On Sat, 10 Sep 2005 19:48:11 -0400, Michael Everson <everson@...>
wrote:

> You may have seen it. You may not. See http://www.veer.com/ideas/etched/

It surely did seem to be 48 MB, and on a slow server, too. (I have ADSL,
capped at 1.5 Mb/s down, but rarely see that.) Maybe I'm "out of it", a
possibility I freely acknowledge, but I was not greatly impressed. My
hearing is deteriorating, so the speech was often hard to understand, but
that's mostly my problem; I have no problems in face-to-face conversation
in ordinary settings. At least, even on an aged installation of 98 SE on a
"trailing edge" machine, there were no stalls or dropped frames; QT worked
well.

Talking-head animation (quite labor-intensive!) was poor; totally-static
head positions looked unnatural (OK, that's economy of style), but facial
motion surely did not seem to match dialogue; it was too simple, and
seemed to have poorly-chosen points to animate. While one might choose to
call this "style", it's a distracting style, imho. Toward the end, when
"the talking T" and six torches were on-screen a lot, if the flames were
supposed to change to match speech, they surely didn't, to my eyes. I've
watched real VU meters for hours, and the dancing pointer has trained me
to recognize fluctuating audio. Again, doing a good match is very
labor-intensive; WinAmp has much-more-successful "visualizations" for its
audio.

As to other production aspects, they were interesting to witness;
installing QT used to sabotage Windows, and I've only recently come to
tolerate it. For that reason, among others, I have not seen a QT
production like this. As I said, interesting.

The movie posters were clever and well-done, I thought.

Hard-to-understand dialogue didn't help to understand the story line.

Nevertheless, I don't "take issue" with Michael's opinion that it's a work
of genius.

Regards,

--
Nicholas Bodley {(·)}
Waltham, Mass., USA