Matthew Dessem

It’s the real deal. Crazy how much of the pilot is obviously modeled after Mad Men, while the rest of the show is not. There’s the show you sell and the show you make and they aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Honestly, I think this works best when the creative team has *no* option but to say, “We are contractually obligated to produce 22 episodes; we have no choice but to get weird.”

People use “dancing about architecture” as a metaphor for using the wrong medium for the message like they’ve never seen a mime trapped in an invisible box.

More songs should start like Monkey Gone to Heaven. "There was a guy." Ok I'm listening, what's this guy up to

Memorable to you, maybe, but from inside the bag it was just another Tuesday.

You're absolutely right—that was not a command post, that was an elementary school. Those were not military leaders—they were schoolchildren. I said the opposite, and that's on me.

A text excerpt. It reads: Once in the shop he let the whole contraption crash to the counter, on which he then leant for a while with his head in his arms. When he looked up again a young man was standing over him and readying a foolscap document. Richard croaked his way through MAKE, MODEL, REGISTRATION NUMBER. At length they came to TYPE OF MALFUNCTION, and the young man said,

A text excerpt. It reads: 'What's wrong with it?' 'How would I know? It cuts out all the time and it makes this screeching sound and the bag leaks all the crap out of the back.' The young man considered Richard, and this information. His stare and his biro returned to the relevant rectangle. The biro hovered there unhappily. He looked up for a moment—time enough for onerous eye-contact. He looked down. The biro itself now struck you as gnawed, cracked and capless, and paranoid, conscious of its disadvantage. Eventually, under TYPE OF MALFUNCTION, the young man wrote: NOT WORKING. 'Yeah,' said Richard. ‘That ought to cover it.'

The secret key to understanding AI discourse is found in this passage from The Information, in which the protagonist takes a vacuum cleaner to the shop for repair.

Also by this standard they still haven’t come close to “a good—or even tolerable—prose style.” If I weren’t choosing my words so carefully I might even be inclined to say they “don’t work!”

“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.