I was researching progressive scan video cameras and came across a short film shot on a Sony TRV900.

This is Flight.357 by Andy Sutton.

A short film I made in 2001 about a guy who when confronted with his impending doom see’s his life flash before his eyes. Low budget, all shot with a Sony TRV900 DV camcorder and edited on the old iMac Graphite. I did the 3d in InfiniD3D and the rest in after effects. No blood or gore, but I think it works.

As for the camera I was researching, the TRV900 has 3 CCDs, progressively scanned for a high quality image. Still rather ‘camcorderish’ but workable for amateur film making as we see here.

It’s an older camera and as such ‘SD’ resolution with a maximum of full-SD PAL @ 720×576. Also included and unusual for a consumer-level camera is a manual focus ring.

Much more information on the TRV900 is to be found here.

Picked up from the Youtube most viewed list for today; No Scope Was Involved is a Machinima film in the’ ‘Red versus Blue’ vein utilising Halo 3.

The premise is that you gain the right to brag if you’ve managed to shoot somebody with a telescopically sighted rifle without bringing the scopes up before you take the shot. The video implies that a musical production is mandatory in the event of a noscope kill

If it ain’t broke, break it.

The BBC, in their never ending quest to be trendy have decided to change their homepage. They’ve developed something of the NASA syndrome* and gone for clicky/slidey widgets everywhere. They have also increased the width of the rendered page to approximately fit 1024 wide displays.

Now, each of the widgets on the page requires a pretty hefty chunk of processing power to render, my E6750 dual core desktop doesn’t notice but my Nokia N800 certainly does. Loading the BBC webpage on the internet tablet takes about 17-20 seconds while each widget unit is rendered. Once rendered, any state-change in a widget (a ‘reveal’ for example) takes a further 5-6 seconds.

To add insult to injury, the ‘New BBC Homepage’ is just a facade over the old site, click on any news item or department link (after slogging your way through the cripplingly slow main homepage on your mobile device) and you’ll be presented with the old webpages. The only other option is to use the ‘mobile/pdas’ link which is in itself, a content-crippled portal to the BBC site.

The TV licence in the UK now costs a staggering £135.50 a year for which you now get very little intelligent programming. I find that I watch about 20-30 minutes of television in an entire week, the only channel of any real factual value seems to be BBC parliament which is nothing more than a relay of proceedings.

I had enjoyed the BBC website and BBC News in particular but the inexorable decline of the journalistic standards has, over the years, diminished it’s value for me. The new homepage system has pretty much removed all remaining value by making the site at best uncomfortable to use and at worst inaccessible from the now common mobile devices.

As a British citizen, it is unfortunate that the BBC now fails to provide me with any useful service.

*At least on nasa.gov with the N800, the site fails over gracefully and allows you to quickly and easily reach the existing, still high quality factual content.

It could have been completely accidental but Pakistan Telecom, in trying to comply with a Pakistan government censorship order, hijacked part of Youtube’s internet routing last night.

Renesys blog tells us:

Just before 18:48 UTC, Pakistan Telecom, in response to government order to block access to YouTube  started advertising a route for 208.65.153.0/24 to its provider, PCCW (AS 3491).

This action began due to a Pakistan government edict that access to Youtube should be blocked within Pakistan due to content related to the Danish cartoons featuring pictoral representations of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.

The effects lasted outside of Pakistan for about half an hour but quickly raised questions as to whether Pakistan Telecom should be trusted to advertise routes and whether countries and telecoms companies who use such methods for censorship are a risk to the internet in general.

You can read more about how Pakistan Telecom managed to break global routing for everyone else on Renesys site. 

Kotaku brings news (or rather a press release) announcing that IGA will be partnering with id Software to provide in-game adverts for the forthcoming Quake Live.

I think this is the first official announcement on Quake Live which is to be a ‘free’ (advertisement supported) game played via your web-browser. The engine is based on id Tech 3 (Quake 3) and it could be quite disruptive to corporate networks as huge numbers of people log-on from their work PCs when they ought to be …. ah… working. ;

I’ve no real issue with adverts in-game if the game is otherwise free to play and as long as they don’t hinder the game-play - imagine if shooting an advert jumped you to a webpage mid-game! What does irk me is adverts in premium games such as Enemy Territory QuakeWars. Thankfully, the advertising middleware for that game couldn’t be ported to Linux so I get to play advert free

Found on Youtube, the machinima crew over at theleetworld (Smooth Few Films) have come up with a mini masterpiece telling the tale of the lives of two turrets at Aperture Science Enrichment Center.

You can find high-res version (including a HD version) of the video on the theleetworld website for download.