Television – Page 21 – Auxiliary Memory

LG BD390 Blu-Ray Player Part 2

[Update 12/30/9: After using my BD390 for six months I wrote a new post about it’s Netflix feature.]

I’ve had my LG Blu-Ray player for ten days now, and I’m learning a lot about this specific player, and Blu-Ray players in general. I had been waiting for the price of a Blu-Ray machine to fall below $200 before buying, which it had, but I ended up spending $150 more for my player because I wanted Draft-N wireless built in, which only LG was offering. I wanted a Samsung player, like my TV, but Samsung only offered wireless-G that plugged in as a dongle, which I gave a Bronx cheer to as a buying option.

Networking speed is everything. For the first six days of owning my LG machine I was totally delighted with the built-in Netflix feature. I was getting the HD bar on their little connection meter, and content looked fabulous. Then Memphis was hit by a storm that knocked out the power to 129,000 homes (luckily, not mine this time), and networking hasn’t been the same since. This isn’t LG’s fault, and I hope Comcast will eventually recover, but this lesson from nature has taught me something significant. Without a very fast broadband connection, don’t count on those extra features of Blu-Ray players that make them cost more.

There are many factors to networking speed. First, is the wireless speed between the device and your wireless router. Draft-N is the fastest, and I think this speed is needed for streaming video well. Then there’s the speed between your house and the Internet. With Cable Internet, this varies greatly. Finally, there is the speed of the video servers. If those machines are hammered, things will be slow no matter how fast the other two connections.

Each evening since the storm, I’ve selected something from my Netflix menu only to be told that my connection was too slow and the machine asked me if I wanted to try anyway. After hopefully answering yes on several nights, I’ve learned to just say no. Movies and TV shows that were once quick to load and beautiful to look at were now almost impossible to load and horrible to watch. Bummer.

I’m not an early adopter, and after several years of Blu-Ray refinements, I had hoped things would be smooth sailing by now. Not so. My wife keeps asking me why I don’t take the LG back. She complained that her DVDs looked better on the old DVD player. The Gilmore Girls jittered. I could see it too. And I had read on the Amazon reviews many complaints about playing DVDs on the LG player, whereas many reviewers said old DVDs looked great. I got into the setup and changed the screen resolution to automatic, and Susan’s problems disappeared. That’s one of the many hassles of digital TV, matching the resolution of the content to the resolution set on the TV. I had set the LG to 1080p, wanting to get the max out of my Blu-Ray discs. The TV was set to 4:3 for playing DVD TV shows.

So my advice to people getting into this Blu-Ray game is to expect a learning curve. They aren’t as easy to use as DVD players with old-style analog TVs. And I also say “buyer beware” to people wanting those new gee-whiz features.

I really wanted Pandora streaming music, a feature offered on Samsung players. I even wrote LG to see if they were working on it. Here’s my plea: “Will the BD 390 be upgraded to handle Pandora streaming music, and Amazon Unbox video?” Here is LG’s short answer after editing out the flowery marketing speak: “Unfortunately this unit does not handle Pandora that is a feature of one of our new home theater systems.” I would have thought their fancy Blu-Ray player was part of their home theater system. At least I got my reply within 24 hours.

If I had seen LG’s support page before buying the player, I don’t think I would have bought my player. It doesn’t offer system updates for downloading, or any information about updates. The unit itself has a menu option for checking for updates, but that only works if you have the box networked or if put the update on a USB drive and feed it to your machine directly. But how do you get those updates if the support page doesn’t offer them? I was also wanting a user forum on the support page. A Blu-Ray player is essentially a computer. It has tremendous potential for expansion. Many great equipment sites have these kinds of features on their support site.

Forums are especially useful because volunteer tech-wizards will offer hard won discovery tips, and company techs will add inside knowledge. I get the feeling LG wants people to accept what’s listed on the box as the only features their machine will ever have. They are missing a marketing advantage by not promoting such goodwill. The menu on the LD BD390 has 8 icons, with room for 4 more without reducing the size of the current icons. They could squeeze 20 icons easily onto the screen if needed, offering 20 super features.

These machines are computers, and adding features is like loading software and updating the menu. LG could offer Pandora, Amazon Unbox, Rhapsody Music, Lala.com, iTunes, Hulu.com, and many other multimedia networked services. And maybe they will. The BD 390 is new. I’m going to be pissed off though if they sell the same box labeled the BD 490 with those features. If I see that, I won’t be buying LG anymore.

For now, I’m not going to take my player back. It does what was advertised on the box, although the box should have had in very big letters, a warning that these features need a very fast Internet connection and without such a fast connection these fancy features will suck. Many people are going to be disappointed. Probably only the top cable and DSL speeds will offer pleasing results. Doesn’t Korea have the best broadband in the world? Their marketing execs need broadband simulator for the other countries they sell to, so as to get an idea of how their products will perform in different markets.

I hope my very fast Comcast connection comes back. [Comcast contacted me because of this blog and reset my modem, and I’m getting 17-20 Mb/s download speeds and the Netflix feature is back to producing excellent results. Thanks Melissa, I’m happy with my LG again, and impressed with Comcast’s service, let’s hope LG might be reading blogs too.]

But the future development of Blu-Ray players that have networked features is illustrated by my desire to have Rhapsody support. I have a separate device, a Roku SoundBridge M1001 that supports getting music off my computer that is stored in Windows Media, iTunes and Rhapsody. The LG BD390 sees the Windows Media, but supports another media server, Nero, and doesn’t see iTunes or Rhapsody. Roku now makes a Netflix/Amazon Unbox decoder. Apple makes a AppleTV device. How many boxes will I need to buy for my den to work with my TV and stereo setup? How many HDMI connections and combinations of HDMI connections will that take? How many surround sound connections to my receiver will I need?

The solution is one box. And the obvious place for that box, is the Blu-Ray player. I waited out the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray fight for the winner to emerge, but now it seems many other contenders must duke it out. There are already several online video distributors, and many music services. Right now it’s like buying a different brand of TV for each TV network you want to watch, and a different radio for each music station you want to play.

If you’re sitting at your computer you can take advantage of all of these offerings. That’s because a computer is a general purpose device. We need to think of the box we hook up to our TV as a general purpose device, and a Blu-Ray player is a computer. They should be upgradable by software, so each quarter, as manufacturers make marketing deals, they can upgrade their players to offer more choices.

Here’s a specific example of my problem. I discovered a new musical group I like, The Kings of Leon on Lala.com. I then went to Zune Marketplace and added their album to my Zune to play on my trip to Birmingham, Alabama. When I got home I wanted to play them on my big stereo in my den. I have Rhapsody set up to do this, but I had switched the optical fiber audio connector to my LG BD390 player, so my SoundBridge M1001 wasn’t hooked up. I went to Target to buy the CD so I could rip it and put it on my computer so the BD 390 could see it. Target was out of the CDs. I already have rights to play this CD on two paid subscription services, but I was willing to buy it on CD so it would work with my new LG BD 390, but that didn’t work out. So I shifted the optical fiber cable from the LG to the SoundBridge and played the CD. When I want to watch a movie, I’ll have to shift the fiber audio cable back.

If the LG supported Rhapsody, Zune or Lala, I could have played it through the Blu-Ray box as it was set up. By the way, even though my connection isn’t fast enough for streaming video from Netflix, it’s perfectly fine for streaming music. The Kings of Leon sounded great. I may still buy the CD to hear them in their best sound quality, but my SACD CD player won’t work if the LG BD 390 is connected because my receiver won’t take 5.1 RCA connection setup from my CD player and optical fiber input by the LG at the same time. The LG will play a normal CD, but it doesn’t support SACD, an orphan technology that I need to keep the old SACD CD player around to play my handful of SACDs. The LG could have offered SACD and DVD-Audio support.

Sometimes I want to just give up on technology for five years, and come back and see if the Geeks of Earth have worked everything out. Man, the Amish must have it easy.

JWH – 6/18/9

Update 6/19/9: Melissa at Comcast posted a reply to this blog offering help, and my network is working perfectly again. The Netflix feature is back too, and this has a lot of implications. I’m on Netflix’s unlimited 1 disc out at a time subscription, but with this new feature I can watch as many TV and movies I want from their Watch Now list. I’ve converted all my queue to Blu-Ray discs. I read customer reviews of the Roku Netflix box on Amazon, and many say how streaming Netflix movies and TV shows have changed the way they do things. One thing they do is to cut their Netflix subscription down to 1 disc out at a time, and many talked about canceling their cable TV. Streaming Netflix, when it works right is a game-changer. I know, for the most part, I’ve stopped buying DVDs because of Netflix, and I won’t be buying Blu-Ray discs, because I can get them from Netflix too. We know Comcast is reading this too. I wonder if they will change the way they offer content. Instead of me buying a zillion channels, I’ll pay a few and stream just the shows I want to watch. Streaming content could mean the end of networks.

Better Than Television

Will there ever be a better invention than television?

Of course I hear all the young Internet dudes instantly reply, sex. Really, and how many hours have you spent humping compared to boob tube dazing? And by the way, I count video games and porn as byproducts of the invention of television. Television is powerful. It’s one hell of an addiction. After air, water and food, I think I’d have to list television as the next necessity for life.

I want to do a quick look back at the history of television, but then move onto using my science fiction vision to see if I can picture something better than TV. For the purposes of this essay I define television as a visual 2D screen with audio, so it doesn’t matter if the actual gadget is a Sears Roebuck cabinet with CRT from 1955, or iPhone from 2009, it’s still television to me. If you can watch a live or recorded TV show on it, then I call it television, so something like the Kindle ebook doesn’t count, but an Asus netbook does.

What did people do before television? I was born in 1951 and grew up with the glass teat, as Harlan Ellison named it. As a child all the adults told me stories about life before television. My mother’s mother, Nanny, was born in 1881. She told me about life before cars, airplanes, radio and television. The only way I could relate to my Nanny’s tales of old America, was through the westerns I grew up watching on TV – those shows showed life with no radios, cars, airplanes or televisions, like Dodge City, in Gunsmoke. It hurt my little head to try imagine life without TV.

Last night I watched, “The Naked Time,” the fourth episode from the first season of Star Trek, which I first viewed on September 29, 1966. Because I grew up thinking television was a new invention, it’s hard to believe that was 43 years ago, and that the first shows I remember seeing at age four, were 54 years ago. That generation that raised me, the ones who knew a time before television, are dead now, or sleeping in line waiting to get into heaven. I imagine rugrats today believing that television existed in the time of Jesus. Television has so perfectly integrated into our minds, culture and life, that it’s almost impossible to imagine life without the TV screen, or its daddy, the movie screen.

Now, I’ve got to ask: Is there a better invention than television waiting to be invented? Some people are going to point to the computer, but I’m going to claim that what we love about the computer is the CRT/LCD screen, so that the Internet is really just a different kind of television show. Ditto for video games. I used computers before they were connected to TV screens, and although I found them fun, most people would have considered them boring with a capital B.

Television is a gestalt experience. Forget about all that damn ESP mumbo-jumbo, television screens are our real sixth sense. Until we get a neural jack in the back of the head, like Neo in The Matrix, the television screen is our information pie hole. Up until the advent of the Internet, the screen was one-way. Now, the screen is a two-way street to the hive mind. As I type this, I’ve got Lala.com open in another window playing “Boom” by P.o.d. If I wanted, I could open Netflix, Amazon Unbox or Hulu, and watch old-style TV shows. Also, I wanted, I could use my webcam and send video back into the system.

But my question still remains: Will there ever be a better invention than television as a communication’s tool? When my Nanny was little, the newspaper was the only form of mass communication. News from around the world was slow and sparse. And it had no immediacy.

By the time my mother was born in 1916, radio was beginning to replace the newspaper as the media of mass communication. To obtain a glimmer of this mind-blowing this transformation was, I can only recommend watching Empire of the Air, a Ken Burns documentary, which is easily found on Netflix. But if you want a much deeper insight, find the out-of-print book by Tom Lewis that the show is based on. The effort will be worth it. Radio is really the audio portion of television, and network the world in the first half of the 20th century.

Television is older than most people think – the technology begun to emerge in the 1920s and 1930s, slowly gained success in the late 1940s, and then blasted-off into the Leave it to Beaver world of the 1950s. Many people think of life before the 1960s as black and white, because of old movies and TV shows, and think it was the psychedelic sixties when reality took on Technicolor hues. Now that we spy on reality in 1080p, I bet future writers will look on the second half of the 20th century as being the fuzzy years.

Radio allowed millions of people to have a shared experience. Now that’s leaving Kansas for Oz. Television expanded on the power of radio, so routinely tens of millions, and on extreme occasions, hundreds of millions, have shared a single historical event. What next invention can top that?

Cell phones are having their impact, now that they are becoming universal, and Apple and its iPhone are pushing the envelope by evolving its invention into a pocket television, because the iPhone is only another form of a TV screen. And as humanity evolves towards those higher beings in WALL-E, sitting on their moving recliners with their faces glued to TV screens, seeing the world not with their eyes, but their television, I can imagine it as the ultimate addiction.

Writing, and its descendent, the book, was the asynchronous form of mass communication that took over the world. Radio synchronized people’s lives. Television brought that synchronized communication to our major sense organ, the eyes, and it has dominated the communication landscape ever since. Can it be topped? I suppose scientists could invent some kind of machine that could broadcast reality directly into our brains, bypassing the screen, but I tend to doubt it. If they could, we could live like the billions in The Matrix, never knowing if we’d taken the red or blue pill.

Such inventions are a long way off, so what could geek science invent before then? TV eye-glasses already exist. The goal is to fool the eyes, but despite fantasy shows like Caprica, there are some major limitations to virtual reality. As long as the viewer just watches we can create better and better ways to view distant reality. But if the viewer wants to interact with virtual reality they quickly face limitations. It’s like waking dreams, if you try to manipulate them, they fall apart.

We can create virtual worlds like Second Life, but no matter how sophisticated such worlds get, will they ever be better than televised views of our reality? Think of the difference between ABC World News Tonight, the latest Star Trek film and Up, a current animated film. One shows scenes from around the world, one shows real actors mixed into CGI scenery, and the last is total animation. Cartoons have always been a staple of TV, but would you want to live inside one. Well, hell yes, for short times. So virtual reality is one candidate to supplant TV.

This means, in the decades to come, there will be kids growing up with virtual reality as part of their lives, and old farts like me will be telling them stories about life without virtual reality. How significant will be their cultural paradigm shift? What if every day you could walk through a different art museum from cities all over the world, but without taking any flights? How close could virtual reality get at showing the details of each painting? What if we had the technology to scan each canvas so it was equal to looking at it from 2 inches away with our eyes, with the choices of various wavelengths of light, and the choice of having the light source come from 8 different directions. Would that beat standing in front of the actual masterpiece?

I’ve always wanted to see Paris, but a phobia against claustrophobic transatlantic flights keeps me from going. What if I could wear a helmet, recline in my La-Z-Boy, and walk the streets of Paris every night for an hour. That would be television too, unless I got beyond the sense of viewing reality through a 2D screen.

We have to think about the holistic nature of television. Television means vision at a distance, with the implied implication we’ll also get sound. Writing and books, were information at a distance too. Photograph and movies were the precursor to television. All are based on 2D transmission. Something better than television will have to be 3D. Thus if I use this new invention and feel like I’m sitting in a room at MIT hearing a lecture or walking on Mars, then that will be a major step forward over 2D television at a distance.

Science fiction has been exploring such ideas for decades, and it has taken that speculation even further with the concept of downloading, which is recording our minds and putting them into computers. How far will reality ever get to catching up with science fiction is open to debate, but I do think VR goggles or helmets will probably be common in the near future, maybe before I die, and I will play the role of Nanny when talking to children who spend most of their time with their heads in VR helmets.

But at a personal level, what do I want from television and its possible replacements? This is where things get philosophically interesting. We use television for entertainment, vicarious thrills and gathering information. What that implies is our brains are bored with our existing location in time and space and we want to fool them into believing we are located in a different time and space. For centuries books were the technology we applied to this simple quest. Intellectuals will claim that reading Pride and Prejudice is superior to watching one of the many 2D screen versions, but the details of a televised version are so vastly richer to our senses.

I know lots of people who shun TV screens, either the broadcast kind or the computer kind. They live among family, friends and pets, pursuing hobbies and enjoying nature. They live in the now, like all good Zen monks teach, but I’m not one of those kinds of people. I grew up on television that has conditioned my mind to want to constantly teleport via 2D screens to distant places, real and imaginary. Is that good or bad? A world without television is like being an ant and not knowing how big reality really is compared to the little environment in which I crawl. Does knowing matter? I think so.

Thus, I’m sure if a better invention than television came around, I’d jump on it, if it allowed me to teleport with more details. But there are other things to consider. I’ll put this into an analogy that horny young men will understand so clearly, and be just as obvious to people who aren’t horny young men. Which is better, a real live naked woman, or a naked woman on HBO?

JWH – 6/13/9

LG BD390 Blu-Ray Player

I woke up this morning, got the newspaper, and opened the ads to discover that the 40th Anniversary Edition of Woodstock the music documentary is to be released on Tuesday. Hot-damn. Not only that, but a special edition with even more un-shown acts was coming out on the Blu-Ray version. I’ve been wanting a Blu-Ray player for years, but have been waiting for the price to come down. I got on Amazon and found out if I ordered my copy of Woodstock from them they’d include a bonus disc with even more un-shown acts from that famous three days of love, happiness and mud, so I ended up buying my first Blu-Ray content before I actually owned a player.

I jumped on Google and started researching players. I figured I’d want to be at Best Buy by 11am to get one, no use wasting any more time. But which Blu-Ray player to buy? I assumed I’d get a Samsung, since I’ve been a Samsung kind of guy for awhile now, but after reading many reviews I decided to give the LG BD390 a try. It was $150 more than what I wanted to pay for my first Blu-Ray player, but it had wireless draft-N built in, whereas the Samsung used a USB plug-in wireless-G dongle. The reviews and specs were more favorable to the LG. Samsung had one thing I really wanted, Pandora streaming, but because of the funky wireless and more complaints, I was pushed to try out LG for the first time in my life.

I decided to pay the extra $150 for the nicer machine because it had wireless-N built in, so I wouldn’t have to run an Ethernet cable across my attic and down two walls. Because the BD390 had 1gb of flash memory built in, so I didn’t have to buy a USB flash drive that stuck out the back of the player to store configuration data and other digital junk within the Blu-Ray unit. Because it had a Netflix decoder, so I could stop wanting the $99 Roku Netflix player. And finally, because it had media player support so I it might replace my SoundBridge 1001 and have a visual interface for looking up music to play on my stereo in the den.

I was at Best Buy by 11:07, and out by 11:27. I grabbed the BD390 and gazed at the Blu-Ray movie selection, settling on the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Matrix as my test disc. I got home and detached my Samsung up-converting DVD player/recorder, and attached the BD390 and put in The Matrix. Total breeze. Set the player to 1080p – the first time I saw media in this mode on my Samsung HDTV, which had been a buying point two years earlier.

Then I used the menu to tell the BD390 about my wireless system, which worked immediately. I had remembered my secret security code okay, which made me feel good, since I’m forgetting so much now-a-days. I then told the new LG player to update itself, which it did. Again, a breeze.

After the update, I click over to the Netflix menu and the LG told me a 4 digit code to go enter at the Netflix web site. I went back to my computer room, brought up Netflix, told them I was willing to spend $3 a month extra to add Blu-Ray discs to my queue, put in the code at /activate, added a few Blu-Ray titles to my growing queue and went back to the den to check on the BD390. All the Play Now movies that were in my queue were now listed on my HDTV screen. So I played the second episode from Star Trek, the original series, called “Charlie X.” It was beautiful. I’m thinking the Netflix streaming episode might have been from the newly re-mastered Blu-Ray episodes, but I don’t know for sure. Netflix streamed perfectly and the video quality was excellent.

Many reviewers of the BD390 complained of having trouble setting up the media server. I checked the menu and my Windows Media server was showing up, but it wouldn’t let me access it. I took the computer install disc that came with the BD390 for Nero MediaHome 4 back to my computer room and installed it on my desktop with all my media files. After a quick install the program scanned my computer for photos, videos and songs. I went back to the den and found several folders of media, including 18,000 MP3 songs. This was under the Nero MediaHome 4 server. Still couldn’t get into Windows Media server that was also listed – I had two media servers in the menu now.

Went back to my computer room and installed the update to Nero MediaHome 4, which messed up the original setup. I ran the update again and got the program running for the second time, but had to re-scan the folders for my media again. Damn, it takes awhile. Went back to the den. This time I could see into both media servers, but the Windows Media files loaded far slower, and had interruptions when playing, whereas the Nero MediaHome 4 folders opened faster and played files flawlessly.

Now for my first complaints. Nero MediaHome 4 is simple, but not elegant, although it plays the files perfectly so far. But with 629 artists and 18,000 songs, jumping to a particular cut involves a lot of menu clicking. I quickly discovered that I could search by artist by displaying 5 large folder icons, or 14 medium-sized folder icons, or 40 small folder icons at a time, by cycling through the Display button. Page down, page down, page down… through 629 artists even at 40 at a time takes awhile. LG needs to add a A-Z selector. The media librarian is spartan, but works. I’d like to see LG add a lot of polish to it, and I hope it can be done through firmware updates.

When you get to an artist’s folder, you’d think you’d see photos of all the albums, and the LG might eventually load them all and show them, but not while I waited. The album covers get displayed when you open an album folder and then the album art is repeated for each song, so it looks stupid. There are 14 tiny photos of Blonde on Blonde covers listing the songs to my favorite Dylan album. Why not show the album covers to each album once in the artist folder? And then just list the tracks by track number within the album folder?

Selecting music through the LG Blu-Ray menu is far nicer than looking up albums on the tiny LED readout of the SoundBridge 1001, but it’s not as fast. Using an iPhone app on my touch is even faster managing the SoundBridge, and using a software program on my laptop is even faster still, but keeping those two machines on and charged in the den is a pain. So is using 4 remotes to get everything turned on and ready for watching a movie or listening to a song. (Cable, TV, LG, Receiver).

The Nero MediaHome 4 also found my the movies I had bought and downloaded from Amazon Unbox, but it wouldn’t play them. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if LG worked with Amazon like it does with Netflix? The BD390 does show CinemaNow rental movies and free YouTube clips as part of its menu. The is so much technical potential out there, but it all needs to work together. One player should be able to be a front-end for many online stores. Who wants to own a device for all the different online movie outlets, much less all the online music stores.

I’m hoping LG will add Pandora, and even Rhapsody to their firmware via an upgrade, but this is probably wishful thinking. Maybe ten years into the future I’ll have one TV, one box and one remote, and life will be simple. I wish my Comcast DVR/cable box had everything built into it, so I didn’t need anything extra. I fantasize about having a DRV with 2gb of storage, a Blu-Ray player and burner, a built in Surround Sound receiver/amp, a media extender for my computer files, all working perfectly integrated and controlled by a single elegant remote. Ha-ha, dream on kid, what a fanciful fantasy.

I suppose someday 1080p video will be streamed, and Netflix will offer absolutely everything in streaming mode. And Rhapsody Music will also stream through the same box. And I wouldn’t have to worry about owning movies, TV shows or songs. Just rent everything and select it from a menu.

I decided I couldn’t wait for Netflix to ship me more Blu-Ray movies, so I went to Target this afternoon and bought Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp for $15, the only movie that I’d wanted to keep that was cheap enough to consider. Both films look beautiful at 1080p, but not stunning like I’ve seen some Blu-Ray movies look at Best Buy. I’m used to 1080i and 720p high definition and to be honest I could probably live with that quality of video for the rest of my life. Blu-Ray is much better than up-scaled DVDs though, and now that special content is coming out for Blu-Ray, I’m happy that I bought a player. I’m looking forward to re-watching Battlestar Galactica on Blu-Ray, and if Netflix offers that new Neil Young retrospective box set on Blu-Ray, I’m anxious to see it, but I wouldn’t spend the money to own it. I was happy to spend $48 for Woodstock though, or at least I hope it will live up to my expectations of having a nostalgia summer, because it’s the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, my high school graduation, and Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Maybe NASA will offer a Blu-Ray retrospective this summer too.

Part 2 of my review…

JWH -6/7/9

Filming Science Fiction Short Stories

Over at BestScienceFictionStories.com Rusty Keele got an email from a film director asking him about which science fiction short stories would make great 10-15 minute films. Go by and post your suggestions. I suggested “The Menace From Earth” by Robert A. Heinlein, even though it would have to be cut down some to meet the time limit.

I remember the science fiction stories from the old Twilight Zone series that started back 1959. Those short films had tremendous impact, so it is possible to tell a gripping story in 25 minutes, but I think it’s going to take a special kind of tale to work in 10-15 minutes. Maybe it will be flash video fiction. However, limiting the length of the film makes it much easier for an amateur film maker to produce, and with people watching videos on YouTube, Hulu, and on their iPods, making short science fiction films might be a great idea.

Since I’m always wishing for more people to discover the wonders of the science fiction short story, and support the dying science fiction magazines (F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog), I’d especially love to see short films based on recent stories from the magazines, and use those films to promote the science fiction short story market. Even though those markets are dying, they still have 15,000-30,000 readers, so that’s a ready audience for the films. I wonder if some kind of marketing synergy could be attained by tying several small enterprises together.

Could we see a film opening with the flashy logo graphics marketing A SFSignal Production partnered with Asimov’s Science Fiction Films of a John X Smith film …, and maybe backed by money collected from online fans from genre entrepreneurs like those great Broadway producers Max Blaylystock and Leo Bloom?

The trouble is getting people to see the short films. Every year at the Oscars when they present the award for short film I always wonder where to do people see them. It’s a shame theaters can’t replace those annoying trivia shows and commercials they torture their patrons with while they wait for their movies to start with good short films. SFSignal has become a great place to catch a short video. I wonder if short Flash based films on the SF/F magazine sites would get them more subscribers? Macromedia Flash based films have evolved into high tech ways of watching videos online.

Most great science fiction short stories are more suitable for film length productions. I wish movie makers would audition the genre mags every month for potential films to make. Hollywood movie makers are obviously short on material when they have to make Terminator movies over and over and bring back Star Trek for the nth time. I mean, when was the last time you saw a really innovative SF film? There are way too many classic SF novels from the 1950s and 1960s that Hollywood has never filmed for them to be wasting their money on remaking The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Another good game to play, would be to list which great classic SF novels would make mind blowing films. Here are some of my suggestions:

Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany
Mindswap by Robert Sheckley
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
Have Space Suit-Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick
Women of the Iron People by Eleanor Arnason
Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

I could go on and on.

JWH – 2/26/9

Biblical Documentaries

I’m not religious, but I’ve been watching a lot of TV about the Bible lately. National Geographic Channel, The Discovery Channel, The History Channel and even PBS have been showing some fascinating shows about the Bible in recent years. Last night I watched “Jesus’ Tomb” from the National Geographic Channel’s Mysteries of the Bible series. Mysteries of the Bible is an entertaining series, but their episodes are no match compared to “The Bible’s Buried Secrets” that appeared on PBS’s NOVA a few weeks ago. All these documentaries vary greatly in quality, and that’s what I want to talk about.

It’s hard to discuss shows about the Bible without ruffling religious feathers. I love science and history shows, and these biblical documentaries combine archeology and anthropology with history, to explain the origins of western civilization. So, when I analyze these programs, I’m not dealing with the related spiritual issues, and for the most part, that’s how the documentary makers work too. They often try to compare what is written in the Bible with what we know from historical research and from scientific studies.

If you watch these shows you’ll learn a lot, but if you hold certain religious beliefs dear, some ideas presented might annoy you. Don’t get me wrong, I think religious folk are the intended audience, because atheists who like Bible history, like me, are not that common. But I’m guessing most of these shows try hard to walk the razor’s edge when it comes to controversial issues of faith.

When watching any documentary you have to analyze the producer’s motive. Many filmmakers start with a cherish idea of their own and do all they can to document the proof of their belief. Others pick an interesting mystery and try very hard to be impartial. One way to judge a film is if it examines the obvious questions that come to your mind while watching. Last night’s show, “Jesus’ Tomb” avoided several issues that popped into my head while watching.

Another way to measure the quality of these TV documentaries is track how often they repeat images or ideas. These one-hour shows actually have about 45-50 minutes of show-time versus the remainder of an hour to fill with commercials. Some shows are stretched by constantly repeating material both visually and verbally. I don’t know if it’s because the show’s producers don’t have enough content, or they think we’re stupid and their viewers need constant reiteration to actually comprehend their discoveries, or they figure most viewers are channel surfing and they want to make sure those drive-by watchers get hooked with the high points.

If repetition is because of the channel flippers, I hope TV producers stop that practice quick. It’s not fair for the serious viewers of their shows to have to be bombarded with sing-song phrases, and psychedelic video flashbacks. I don’t mind shows repeating a complex concept in different ways to help people to understand, but to flat out say and show the same words and pictures over and over again is just damn annoying. One reason PBS documentaries often seem head and shoulders above the documentaries on all the other channels is because they don’t have commercials to interrupt their flow, so PBS shows don’t do that say it five times song and dance crap.

Another thing commercial driven channels do is spend too much of their times before and after commercials presenting teases for what’s to come. Last night’s one-hour show, “Jesus’ Tomb” could easily have been a nice 30-minute documentary. If they had put in 20 more minutes of genuine content, it would have been a very good hour show even with commercials. And all my criticisms could have been answered in those twenty minutes too.

One thing I love about these biblical documentaries is they show video of where historical events took place. Seeing all the various kinds of tombs cut out of rock in last night’s show was a great way to illustrate the Bible. The filmmakers interviewed scholars about Jewish burial practices of the time, checked with what archeologists were finding, quoted related biblical verses, and showed how various beliefs came down through history in stories, paintings, and religious beliefs. Last night’s show did a pretty good job of exploring why and how Jesus might have been put in a nearby tomb, but I was left with a bunch of questions for the filmmakers, even at their simple level.

How common was it to put people in those small tombs cut into solid rock? If it was very common, wouldn’t there be millions of them in Israel? To the spiritually minded, the important issue is the resurrection of Jesus. For that story to work a tomb is a good stage, but would a common criminal be buried in a tomb? (That’s what the Romans and Jewish leaders thought of him.) The show spent a lot of time exploring how and why Jesus’ body could have been removed from the tomb, but they didn’t explain two ways that popped into my mind.

Could some his followers have removed him and buried him elsewhere, not telling the women who found the tomb empty the next day? And were there no grave-robbers in that time, even Romans who wanted to get rid of a martyr’s body? Of course, for the spiritual story to work, Jesus’ body had to disappear, so does it really matter how?

And here’s the part of the show that the filmmakers avoided, but I wanted explored. In the early parts of the Bible the concept of afterlife is missing. The show did interview one scholar that said Jews of the time believed in the resurrection, and wanted their bodies gathered in ossuaries, but they believed all people would be returned to their bodies at the end of time. For centuries Christians believed something like this too. So when did the idea of dying and immediately going to heaven come about?

The point of Jesus’ tomb story is about resurrection. Why couldn’t the show’s filmmaker spend twenty minutes on the history of this idea rather than repeating so much of the other information. At what point in the history of mankind did people start thinking about living after death? And is the story of Jesus and his tomb the pivotal point in history when this idea was born? I’m not asking the filmmaker to state whether resurrection is possible or not possible, I just want the history and archeology of that idea.

Many of the biblical documentaries are quite timid on exploring the depth of an idea. They love to bring up startling ideas, like another show that dealt with apocryphal stories of Jesus, including one where Jesus killed a child when he was a child himself. They are not afraid to have National Enquirer headlines, but they don’t want to have scholarly expositions because that might bore people.

On the whole I find these shows very entertaining because of they usually give me a good deal of history I haven’t known about before, along with some nice video of archeological digs, science labs pursing arcane mysteries of ancient evidence, and interviews with fascinating scholars. However, sometimes I think they throw in some interviews with wild-eyed theorists and fanatics too.

Studying the Bible is like studying the founding fathers of America, but the people of the Bible are the founding fathers of Western civilization. So far these Bible documentary makers examine artifacts and compare them to Bible stories. What I’d like to see is for them to examine the history of the mind of the people. A history of psychological development. Please show a history of the common ideas that arose during biblical times. The NOVA show, “The Bible’s Buried Secrets” is a step in the right direction.

Understanding the early history of mankind is like researching our childhood to figure out how we came to be who we are. Every age interprets the Bible anew, reinventing religion. Most people ignore that or never knew that, and assume that current religious beliefs have always existed as they do now. I want these biblical documentary historians to show how beliefs were different century by century and how the people were different because of their beliefs. Some Christians hate the word evolution, but all the concepts we hold in our head are a product of evolution too.

God, Satan, Heaven, Hell, sin, redemption, charity, faith, etc., all started out as tiny one cell ideas in the mind of man and over the centuries have evolved into the dinosaur ideas they are today. This season’s shows about Bible history barely touch on this, but I expect the biblical documentaries to evolve too.

JWH 12/17/8