James Larsen

I control all my engagement with twitter carefully.

[James Larsen @jlartweets]

@notsoErudite @unfamericatour I'm a fan of skipping the hyberbole with these fucks.

People attracted to Andrew Wilson and the extremely flawed chauvinists like him are emotionally shallow, and do not self reflect. That's the point of most Conservative grifting, it's a feature not a bug.

[James Larsen @jlartweets]

@LoverL70821 @Gadget440 @StudioAtrata When you're too stupid to argue, insult. Got it.

[James Larsen @jlartweets]

Jesus, how are these getting into my feeds.

Look, I don't play Rivals, I don't like Rivals, I don't like Rivals art style, I'm totally indifferent across the board. I like Marvel. And Marvel's tradition is to license out or alt-version the fuck out everything, let the Rivalers have their own designs, christ.

[James Larsen @jlartweets]

@Happy_SlapCat @DougWahl1 Yeah, that was my first flag. I long for the day locking up opponents was a red flag, jesus.

[James Larsen @jlartweets]

@HubPointless Thank you for the rare enjoyable experience on twitter. :D

[James Larsen @jlartweets]

@lost_histories In case anyone missed the other posts, these are 13 and 16 year-olds and the OP is trying evade all the self report accusations in the comments, but is too stupid to just delete the obviously stupid tweet.

[James Larsen @jlartweets]

@krassenstein Please stop underestimating how crazy and self absorbed this man is, he'll do it and you won't.

[James Larsen @jlartweets]

@RepBrandonGill ... This comes off more like embracing racism than calling the left liars.

WTF happened to your comms? You guys got way dumber this cycle.

[James Larsen @jlartweets]

@Witsend68 @AzPetrich "Don't you love how Trump pretends to be mentally failing so well no one can tell he's faking it" isn't the sick retort you think it is, my dude.

[James Larsen @jlartweets]

I'm interested to see what would happen on appeal. Because the judge basically said Denims transformed the content SO HARD that none Ethan's good arguments mattered. He just points back to pilllar 1, or handwaves all of Ethan's arguments with little explanation and fails to call out anything presented that counters his arguments.

Like, there's a distinct lack of reference to the strongest things in Ethan's favor which is odd.

I don't think a lot of judges would agree with this ruling, a jury needed to figure this out. The judge seems to think that because there was intent for criticism there can't be intent for other stuff (but hedges, even if there is IT'S SO TRANSFORMATIVE).

At the end, it seems Ethan's loss hinges on the fact that he didn't have big huge monetary damages to point to and that Denims transformed this so far that nothing else really matters anyway.

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The way I read it is:
1. a. She TRANSFORMED IT REALLY GOOD
b. Doesn't matter if she made money, look how good she transformed it
2. The original is creative, but that's not super important
3. Sure, she used the whole thing, but she says she had to, and that's enough for me. The judge does not really explain himself here -- like at all.
4. The Judge just seems to say "I don't think it can hurt him, so it this doesn't matter."

He then goes on to say basically that only pillar 2 helps Ethan.

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There's a lot of that goes unaddressed and unexplained as far as her intent being to steal the hate watch revenue, and the judge resoundingly avoids discussing this and hides broadly behind Rom's bad wording of his arguments. For example, a statement is made of H3 saying “the entire purpose of Denim’s watch party was to hate-watch TEI’s work without giving any benefit to TEI” but makes no attempt to break it down into what really happened. The word 'entire' is doing some heavy lifting. Ethan's Lawyer is dramatic, and I suspect his showmanship broadly hurts Ethan here. There's a lot of reasons to do a stream, it could be for BOTH the reasons of critiquing and infringing.

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Someone brought up (LUS, I think?) that this judge's ruling seems to be far away from the ruling of other judges on similar issues, including the ones for the snarker subpoenas. I think more needs to go into the transformative nature, because I'm not sure everyone would agree with this judge's take on this being extremely different than the original, it's all hyperbolic drama framed around life changing politics and from someone with no investment into either side it probably all looks the same.

In addition to that, the judge makes such little attempt to explain why using the whole thing is fine. It wouldn't be hard for someone to make a clip list to watch and do this and cover only the important bits, so she didn't HAVE to use the whole thing for this. The whole thing was used explicitly to deny revenue to the plaintiff BY the defendant, according to the defendant's words at the time. It's very strange that the judge gives this basically no weight because "OMG SO TRANSFORMATIVE".

Not to mention this will likely get overturned because it doesn't stipulate why you can do this to Ethan and not Disney or Sony or Warner Brothers. Can someone hating John Oliver now stream his entire show to their channel just like this? I wouldn't expect that.

I want to see it appealed because the result of the appeal could explain that disconnect between why you can do this to Ethan but not a huge corporation.

Ethan wanted to fill the gaps in case law about Fair Use, I don't think it's going the way he (or many of us) thought.

[James Larsen @jlartweets]

@JSmithingler @SenTomCotton Thank you for replying about the second amendment, which I was not discussing and is different than the fourteenth, which is what I was discussing. I appreciate your bad faith attempt to go around what I said, but I decline to reply to your dodge. Thanks again! :D

[James Larsen @jlartweets]

@ItsDante718 Can I have "tell me you didn't watch the entire video" for $330, Alex?

[James Larsen @jlartweets]

That's a good question. I think the industry is trying to come up with that answer right now, and I don't know what it's going to end up being.

The experience is still more immersive to some, but it's a far less compelling proposition than it was in the days before competent home theatres and super affordable high quality middle grounds exist, so I understand where you're going here.

If pressed right now the answer most people would give you is 'the experience' with that meaning different things to different consumers, vendors, and exhibitors. They're trying to figure out what the cinema experience needs to evolve into to compete.

Also, keep in a mind a lot of our population isn't on twitter and do everything from their phones and don't keep computers, big TV, etc.. around. Not all of my friends have 4K TV's. I literally just helped my best friend and her family buy their first one a few weeks ago. Media isn't everything to everyone, and for people like that family cinema's a thing worth doing, if only barely.

[James Larsen @jlartweets]

To be honest, I never got a strong answer to that from the engineering side. I'm between the engineer and the guy who answers the phone and my observation would be yes, it's a big part of it. Laser solves a lot of problems, introduces new ones, but also leaves many alone. I think the switch is an "all of these advantages over Xenon" kind of thing, but mostly price and safety, with every other reason also contributing to price and safety. E.g it's less wasteful, too.

I think that the industry needed a direction to go and that was a huge motivator because there was market saturation. Moving away from the plethora of safety issues of Xenon to something slightly less dangerous was always going to be a thing, and they went that way. It doesn't solve all of the problems I listed because it's just one part of the optical path, so you still need crazy filters to keep oil and dust out of your optics. You also still need to protect the light engine, and you're trading broken reflectors with burnt fiber optics. So it's a different type of catastrophic failure, but in the case of laser, catastrophic failures have nothing to do with maintenance and now it's one that's overly mitigated to be extremely safer than the big hot blind-making temp-sensitive glass bomb of the last several decades. My big take away is this has dangers, but it's safer for a lot of reasons including that it needs less interaction and it's loaded with redundant safety shut offs.

There's also cheaper operation and maintenance as the lamp was consumable and still pretty pricy, and they don't degrade like lamps do. As a lamp degrades, it can draw much more power to make that spark ignite between the two tungsten points. The older they are, they often take more power to run as they get broken down and pitted. Lasers are just less volatile and we're reaping the advantages of all of it, which collectively make up for why we went this direction. We needed a direction that would include a legitimately better product because since there's an almost 100% adoption rate on digital, no one would want it if it wasn't better. Laser is better than Xenon in a number of important metrics and worse in none.

[James Larsen @jlartweets]

.... sorta? Cost is an issue, but not the change of the bulb -- at least that's not the apex of the problem by any measure. Let me over-explain:

You're not wrong, but there's more to it and it's not that simple. Xenon lamps (bulbs) run super high voltage and amps to arc between the two nodes inside and produce a high volume of light and sits inside a reflective bowl that aims a chunk of that light down a small transparent bar to the optics.

Most projectors can move that lamp to focus the light to the desired brightness and modern systems will do this automatically albeit poorly, in some cases.

Cinema staff is generally not a well paid field, and for cost saving, lamps may not always be replaced when they should be. In fact, when I first started in the biz, there were a lot more over-run, cheap lamps being used and a lot more lamp explosions from the cost cutting. It appears it got so bad they stopped doing this nearly as much. It's really expensive to get a broken reflector (the bowl the lamp sits in) cleaned up and replaced by a technician when compared to the cost of a lamp, and an hour of employee time. It costs multiple times the lamp, but it varies by you lamp needs and the nature of a failure.

I've heard some speculation that for large chains in made sense to do this financially at some point because the savings buying and over-using lamps exceeded the repair costs of when they blew up. Something clearly changed. This was just industry inside guessing though.

Dim lamps happen, but dim images are more a byproduct of projector age, condition, cost cutting, and poor maintenance than lamp change costs being high specifically. Cinema projection needs a lot of maintenance. Respectively, a lamp change is just not more expensive than consequences of not changing your bulb -- unless you're a huge cinema chain and can maximize the savings across thousands of auditoriums.

But lamps DO dim. Some dim prematurely too, it's actually pretty common, but most should meet their spec their entire life. The bigger issue with lamps is they're dangerous to change. They're under 25 atmospheres of pressure and are sensitive to un-uniform temperatures. They're shotguns of glass when they explode and you need face and chest gear to change them. They're also so bright they will absolutely damage your eyes if you look at them lit directly.

I don't want to go into exact costs, because that's not what I do, so there might be details I miss, but I expect the cost of changing a lamp is your hourly employee's hour + $200-$2000 for your lamp depending on what you need and where you're getting it. Sometimes it's included in service plans to have someone come do it for you, too.

I don't know the exact cost of replacing the reflector but it's more than twice the average lamp cost, and it's more than a lamp even if nothing but the reflector gets damaged -- AND that can sky rocket if it damages any of the wiring harnesses in the lamp house, or bring up other things that're found during repair. It's an explosion, a shotgun spray of glass in a metal box, there's no price or rules to explain its cost. Lord, if an employee got hurt...

And then another factor that goes into dim lamps and images is this:

Most of the systems you encounter -- especially outside of metro areas -- are going to be dated systems from phase 1 and 2 of the digital roll out. They'll be reflected in series names -- series 1, series 2 -- these are just old, early designs that had a lot of room to mature, but aren't being quickly replaced so much as slowly phased out. Things like the optical paths degrade over time, plus focusing mechanisms degrade and with these huge amounts of light and heat energies. They can get infiltrated with popcorn oil in old buildings which gets on their optics, and a lot is done in these machines to preserve the life of those optics including the light engines.

And there are still phase 1 systems that are around 20 years old in the wild, that're standing as a testament of being well built because there aren't a lot of parts left to keep them going.

tldr; So, you have a ton of 10-20 year old systems out there, with aging light sensors, and rudimentary automation handling the focused light output of an extremely volatile lamp that could be suffering from a ton of problems anywhere from the lamp itself, to motors, to optics, to light engine, to lens, to port glass, to old screen, to bad maintenance for intrusion and it all contributes to the problem in some way.

These are really complicated systems with all the quirks that come with being giant multi-hundred pound industrial system that runs kilo-watt levels of energy through them. All the stuff that goes into making them work also contributes to the problems you have to conquer to make them work *well*. These are machines often with personalities and relationships with their technicians.

So, if you go into a theatre and your image is dim, odds are that it's not just that the lamp needs to be changed, though it could totally be a factor. Entropy wants the light to be dim. We need to fight that on numerous fronts.

[James Larsen @jlartweets]

@lauriewired It's also worth noting because the encoding is lossless, this makes for clearer images at lower resolutions than what we're used to on the consumer side, so that contributes, too. Like any cool engineering or science there's a lot of factors.

[James Larsen @jlartweets]

I got so sidetracked by replying to everything, I forgot to go on to say that broadly, the US at least still uses the 2K DMD chips that represent an equivalent to 1080p.

The concept is spot on, we're not using big resolutions at most cinema screens. They're widely using near 1080p resolutions, and you're getting that level of sharpness and detail on the screen.