Yearly Archives: 2013

Essential Blu-Ray movies

Movies, Photography

A small collection.

Having successfully added a Blu-Ray reader/burner to the HackMini I went about buying a few Blu-Ray movies, all of which I already own in standard definition DVDs. These are distinguished by exceptional cinematography, often more reminiscent of still images and come highly recommended in these new transfers based on user reviews at Amazon.com. I regard most of these as essential viewing for any photographer. These are the ones I bought:

  • 2001: A Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece remains one of the very few science fiction movies I will watch. It’s a genre I mostly detest as it’s all to easy to conjure up fantastical plots which bear no relation to reality by some asinine construct like time travel or teleportation. Poor excuses for proper writing. But Kubrick’s movie is different, not just for its startling foresights and extraordinary imagery but also for its pervasive sense of mystery. You place your own interpretation on what you see and have no need to explain it to anyone. And there is, of course, the most breathtaking cut ever in world cinema, being the moment the monkey hurls the weapon in the air to the space station in orbit. Exceptional video and sound. (Full disclosure: For the past 5 years my screensaver has been the Hal 9000 lip reading).

  • Funny Face: Stanley Donen’s 1957 confection has Fred Astaire acting Richard Avedon and Audrey Hepburn as the ingenue fashion model. The Gershwin score completes this exercise in champagne perfection and you have not lived until the multiple fashion ‘shoot’ scenes have overpowered you, set in the most beautiful city on earth, Paris. If you are a photographer and do not have this movie …. well, sorry, you had better stick to reading gear reviews.

  • Lawrence of Arabia: Like Kubrick, David Lean made very few movies and no bad ones. This was his best. A beautiful Peter O’Toole in his acting debut and the second greatest cut in cinematic history after Kubrick’s in 2001, the moment when T E Lawrence extinguishes the match. Maurice Jarre’s unforgettable score completes this exercise in perfection.

  • North by Northwest: Take the all time leading man, Cary Grant, match him up with Eve Marie Saint and an evil James Mason (surely the most beautiful, sonorous voice ever, back when beautiful English still set the standard for enunciation and could still be heard on the BBC) and set them on a cross-country chase across America from the bar in New York’s Plaza Hotel to Mount Rushmore, throw in a fabulous, memorable score by Bernard Herrmann, and you have the best thriller made. The Blu-Ray transfer is exceptional.

  • Once Upon A Time In America: Sergio Leone not only made the greatest Western (it takes an Italian!), see below, he also made this exceptional gangster movie about the Jewish Mob during prohibition. The early New York scenes at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge tell of a longing for a simpler world which never ages. James Woods, with his typical intensity, and a fine Robert DeNiro make the movie riveting, but it’s the youthful actors in the flashbacks, especially a divine Jennifer Connelly, who make the movie. Despite its vast length, almost four hours, the set design and art direction are to die for, and the movie is over before you know it. Sticking with the best of the best, Leone had Ennio Morricone write the haunting pan pipe music and Tonnino Delli Colli did the masterful cinematography.

  • Once Upon A Time In The West: Forget third rate players like John Wayne or limited range ones like Clint Eastwood. OUATITW is a unique melding of acting (Bronson, Fonda, Robards, Cardinale), directing (Leone), cinematography (Delli Colli) and music (Morricone). The regular DVD is already very fine but the Blu-Ray adds nicely to the visuals and greatly to the sound. Listen to the steam train ‘breathing’ in that magical opening sequence. The Blu-Ray comes with not one but two versions of the movie, the 165 minute theatrical release and the 166 minute remastered one. Watch the latter.

  • The Third Man: The finest monochrome photography, still or ciné, is to be found here. No self-respecting photographer should be without this movie and the Blu-Ray transfer is beyond words wonderful. Karras’s zither has never sounded better.

  • To Catch A Thief: Another confection with two of the most beautiful people who have ever trodden this Earth – Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. This is the last of three movies Kelly made with Hitchcock (after ‘Dial M for Murder’ and ‘Rear Window’) before her new job as Monaco royalty and she has never been more beautiful. The setting and cinematography on the French Riviera are to die for. Once my son graduates Harvard and I have made a fortune, I’m retiring there ….

* * * * *

These all ran me $10-12 except for Funny Face which was an exhorbitant $35, remastered in Sweden for some reason. It’s OK, it’s in English.

It’s not like classics like those above come around every day. The most recent was made 20 years ago, which tells you something about the CGI-digital garbage and poor writing with which we are presented by modern movie makers. There’s lots of film grain to be seen in the above movies, and thank goodness for that.

With disk storage so inexepensive, I rip my Blu-Ray movies to disk and give the originals to the local library. Nothing beats (cataloged) random access.

Workarounds to Adobe’s tyranny

Software

No bullies allowed.

As I mentioned the other day, Adobe has bet the farm that it can stick it to customers, depending on its quasi-monopoly in image processing (Photoshop) by making the app available solely on line.

In addition to the artistic implications (Will I lose my files if I cease paying the monthly rent? What happens to my images when I die?) and economic issues (Will I get hosed down with rent increases just because ADBE’s greedy C-suite wants a pay hike?) there are simple obsolescence issues. As we know, seemingly every new digicam with RAW capability needs a new RAW converter before applications can import the images. When the Nikon D900 or Canon 5D/IV come along, you can bet they will need new RAW converters, so what’s a hold-out to do if he refuses to subscribe to Adobe’s tyranny by not signing up for Creative Cloud?

Right now the answer is simple. Lightroom users are not being forced to move to CC so they can import the new RAW images to LR – which has been very good about ACR/RAW converter updates – then round trip them to Photoshop CS6 or lower when the great processing powers of Photoshop are needed. Aperture users (Mac only) can do likewise, though Apple’s updates to its RAW converter have been generally significantly slower than Adobe’s to LR and PS.

Yet I suspect these are both short-term fixes.

Mindful of the lucrative prosumer user base for Lightroom (you know, old farts with disposable income who are not driving their net worth) it will not be long, I suspect, before greed trumps reality at Adobe and Lightroom will suffer the same fate as Photoshop and become available solely through CC. In fact that seems a certainty to me given what I wrote above. Meanwhile, the delay gives Adobe the chance to grease its whores, people who make a living from teaching Photoshop and the like, and tell them to convince the world that CC is a Good Thing.

And the Apple picture is no brighter. First, it’s Mac only so that leaves out 80% of computer users. Second, Apple has never shown any enthusiasm for the product as the increasingly slow delivery of new RAW converters confirms. Sure the same RAW converters are engineered to work with iPhoto but let’s face it, your average iPhoto user is not waiting breathlessly for the D900 to create and process RAW images in what is a decent if limited application.

Thus given that the next (last?) standalone version of LR will still have the great database and processing features on Macs or PCs, what is called for is a replacement for PS for those cases where LR (or Aperture) cannot do the job. These are increasingly few and far between but when you need PS, you really need it.

If you have one of the later versions of PS – CS4/5/6 – then it’s likely you are set for many years. Enhancements in PS are very minor nowadays, so you are not likely to be missing some killer feature which Adobe has added solely to the CC version. If you do not own PS, either buy a used version or try something like GIMP which I tried a couple of years ago and liked. There is a learning curve but the pain is eased by knowing that Adobe’s hand is no longer in your pocket.

And GIMP has one truly ‘priceless’ feature. It’s free.


Click the image to go to the GIMP download area.

It’s Mac OS X only. PC users can try Corel’s PaintShop Pro for all of $70. It’s not the fastest on RAW updates but at $70 it’s cheap and is highly regarded, though as an OS X-only user I have no way of testing it.

How about RAW conversion for that D900 or 5D/IV? Mercifully there are many manufacturers of RAW converters which will allow the user to bypass Adobe. First, there’s the software which comes with your new D900. It may be awful, have a frightful UI and generally be a PITA but you only need it to convert your RAW files to lossless TIFFs then off they go to Aperture or Lightroom. That will always be a solution as digicam makers are not about to sell you a camera with no way of importing the images it makes. Doubtless Adobe will offer them bribes to include only CC licenses with the hardware but I do not see any digicam maker as being so dumb as to restrict buyers to one ugly solution.

Alternatively, you can use an aftermarket solution. While the piece is a bit dated, Steve Hoffmann does a fine comparison on his site here.

Phase One’s Capture One has a stellar reputation, seems to be a survivor, runs $300 for the whole thing and $100 for upgrades, and comes in both Windows and OS X versions.

Finally, many DSLRs offer the ability to save images to their SD or CF card in uncompressed TIFF format. I checked my Nikon D2x (7 years old) and D3x and both support TIFF. However, neither my Panny G1 or G3 offers this nor, best as I can tell, does the new Fuji X100S. TIFF is lossless and while the files are larger than RAW format ones, there is no dependence on a RAW converter to get to the processing stage.

Bottom line? Adobe will doubtless move Lightroom to the Creative Cloud and new RAW formats will not work with the desktop version. RAW conversion can be done in aftermarket apps far cheaper and Photoshop-like capabilities can be found at no cost in GIMP. Adobe’s prosumer base has started the long amortization to zero as of now. Once Adobe sees the numbers I would think there’s a fair chance they will reverse their policy but as the old saw has it “Cheat me once – shame on you, cheat me twice – shame on me”.