Jun 1, 1998 12:00 PM

Synthetic HDTV

By Michael Grebb

| NEW MEDIA

| Synthetic HDTV

Rhapsody in Bluescreens

Movie Commander

Mortal Media: From Data to Dust

The Webzine Food Chain

Donkey Kong U.

Hollywood at Hyperspeed

The Net Net on Nielsen

Raw Data

<h4>#### broadcasters not willing to sink millions into high-definition equipment, Yves Faroudja offers a cheap fix.</h4 YFaroudja admits that when high-definition television will arrive is anyone's guess. "Only God knows," he says with a chuckle. "And I'm not even sure he or she cares." But the founder and designated "vision" guy at Faroudja Laboratories most decidedly does. In fact, the fortunes of the video-equipment company that bears his name depend on it.

Aroadcasters scrounge for ways to go digital without spending millions on HDTV cameras and other studio equipment, the 70-person Sunnyvale, California, shop has been wooing them with a cheap fix: the Digital Format Translator, which allows stations to convert analog broadcasts into three of the 18 digital format choices mandated by the US government.

TDFT can take a standard 525-line TV picture and more than double the lines of resolution, creating a sort of synthetic HDTV. In some instances, the converter actually interpolates where additional pixels would go and paints them in itself. The technique's critics point out that such computer-enhanced HDTV doesn't look as sharp as the real thing – especially on some of the top-of-the-line, US$15,000 digital sets scheduled to come out by year's end. But Faroudja says that the TV-viewing majority with standard sets won't care. "You'd have to put your nose on the screen to see the difference," he says.

Fudja isn't getting cocky yet, but he believes the almighty dollar is on his side. "It's millions and millions of dollars," he says of the equipment costs broadcasters face. "They won't spend $200,000 per camera just to bring you the football game.

"s the biggest bet we've ever made," admits Faroudja. High-def heaven or hell awaits.

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In theginning, there was the studio back lot. Then movies went on location. Now sets can be generated on workstations, and only the camera and talent are needed. What studios crave are virtual sets that seamlessly combine footage of actors in real time.

pthe industry took a giant step closer to this techno nirvana. Tel Aviv-based entertainment firm RT-SET, in partnership with New York's 3DV, a manufacturer of virtual sets for TV broadcasting, claims to have developed a real-time system for film.

'ow the technology works: First, a digital set is "built" in an SGI Onyx2. Then, in order to blend the live action and the virtual set, cameras are fitted with robotic heads, transforming them into motion-control cameras. "You can pan, tilt, and zoom the camera, and the virtual set will follow," explains 3DV president Al Rocco (left).

tem raises the bar for what's possible in real time," says Greg Estes, SGI's director of entertainment marketing. Still, he doesn't predict a cinematic revolution just yet. "I think the coolest immediate application will be digital dailies, where the James Camerons of the world can get a close approximation of what a shot could look like for real. But with the luxury of time, you can do a lot of things you can't do at 24 frames per second," such as detail renderings and compositing.

pucers of the Stars pr are rumored to be doing just that. "We're in negotiations now for the first use on film," says Alon Carmeli, RT-SET's vice president of marketing. "This technology needs the support of talented filmmakers to create what could become a whole new film language."

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e moviI love and the games I love both share the same quality," says videogame auteur Chris Roberts. "They believably create an alternate universe I can escape to, whether it's for two hours at a movie theater or 20 hours in front of my computer." This

mthe 30-year-old Manchester, England, expatriate gets a chance to test his ideas about cross-media storytelling as he begins postproduction on Wing Comer. This 2entury Fox movie, based on Roberts's best-selling computer game, is the first feature to be directed by a game creator. Digi

Al, Roberts's new Austin, Texas, game and movie production house, will generate special effects derived from the computer game's design. Like

othread on an ancient knit sweater, the 1s and 0s of digital documents can come undone over time, turning precious files into an incoherent jumble. Durable, long-term storage media aren't easy to come by. Inex

iCD-ROMs can become unreadable after only five years, although high-end products recently introduced by Kodak are intended to last 100 to 200 years. Of course, even if you do keep a disc for that long, there's no guarantee that the technology to play it will still be around or in working order. Brew

le, founder of Alexa Internet, a digital archive of the entire Web, has done a lot of thinking about this problem. "The general consensus among archive folks out there is that a long-lasting media type is not the answer." So Kahle has committed resources to back up or translate his multimillion-dollar digital library every 10 years, "because if the media doesn't degrade," he says, "the platform will become extinct." For

eo can't manage long-term care and feeding of archives, the best bet may be good old retro analog. Norsam Technologies just released HD-Rosetta, a 2-inch nickel disc that its maker claims will be able to store up to 95,000 pristine images for more than 1,000 years. No digital equipment is needed to read the disc – just a big microscope. Med

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gossi#### d news may be regurgitated, but to hungry publishers, it smells like lunch. By Joey Anuff</h4> Of the ieasing number of dead webzines – Salvo, The Hub, Word, Total New York, äda `web, Spiv, Charged, The Spot, Ferndale, Mint, ShiftControl, Adrenaline 3AM – I have publicity knickknacks from almost half of them. At one point, my Big Idea was to scan and publish these objets d'art online as the Museum of Webzine Promotional Crap. Webzines, of course, are as permanent as Cracker Jack tattoos. Preserving their memory by archiving the few tangible artifacts they generated seemed like a fantastic idea back in 1996. But then I realized that the museum would be mulch soon enough, just like the rest – and who'd remember it? The cont

pe of '98 – the closing of Word, Total New York, äda `web, and The Hub – may resemble The Shining'm> torrent ofd cascading from the elevator, but it isn't about bloodbaths so much as clipped toenails. Word, Total New York, and The Hub functioned more or less as vanity plates for the houses that subsidized them – IconCMT, Digital City, and AOL Studios/New Line TV, respectively. Phantom limb (or toenail) syndrome notwithstanding, its founders are doing quite well. The ex-employees of any given AOL or MSN content property (take your pick – they're all dead, except Slate) aren't manning Slurpee nozzles at 7-Elevens; they've wrangled better jobs for better pay somewhere else. A Web built out of 400 million pages has to be, more often than not, about failure. Four hundred million pages in four years is not a document; it's a learning curve. A steep one. Clinging to today's digital misfires would be like Alan Greenspan obsessing over mistakes on a third-grade math quiz. It's simply no way to run an economy. The Web,

sld be said, has its successes, but they're rare and mostly accidental. Follow t

l Clinton reads and loathes Matt Drudge, Clinton's supporters (and perhaps his employees) feed stories to Salon, which Kenneth Starr reads and loathes, and his supporters (and perhaps employees) feed stories to Drudge. Millions are revolted by this dynamic, religiously. Drudge was the first true Internet sensation – he broke Monica Lewinsky. He didn't do any actual reporting, but so what? The Washingtost, The Nekes, CNN: They ed about Lewinsky from Drudge, not Michael Isikoff and Newsweek.</ehe messag you want to leak a story, leak to Drudge. If you want to read leaked stories, read Drudge. How's that for a unique selling proposition? Drudge b

eown as a pawn of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, a tool in both senses of the word. Sensing a cosmic imbalance, Salon, the mainstream-focused culture webzine, unleashed a tsunami of pro-Clinton reporting. Sample headlines: "Hillary Was Right," "Behind the Clinton Cocaine Smear," "Turning the Tables on Starr." For its efforts (which were considerable: it spit out several such stories a day – each requiring bona fide reporting, unlike Drudge's), it was christened the organ of the White House Damage Control Operation on Nightline,</Meet te/em> and Thek.</Like Drudglon became a force not only online, but in the media world at large. Then the

ry Knowles, editor of Ain't It Cool News. Unlike his pal Drudge or folks at Salon, Knowles loves his target: the film industry. "I don't want to smash anyone's glass houses," he said at a recent panel discussion. "I just want cool movies, man." Knowles's naïveté is not only tolerated, but encouraged. Don't believe in this ur-fanboy's Vanity Fair< profile, be in his traffic – the quarter-million daily page views from people who tune in to atrociously written news and reviews. Liked and leaked to, Knowles is the Web's latest golden child, the baby bird in whose mouth all mothers vomit. The process may seem crude, but in the Web world, it smells like lunch. On the o

d, Slate, Microsoft's version of Suck for reasonable, non-paint-chip-gobbling adults, has very little going for it. Top-notch editorial, expansive columnists like Paul Krugman and Michael Lewis, great art, a generous corporate benefactor, decent but not tectonic traffic (now, subscribers): very little going for it. Editor Michael Kinsley shares with me, I suspect, a tendency to daydream about the unlikely possibility that one day our publications will blunder onto some Really Big Idea – bigger than the Museum of Webzine Promotional Crap, even – and ride the lightning into the traffic stratosphere without compromising our voices, ethics, or identity. The best we can do to attain this fugue state of combustive success is prance in the hills with metal dunce caps strapped to our heads, hoping for a thunderstorm. Hoping to be remembered, even if only as a particularly dramatic chalk outline. By J

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year, n Nintendo helps a school open a lab in Redmond, it moves one step closer to creating its own production line of programmers. The gaming g

equipped the spanking-new facility for the DigiPen Institute of Technology, which earlier this year announced the world's first bachelor's degree in videogame development. "The lab's mandate," says Claude Comair (left), DigiPen's president and founder, "is to present the N64 programming environment to our best students so that they can join any company writing games for the platform." DigiPen's cu

uis rigorous. Students consume a hefty diet of hard math, physics, computer science, and simulation classes. "Videogames

tonly US$20 billion-plus business in the world without a means of sourcing new talent," says Perrin Kaplan, Nintendo's corporate affairs director. "DigiPen is the first step in a vital missing link." Fifteen thou

lication requests have flooded DigiPen, but it will admit only 100 students paying $12,000 a year each. When the first graduates matriculate in 2001, "they will be at the forefront of new 3-D game technologies," predicts John Shaw, executive editor of Electric Playground, an online gaming site. Let the bidding wars begin. By Spenc

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, in alaxy far, far away, big-screen success required multimillion-dollar budgets, truckloads of technology, and big-muscle marketing. Not anymore. Take Troops, this ye runawaerground video. The 10-minute, f/x-laden short is a hilarious send-up of Star Wars and <ops cost ddly,200 to make and market. Kevin Rubio, <em

os 30-yead writerctor, dreamed up the parody after watching The Empire Strikes B/em> on the Fox lot, whe archives animation cels for the Fox Kids Network. Three days later, with a first-draft script in hand, Rubio recruited Babylon 5 effecizards Shordan and Patrick Perez to begin production. "The effects are what raise Troops to an enly dift level," says Rubio. "That's why it is as popular as it is." The short's popu

tegan last summer, after Rubio screened it at Comic-Con, a science fiction trade show, but it wasn't until a Star Wars fan s <a href=://www.thefought the video ne in February that it approached hyperspeed. Distributed exclusively on the Net, it's now downloaded thousands of times daily. Jordan and Perez

dd realistic sandcrawlers and explosions on a souped-up DEC Alpha computer. Thanks to faster processors and drives, the gap between high-end workstations and consumer-grade systems has virtually disappeared, Jordan says. "The fact that you can do this level of effects without spending massive amounts of money really excites the studios." Troops

lts cre on Hollywood's radar screen. William Morris signed Rubio, and Perez and Jordan are fielding inquiries from major studios. "Instead of getting their film into Sundance, they've done it themselves," effuses Gregory McKnight, Rubio's agent. By Scott Kir

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sen. Ro has Arbitron. The Web, however, has a half-dozen ratings firms. Advertisers and publ

rof course, desperately want a single source of reliable data about Web audiences. And the competition for bragging rights will heat up this summer, when Nielsen Media Research launches on the Net. Nielsen has its adva

enamely a client base of thousands. It also plans to track Web access on PC and non-PC devices and has partnered with Microsoft to chart Web and TV usage. Analysts predict fie

cetition. Ratings companies will likely try to boost users (Media Metrix leads with 10,000 households), increase timeliness (here, RelevantKnowledge is tops), and add offices and schools. Such avid jockeying

bshock to Nielsen. Says Jeff Levy, CEO of RelevantKnowledge, "Just because they're the monopolist in TV doesn't mean they have a game-winning advantage on the Web." Revenues for telepho

0umbers, including sex and psychic hot lines, are projected to double to US$1.4 billion by 2000 (Strategic TeleMedia) … Restaurans4.4 bites per minute when background music is playing, versus 3.23 per minute with no music (Fairfield University) … The Drudg received more than 6 million visitors in the 30 days after it broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal; almost 30,000 hits came from White House domain names (Drudge Report) … One in forters contains pornographic files (Digital Detective Services) … Universittve doubled due to compulsive Net usage among undergraduates, with 20 percent logged on an average of 20 hours a week, mostly visiting chat rooms and playing online games (CNET)