak of - Victory of the Daleks - is without question the worst episode of the season.  I certainly wouldn't recommend skipping it (unlike Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks, which is the worst Dalek story ever written and contributes nothing to the Series 3 arc), but be prepared for it to be pretty bad.  Every other S5 episode is pretty fantastic, though (with the possible exception of The Vampires of Venice).

Also, Matt Smith will grow on you.  He's my favorite Doctor next to Troughton, and Series 5 is my favorite season of the show since it returned in 2005.

And I have to echo Bingowings' sentiments about Rose.  She was good, if not the best, in Series 1, but she pissed me off so much in Series 2, and was absolute ridiculous action-hero-y rubbish in Series 4.  I hope to God we never see her again.

Martha was a great missed opportunity - she could have been one of the best companions ever, but Davies wrote her as the "I love you Doctor, but you're hung up on Rose so I'm going to always be mopey" type.  Similar thing happened with the Doctor that season - all mopey and "I miss Rose, I want Rose back, here Martha, I'll take you to all these places I already went with Rose."

I hated Donna in The Runaway Bride, and that hate carried over for the first half or so of Series 4.  By the end of the series, though, she became my favorite 2005+ companion by a long shot.

Amy's hot, but her dialogue is all quips and she's too smart for her own good when the story requires her to be, and much dumber than she should be when the story requires it as well.

Rory, on the other hand, is fucking awesome.  He should have joined the Doctor in The Eleventh Hour, not Amy.  :-(

I think I've pinpointed when The Simpsons began to go downhill.  Season 9, episode 2(?) - "The Principal and the Pauper."  The first truly horrid episode of the show, and the mark of its eventual downfall.

Season 11 is the first legitimately terrible season.  9 and 10 each have gems scattered throughout, but 11 is just ... awful.

Now, of course ... well, Duracell described it better than I could.

RedFive said:

PG-13 wasn't adopted till '84, thanks to Spielberg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Association_of_America_film_rating_system#The_PG-13_rating_is_adopted

Exactly.

What bugs me the most about all this is that, while PG-13 was intended to split the PG category between the less violent films and the "maybe-possibly-should-be-rated-R" films.  Unfortunately, what has actually happened is that PG-13 has essentially replaced PG, and PG has taken G's place, while G has become largely irrelevant, with a stigma almost as damaging as NC-17 (though with G, the stigma is "it's for little kids, not adults" and not "it's porn").  No one would see a movie like 2001 today if it was released with a G rating (which it was in 1968) - they'd send their kids to see it, sure, but they'd think "Oh, it's rated G, it's made for kids, not me."

Frankly, I think the whole CARA system should be abolished, and replaced by a voluntary "rating" imposed on the film by its director or producer.  I.E., for WALL-E, the poster/advertisements would say "This film is appropriate for family viewing" (the implication being that it may be a little intense for little kids to watch on their own, but should be fine for kids watching with their parents), whereas something like The Dark Knight would say "This film is intended for teenage and adult audiences, and is likely to be too intense for younger children."

Not perfect, I know, but I just hate the way the MPAA/CARA works.

Also, anyone interested in the topic should check out the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated.  Very good, and very enlightening.

I don't understand how anyone can dislike the guy that made this song.

I'd love to use a program like XBMC, but there's too much about it that just pisses me off.

Can anyone recommend a program similar to XBMC that lets you customize sorting and actually change the metadata yourself instead of forcing you to stick with specific file names and metadata that it pulls off the Internet?

I'd crop them out and re-do them yourself using the title tool.  It may be a little more work, but you have more control over them and the size of the image that way.

I've been thinking about diving back into Twin Peaks now that it's on Netflix Instant.  Don't think I could make it through the back half of season 2 again, though...

Good call, Tobar.  The Land Before Time is one of my favorites.

SilverWook said:

Holy Grail is practically a PG film by today's standards.

But it is a PG film...

hairy_hen said:

Man, don't even talk about Torchwood.  It's one of the most vile, misguided, and just plain stupid shows I've ever had the misfortune of being subjected to.  Bunch of pointless wangsty rubbish that means absolutely nothing, and completely wastes the potential that an interesting character like Jack Harkness seemed to promise when Doctor Who first introduced him.  To hell with that garbage!

I feel that describes Series 1 and, to a lesser extent, Series 2 pretty well, but Children of Earth (Series 3) was absolutely brilliant.  Basically, something like Children of Earth is what I expected Torchwood to be when I first sat down to watch it from the beginning.  I'm pretty excited for Miracle Day (Series 4) right now, whereas I only watched Children of Earth out of a feeling of obligation since I'd already watched the first two series and it was only 5 episodes long.

I do agree that Captain Jack was pretty completely wasted within Doctor Who.  He should have come back halfway through Series 2 and stuck around for a while, if you ask me.

Rewatching Series 5 of Doctor Who (and a couple earlier episodes) before Series 6 starts up in a couple weeks.

Watched Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead (from Series 4) last night, then the ending to The End of Time (for the regeneration scene); watched The Eleventh Hour earlier today, and I'm about to watch The Beast Below before I head to bed.

I'm way more excited for this series than I was for last series, I have to admit.  I'm not sure where I stand on the split-season format, though - I guess it'll depend on the strength of the "game-changing" cliffhanger.

I quite like the Seagate FreeAgent Theater+.  It has its drawbacks, but it handles almost everything I put in  it.  The main reason I chose it was for its ability to output DTS audio as analog stereo, and the fact that it can read Mac (HFS+) formatted hard drives.

This is the way I'd do it, though I have no idea how to do this in AviSynth or VirtualDub.

Unless you think that'd be too distracting.  If that were the case, I'd just crop the top and bottom of the frame, i.e. make the letterboxing big enough to cover the timecode.

Try typing in numerical values in the "Motion" tab of the source window instead of using the mouse.  Also, don't forget that in FCP, you can almost always use decimals (i.e., if you're scaling, and 94 is too much while 95 isn't enough, you can type in 94.5, or 94.25, or 94.6, et cetera).

I did, but I was just assuming how it would look compared to the 14 that he'd used before.  I tend to resize manually in FCP or Avid when I do subtitles instead of fiddling around with font point sizes, so I don't really know what sizes are too small/too big.

But leaving them at the size they're at now would be fine, they're perfectly legible as it is.

Perfect!  Maybe even a little too small still, but that might just be my own personal preference.

Ah, that makes sense I suppose.  I don't know if you can have an LFE channel on an LPCM track, though (at least for standard DVD).

Well, sure, but why would you want to do that?  The 97 stereo is just a down-mix of the 97 5.1 anyway.

Serif fonts are rarely good for subtitles.  I'd strongly advise against Bookman for this reason.  It's much harder to read.

Also, you have a PM.

--edit--

By the way, you say that red looks too blurry.  Try making it less red than true red.  True red tends to bleed very badly in NTSC video, which is probably where you're getting the blurriness.

Also keep in mind that your color values should never go all the way to 255, or you'll have an illegal video signal - 235 is the limit for NTSC video.

I've never used RW's, personally.

The Alien and Aliens Blu-Rays have 4.1 mixes on their theatrical cuts.  Anyone know if those are 70mm six-track mixes, or Dolby Surround discrete mixes?

Pad your timeline with 15 seconds of black at the beginning.

There's probably a better solution, but that's all I've got this time.

I'd go with size 16, yellow, no outline, black drop shadow (drop shadow shouldn't be "soft," and it should go down and to the right), and probably a Franklin Gothic or Helvetica-style font.  Also, a wee bit higher.

And I'd also preserve the color changes as present on the Region 1 DVDs (as in, in that one scene they're green, and then red, instead of yellow), but also keep the same size/font and black drop shadow.

I think Inglourious Basterds is a good reference for Kill Bill subtitles.  They kept the theatrical (burned-in) subtitles on the DVD/Blu-Ray (I think), and they look pretty much exactly how I remember the Kill Bill subtitles looking in theaters:

(totally didn't realize that was a GIF until I pasted it in here, haha)