miércoles, 3 de noviembre de 2010

Ghostbusters 3 podría empezar a rodarse en Mayo

Después de la tan anunciada realización, y el correctísimo video juego, finalmente, parece que la cosa se va oficializando :)

gb3 Ghostbusters 3 podría empezar a rodarse en Mayo

 

Por Alberto Santaella el 2 de Noviembre de 2010

El culebrón “Ghostbusters 3” podría llegar a su fin próximamente si se confirman los rumores que apuntan a que la tercera parte de las aventuras de los Cazafantasmaspodría empezar a rodarse el próximo mes de Mayo de 2011.

Y es que por más que se han esforzado en desmentirlo, la taquilla manda, y son muchos los fans que piden la vuelta de Venkman y compañía. El guión estaría re-escrito por Dan Aykroyd, según la primera versión hecha por los responalbes de “The Office” y “Year One”, Lee Eisenberg y Gene Stupnitsky. Al parecer, finalmente todos los protagonistas de las dos primeras partes formarían parte del elenco: Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson,Sigourney Weaver, Rick Moranis y el propio Aykroyd, a los que se sumaría Ana Faris.

Si hacemos caso a los rumores, la dirección de la película volvería a estar en manos de Ivan Reitman. Tiene toda la lógica del mundo que la mayoría de los actores de la original aceptasen formar parte de la tercera entrega. Salvando a Weaver y Murray, ninguno de ellos ha mantenido el status de estrella que alcanzaron gracias a andar por Nueva York cargados con pesadas mochilas.

Dan Aykroyd ha visto reducida su carrera a papeles en TV y algún que otro cameo en comedias menores como “50 first dates” o “I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry”. Su mayor éxito en los últimos años ha sido darle voz al Oso Yogi, lo que tampoco es decir mucho. Por su parte, Ernie Hudson, el “Cazafantasmas negro” tampoco ha tenido mucha suerte en el mundo del cine, no ha dejado de trabajar, pero nunca ha tenido un protagónico en un film de éxito, siendo éste su papel más recordado.

Harold Ramis si que ha tenido algunos éxitos como actor, con pequeños papeles en películas como “As Good as It Gets” o“Knocked Up”, pero definitivamente se ha centrado más en su carrera como director. Por su parte, Rick Moranislleva alejado de una pantalla de cine desde 1996 cuando protagonizara “Big Bully”. Desde entonces doblaje de personajes de animación y algún trabajo esporádico en TV, así que, tal y como os comentamos, esta película podría suponer su vuelta triunfal.

Por último, a su director, Ivan Reitman también le vendría de lujo un éxito como el que se le presupone a “Ghostbusters 3”, pues aunque no ha dejado de trabajar, y es toda una garantía de calidad en comedia, sus últimas películas no han funcionado en taquilla como lo hicieran las de los ochenta. Así las cosas, todo está de cara a que el equipo original se reúna para revivir viejas glorias. Sólo queda esperar que el espectador se lo pase tan bien como se lo pasó con las dos entregas originales.

Vía: /Film

Fuente: http://extracine.com/2010/11/ghostbusters-3-podria-empezar-a-rodarse-en-mayo

1000 cables para transmitir HD de forma inalámbrica…

Curioso kit de Asus, revisado en esta nota, que pretende eliminar los cables, de las transmisiones de video HD… Claramente, un ejemplo de “El remedio es peor que la enfermedad”

Asus WiCast: Wireless 1080p to your TV

by Dustin Sklavos on 11/1/2010 12:01:00 AM

The ASUS WiCast

Since it landed, Intel's Wireless Display (WiDi) technology has been something of a mixed bag. There's a lot to mull over: you have to consider latency, the 720p limitation, being stuck with Intel HD graphics, buying the wireless box for your television, and maybe the biggest question of all, whether or not it's really practical. WiDi has resulted in a split decision here; Vivek is a big fan of it, but I have a hard time understanding why someone would deal with all these limitations instead of just plugging in a five dollar HDMI cable and calling it a day.

If we take practicality off the table and focus on the technology itself, we're still left with some frustrating limitations, and mercifully it's those limitations that ASUS seeks to ameliorate with their new WiCast setup. ASUS promises near-invisible latency, full 1080p video, and compatibility with anything that has an HDMI port. We received the WiCast as part of a review kit including two notebooks, but we felt it was worth reviewing on its own.

The setup is probably the biggest hurdle for the WiCast, because when you open the box you're greeted by a remarkable number of little pieces of hardware. There are the two WiCast boxes—the transmitter and the receiver—followed by two HDMI cables (one three inches long, which may be used either at the receiver or transmitter side), two AC adaptors, and a USB cable. At least there are no software discs and a fairly thin instruction manual.

The transmitter and receiver boxes are fairly similar; the transmitter's just the smaller one, but both have an AC adaptor, HDMI, and mini-USB ports. On the receiver the mini-USB port is covered, but it can be used to power the receiver if for some odd reason that's more convenient than just plugging it in. I'm going to assume your television is stationary, though, which means there's a reasonably close power outlet. For the receiver, though, the USB is probably going to be your preferred way to power the transmitter. Mercifully that means that the second AC adaptor isn't essential, but is just an alternative power source if your USB ports are all used up on your notebook/desktop/whatever.

That's honestly pretty much it, too. Connecting everything is fairly self-explanatory, and once you have your HDMI cables plugged in you're just about set. It's one of the nice things about WiCast compared to Intel's WiDi: there's no software to install or configure, and no hardware limitations outside of the HDMI port. That makes for a concise review, though: it either works or it doesn't. So let's see if that's the case.

WiCast in Practice

Getting the ASUS WiCast to work really is a breeze. The manual notes the transmitter and receiver may take as much as a minute to sync, but my experience was much better. With the two boxes about five feet apart, syncing was actually very quick once Windows loaded, and within Windows the solution was as transparent as it should be. The WiCast-connected monitor appeared the way any wired monitor would, and I was able to switch audio over to the WiCast easily.

My first test was to see if the WiCast could hit 1080p, and sure enough it could. Latency, at least on the Windows desktop, was invisible. At 1080p (60Hz), the solution was largely seamless. In fact the only artifacting I really saw was in high-contrast areas, where there would be slight flickering on the edges of shapes and letters. The whole image appeared slightly darker than it did on a wired connection.

The next step was to see how well it handled audio, so I fired up WinAMP and put my usual audio testing whipping boy, The Prodigy's "Spitfire", through its paces. Audio quality between wired HDMI and the WiCast was indistinguishable, though it did serve to highlight how poor the speakers in my television are. It's reasonable to assume the WiCast probably handles multichannel audio perfectly fine, but I have a hard time imagining a home theatre enthusiast who would opt to use the WiCast instead of a hard line for reasons that will become clear soon enough.

For me, the big test was latency, something Intel's WiDi has a real problem with. I fired up Quake Wars (yes, some of us still play this), set it to 1080p, and was up and running. Gameplay was nigh-indistinguishable from a wired connection. ASUS advertises a latency at or below 1ms and while I can't confirm that, I can tell you that from a gaming perspective the WiCast is remarkably fluid and responsive. It's worth noting that this is one area where the WiDi simply can't compete: while I was able to use the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650 in my notebook to push polygons in Quake Wars, WiDi is restricted to Intel HD graphics only. So in this test we've already exposed two things WiCast can do that WiDi can't: game, and game at 1080p.

Finally I wanted to test Blu-ray playback, and it was here that things started to get a little hairy. There weren't any HDCP issues, but when I tried to play Iron Man 2, the WiCast started to have trouble with interference. It wasn't anything game-breaking, but there were five horizontal lines of artifacting on the screen, evenly spaced. Adjusting the transmitter seemed to help a little, and often the lines would go away on their own, but nonetheless the WiCast seemed to have a hard time keeping a clean signal at just five feet away.

With the above in mind, we did some additional testing of the signal quality at five foot intervals. Keeping in mind the WiCast is rated at "up to" 33 feet, we were unimpressed with the amount of blocking and other artifacts even at close range with Blu-ray, and it quickly gets worse as we move away from the receiver. Oddly enough, we had better experience testing the WiCast with a Gateway ID49C than we did with a Dell Studio 17—the former worked at up to 20 feet without any noticeable problems while the latter had periodic issues even when the receiver/transmitter were nearly on top of each other.

The signal ended up being more of a case of all or nothing: it either worked or it didn't, though sometimes other factors seem to come into play (a person moving in between the transmitter and receiver, or interference from other electronic devices). Since the WiCast is also device agnostic, you can use it with a PlayStation 3, Xbox360, or any other HDMI-equipped hardware. Again, the most likely use seems to be laptops, simply because anything else is already hard-wired for AC power. Also worth noting is that we measured power draw on the transmitter of 5.7-5.8W, which means if you're running off a notebook's battery, you'll take a pretty significant hit to battery life.

Conclusion: Lots of Wires for "Wireless"

If we take practicality out of the equation, we're left with a solution that is more or less directly superior to Intel's WiDi. That's not too outlandish to consider; WiDi uses a notebook's internal wireless connection, which means it has a peak throughput of 300Mbps. Compare that to the ASUS WiCast's advertised 3Gbps connection and it's obvious why the WiCast is capable of handling 1080p video, multichannel audio, and doing all of that with near-invisible latency. Even better, WiCast works with anything with an HDMI port, while WiDi is limited to Intel HD graphics and Intel wireless hardware.

The problem is we can't take practicality out of the equation, not really. WiDi's big advantage is that it doesn't require an extra box on the notebook side, but the trade-offs are horrendous. In the meantime, WiCast requires you to connect three cables (two USB and an HDMI) to your notebook (or an AC adapter in place of the USB) and a receiver box to your television. The receiver isn't the issue, but the box and cables on the notebook can turn into a mess in a hurry. You're making an awful lot of sacrifices just to transmit 1080p video wirelessly to your television, and given the number of connections that need to be made, that "wireless" part almost feels like a bit of a misnomer.

Range and interference are a concern as well. Five feet isn't an unreasonable request to make for a wireless home theatre or presentation technology, but the WiCast sometimes had problems with interference even at that distance. There weren't any signal drops, but the lines of artifacting that appeared in the picture during Iron Man 2weren't exactly easy to ignore.

This all circles back to the essential problem with wireless display technologies, at least at the present time: it's a hell of a lot of work just to get rid of one cable connection. For WiDi, I have to hunt down a notebook with the specific configuration needed to use it, and then drop $99 on the receiver box for the television. For the ASUS WiCast, I have to pay $199, but at least it'll work with whatever I need it to work with. Or I can just order a fifteen foot HDMI cable off of NewEgg for under ten bucks and not have to worry about latency or interference.

So that in mind, I will say this: as far as wireless display goes, the WiCast is in my opinion a superior solution to Intel's WiDi. If this is something you have a need or a use for, then it's an easy sell. But for everyone else, this technology is a tough sell from any vendor. It's just too cumbersome and asks too many trade-offs just to replace one of the cheapest wired connections in a home theater. Yes, you can use it with desktops and even PS3/Xbox 360 if you'd like, but as long as you're still running an AC adapter and range is realistically less than 10 feet, we can't really see this as anything but a niche product. Some will love it, and it's much cheaper than previous 1080p wireless solutions, but $200 is still a fair amount to spend unless this fills a specific need.

 

Fuente: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3978/asus-wicast-wireless-1080p-to-your-tv

Gizmodo Shooting Challenge: Con el lente suelto

Excelente idea la de los muchachos de Gizmodo, que como siempre, sorprenden tanto con sus certámenes, como por los resultados enviados por sus lectores. Hoy, las tomas tienen como hilo conductor, nada mas y nada menos, que cámaras réflex, con sus lentes desenroscados! Así es, tomen con una mano la cámara, con la otra el lente, y a experimentar!

Take your DSLR in one hand. Unscrew the lens with the other. Tilt the lens away from the camera body-maybe even flip the optics backwards. And take photos that you never imagined you could without expensive upgrades.

Lead Shot

With the deadline for this challenge just a few hours away I decided to test out this whole "freelensing" thing. I tried it on random stuff I had around my apartment but ultimate ended up in front of my bathroom mirror. I had a few pictures with some interesting lighting but I ended up liking this one the best. Sony NEX-5 with an 18-55mm kit lens (1/25 sec/ISO 800).
-Adam King

Pumpkins

101 Photos Taken With the Lens Detached
I visited a corn maze this past weekend and was taking pictures of all sorts of things and experimenting with freelensing, but these small pumpkins caught my eye and ended up being my best shot. Shot with a Canon T1i, 50mm f/1.8, ISO 100.
-Aaron Lovell

Toothbrush Villi

101 Photos Taken With the Lens Detached
I had done some free-lensing in the past, so I was excited when this challenge popped up. I got this shot by taking an old 18-55 lens and holding backwards in front of a toothbrush. By holding it backwards, (by the way you can do this with any lens) you get these insane macro shots. The lower the mm of the lens, the closer you can get.

Theres a pretty cool guide to hacking one of these lenses so that it can be attached to an EF/S body with full electronic function. (minus AF) It looks pretty simple and I plan on giving it a shot sometime since these lenses are about 50 bucks used. 7D, 18-55 (detached, backwards), ISO 1600, 1/40 shutter
-Michael Salisbury

3D Conversion

101 Photos Taken With the Lens Detached
For this shot I simply set up a 500watt halogen work light facing this canvas print of a forest and a waterfall. From there it was just a matter for getting my lens in the right position to add depth to this flat surface. Canon 7D, Canon 50mm f/1.4, ISO: 640, f/0
-Chris Humphrey

Burj Khalifa

101 Photos Taken With the Lens Detached
I am currently working in Dubai and had the opportunity to visit the terrace on the 112th floor of the Burj Khalifa, snapped this while up there...holding my lens very tightly for fear i might drop it a few thousand feet. 5D MKII, 24-70mm L at roughly 50mm, ISO: 100, Shutter: 1/1000
-Ian Doss

Mr. T Needs Oil

101 Photos Taken With the Lens Detached
Never knew of this technique until i saw the challenge, so i grabbed an old spare camera (like hell am i getting dust in the canon!) and started experimenting. I was really pleased with the results and this was one of my favs, it was accomplished by reversing the lens for the macro and shining a powerful torch on the subject. Which in this case was one of my necklaces =D Now just waiting for a sunny day to go bug hunting! Olympus E-410, 40-150mm, ISO 100, Flash off, the rest was auto
-Joe Kelly

Fall Fell

101 Photos Taken With the Lens Detached
Top on my wish list is the Canon TS-E 17mm f/4L lens, so it follows that my favorite thing about freelensing is the selective focus possible by manually tilting your lens. In this case, I tilted my lens down a bit and blew this waning tree into beautiful bokeh, while capturing the detritus on the ground below in crisp focus. I have trouble saying much beyond that, I think this photo speaks for itself. Shot with a Canon 5d2 at ISO 200 and 1/500th, with a Canon 50mm f/1.4 prime at f13. (Remember, the Fall Leaves Part II Challenge is still going. Anything you've shot all autumn counts!)
-Charlie Dwyer

Flowers

101 Photos Taken With the Lens Detached
I was driving to my hometown and during the drive I saw some cows hanging out in the field. I stopped to take some pictures of the scenery and when I looked down I saw these little flowers, I told my-self "This is a perfect time to try freelensing!" So I did, it was a lot harder that I thought it would be. You have to move closer and further to focus on the subject and it is impossible to use your photometer. So I did several tests before getting the lighting that I wanted without blurring the photo because I was moving. It was hard to stand still because cars were going really fast on the road next to me. They honked at me, probably asking themselves "what is that guy doing crouched next to the highway holding his camera like a crazy person?" Well I was freelensing! So here's my first try at macro-freelensing. I processed the picture using picasa (v3) and photoshop for resolution. Nikon D40x equipped with a Nikkor 18-55 mm. ISO : 242, 1/320, Aperture: Impossible to determine
-John Tremblay

Chili Weather

101 Photos Taken With the Lens Detached
This is my first and last chili harvest of the year, a mix of Habanero's, Scotchbonnets, Thai Hot and Fatalli's. I had just picked them and set them on the windowsill and it was a beautiful subject, especially for the great topic of this week's challenge. So many colours and shapes, so it was great to try it out. Held the lens a little away from the body and tilted it left. Nikon D90, Nikor 50 mm 1.8, 1/60 sec ISO 320
-Nils Rohwer

The Quintessential Eye

101 Photos Taken With the Lens Detached
Ok, here's my first shooting contest entry, had lots of fun with it. I had my girlfriend stand inches away from a bright studio light and got this picture after about 200 shots from a very small distance (after eliminating light leaks by having a piece of black cloth draped over my head like a 19th century photographer). I had experimented with freelensing for a few days, but I would not have thought I'd get such a sharp and fragment-less picture. The photo is taken with a Canon 7D (iso 640, 1/60s), with a 40 year old minolta mc 58mm 1.4 lens held in front of it. The lens was stepped down to 2.8, to get at least a few millimeters of sharpness in the picture. The photo was photoshopped to reduce noise and dramatize the contrast and colors, but nothing more.
-Robert Kirberich

Texture, Color, Rot

101 Photos Taken With the Lens Detached
I was hiking the biggest cliff in town when I noticed it was about to get dark very quickly, so I began making my way back down the hill when I saw a natural backdrop on mini "trees". I thought it was my chance to try the free lensing challenge, so I took a few shots and got caught up in it. Suffice it to say I had to walk back down the hill in the dark. Canon EOS 550D, EF 85mm f/1.8 USM, ISO 1250, Shutter Speed 1/80
-Patrick Tilghman

WINNER - 'The Fighter'

(It's OK Everyone, The Chick Lived)
101 Photos Taken With the Lens Detached
I would never have anticipated this would have become my subject for this challenge, but his baby chick hatched just in time for it - even though it was born a day later than the other chicks and was abandoned and forgotten by the hen. The only reason it wasn't thrown out was because it was peeping loudly from inside its shell. Once warmed up, the chick was finally able to push out from the shell while I documented the whole thing. Of all the other shots I took, this one turned out to be my favorite. Contextually, I like how this shot really encompasses the entire experience of struggling to survive and the exhaustion felt in the moments of repose after succeeding. Visually, I like how the focus from tilting the lens falls diagonally right on the head, wing, and foot - while the head and body of the chick lie in a horizontal line that ends with the out of focus remains of the egg shell in the background. Canon Rebel XSi, Canon EF 50mm f/2.5 Macro Lens ISO 100, Shutter Speed 1/500
-Esmer Olvera

So many incredible entries this week! There was a bit of criticism when this challenge was announced that "freelensing" wasn't a valid technique. For the naysayers still in the audience, fine, call it a hack if you prefer. But I think Gizmodo photographers have proven that freelensing has unquestionable potential in one's artistic arsenal. Full galleries below. Wallpaper sizes on flickr.

Gallery 1 (one-page view)

Gallery 2 (one-page view)

Now that you've mastered the art of freelensing, come use it some more on my siteLife, Panoramic. Did that little plug come off as an order? Good.

 

Fuente: http://gizmodo.com/5679403/101-photos-taken-with-the-lens-detached?skyline=true&s=i