Matthew Dessem

“Our Stories Live Forever” is a terrible tagline for “Hamnet.” We aren’t all related to William Shakespeare!

You would think that “Is Paris Burning?” and “Paris Is Burning” would make a good double feature but you would be wrong.

American Epic | The Official Movie Website The official site for the award-winning documentary series directed by Bernard MacMahon.

If you are contrasting overproduced modern pop with the authentic clockwork recording devices resurrected for American Epic, you are on much firmer ground.

Whenever you contrast some imagined era of authenticity in recorded music with the overproduced pop of today, keep in mind that the Sun Studio sound was created with tape delay. Elvis’s voice didn’t sound that way!

Okay but liver is delicious.

Not too surprisingly, the first streaming app to adopt Dolby Vision 2 will be Peacock, which currently doesn’t even stream video in its native colorspace or framerate.

Stone Cold Jane Austen

The Zahn novels and the video games, especially X-Wing and TIE Fighter, had a lot to do with this too. (Especially compared to earlier attempts to expand Star Wars lore, like the Ewok movies.)

No one is writing songs for people who get busy in Burger King bathrooms anymore.

The title screen from “Philips Cavalcade: 75 Years of Music.”

(The film in question was a Pupptetoons-style promotion for Philips produced by Joop Geesink. In retrospect, of course it was gonna have Jolson, plus an EPCOT-center-type tour of stereotypes of the world.)

I learned one other valuable lesson last night: If you have an 8mm film you’ve never seen, don’t project it for the first time for an audience, especially if it’s a salute to the history of recorded sound produced by Dutch animators in the 1960s, ’cause there’s gonna be blackface.

This has been TV Corner, with your TV Talk TV Host, TV Matt.

Anyway, the surprising part was that none of the technological advances after 2" quad improved picture quality, they all degraded it, but they were cheaper and more reliable. (Getting video from a 2" quad tape *now* is ruinously expensive because so few players are still in working order.)

(Tapes and broadcast have the same number of horizontal scanlines, but a broadcast could switch from black to white *within* a scan line faster than a magnetic tape head could change what it was writing from 0 to 1.)

Anyway: until digital video, live broadcast was the gold standard, anything pre-produced was lower quality, beyond the usual generational loss between tapes. They never built *anything* that could capture a television signal as well as a television could display it.

I think I’ve posted before about this but television really was conceived and designed to be “vision at a distance,” not “a broadcast medium for motion pictures,” and a lot of initially baffling technical decisions are downstream of that.

End result is your shittiest local 6:00 news broadcast technically had better picture quality than the most lavishly produced network show.

So a live broadcast would always be higher quality than anything pre-filmed or time-shifted, and that difference increased as the industry standardized on lower quality but more reliable tape formats. (I think a tape delay would change this?)

Here is something I learned last night: No analog videotape format was able to capture the effective resolution of a television camera->analog broadcast->television set. Two inch quad came the closest and everything after that was a further step down.

Whatever you are watching or listening to, it looked and sounded a specific way in the colorist’s suite and mixing stage. Reproducing that look and that sound is the only goal, everything else is bullshit and shenanigans.

You could build a better factory calibration step into manufacturing for like 5% of the money and effort that has been spent on pretending complicated things are simple.

A screenshot from Dolby about DolbyVision 2. It reads: Content Intelligence Content Intelligence introduces new tools to better bridge the creative suite to the viewer's living room. This foundation allows Dolby Vision 2 to authentically and automatically optimize your TV to deliver a more captivating picture based on what you're watching and where you are watching. And with Al capabilities, Dolby Vision 2 will intelligently adapt to give the best presentation of the content fine-tuned for your device and viewing environment. Content Intelligence includes: • Precision Black reduces consumer frustration that the image is "too dark" by making it crystal clear and improving clarity in any viewing environment without compromising artistic intent. • Light Sense fine-tunes picture quality through advanced ambient light detection and new reference lighting data from the content source to optimize your TV for the ideal viewing experience. • Sports and Gaming Optimization introduce new enhancements such as white point adjustments and motion control designed specifically to address the unique needs of live sports and gaming.

Another screenshot from Dolby Vision 2. It reads: Building on Content Intelligence, Dolby Vision 2 introduces new tone-mapping that takes advantage of modern TV improvements. Today's TVs are brighter and more colorful than ever. With bi-directional tone mapping, creators now have new controls that let them make the most of these enhanced displays. This allows high-performance TVs to deliver higher brightness, sharper contrast, and deeply saturated colors while preserving the artist's creative vision. Going Beyond HDR Dolby Vision 2 expands the capabilities of Dolby Vision beyond HDR. This includes features like Authentic Motion, the world's first creative driven motion control tool to make scenes feel more authentically cinematic without unwanted judder on a shot-by-shot basis.

Dolby Vision 2 is just kind of giving up on the idea of a standard image, huh? If you're using AI and an ambient light sensor to recalibrate the black level, whitepoint, and motion smoothing on the fly, you aren’t “preserving the artist’s creative vision,” you just aren’t.

Like, if clinical trials will find the patent medicine that has penicillin in it, it shouldn’t matter to me if we agree that “some patent medicines work” beforehand. Money is getting hoovered out of education to AI companies right now, that’s much more meaningful than a debate over consciousness.

I think in that scenario the job is devising and selling meaningful ways to regulate the patent medicine industry! You don’t have to agree about *why* something is a bad idea to work together to stop it.

Yes, and maybe one patent medicine contains penicillin, the task is to extract the baby from the bathwater, not complain that people keep saying bad things about bathwater!

I think for most people and in most places they will encounter or be encouraged to adopt the technology, “AI doesn’t work” is going to have more predictive power than other formulations.

I mean if this is a debate about what text counts as “meaningful” why is that debate meaningful? A debate about whether a human can truly own land is interesting but kind of ancillary to a conversation about whether government, industry, and education should all invest heavily in Poinciana.

So “doesn’t work” here means, what, can’t create a text that meets her definition of “meaningful?”

The cover of Collier’s anti-patent-medicine issue.

If you discovered penicillin in the 1890s but marketed it as “Dr. McGillicuddy’s Miracle Tonic,” muckraking journalists saying mean things about “patent medicine” that weren’t strictly true of your product would hurt sales. That would not make those journalists “anti-science.”

I don’t see a lot of people downplaying the surveillance risks, but do you really think the labor impacts will be long term? In what industries?