Daily Archives: February 7, 2007

Feb072007

My DVD Collection

I haven’t mentioned it for a while, but I’ve been continuing to add to my LibraryThing catalog over the past several months. In case you’re curious, I’m now up to 1,245 (holy crap!) books entered, which comprises the bulk of my personal library. All I have left to do is a couple boxes of collectible books (the ones which live inside archival plastic sleeves and Aren’t For Reading) and a stack of children’s and young-adult books I found inside my old toy box. Obviously, this little data entry project has been a god-awful amount of work, but I don’t regret it one bit. For one thing, it’s been gratifying to get a handle on what exactly I own (when you have over 1,000 books, it’s easy to forget that you’ve got any one particular title) and fun to share that information with my Three Loyal Readers (there goes my exhibitionistic streak again!). But it’s also useful, I’ve decided, to have an inventory list stored somewhere other than in the same place where I actually keep my stuff. What good does a local inventory stored on my home PC accomplish if the house burns down and I lose everything? With LibraryThing, I have a list that I can access from anywhere and show to my insurance company in the event of a disaster.
That logic started me thinking that I really ought to set up something similar for my other valuable collections, especially my movies. A lot of googling led me DVDSpot.com, which is essentially the same thing as LibraryThing only specialized for those shiny silver discs we all love so much. I don’t like its interface quite as well as LibraryThing’s, and some of the community features that I enjoy on LT are lacking. Also, I would’ve liked to have some capability for cataloging VHS movies as well, since I still have a lot of those. But it does the DVD job well enough, and I didn’t find any online service that considered VHS. I guess a media format is well and truly dead when you can’t even find a way to inventory your legacy titles.

Anyway, cataloging my DVDs didn’t take nearly as long as my books, so without further fanfare, I now present to you Bennion’s DVDSpot catalog. I’ll put a link in the sidebar as well. Happy browsing!

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Feb072007

3-D Video-Enhanced Movie Posters

Further evidence that we’re now living in the future: a Canadian company called XYZ RGB (even the company’s name is futuristic!) has created what it calls the “next-generation movie poster”:

Using cutting-edge technologies, XYZ RGB can turn an eight-second video into a full-colour hologram and place it in a plastic film that can be posted in malls, pasted to billboards or even wrapped around a can of soup.

 

The energy needed to make it work? Only a source of light.

The effect is described as similar to those newspapers in the Harry Potter movies that show a looped film clip over and over.
To be honest, I find that I’m rather ambivalent about this development. I’m totally wowed by the concept and the technology, and given that I used to collect movie posters, I think this may be a great way to revive what has deteriorated into a sadly unimaginative art form. However, if this technology becomes commonplace and ends up on everything from giant billboards to soup cans, I fear that the novelty will fade very quickly and we’ll be left with just so much additional noise in an already-deafening environment. I’ve become very conscious in recent years of how many commercial messages we receive during the day and frankly I resent them. It would be nice to find a way to turn down the volume, and I’m not sure this is it. I imagine that “video posters” will be pretty damn distracting once we start seeing them out in the wild; I can’t wait for the first 30-car pile-up because someone was checking out that amazing new sign looming over the freeway.

Of course, these posters may never rise beyond the level of novelty. The production process currently takes too long for any kind of large-scale implementation — a couple of hours are required to produce a single poster — and the company may never manage to improve on that. But I suspect they will. And the year 2015 may look a lot more like Back to the Future II than we ever expected…

You can see a video of the Terminator 2 demo poster here (the 3-D effect is great, but the video doesn’t demonstrate the embedded film clip very well); I originally found this story here.

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