Studio711.com – Ben Martens

The Hobbit is out and is one of the first movies to offer a higher framerate than standard movies. There was a bunch of other relatively new tech in the theater. Here’s my review of each piece:

• Higher framerate: Almost every movie you’ve ever seen is in 24 frames per second. That means that 24 individual pictures go by every second and your brain sees it as a moving image. Home video cameras generally shoot video in 30 frames per second which is one reason why your home movies look a little different than movies in the theater. But generally, the more frames you have, the smoother and more realistic the video is going to look. Have you ever noticed how images on a screen get blurry when the camera pans quickly? There are a few reasons, but the low framerate is a big reason. With 48 frames per second, I was consistently impressed with how crisp the image was even when the camera was panning or things were moving quickly on the screen. It did look dramatically different and there is already outrage from some people who claim it “doesn’t look like a movie is supposed to look.” If someone had never seen a movie and you showed them 24fps and 48fps, I’m sure they’d pick 48fps. We’re just used to seeing video that has a little stutter to it and blurry fast action scenes. In 10 years, we’ll all be watching 48fps and wondering why we used to like those old movies. This one will take a while to become mainstream because of the additional production and display costs, but I’m giving it a thumbs up.
• 3D: This was only the second movie I’ve seen in 3D. The first was Avatar. I figured I’d give it another shot with this movie, but I still didn’t like it. When you see a 3D image, your brain assumes it can focus in on any part of the screen. But only part of a 3D movie is in focus and trying to focus on something else will just give you eye strain. Green screen computer graphics effects also look exceedingly fake in a 3D environment to me. I want to see this movie again without 3D as the 3D nature of the movie kept taking me out of the experience. Thumbs down. I won’t write off the technology completely though until I’ve seen sports in 3D. That’s supposed to be the scenario that works very well. But I’m done going to see 3D movies.
• Dolby Atmos: I thought I had blogged about Atmos before, but I can’t find the post so I’ll give you a quick overview. In a normal movie, the sound engineer and the director mix the sound into 5 or 7 separate channels. The sound is fixed to come out of the front right speaker, the rear left speaker, etc. They will also make a stereo 2-channel mix for people at home who don’t have 5.1 or 7.1 speaker setups. The problem is that you’re trying to make it sound good on someone’s TV speakers and in a huge theater. Dolby Atmos changes the way sound engineers work. Instead of saying what speaker a sound should come from, the sound engineer picks a point in a big virtual sphere around the listener and says that’s where a specific sound comes from. When the sound is played back, the playback system takes that point and figures out which of the installed speakers should play it. That means you can use 1 speaker or 1000 and the exact same soundtrack will work. Obviously, the more speakers you have, the more accurate the location where the sound originates will be. This movie was the first time I’d been in a theater with Dolby Atmos and it was my favorite part of the whole experience. The level of sound immersion was incredible. You really have to hear it to believe it. If I could pick just one of the three technologies I’ve mentioned in this post, Dolby Atmos is the one I’d pay extra to experience. The only downside is that this is at least a few years from coming to the home because you’ll need a new A/V receiver and you’ll need content that is mixed in this format. Neither one exist yet and there’s a chicken/egg problem.

Oh and how was the movie? It was good, but not great and that’s how I felt about the book too. If you like Lord of the Rings, you should see it. As with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the movie is about 20 minutes too long, but that’s Jackson’s style and he sticks with it. I’ll see the next two as well, but I might see them at home unless I can find a theater that will do 2D 48fps Dolby Atmos.

If you use a Surface RT, you may have noticed that Flash only works on some sites. There is a whitelist built in and Flash will only work if the website is on that list. But what about sites like studio711.com? If you want to watch the Flash that is used here, you’ll need to do a little extra work. Of course you’ll be doing something that isn’t recommended by Microsoft so proceed at your own risk. Still willing to try it? Follow the steps at wingadgetnews.com and you should be in action.

The rumor is that flash isn’t enabled for all sites because there are lots of crazy flash apps that could cause problems on your Surface RT. It’s generally enabled where I need it to be though and with this trick, I can make it work in the other places too. Walking around the house with ESPN3 streaming to the tablet was pretty cool.

Facebook sent me a $50 advertising credit so I decided to use it to promote my CascadeSkier applications and see behind the scenes of a Facebook ad.

Creating the ad was very simple. You set up the graphic, the text, where you want the ad to go (website or Facebook page) and then start narrowing down your target audience. I set up two versions of the ad. One was targeted to people in Washington and Oregon who were in one of the following categories: Outdoor fitness activities, extreme sports, traveling, or Windows. That one encompassed 2.7 million users. The second ad was much more targeted to people who were like the ski areas covered by my apps. That targeted 200K users.

Your two options for payment are per view or per click. Per click is obviously much more expensive, though in retrospect, I would have paid about the same with either choice. You can say how much you’re willing to pay and obviously Facebook shows ads for advertisers who are willing to pay more. I ended up paying $0.07 per 1000 views.

After 2.5 weeks, the ad had been shown to 92,163 unique users and each user had seen the ad an average of 4.6 times. That means I paid about $30. Of the 424,000 times my ad popped up on someone’s screen, it was clicked on a grand total of 23 times. That a 0.005% click through rate. Some quick searching revealed this is pretty standard. Unfortunately in my case there’s no way to know for sure if anybody bought anything when they went to cascadeskier.com because transactions are handled through the Windows Phone store, the Windows 8 store, and CafePress. Let’s assume that everyone who clicked there bought the phone app (because that’s where I make the most money per sale right now.) That would be $45.77 in sales minus the 30% cut that the store takes leaves me $32.04. Then if you take about 20% out for taxes I’m left with $25.63. So paying $30 in advertising gained me $25.63 in a very good scenario. It’s more likely that I only got one or two sales from those clicks.

I’ll let the $50 credit run out, but this doesn’t seem to be a net gain for me. Word of mouth has been a lot more successful and it’s free.

In addition to regular paper coupons, our grocery store has started a program called “Just For U” where you can clip coupons online. They intend for you to flip through the coupons and add certain ones to your frequent shopper card. Those items show up in the phone app and you are supposed to go buy those specific items. I’ve never been one for clipping coupons, but every once in a while, I go to the site and click Add on every single coupon. We use OneNote to track our shopping lists so their app has no appeal to me. I save a few bucks here and there, but it’s not really worth my time to clip these virtual coupons.

Then one day I had an idea: why am I manually clicking on all these buttons? I’m a geek and geek’s don’t do this sort of repetitive stuff. We write code to do it for us! So with a little ingenuity, I whipped up a very basic piece of javascript that runs over the whole page, finds all the coupon buttons and then clicks them. Within a second or two, I can clip hundreds of coupons. I even made this a button in my browser toolbar so it’s nice and easy to run.

javascript:(async function(){ function sleep(ms) { return new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, ms)); } async function scrollDown(count) { for (var i = 0; i < count; i++) { $(“.load-more”).click(); await sleep(1000); } } await scrollDown(10); $(‘.grid-coupon-btn:not([disabled])’).each(function(index,value){ value.click() });})()

This won’t help me save any more money, but it definitely means I spend less time clicking around on their website!

[11/23/2020] Updated Javascript to match the current website.