NEILL BLOMKAMP’S ALIEN 5 CONCEPT ART HAS STOLEN OUR HEARTS

If you wanna direct a big movie.... don't wait for permission- just ask Neill Blomkamp who just went ahead and started pre production in the hopes the studio would like the direction he's going in.........
and the studio saw it and they liked it... and so did the hordes of fans who groped their computer screens via Neill's Instagram account where he posted concept art.

Now it's full steam ahead and Sigourney Weaver is on board for Alien 5.

Source link: nerdist.com

Hard disk reliability examined once more: HGST rules, Seagate is alarming

An independent study has shown that HGST (Western Digital) are the drives to get with a 1.1percent failure rate over 4 years. Seagate, on the other hand, has failure rates that are higher. Depending on what model you are talking about, they range from around 9% failure rate to a whopping 43% O_O This is from a datacenter that keeps track of the drives it has to replace. So........... guess the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Source link: Ars Technica

TEST SAMYANG 24mm f1.4 on APS-C Sensor

Rokinon / Samyang 24mm on 550D (APS-C ~35mm sensor)......... O_O
I LIKE TO WATCH

How one of the best films at Sundance was shot using an iPhone 5S

BREAKING: "Tangerine". Remember that movie title. Don't laugh.... this film was shot on a phone. An iPhone 5S to be specific. It premiered at Sundance 2015... has alredy received 1 win and, wait for it, just sold its distribution rights have to a Hollywood Studio - Magnolia Studios to be precise.

Source: The Verge

Sony A7S footage. Night for Day shooting. Literally.

Change the moon into the sun with the A7S and a fast lens. Exchange your 1K ARRI Spotlight for a flashlight. Use an iphone light and a diffuser instead of a soft box.

Need permits? How can they see that you are shooting a film... when they can barely see what you are doing?

Portable lights like LED lights from your phone and flashlights means no cables, no wires, no generators.

Very low light shooting means you can go to public places and shoot under the cover/protection of night. Nobody (at least for the moment) will even suspect what you are doing.

Because you are shooting in the moonlight, you don't have the sun-related issues to worry about:

• Dehydration
• Sunburn
• Heat exhaustion
• Sweat ruining makeup
• Sweat ruining hair and clothes
• More parking options at night generally

What does the end product look like? Take a look at the video.

The one caveat: Better find a remote location away from city lights. they can overpower the scene and blow out entire buildings to white.

Hololens welcomes you to the future, or at least the future Microsoft is pushing

[outside]: *Knock knock*.
[Me]: Uhh... who's there?
[outside]: The future.
[Me]: Oh... ummm the future... who?
[outside]: You know those sci-fi hologram things that you thought were so far into the future that you'd never ever see it and it would always be a thing in a movie?
[Me]: Yeah................ wait..... thats... THATS-
[outside]: Yeah. That's me.
[Me]: WOOHOOO! COME IN MY SON. COME IN.

Microsoft's Hololens looks amazing... however I couldn't help but notice a few things about these new holograms that MS may have been cleverly "disguising". Firstly, I'm not sure if the new processor can discern or account for distance and occlusion. In other words, if you have a hologram of a picture on a wall and you raise your hand to click, one would think that your hand would be IN FRONT OF the hologram. I don't think it does that as the camera angles from everything in the demos to the live demo of Holo Studio were cleverly avoiding the occlusion issue. Maybe it's not such a big deal. Obviously it's nice to not wave this potential downer in front of people's faces (you see what I did there) to kill the hype.

I'm still super excited and down the line the whole prospect of giving the hardware and software enough spatial information in real time for it to calculate occlusion is something that isn't out of the range of possibility.

French Connection Car Chase: Guerilla film making at its best.

You want to see a shot list? Here's how they did it back in the 70s. One of the greatest car chase scenes in cinema history broken down page by page. Check out the original documentation.

DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME KIDS: No permits. LIVE traffic. They just stuck a siren on the top of a car, threw some cameras on board and WEAVED THROUGH LIVE TRAFFIC!

Yep... talk about guerilla film making.

Read the full article from the source: Oscars.org

The Expanse trailer teases your inner Space-Geek

Want to make a Science Fiction series about the Solar System? Nobody's done it before, right?

WRONG.

That's right. As of today you are TOO LATE JUNIOR! TOO LATE.
Here it is. The Expanse. Trailer #1.

Time to move on to the next crazy idea that you think nobody is going to write something about...

Read the full article from the source: Cinemablend

RaiJintek METIS MINI ITX Case with full sized PSU

If you are looking for a home for your new mITX build, there are some pretty big issues to overcome with most mITX cases. They usually require a squished compact (more expensive) power supply. There's not enough room for a full sized GPU. There's usually no room to mount a half decent sized CPU cooler and hard drive space? Well, anywhere where there is space left. Usually.

But not this case.

This case is amazing. It addresses ALL of the problems hounded by previous "small" mITX cases. With this case, not only is it really small - but get this:

1. You can fit a FULL SIZE ATX PSU. Full size!
2. You can fit a GPU as long as 170mm which is full size!
3. Got a big chunky CPU cooler? There is 160mm of headspace for that!
4. Hard drives? Yes, you can fit not only a decently fast 3.5" HDD - but you can also fit an additional 2x2.5" HDDs also.

So, really, this is the mITX case with no compromises. You have a small box with huge cooling, big graphics, big power and drive space. Amazing but true... and you can get them in multiple colours.
It's also available via popular sites such as PC Case Gear for the amazingly expensive price of..... wait for it...... $79.

Yep. Cheap as chips too. Go buy it.

Pathtracing with Brigade Update: As good as it got in 2014.

Another year, another step closer to real-time ray tracing. This is as good as it gets in 2014. A little noisy but I'd say give it a few more years, a few more teraflops of GPU power and we will be seeing games, phones, tablets, you name it, rendering reality. Reality like what you see out your bedroom window, in real time.

Then what will happen to the world? What happens to film making when you don't need to walk out the door to film something? What happens when you can really start to think about building The Matrix?

Facebook + Second Life + GPU + Brigade 3.0 = The Matrix?

Only time will tell. Perhaps the next World of Warcraft will be more immersive than we dare imagine.