Archive for August, 2007

I remember when I was little my sister took me to see Amadeus, a film I was probably too young to see or appreciate at the time. The final scenes of Mozart’s death, with “Sequentia: Rex Tremendae” underneath them, are indelibly marked onto my brain even now. Though it should have been far over my head I remember watching the entire movie intently, long after the row behind us (and my sister) had fallen asleep.

I’ve been doing a lot of music shopping lately, buying up tons of records most nights and stuffing them onto my iPod for my morning drive. Every six months or so I remember that life is pretty worthless without music and I do this. I’ve managed to find some good and worthwhile things to listen to, but none so incredible as a recording of Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor. The provenance of the piece alone is amazing and eerie, but my favorite part is this from the Wikipedia entry:

The autograph of the Requiem was placed on display at the World’s Fair in 1958 in Brussels. At some point during the fair, someone was able to gain access to the manuscript, tearing off the bottom right-hand corner of the second to last page (folio 99r/45r), containing the words “Quam olim d: C:” (an instruction that the “Quam olim” fugue of the Domine Jesu was to be repeated “da capo”, at the end of the Hostias). To this day the perpetrator has not been identified and the fragment has not been recovered.

Ever since I read this passage I’ve been imaging a screenplay depicting the events leading up to the display of the score and the theft of the fragment of the page. Most fascinating of all may be the last part:

If the most common authorship theory is true, then “Quam olim d: C:” might very well be the last words Mozart wrote before he died. It is probable that whoever stole the fragment believed that to be the case.

Home inspection finally done today, and the inspector was friendly and super helpful. Also, a few pics of the house in its current state are here.

There’s new house news on the horizon.

There’s quite a disturbance in the force lately if you ask the tech blogging community, and it involves the latest release of Apple’s iLife suite of multimedia apps. This release offers complete overhauls of several important apps; and one, the new version of iMovie, is being met with some bad reviews. They stem from the fact that iMovie ‘08 has in many ways parted with the design specification set forth by the very first version: offer many of the same editing tools found in Final Cut Pro–timelines, transitions and multiple audio sources–but with a far lower learning curve and a rock bottom price (iLife ‘08 retails for $79.95).

But instead of focusing on the budding feature film director iMovie ‘08 is primarily concerned with helping you throw a movie together in “half an hour.” This means no timeline or multiple audio sources—in other words most of the things that made it so popular in the first place are gone. Apple does bill this as a complete recode of the old app, but it’s odd to shift the focus of an app so dramatically and maintain the name and versioning of all the previous incarnations. But really, I don’t care.

I’ve never made a movie in iMovie that I thought was all that great. Something happens to you after you see a Stanley Kubrick movie that makes it really difficult not to sweat the small stuff when you make a movie. When I shot those vlog posts a few weeks back I finally had to give up and give the camera to my wife to shoot me with, since I spent forty five minutes fidgeting around for good camera angles and lighting. Even when all the footage was in the can I had a terrible time editing myself, and a worse time color correcting each clip and making it ready to mix down. At one point I had actually dug up my old copy of Final Cut Pro and started editing there.

Yes, I was editing MiniDV footage from the three year old hand held camera with a $1300 editing system. Perhaps you see the level of perfectionism I’m dealing with here.

I guess my problem is that I’ve never been certain what the real goal of this much power on a consumer computer really is supposed to be. I understand the dream of the software: Apple’s demo movies always look so slick, like music videos would if anyone showed them anymore—all slash cut edits and triumphant choruses from Fallout Boy songs and daring 180’s off of powdery moguls. But every iMovie I’ve ever seen looks mostly the same, in the way that all those “iCompositions” that cropped up after GarageBand came out sounded mostly the same. Don’t get me wrong, I like that these things exist. I just never feel as if I’m using them as they were intended. I also have a good face for radio, much better suited to audio than video.

So the fact that iMovie ‘08 is so drastically different should come as no shock. The goal was always to create a finished and shareable movie in the shortest possible time frame, and not necessarily to offer conventional non-linear editing tools for the achievement of that goal. In fact, if I know Apple, shattering that sacred paradigm was always in the cards. However, waiting so long to ship the “real” iMovie comes with some pain. No more pain than wanting Stanley Kubrick production values on a cable access budget, but pain nonetheless.

My iPhone sustained its first battle scar this morning, as it took a sickening dive to the pavement. My headphone cord caught the buckle on my computer bag, launching the iPhone out of its holster. It made a gut wrenching hollow noise as it hit the ground, but once I was sure the screen was alright (and it is 100% alright) I was regaled with the sound of music through the earbuds. So, this thing can take a spill. I will not be allowing it to do it again, however.