surfarthur
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Posts posted by surfarthur
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I can't really say that I have seen any good movies lately, but maybe check this one out:
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Great stuff Snowjunky, looks like you got some pretty good conditions. The heli terrain looks awesome.
stunning pics SJ......NZ looks a beautiful place. Very interesting as well how only the upper mountains are snow capped.....is that always the case? How tall are these mountains? They look damned big! With the apparent lack of trees, does that make the snow icy and windblown a lot?
Sometimes the snow will get down to sea level in the south island, but not often, most of the time only the upper parts of the mountains are snow covered. With no trees, yes you can get alot of wind affected and icy snow, and also visibility can make a much bigger impact than if you have tree lined slopes, however if you seek out the lee slopes you will find the goods after a blow. Mt Cook is the tallest mountain in NZ, at 3,754 meters, but most of the skifields are between 1200m and 1600m base height and up to about 2300m highest altitude. Biggest vertical is just over 700m from memory.
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Sounds like a (deliberate) bad translation to me.
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Disagree re dragon.....goggles are different for everyone due to the difference in shape of our faces. One brand that fits snugly for some won't for others. Go try a bunch on, see what fits ur face best. You want as snug a fit as possible with no gaps, this will minimise fogging.
If you have an old pair that fog up easy, you can reuse them by spraying a little WD-40 in the inside and buffing it out over the interior...that is all a fancy anti-fog agent does...it's a hydrophobic liquid that coats the inside of the lens
Have just invested in some smith io's. They get good reviews online as do oakley - hope they perform as they were (I believe) pricey but may be if I didn't stack they wouldn't fog up. Took a bit of a punt with fit with head/ helmet. Have bought a few cheapies from aldi to compare but will be carrying a spare pair. One word of advice - dont leave them too close/ long on heater at lunch or end of day. The lenses may warp and you could be making an offering to the snow gods.
I bought some Smith IOs before our last trip - fogged up really bad on any bad weather days. In fact, one day i had a full layer of ice over the inside of the lens. Will be going back to Dragon personally, haven't had a problem with their entry level goggles previously. I hope you have better luck with your IOs Rucky Inu, but if you still have your old pair, take em just in case.
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I preordered a PS4 a few weeks ago, and unfortunately I left it a bit late - might be February before I get mine. Note to self - next time preorder straight away
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He meant to say, go Roosters.
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Obviously it's only september!
Yotei wasn't what I was talking about....Rusutsu posted a pic of the first snow at the top of the mountain on their FB page
Yeah - of Yotei, not the resort
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well, a dusting on Yotei, none to actual resort level yet from what I have seen.
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Actually, it sounds like a pretty mind numbing and boringly repetitive process to me, but I guess the overall process is interesting.
I bet there are a bunch of graphic design graduates thinking they would be doing amazing and groundbreaking things, only to find themselves making raindrops into 3D. Definitely not the job for me.
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How do they actually make 2D movies into 3D?
Today, moviegoers across the country will have the opportunity to see a 20-year-old movie on the big screen — and with an extra dimension to boot. Jurassic Park 3D is the latest case of a two-dimensional movie getting the three-dimensional (or “stereo”) treatment, following in the footsteps of several Disney titles and last year’s 3D re-release of Titanic. Since this is a new process, one that’s not yet been painstakingly demystified by DVD extras and behind-the-scenes reports, it seems, frankly, to be some sort of witchcraft; how do they take a movie that was finished two decades ago and transform it into a 3D experience? Luckily, we were able to get William Sherak to break it down for us.Sherak is the president of Stereo D, the company responsible for the 2D to 3D conversions of Jurassic Park and Titanic, as well as more recent titles like G.I. Joe: Retaliation and The Green Hornet. It is, as he explains it, a multi-tiered process, attempting to merge both creative and technological considerations. It starts with a creative meeting with the filmmaker, in which they watch the movie film together, discussing it scene by scene and point by point: “What are you looking for, what do you want from this, how do you want it to work?” For Jurassic Park, that meant a long sit with Steven Spielberg, which Sherak defines as “the most awesome meeting of my life… I’m sitting in a screening room with Steven Spielberg watching Jurassic Park on mute and talking through how he did the movie 20 years ago. Just as a fan, I mean, talk about a cool meeting! You try and do that as many times as you can just ‘cause you wanna relive it again and again and again.”
Next comes a step that will warm the hearts of film preservation advocates: a full 4K digital scan of the original negative, followed by a restoration to eliminate scratches, grain noise, and other natural artifacts incurred in the 20 years since its completion. And then the conversion begins, which breaks into four basic steps:
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Rotoscoping. This is the process, according to Sherak, of “literally isolating on the computer, tracing every single image in the frame so that we can then assign depth to it. And when I say every image, I’m actually talking, you’re isolating somebody’s nose separate of their cheek — so that the nose can play further from the cheek — down to every drop of rain during the rain sequence, during the storm, every move is isolated.” They do that for every single frame: 24 frames per second, 1440 frames per minute, equaling 182,880 frames for the 127-minute Jurassic Park.
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Depth map. “This is where real artistry comes in,” Sherak explains. “This is where hundreds of artists sit down with every frame and they assign depth where we believe Steven will be happy, so we create depth of every frame — meaning we isolate every image. You place it in space, and then you create internal volume inside each of the items individually as well. So a body is not just separated from the chair it’s sitting on, you then have to give that body volume as well.”
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Creative feedback. When the depth map is complete, the filmmaker — in this case, Spielberg — comes back in to take a look and approve it. “Steven watches it and gives notes on how he likes the depth,” says Sherak. “Is he happy with our choices? Does he want us to make changes? What would he like, you know, I want this out more, I want this dinosaur to feel bigger, I want this glass of water to have less volume so that you’re really focusing on the person that’s holding the glass, all of those.” After all, “it’s the first time he’s seeing his movie in 3D.”
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Painting. Once Spielberg and the conversion artists are happy with the depth on every frame (“Yes, every single frame,” Sherak laughs) they begin the cleanup process. “When you assign depth to something that was 2D,” he explains, “there’s missing information in the frame. Right? If I create volume in your head from a 2D photograph, the side of your head you could never see before is now visible, because now there’s volume so that information on the side of your head is stereo noise on the frame, a bit blurry, so we now have to go and clean all of that up. And that’s what’s called the painting process.”
The filmmaker continues to give feedback on the work (“Steven might watch the shot five times until every note is addressed”); once they think they’ve got it down, they’ll run the film on a giant screen to check for little imperfections that they might’ve missed on their smaller screens and computer monitors. In the case of Jurassic Park, a new sound mix was created for the 3D re-release, and voila: project completed.
For this project, Sherak says, the process took a total of about nine and a half months, with more than 700 people on the job. Contrary to what you might think, the film’s age didn’t make it a particularly difficult conversion: “The challenges in this film were not because it was old. The challenge in the film was because – remember when we talked about the rotoscoping process? The challenge in this film is that it took place in a jungle with a rainstorm.” That means isolating every drop of rain — and that’s rain that was created practically, on the set, not in a computer after the fact (as might have happened were the film made today). “In today’s world you’d be given the visual effect,” Sherak says, “and then we’d just dimensionalize the CG rain that’s already technically in 3D and then we’d just add volume to it, because the CG raindrop is created in the 3D program inside a computer.”
With Jurassic Park in theaters today, Sherak is plenty busy, in the midst of 3D work on the upcoming Star Trek sequel, Guillermo del Toro’sPacific Rim, and Iron Man 3. Those were all films initially intended for stereo exhibition (unlike Jurassic Park of G.I. Joe), but Sherak stresses that, contrary to the negative connotations that have sprouted around some post-conversions, “we still convert the movie after it’s shot. You still have to let them capture the image. The difference is, yes, we were involved from the beginning.” They’ve got people on set, working with the filmmakers during production; “they’re making the decision before they shoot but they’re saying I want more leeway later so I’m gonna shoot the movie in 2D, then we’ll convert it later but knowing 100% from day one that it will be 3D.” But these conversions of older films are a dream come true for a movie lover like Sherak. “When we sat with Steven and he was talking about lens choices – I mean, 20 years later, how many movies… he remembered the lens! This was a 45 mil. Wow. Like, really? You can tell me every lens choice from that film? I’m the film geek who watches the behind the scenes on the DVD extras, right? So I got to do it for real.”
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Rotoscoping. This is the process, according to Sherak, of “literally isolating on the computer, tracing every single image in the frame so that we can then assign depth to it. And when I say every image, I’m actually talking, you’re isolating somebody’s nose separate of their cheek — so that the nose can play further from the cheek — down to every drop of rain during the rain sequence, during the storm, every move is isolated.” They do that for every single frame: 24 frames per second, 1440 frames per minute, equaling 182,880 frames for the 127-minute Jurassic Park.
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I wonder if it had detonated, would it all have been blamed on the soviets, and would the US government have waged a nuclear war with the soviets, rather than admit that they stuffed up?
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Yesterday, word came that Hiroshi Yamauchi, who was the head of Nintendo from 1949 through 2002, had died at the age of eighty-five. Yamauchi led his company, which had been founded in the nineteenth century by his great-grandfather, through an extraordinary and unique transformation. In his 2010 article “Master of Play,” which is about Nintendo’s preëminent video-game designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, Nick Paumgarten told some of Yamauchi’s story:Nintendo has been in the business of play since 1889. Its founder, Fusajiro Yamauchi, made playing cards, orkaruta. Well into the next century, the company’s main product washanafuda—cards made from crushed mulberry bark and lavishly illustrated with symbols such as animals and flowers—which replaced the painted seashells that the Japanese had traditionally used and which became widespread in Japan for gambling. As it happens, fortune and luck are intrinsic to the company’s name. Made up of the three kanji charactersnin,ten, anddo, the name has been said to mean “Leave luck to heaven,” or “Work hard, but in the end it is in heaven’s hands,” as the journalist David Sheff rendered it, in his 1993 portrait of the company, “Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children.”…In 1949, Yamauchi’s headstrong and debonair great-grandson Hiroshi Yamauchi, aged twenty-two, took over Nintendo and began restlessly casting about for ways to extend its reach. He secured a licensing agreement with the Walt Disney Company and scored a big hit with American-style playing cards adorned with the image of Mickey Mouse. Other entrepreneurial gambits—instant rice, a taxi fleet—fared poorly. In the mid-nineteen-sixties, Yamauchi hired an engineer named Gunpei Yokoi and a crew of young tinkerers to think about making toys and games, and their experiments helped foster a culture of whimsy and risk amid Nintendo’s rigid corporate structure.…The very serious men turned out a succession of silly gizmos. There was the Ultra Hand, a device with a gripping hand at the end of it; the Love Tester, a primitive electronic contrivance that purported to measure the level of ardor between a boy and a girl; the Beam Gun, which used a ray of light to hit simulated targets. (Nintendo converted abandoned bowling alleys into “shooting ranges,” where you could fire at simulations of clay pigeons.) Across the ocean, a company called Atari, based in California, had created Pong, the first hit video game. Pong, originally an arcade game, was turned into a home version in 1975. Inspired by Atari, and by the craze for a new arcade game called Space Invaders, Yamauchi, who told Sheff that he had never played a video game, led Nintendo into the arcade business, and also pushed for the development of a home console like Atari’s, an apparatus that would come to be called the Family Computer, or Famicom.
Yamauchi later hired Miyamoto, who went on to design games like Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., and Legend of Zelda; the Famicom was eventually marketed in the United States as the Nintendo Entertainment System, or N.E.S. You can read more about of Hiroshi Yamauchi and the history of Nintendo in “Master of Play,” which is available online.
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The wind has been very cold, at least it seems to have been to me, regardless of the max temp. We have had our heater back out after not using it for a month or so, and we are using our electric blankets again.
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To be fair, Snowdude, if i read your forcast correctly, you are predicting that this winter might be colder and more snowy, it might get off to a late starts, or it might be warmer than usual. that is a pretty broad forecast which no doubt because of how open you have left it, you will claim to be 100% correct around march.
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or the effects of abenomics?
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I have been speaking to others and my father and they are all telling me, how our house is done is correct where the panels overlap which is done for strength as much as anything.
A single line would be less strong, which is logical of course. I know a lot, but not all houses I have looked at are done like ours, except for the ones that have the longer panels.
So I am wondering do I go with the majority or go against what I am being recommended/told? Just I don't like imbalance and I really need to tell them by this Sunday if I want them to change the panels, otherwise it is going to be too late as the house is getting well on its way.
Below is a diagram I made to show how our house panels are put on at the moment, which everyone tells me is the correct way to do siding.
so this is how they have done the siding, but you would prefer a single line in the middle of the 2 windows? Personally, I prefer the way they have already done it, and I think it will be less noticeable this way, as well as being stronger. However, I don't have to live there, you do. If this is something that will drive you crazy every time you see it, get it done the way you want now, rather than spend the next 20 years wishing you had.
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Pork, cider and fennel pie.
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Can we stop talking about lady gaga now? seriously not worth wasting another post on.
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From swellnet.com.au
It's probably un-PC to call it so but I'm sure everyone is aware of the game Chinese whispers. You know, whisper a message to a friend, they pass it on but alter the facts slightly, the next person does the same till it gets to the end of the line. Then, when the message is retold it bears little resemblance to the one first communicated.The phenomenon occurs because individual interpretations alter during each retelling of the message. And although only a game it's instructive as it shows how easily information can become corrupted by indirect communication. Chinese whispers has a corollary in the media: whenever possible journalists should speak directly to the protagonists of a story lest their version of events gets coloured by second-hand retelling.
Recently a modern version of Chinese whispers has emerged, and it's been created and perpetuated by internet journalism. It's presence highlighting the flaws and limitations of the medium.
A story that's currently gathering global interest is the spread of radiation from cooling water at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Two and a half years after the initial incident the after effects are starting to be detected and reported upon. Namely radiation in fish caught far from the Japanese coast, some as far away as California. The leaking radiation is entering the food chain, increasing as it climbs the trophic levels, ending up in apex predators such as Bluefin Tuna, which then migrate away from the Japanese coast. It's a disturbing and also dynamic news story.
About a month ago a news outlet - I'm not sure which one now - covered the story using a wholly incorrect graphic to represent the spread of Bluefin Tuna across the Pacific Ocean. The image used was the visual representation of the Japanese tsunami that caused the Fukushima meltdown. In it, almost every corner of the Pacific was coloured leading readers to believe the radiation in the stories headline was also present everywhere. An alarming proposition.
Since then the 'radiation map' has been relayed and used in many similar stories. Last week Surfing magazine used it, though they explained its use away in the story. Today it's US surf news site The Inertia who are using the fallacious map and they're combining it with a hearty dose of sensationalism. "This is the predicted radiation plume from Fukushima," says their Facebook link to the story. "The scariest thing you'll read all year."
For a serious news site, one with esteemed writer Ted Endo at the editorial helm (although he didn't write said article), it's a black mark. The false map has been circulating the 'net like a LOL cats meme for a month, online mythbusters Snopes debunked it, every time it surfaces on Facebook someone calls out the author in the comments.
It's not only the oversight that is of issue here, of equal concern is the absence of fact checking. Something for which The Inertia are not solely to blame, many other news outlets did the same. And this is where the modern day Chinese whispers comes into play. Rather than going to the source, or at least verifying the information, anyone who passed on the radiation 'whisper' kept the chain of misinformation going.
The greater risk here is integrity, not of the news outlets but of the news story. If the lead graphic is patently wrong, used intentionally, some may suspect, to clickbait readers onto the story, how much credit should be given the actual written information in the story? Doubts arise before the first word is read. And that's a travesty for a story as far-reaching and consequential as this.
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Although August has had above average rainfall in Perth, so I can see why you would think that it's been wetter based on the last month.
Which Ski Area?
in Snow talk, trip reports, Japan avalanche & backcountry
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Surely you can't go wrong with the mighty mt granview?