Second, and on a related note, the TC has suggested to Microsoft that it would be
extremely beneficial to the TC and licensees to create a mechanism for detailing changes
between versions of the documentation. Currently, it is difficult to tell exactly what has changed
when Microsoft releases a new version of the documentation. This slows down the TC in its
work by making it difficult to evaluate revisions to the documentation and causes issues such as
the one discussed in the previous paragraph, where it is difficult for the TC (and Microsoft itself)
to determine whether protocol elements have been removed from the documentation. Licensees
have also informed the TC that the absence of version-to-version change information
complicates product development. Microsoft was receptive to the TC’s suggestion and will
work with the TC to develop an effective mechanism to track changes to the documentation.

Federal antitrust regulators and Microsoft issued a joint status report Tuesday on the software giant’s compliance with the 2003 final judgment on interoperability with third parties.

Microsoft’s licensing policy for the interoperability information will be further tweaked, after the Justice Department raised several issues over the software giant’s new patent license. The Justice Department wanted to ensure that future licensees had the “same legal rights under the license that existing licensees possess.”

In the interim report, the Justice Department claims three issues have arisen that affect Microsoft’s progress in improving the documentation it supplies to third parties. The documents relate to its Milestone schedule, including the last group of documents designed to cover an update to Windows Server 2008, or Longhorn, product.

And in the issue of Vista’s successor, Microsoft recently authorized the technical committee to review another early build of the Windows 7 operating system. And as the
Windows 7 builds progress, the technical committee will conduct middleware-related tests to ensure Vista bugs don’t reappear in Windows 7.

And on its progress in modifying the technical documentation, Microsoft notes it is currently examining ways to present changes to its various document versions in an efficient fashion, as well as working on ramping up the frequency of publishing protocol documentation from a quarterly cycle. Microsoft anticipates presenting its revised schedule in the coming weeks.

Microsoft and the Justice Department give their respective assessments in the status report, and the parties currently have a status conference scheduled for next Tuesday. (Here is a PDF of the report).

And here is footnote (2) for the first issue of concern raised by the technical committee, which deals with the “valid and sufficient reasons for removing certain protocol elements”:

First, the TC (Technical Committee) determined that in the process of revising the technical
documentation, Microsoft removed a number of protocol elements that were included in previous
versions of the documentation. When this same issue arose last year, Microsoft and the TC
discussed that Microsoft would not remove protocol elements from the documentation without
first discussing it with the TC in order to ensure that there was no substantive disagreement.
Plaintiffs are concerned that the same problem has occurred again. In some cases there may be
perfectly valid and sufficient reasons for removing certain protocol elements (2), but it is important
for the stability of the documentation that the TC review the proposed deletions before they
occur, as Microsoft and the TC previously agreed.

Microsoft stated in the report on its progress in communications protocol licensing:

In the interim report, the parties focus on efforts by the U.S. Department of Justice to enforce the final judgments of the 2003 order and Microsoft’s work on complying with those judgments.

Microsoft, meanwhile, notes it’s made progress in complying with the final judgment order of 2003. The software giant stated that although it has received seven complaints or inquiries since the last joint status report in late February, none of these issues is related to Microsoft’s compliance obligations under the 2003 final judgment.

Finally, at the beginning of the year Microsoft changed the schedule for publishing
updated technical documentation from monthly to quarterly. The TC’s experience with this
change has not been positive, as it creates a longer lag time between the identification of issues
in the documentation and the publication of fixes to those issues. Licensees have expressed
similar concerns to the TC. The TC therefore raised this issue with Microsoft in a recent
meeting, and Microsoft agreed to increase the frequency of publishing updates to the
documentation.

2 For example, Microsoft or the TC might have discovered that a particular protocol
element does not actually pass over the wire between a Windows server and a Windows client,
but rather is merely internal within the Windows server and therefore does not need to be
documented as part of the MCPP (Microsoft Communications Protocol Program).

The Justice Department further notes that as part of the original documentation plan Microsoft said it would produce to give an overview to third parties on how the MCPP protocols work together, the software giant developed a template for the system documents and will discuss potential modifications to the template with the technical committee.

While Microsoft firmly believes that the current protocol documentation available to
implementers enables interoperability with Windows and fully complies with the Final
Judgments, in response to the Technical Committee’s (”TC”) request, Microsoft is undertaking a
new effort to supplement the existing protocol documentation with additional “System”
documents.

The final settlement stems from a 2002 consent decree, which the court, in a ruling earlier this year, extended by two years. Under the settlement, Microsoft agreed to be subject to antitrust review for compliance of the consent decree, which calls for Microsoft to share its interoperability information with rivals and other third parties.

Also, 49 companies have licensed patents for the communications protocols since the final judgment, with 36 of the companies signing aboard for a royalty bearing license.

The software giant also addressed its progress in resolving technical documentation issues via protocol test suites, which tests newly rewritten protocol documentation; as well as its interoperability labs, which offers direct access to the software giant’s product development teams and engineering staffs for technical support to test licensees’ implementations of MCPP protocols.

To date the interoperability labs, which are offered free to MCPP licensees at its Microsoft Engineering Center, Microsoft completed an interoperability lab with one licensee in March and another in May.

Here are excerpts of those three issues raised by the Justice Department:

“Microsoft received very positive feedback from licensees on both events,” Microsoft stated in its status report.

To date, Microsoft has developed a list of 19 system documents it plans to create and an approximate schedule for producing the paperwork. Microsoft expects to publish drafts of the 19 documents by the end of March and a final version by late June 2009.

Since making its communications protocols available for free on its Web site, users pulled 146,000 downloads of the documents since the first of this month, Microsoft noted.

The software giant also noted it is working toward providing additional information on its protocol documentation.

But engineering? Novell has that in spades.

Despite my frequent criticism of Novell, I think it actually has a good chance in this category of software. Novell employs exceptional developers. What it often lacks is operational excellence and marketing prowess. At the developer marketing level – read: Miguel – it does very well, as Miguel is able to deflect criticism for even unpopular or potentially controversial moves like Moonlight.

Novell has been on a buying binge lately, today announcing its acquisition of PlateSpin, and previously announcing its acquisition of SiteScape. SiteScape – a company whose product Novell helped to completely rewrite in Java before acquiring it, is nothing to write home about.

PlateSpin, though relatively unknown, might be more interesting.

As for Novell’s marketing at the corporate level…not so great. (And no, John, I’m not talking about you.) When your lead on Linux and open-source marketing blankets the market with FUD about competitors and open source, you’ve got a problem.

PlateSpin offers…solutions for the management of heterogeneous workloads that encapsulate data, applications and operating systems residing on a physical or virtual host.

All of which makes its efforts in the data center interesting and plausible. Novell is no longer a Groupwise and workgroup collaboration company, even if it wants to play in all camps. It has been moving all Groupwise development to India for some time while it focuses its engineering resources on the things that make it real money: Linux and Identity Management. PlateSpin continues this.

P.S. Word on the street is that Novell is currently foraging for an open-source IT management company. Given Hyperic’s moves with Red Hat, my money is on Novell to acquire Zenoss.

These solutions improve the speed and quality of server consolidation, data center relocation and disaster recovery. Novell and PlateSpin will deliver…support for mixed infrastructure environments offering products for complete workload lifecycle management and optimization for Linux, UNIX and Windows operating systems in the physical and virtual data center.

commentary

Novell has long done well in “back-office” server management. This acquisition should help to further its expertise by making virtualization (across physical and virtual assets) easier, as Novell’s chief marketing officer John Dragoon writes.

It’s time for Novell to recognize what it is…and isn’t. It’s not a credible vendor in the email and collaboration space. It is credible – or could be – in the infrastructure and system management market.

The image, which you can see here, suggests that E.T. has lost his way. Perhaps he has lost his bike.

This is rumored to be E.T.'s great-great-great-great grandfather. He resides in a museum in Belfast.

Perhaps the Mob is experimenting with more refined scientific techniques in shipping coke and dead bodies. Or perhaps this was a spaceship bringing E.T. back to Earth after he’d had an argument with his mom.

“On close inspection, the similarities with E.T. are obvious, but it’s hard to say with any certainty what, exactly, it is,” said Malcolm Robinson, Head of Strange Phenomena Investigations, according to the Telegraph.

I demand a full investigation, don’t you? I’m worried that Steven Spielberg might make a sequel.

(Credit: CC Dalbera)

The kindly Google Street View camera took the image on the corner of Diamond Hill Road, about 8 miles from Morristown Municipal Airport.

There is much debate as to why New Jersey seems to have become something of a epicenter for unexplained flying objects. Three months ago, unsettling, blinking red lights were seen in the Morris County sky.

That is the troublesome question patting at the heads of certain UFO experts, whose attention has been drawn to the apparent apparition of E.T. on Google Street View.

If you were able to get on a bicycle, put a little child or two into the front basket, and fly off into the bluest yonder, would you make your home in Berkeley Heights, N.J.?

But Apple products raise more than just PR questions. On the O’Reilly blog, Dale Dougherty takes Apple’s 1984 slogan “The computer for the rest of us” as a starting point to meditate on the “rest of the rest of us”–those excluded from our high-tech frenzy and without the means to participate in the Apple universe of godly gadgets. He does so because he feels “iPhone guilt”:

“I’ve never been a big fan of ‘giving up control of the message’ or ‘information wants to be free’ or ‘user generated content will rule the world’ or ‘it’s all about the conversation.’ But I’m a huge believer in the value of ongoing communication, to the right audiences, about the topics they care most about, in a regular, sustained way.”

He refers to the Feiler Faster Thesis, which states that people’s ability to retain and process information has accelerated, resulting in significantly faster news cycles:

“Is the high-tech world indifferent to the problems of the poor? Do we have any competence that matters in helping them find a better life? Or are we just making ‘the happy few’ that much happier? What is a social network if the people facing the toughest problems are not part of it? They don’t need more signs that tell them that they are on their own. The have-nots don’t do networking. It doesn’t get them anywhere.”

iPhone guilt

He admits that he’s a proponent of “small ball” rather than “home run ball,” and it’s hard to judge whether that makes him old-school or PR avant-garde:

“Whether it’s the latest from Web 2.0 or Apple Computer, do we need to ask what it means for those who aren’t able to take part? Does it help them catch up or put them further behind? That calculation is part of the social cost of any new technology. We might think of it like we’re starting to think about our oversized carbon footprint and its impact on the physical world. Is there any way to offset the negative social impact of the technology that we’re so busily developing?”

“So in this world, is a twice a year news bang sufficient? The answer could be yes–but there is little room for events like today in that world. Apple stepped to the plate today, IMHO, and hit…a single. The company won’t be up to bat again for a while…if you are only up a few times a year, you better hit some home runs.”

Sure, there was the MacBook Air and the buzz around “thinnovation.” But wasn’t that–pun intended–too “thin” for a big media splash, especially compared with past years? Now that MacWorld is over, pundits are reviewing Apple’s PR efforts, and when the expectations are so high (and a company is so good at it), it is not too surprising that some are disappointed with what they’ve seen this year. Frank Shaw, a PR professional at Waggener Edstrom, Microsoft’s lead PR agency, is one of them, and you have to give him credit for being so vocal in public despite his affiliation with the Apple rival. (It would be easy to dismiss his criticism as just a Microsoft cabal.) Shaw is wondering whether Apple’s shock and awe, event-focused product launch PR philosophy has lost its relevance in a time of always-on communications:

Dougherty’s moral treatise poses some uncomfortable questions:

“It’s a challenge for the ‘best of us’ to address.”

Is Apple’s PR wearing thin?

(Credit: Seattle Post Intelligencer)

“The concept of holding news, building expectations, and then unveiling a massive surprise has been super effective, and no more so than last year with the
iPhone. It was a tour de force from a communications standpoint. This recent Macworld? Not so much.”

“Taking the iPhone out of my pocket in a public place makes me uncomfortable. Some people ask nicely about it: ‘How do you like it?’ But I’m keenly aware that others don’t have what I have and they notice it. The iPhone is a great phone but I’m conscious that it’s helping to define ‘the rest of us versus them.’”

What would MySQL Enterprise look like if it truly followed Red Hat Enterprise Linux?

MySQL would make Enterprise available only to paid subscribers, which subscription would include 100 percent of its core database software as GPL (or some other open source-licensed) code, along with proprietary services (support, MySQL Network (Red Hat’s Network was proprietary), up-to-date bug fixes, etc.);
MySQL, like Red Hat, could block “first sale” access to the Enterprise bits to paid subscribers by placing the availability of the bits behind a support contract (This would ensure a steady stream of paying customers but wouldn’t stop a CentOS, as seen below);
These subscribers would have the option to redistribute the core software because, after all, it’s open source. (They would not be able to distribute Network and the patches/services distributed through this mechanism.) However, as with CentOS and other RHEL clones, they’re more of a minor nuisance than a serious threat to Red Hat, and I can’t imagine that MySQL would suffer much at the hands of the clones, either (including from Oracle – I heard from one of its Unbreakable Linux salespeople that things aren’t going too swimmingly there);
MySQL is spared having to make distinctions between proprietary code and instead can focus on a very clear distinction between core (100 percent open source) and complement (some percentage of which is closed).

Of course, MySQL is a business that needs to please shareholders. I believe, however, that it can do this without sacrificing the community that contributes much to its success, even if it doesn’t contribute much to its code base.

The reason is that we have an ambition not only to produce FOSS [free and open-source] code, but also to be a profitable business that can exist for a long time. Each time we make more money, we hire more developers to develop GPL code.

The sound and fury around MySQL’s moves is because people (wrongly, for the most part) perceive that MySQL is closing off the core of its product to them. It is not. MySQL is considering holding back future add-ons to its core product, either as proprietary software or as proprietary services (in the fashion that I’ve described). But by not taking a bold, RHEL-esque move, MySQL’s position looks shakier than it actually is.

The services around MySQL, including Workbench (around which MySQL did a better job of explaining the difference between the open-source core and the “proprietary” periphery), Network, and other add-on services that make the MySQL experience more pleasant but not necessarily more capable are fine to close off to paid subscribers, as Red Hat has long done.

A very simple principle that can help MySQL and every other open-source company intelligently make decisions about how it licenses its software.

As for monetization, in open source you do it exactly the opposite as in proprietary software, which jealously guards the core and throws trifles to the crowd as free complements. In open source, you charge for the complements while giving away “the crown jewels.”

To get to this goal of ours, we believe we have to be more pragmatic than dogmatic. Call it a necessary evil if you like. Having production add-ons that we provide only to paying customers currently seems to use to be a useful model. Our partners and customers think it is great. Many users think it is great. But not all do (as evident from this thread on /.). I would hope we could please all, but I am afraid we cannot.

The key, again, is to separate the core from the complement. MySQL, the database, is the core. That should be open source. It’s good for MySQL that it be such. It leads to greater distribution.

Perhaps it’s just a matter of semantics (Marc Fleury certainly believes it is), but I think MySQL would have been wiser (at least as an interim step) to adopt Red Hat’s model rather than don the hairshirt over commercial extensions, without clearly defining what this means.

The bits are free; the service is not.

One way to further improve such a strategy is to make the short-term difficult step of clearly separating out a separately trademarked/branded community product as Red Hat did with Fedora. Clearly brand it as the community/labs product and foster its growth on its own merits, then focus the bulk of MySQL, the company, on MySQL Enterprise. Fedora is a vibrant community in its own right. There’s no reason that Dolphora (MySQL Community couldn’t be the same.

It’s a fine defense, and one that SugarCRM has used for years (and one which Zimbra never had to, for some reason, quietly churning out tons of cash in the background while others took the arrows. Perhaps Satish was on to something . But it’s unclear to me why MySQL had to get to this point.

MySQL has placed itself in the middle of a rising furor over its allegedly diminished commitment to open source. To be fair, it has only itself to blame.

As Michael Tiemann of Red Hat expresses it:

commentary

Ultimately, MySQL has made a short-term public relations error, but one that is easily fixed. It simply needs to reassure its user community that it is not taking anything away, now or in the future. Instead, it is offering additional services to subscribers, services that augment the MySQL experience but don’t imply a degraded MySQL experience for those who opt for the free download of Community.

It all started with a disgruntled ex-MySQL employee, Jeremy Cole. Cole declared that MySQL’s sky was falling because it was to be releasing certain parts of the next version of its database as closed-source software. Marten Mickos responded that he had misunderstood (when, in fact, he had understood very well), it went to Slashdot (where it was of course misconstrued even further), and we’re left with a somewhat tepid defense by Marten in the comments section of Slashdot to the self-addressed question, “Why is MySQL now producing some proprietary software?”:

If the world were perfect, we would only produce GPL code and we would have a great business that can fund the software development. But we have found that the world is not perfect. We have been experimenting with a variety of business models around FOSS (dual licensing, support only, simple subscriptions, different binaries for community and enterprise, non-open source features) to find the best one. And we will continue to experiment until we are satisfied. We need to find a model that allows us to produce a ton of great code under GPL while having the financial strength to do all this.

You might be wondering how this would be useful for anyone besides potential stalkers. The answer is that if you’re in a Twitter-rich city, drilling down to 1- to 5-mile radius around you will let you know all sorts of things going on in your area as they’re happening.

We’ve featured disaster preparedness tools using Twitter several times before, but Twinkle puts it together in a portable, user-friendly package. I fully expect it to be released as a standalone application in the iPhone App Store in a few months when Apple updates the firmware.

Twinkle’s other fantastic feature, which I demo in the video below, is the built-in photo integration that uses the iPhone’s camera to take pictures you can attach to your Tweets. The only catch is that you’ve got to be using Twinkle to see the photos. It’s fantastically simple, and something I think will make its way into Twitter applications for other handsets.

Do you have a jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch?

( polls)

Related:
Twitter + Maps = Global stream of consciousness

Got a jailbroken
iPhone? Then you’ve got to download a fantastic app called Twinkle that’s doing some amazing things to make Twitter even more useful for people while they’re out and about. Besides being a delightfully simple Twitter client (see also: ThinCloud and Hahlo), Twilight’s killer app is its location tool, which taps into the LocateMe feature introduced in iPhone firmware version 1.1.3. Using this, it can narrow down not only where you are (to be included in your Tweets), but it also lets you see who’s around you anywhere from 1 to 252,000 miles away using local cell phone towers or your Wi-Fi connection.

I’ve occasionally seen and heard rumors of a Microsoft push into retail. If so, they should be using the Apple Store as a model–nobody else does it better.

A few months ago, they remodeled to get rid of the large screen and seating area they used for in-store workshops. I liked the few classes I happened in upon during the weekend, but most of them were sparsely attended, and the workshops I really wanted to take–like Garage Band–were during normal work hours. In place of the demo area, they more than doubled the size of the Genius Bar, Apple’s in-store customer support desk. The end-result: a mass of highly engaged customers at the back of the store, instead of a mostly empty space. (Engaged might mean enraged, but it seems that even customers with serious problems–like a dead
iPod out of warranty–remain calm when faced with a real person as opposed to an anonymous phone support employee.)

Sony has a lot of great products as well, but when I go to the nearby Sony Style store, it always feels a little haphazard, with PlayStations next to flat TVs next to Blu-ray discs. And it’s never crowded. And I never leave with a purchase. (Although the array of flat-screens looping this Bravia commercial is refreshingly inoffensive–very little branding–and completely mesmerizes my two-year-old daughter.)

Recently, I’ve noticed two interesting changes at my local Apple Store, both evidence of Apple’s mastery of retail.

More recently, my wife went in to buy me a Shuffle as a surprise–my 4th-generation iPod died a copule years ago, her iPod is permanently connected to an iHome clock radio upstairs, and my 30GB
Zune is a little bulky for walking the dog or going to the gym. After talking to a salesperson who led her through colors and GB sizes and prices, she said she was ready to buy and started walking toward the registers at the front of the store. Not necessary–the salesperson had a handheld device with a credit card scanner, checked her out on the spot, and e-mailed her a receipt. Genius.

My local Apple Store is an attraction, not just a store.

Brightcove helps media companies display their video over the Internet and offers varying services for managing video including publishing, distribution and advertising.

Brightcove, the Internet-video syndication and services company, announced on Monday that video content from its customers will appear on social-networking sites: Bebo, Meebo, RockYou, Slide and Veoh.

The new deal means that Brightcove customers will have access to the combined 300 million monthly visitors of the social networks.

CEO Jeremy Allaire has amassed a customer list that reads like a who’s who of media conglomerates, such as CBS, HBO, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and 20th Century Fox.

Even after that realization, I looked at the water in the film and thought the animators had done a remarkable job at recreating one of the things that, like making human hair look realistic, has always been hardest to recreate.

Sony Pictures’ animated surfing penguins documentary, ‘Surf’s Up,’ was nominated for the best animated feature Oscar this year, certainly in large part because of its work on creating realistic waves.

That’s why, when I was watching Surf’s Up, I noticed during one surfing scene that there were a couple of drops of water on the lens. At first, it had escaped my attention because it is such a realistic detail that your eye doesn’t quite pick up on it. But then I realized that that was intentionally placed there. I had to go back and look again in appreciation of the thoughtfulness behind it.

As I mentioned above, the purpose of doing so was to make the texture feel like a documentary. And that meant simulating the kind of slight movements that come when a cameraperson is working with a hand-held camera on location.

Bredow said that the basic system for creating waves involves modeling each one from flat water to swell to rolling over to crashing down, and then blending through all those shapes into a single, animated effect.

“We simulate thousands of water ripples interacting with each other to simulate the texture,” he said. “Basically, we use millions of interfering water ripples to create the wave texture.”

And as I said above, the results were spectacular. Without commenting on the overall quality of the movie, I will say categorically, that it is beautiful, and the work Bredow and his team did to create the many waves was nothing short of amazing.

To do this, Williams explained, the animators designed a system where they programmed the animation of the many penguins in the film and then turned to their live-action camera, an ancient Sony camera–bought off eBay, no less–that was somewhat like what surfing documentarians would have used a decade or so ago.

After leaving the screening room and saying goodbye to Bredow, Brannon, Buck and Jenkins, I was taken to Imageworks’ layout room, a single room a couple of stories below where, it turns out, the filmmakers shot much of the film.

Finally, the animators worked on the way light goes through a wave.

Soon, I was ushered into a small screening room where the brains behind Surf’s Up, producer Chris Jenkins, co-directors Ash Brannon and Chris Buck, and visual effects supervisor Rob Bredow had gathered to talk to me about the film and about those fantastic waves.

We “put a ring around key points in each wave,” Bredow said. “As we grab the ring and pull on it, or rotate the ring, the corresponding section of the wave will evolve forward and crash.”

All of this was done, said producer Jenkins, so that the desired effect of a surfing documentary felt real to the audience.

It’s an odd concept, and one that took me a little while to understand, but it actually makes a lot of sense, and is a pretty elegant solution to the problem of how to build in the little imperfections in a documentary that the filmmakers wanted to see in their fully digital movie.

(Credit:
Sony Imageworks)

Waves are “essentially modeled one section at a time,” said Bredow. “They start flat, turn into a swell, and then flip over and turn into classic crashing waves….We modeled (them) on what real waves would look like.”

Then, once the wave animation is created, it’s time to add the water texture to it.

Others must agree, because last month, Surf’s Up was chosen as one three nominees for the best animated feature Oscar. And while the film would have to be considered a big underdog, since it, and its fellow lesser-known nominee, Persepolis, are going up against Pixar’s juggernaut, Ratatouille, a huge critical and commercial success.

One of the reasons for that is that Surf’s Up, as mentioned above, is fashioned as a surfing documentary, focused on Cody, the main character, a young provincial penguin longing to join the glamorous world of pro surfing.

And in order to make that happen, the animation system revolves around a series of blue vertical control rings superimposed on a wire frame wave that the animators can “pull” forward.

Bredow said that when lighting a breaking wave, his team would break a wave down into individual wave “zones,” perhaps eleven per wave, and then light each zone individually. They’d use different hues of greens or blues, depending on the need, and voila, a wave.

Sony Imageworks utilized a special live-action camera to build in the kind of realistic camera movements found in traditional documentaries.

The point with that system is to be able to simulate the rolling effect of a wave crashing, left to right.

The film’s story, Bredow added, called for three main types of waves: simple spilling breakers, classic tube waves modeled on Hawaii’s famous Pipeline, and the kinds of huge waves found at Northern California’s celebrated Maverick’s.

For that, Bredow said, his team takes a smooth plane that doesn’t look at all like water, and adds many different levels of “noise.”

The result, Williams demonstrated, is that when he moved the camera a little bit from side to side, the animated penguins on screen would shift in the camera’s view.

“If something’s not quite right, even within a tenth of a percent,” Jenkins said, the audience sees it. “It has to be just right.”

Looking at what seem like schematic still images of the structure of the waves, one sees what looks like the shape of a big wave with a grid of criss-crossed wire frame lines superimposed on it. The vertical lines, Bredow explained, segment the different sections of the wave, each of which can be controlled individually.

Another important element in the making of Surf’s Up, then, was the incorporation of the live-action camera, something that might not be entirely intuitive in a fully animated movie.

Lest you think that creating waves for an animated surfing film starring penguins is a simple job, let me assure you that it isn’t.

CULVER CITY, Calif.–One of the things that struck me towards the end of the animated surfing penguin mockumentary, Surf’s Up, is that I had forgotten that every bit of water in the film–mainly loads of lovingly rendered surfing waves–was digitally animated.

One of the choices the filmmakers made when proceeding with Surf’s Up, according to co-director Brannon, was to deliberately try to give each wave “character.”

“If you’re going for perfection, you fail,” said Brannon. “We were going for humanity, and that comes through in the final product and gives it an organic feel.”

But use a live-action camera they did.

Did it work? Well, as I alluded to above, I think the filmmakers succeeded in making many of the details of their movie work exactly as planned. Things that seemed totally authentic struck me later on, particularly because I realized they were, in fact, totally digital and totally fabricated. And that’s the sign of amazing attention to detail.

“We had a bunch of surfers, guys who loved surfing, on the movie,” Bredow said. “They’d go through hours of (surfing films) and find waves” they liked and which the Surf’s Up team could model the film’s waves on.

Then it’s time to add the proper lighting effects, a combination of many different techniques, Bredow explained.

The film wasn’t much of a commercial success, however, perhaps because the story was a little bit predictable and standard. So much of the Imageworks team’s labor was missed by the moviegoing public.

There, James Williams, Imageworks’ head of layout, explained and demonstrated how live-action had been incorporated.

The point, then, was to make the film feel very much like a documentary. And that meant a slightly rougher edge to the texture, including a slightly shaky camera, as well as water on the lens and other such artifacts that wouldn’t show up in a normal movie, but which are unavoidable in documentaries.

“We made sure the water had all the (right) properties using different photo techniques,” he added: “reflection, refraction, and the specular highlights that bloom the right color, and the surface foam on the surface of the water.”

Still, when Sony Imageworks, the Sony Pictures in-house visual effects studio behind the imagery in films like Spider-Man 3, Beowulf and I am Legend, invited me down to L.A. to talk about Surf’s Up and the animation wizardry behind it, I readily agreed.

(Credit:
Sony Imageworks)

The camera was fitted with a special sensor that emitted signals picked up by a grid of hundreds of sensors on the room’s ceiling in order to translate the camera’s exact real physical movements onto the animated scene.

Imageworks designed a wave animation control system that was used to create realistic wave motion and evolution. The vertical rings are used by the animators to pull the various sections of the waves forward.

Imageworks’ special sauce begins with its wave animation control system, a proprietary technology the company developed to create the waves for Surf’s Up, and which was a modified version of the system it used to make the water effects for the Tom Hanks film Cast Away.

But they surely tried hard to make a film that stayed true to the look and feel of the classic surfing documentary. And for that, they deserve their Oscar nomination.

Walking into Imageworks’ offices in Culver City, just a couple blocks down the street from Sony Pictures Studios’ gargantuan facilities, one of the first things that struck me was how dark and quiet it was. All the better to keep glare off of animators’ computer screens and to get work done, I was told.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

“The look of the movie was determined by the water,” Brannon said. “We wanted believable water, not necessarily photorealistic, but not stylized, either.”

SAN DIEGO–Imagine storing all your DVDs onto your computer like you do now with music CDs.

“It’s a good story for studios. We have stopped the worst violations people can do (peer-to-peer distribution),” Eric Fox, senior product manager at RealNetworks told CNET News. “We’re letting people get more value out of the DVDs they own and encouraging people to buy more DVDs.”

RealNetworks launched new software called RealDVD that lets people save DVDs to their PCs and create film libraries for watching any time, without needing the disc.

It allows people to save the box cover art and special features, as well as sort the collection by genre, rating, or actor and set parental controls. Users can also save a DVD and play it at the same time. It works on computers running Windows XP or Vista.

Additional copies of a DVD can be saved to a different computer or storage device for $19.99 each.

RealDVD, unveiled Monday here at DemoFall, saves an exact copy of the DVD and puts it on the PC, a USB hard drive, or thumb flash drive. For people who have very large DVD libraries, the software saves the DVDs to external hard drives.

The company says the software is “legal,” but acknowledges that people will be able to make digital copies from any DVD, even if rented, because the software can’t distinguish between rented and owned DVDs. However, the software won’t let people post copies to peer-to-peer networks or send them via e-mail.

RealDVD will be available by end of the month for an introductory price of $29.99, which will rise to $49.99 later.

For a more information on the software, see this post on CNET’s Crave.

Updated at 1:50 p.m. PDT with more details.