Posts Tagged ‘cinema’

Ze movies!

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

It’s been way to long since I did any movie reviews, so I’ll have to do a short update on Movies I’ve seen lately.

Men Who Stare At Goats
The trailer portrayed this one as pretty funny and interesting, but the trailer contains about 80% of the comedy in the movie and the rest is pretty booring.
Rating: 2.5 / 10

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I must say I was rather skeptical as the last big hit movies that everyone is raving about turned out to be crap. But I gave it a chance, if it sucked at least there would be nice graphics and 3D. But I must say even though the plot is a bit simple and neat, this movie is kick ass. The plot is nice and tidy, characters are great and the 3 hours go by quickly because the movie never ceases to be interesting and/or exciting. I will definitively go back to the cinema and watch it one more time in 3D before they stop showing it.
Rating: 9.4 / 10

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
My expectations were very low for this one, but it was actually pretty good of showing the origins of Wolverine, can’t wait for Magneto :)
Rating: 6 / 10

Terminator Salvation
This is by far the worst Terminator film made, boring and does not really feel like a Terminator film.. It does have some nice effects though, and is mildly entertaining at periods.
Rating: 3 / 10

Transformers 2 (Revenge of the Fallen)
Wow.. Even though my expectations were pretty much as low as they go (the previous Transformers movie was a piece of crap with an idiotic plot, boring as hell and with lame ass characters), this movie is actually so bad and retarded that it actually put me to sleep even though I was not tired (must have been the brains natural defense mechanism).
Now why would I watch Transformers 2 when I hated the first one you might ask? I’ll tell you.. It was a gift, and I was hoping to see some cool effects, after all who doesn’t love robots? But even in that department the movie is a huge disappointment, the first one actually have cooler and more interesting effects.
Rating: 0.8 / 10

UP
I feel ripped off! The trailer portrays this as a funny movie filled with humor.. The humor is there but it’s miles apart, and completely drowned out by the sadness of the movie, which came like a shock when expecting a comedy :(
Rating: 4 / 10

Zombieland
Veeeery skeptical, with the horrible “Dead Snow” still fresh in memory I did not really want to even see a comedy zombie movie. But it quickly became apparent that this movie was quite good, not exactly Shaun of the dead, but still very enjoyable with lovely characters.
Rating: 7.5 / 10

Video editing software

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

I enjoy the occasional editing and creation of videos. Recently I’ve been making a cinema commercial for the WSPA organization here in Trondheim (“Dyrebeskyttelsen”), but choosing the right video editing software is not trivial. For me it needed to have good tools for panning, zooming, cropping, masking and support lots of video tracks. Also the ability to work with HD, color correction, text effects, exporting to a sensible video format is a must. I tried out 4 different video editing software products and wrote a small review of them:

Sony Vegas
I really like Sony Vegas, but it’s limit of 4 video tracks is extremely annoying! I could get an unlimited number of tracks if I could afford 700$ for the Professional edition, however as my video editing is mostly on a hobby basis that’s not an option.

I think the 4 track limit is moronic, you just need to have 2 videos + some text and a picture and you’re maxed out.. There are ways around this by rendering your 4 tracks into a movie, then importing that movie in a new project but then it’s a nightmare to change stuff which you do all the time while editing. Great software, but way to expensive for 4+ tracks.

Pinnacle Studio Ultimate
So I decided to try another piece of software, Pinnacle studio ultimate, a hefty 1.9 gig download for the trial version. This proved to be the biggest disappointment since Star Trek 11. First of all the software is overly simplistic and lacks lots of features found in Vegas, it is cumbersome (does not allow for fast cross-fading video/audio and other neat functions like Vegas does). But the worst part.. It’s limited to 3 (THREE) video tracks? WTF? I could not uninstall it fast enough, and now my computer feels kinda dirty..

Adobe Premiere / Premiere Elements
Wow, it’s even more expensive than Sony Vegas Professional, 800$ And the fact that their webpage is a mess and I have to register for a trial means I won’t even bother testing it. However! at the time of writing this I see there is also a “Premiere Elements” that according to Wikipedia allows for unlimited tracks for 100$ so I had to give it a try.
1.2 gb download, but it went very fast, installing took a while and required a reboot.. The program itself was not very intuitive and the trial made a HUGE ugly watermark on all the videos AND all images in that video. It was also horribly slow, background rendering running for like a minute with just a background image in one track and a moving image on the other track. The program also locked up twice in the hour I was testing it.. Not impressed.

Cyberlink PowerDirector 8
Another more reasonably priced piece of software (70-100$) which is supposed to be able to handle 16 tracks, and I honestly can’t see myself having more than 16 objects visible at the same time any time soon, so I guess I’ll have to try this one as well. The trial version was on a slow server so took a long time to download the software despite it’s small 235 MB size.
I did however not get to try this software for reasons stated below.

Magix Movie Edit Pro
Unlike the other 3 products mentioned, I hadn’t heard of this one until recently. The trial version was only around 200 MB compared to Premiere and Pinnacle which were 1,2 and 1,9 GB. But the websites promise of unlimited tracks and a fairly low price of 90$ made me check this one out. Like powerDirector it was on a slow server, and took a while to download.
Fast simple install, and user interface is nice and simple. Using keyframes to do changes/motion/scaling, etc.. was very nicely done and easy to use, and the program was a pleasure to work with. My only complaint is that the preview of the video has very bad framerate (maybe it’s just because of my semi transparent video over an image), do detecting subtle changes in the video while editing could be extremely hard.

Conclusion
After being forced to abandon Sony Vegas I found that the best program for me (behaved most like Vegas, lots of functions and lots of tracks) was without a doubt Magix Movie Edit Pro, it’s a very nice piece of software which I will be buying before the trial is up. It’s stupid that when you buy the downloaded version you miss out on getting Vasco De Gama bundled with it, but that I can live without.

2012

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

2012

I went to the cinema last night and saw 2012, and it was pretty awesome.

The movie itself and the plot was ok, except for some bad physics at moments, but then again I didn’t go to the cinema for a great story.

I just like seeing things being smashed, torn, destroyed, burned, exploded, destroyed and utterly demolished :)

This movie got very nice CGI destruction, albeit comically exaggerated at times, and it’s worth watching this one in the cinema just for the awesome destruction :)

rating: 8 / 10

Borat

Monday, November 27th, 2006

I saw the Borat movie today, and it absolutely lived up to my expectations. I’ve been a Ali-G fan for years and particularly enjoyed the Borat character, and finally got my ass to the cinema today.

The movie was very funny, and it was nice to have a main story instead of lots of independent short clips. I laughed a lot and my mouth hurt from grinning after the 1.5 hours (way to short).

This is one of the funniest movies I’ve seen this year, and I give it 8.3 /10 points.

Favorite moments (contains light spoilers) (more…)