Apple: Pro/Film + Video. Successful stories of film and video productions using Apple programs, obviously. Good stuff.

Apple - QuickTime - HD Gallery. With release of Tiger, Apple is bring a number of upgraded applications out, including this stunning HD capable QuickTime 7. The program is released for Mac only, but when I saw it on my 20" monitor, it's breathtaking. They are most beautiful, crisp clear footages I've seen on my monitor.

It looks like next version of Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro 4 is coming out in a month or so. The next suite of these programs are called Final Cut Studio. (The page is not available yet) The programs are not forcing you to upgrade to Tiger (OS 10.4) yet, the hardware requirements are steeper and somewhat prohibitive to effectively run and utilize all the softwares. DVD Studio Pro 4 will allow you to author HD DVD, but I would wait until the next-generation DVD standard is finalized between Japanese conglomerates. (Yes, I'm looking at you Sony.) I'm going to skip this version in order to a) master Final Cut Pro HD and DVD Studio Pro 3, and b) this version seems more of a stop-gap program before HD DVD standard truly hits in next few years.

The latest jargon in HD world is H.265. It's the codec I am familiar with at the moment because that's the codec that runs on Playstation Portable. Good stuff.

posterwire.com - the movie poster weblog. Awesome blog. If anything, a movie poster is the very first visual expression for a movie, the very first visual synopsis of a movie, and the very first lasting impression for a movie. That's why I want to retain my movie poster approval rights over anything.

"One thing you may not know about movie posters (and film trailers) is that the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) has approval over them. The film industry trade group, which assigns film ratings to all U.S. domestic films bound for a theatrical release, also has control over the content of one-sheets and trailers sent to movie theaters. As with all matters involving the MPAA, this involves some de facto censorship on the part of film studio marketing departments in an effort to comply with undefined and arbitrary rules imposed on advertising." Wow, that's news to me.

I used to collect movie posters, but I ran out of space. And I ran out of money to buy them, too.

NY Times: Watching TV Makes You Smarter. "For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ''masses'' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that ''24'' episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of ''24,'' you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ''24,'' you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion -- video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms -- turn out to be nutritional after all.

I believe that the Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today, and I believe it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down... Judged by that morality-play standard, the story of popular culture over the past 50 years -- if not 500 -- is a story of decline: the morals of the stories have grown darker and more ambiguous, and the antiheroes have multiplied.

But another kind of televised intelligence is on the rise. Think of the cognitive benefits conventionally ascribed to reading: attention, patience, retention, the parsing of narrative threads. Over the last half-century, programming on TV has increased the demands it places on precisely these mental faculties. This growing complexity involves three primary elements: multiple threading, flashing arrows and social networks.

A contemporary drama like ''The West Wing,'' on the other hand, constantly embeds mysteries into the present-tense events: you see characters performing actions or discussing events about which crucial information has been deliberately withheld. Anyone who has watched more than a handful of ''The West Wing'' episodes closely will know the feeling: scene after scene refers to some clearly crucial but unexplained piece of information, and after the sixth reference, you'll find yourself wishing you could rewind the tape to figure out what they're talking about, assuming you've missed something. And then you realize that you're supposed to be confused. The open question posed by these sequences is not ''How will this turn out in the end?'' The question is ''What's happening right now?''

The deliberate lack of hand-holding extends down to the microlevel of dialogue as well. Popular entertainment that addresses technical issues -- whether they are the intricacies of passing legislation, or of performing a heart bypass, or of operating a particle accelerator -- conventionally switches between two modes of information in dialogue: texture and substance. Texture is all the arcane verbiage provided to convince the viewer that they're watching Actual Doctors at Work; substance is the material planted amid the background texture that the viewer needs make sense of the plot.

If early television took its cues from the stage, today's reality programming is reliably structured like a video game: a series of competitive tests, growing more challenging over time. Many reality shows borrow a subtler device from gaming culture as well: the rules aren't fully established at the outset. You learn as you play.

Reality programming borrowed another key ingredient from games: the intellectual labor of probing the system's rules for weak spots and opportunities. As each show discloses its conventions, and each participant reveals his or her personality traits and background, the intrigue in watching comes from figuring out how the participants should best navigate the environment that has been created for them. The pleasure in these shows comes not from watching other people being humiliated on national television; it comes from depositing other people in a complex, high-pressure environment where no established strategies exist and watching them find their bearings... When we watch these shows, the part of our brain that monitors the emotional lives of the people around us -- the part that tracks subtle shifts in intonation and gesture and facial expression -- scrutinizes the action on the screen, looking for clues. We trust certain characters implicitly and vote others off the island in a heartbeat. Traditional narrative shows also trigger emotional connections to the characters, but those connections don't have the same participatory effect, because traditional narratives aren't explicitly about strategy. The phrase ''Monday-morning quarterbacking'' describes the engaged feeling that spectators have in relation to games as opposed to stories. We absorb stories, but we second-guess games. Reality programming has brought that second-guessing to prime time, only the game in question revolves around social dexterity rather than the physical kind.

Of course, the entertainment industry isn't increasing the cognitive complexity of its products for charitable reasons. The Sleeper Curve exists because there's money to be made by making culture smarter. The economics of television syndication and DVD sales mean that there's a tremendous financial pressure to make programs that can be watched multiple times, revealing new nuances and shadings on the third viewing. Meanwhile, the Web has created a forum for annotation and commentary that allows more complicated shows to prosper, thanks to the fan sites where each episode of shows like ''Lost'' or ''Alias'' is dissected with an intensity usually reserved for Talmud scholars. Finally, interactive games have trained a new generation of media consumers to probe complex environments and to think on their feet, and that gamer audience has now come to expect the same challenges from their television shows. In the end, the Sleeper Curve tells us something about the human mind. It may be drawn toward the sensational where content is concerned -- sex does sell, after all. But the mind also likes to be challenged; there's real pleasure to be found in solving puzzles, detecting patterns or unpacking a complex narrative system.

If your kids want to watch reality TV, encourage them to watch ''Survivor'' over ''Fear Factor.'' If they want to watch a mystery show, encourage ''24'' over ''Law and Order.'' If they want to play a violent game, encourage Grand Theft Auto over Quake. Indeed, it might be just as helpful to have a rating system that used mental labor and not obscenity and violence as its classification scheme for the world of mass culture.

The kids are forced to think like grown-ups: analyzing complex social networks, managing resources, tracking subtle narrative intertwinings, recognizing long-term patterns. The grown-ups, in turn, get to learn from the kids: decoding each new technological wave, parsing the interfaces and discovering the intellectual rewards of play. Parents should see this as an opportunity, not a crisis. Smart culture is no longer something you force your kids to ingest, like green vegetables. It's something you share." The information density we have to digest has multiplied exponentially. If you watch a TV screen these days, it's packed with info, even a basic football game broadcast is layered with player/game stats, commentaries, in addition to game itself. I can definitely say we the humans are getting collectively smarter, but not for better. Smart = intelligence != wisdom and truth.

There seems to be a Star Wars fan film production that tops themselves every year. Revelations is the latest star wars fan film that brings the best production values seen yet. It even has TWO DVDs to be downloaded via BitTorrent.

It features two staples of Star Wars fan films: A space battle with imperial TIE Fighters and lightsaber duels between Jedi. The first part is the most impressive with the its scope and its SFX achievements considering its limited production resources, with growing technical and computing powers. The second light part is little disappointing that actors don't seem to be comfortable with yielding lightsabers. The story makes sense, some characters are little wooden, the lighting is dark to view things clearly, but overall, admirable achievement.

3 years of dedicated hard works and maxing out credit cards--sounds like an indie production model that we heard so many times, but I can't help wonder if they exploited their resources to develop original IP than a fan film of established IP, they would gotten more out of it--possibly some money from distribution and sales of DVDs. Then again, the creators would not gotten the fans backing, would've cost more to get more production values on the screen, and limited exposure being new IP.

The film credit runs long, displaying the dedicated & hardworking fan base for this beloved series. If and only upcoming Episode III can close the lackluster prequel trilogy with a bang, the fans will be making more fan films to years to come.

Weta Workshop Homepage. Yes, I want my very own effect shop for my next birthday. Or next next next birthday. You get my drift.

Check out Neon Genesis Evangelion concept art gallery. Too bad the film is on hold--script problem, I'm sure.

Apple: Save the Green Planet trailer. The movie tanked in Korea because a) bad marketing labeled the movie as a comedy when it was clear not, and b) this kind of genre film does not work in small Korean film market.

However, the film is by far one of the best Korean films made in recent memory, with dazzling cinematography, clever plot twists, and singular characters inhibit within this film.

I'm just glad someone at Sony Classic recognize the potential for this destined-to-be-cult-favorite and brought to the US.

I starve for exclusive + limited + ultra rare edition Korean DVD set that included actual pain reliever gel stick used in the movie.

Google Video (Beta) Upload Program launches. "The coolest part is that you can even charge for downloads/viewings of video. I can't wait to see what comes out of this, perhaps Google was trying to one-up companies in the bittorrent and IP-based TV space before they could even get going." This means they are also working on payment mechanism as well as video service. That's a whole new platform. This could become big. Any 'paying' distribution channel is good for an indie filmmaker.

Keith Schofield / DJ Format featuring Abdominal & D-Sisive "3 Feet Deep". Oh, why oh why didn't I think of this? I mean, I'm hardcore, Beatmania DJ game and Dance Dance Revolution player!

Oh, I can't rap, that's why. :-(

iSight and TV on Flickr. Here's no frill internet broadcasting/sharing. The technology came really long way, baby.