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Clint Johnson

Member since: Jan 12th, 2006

Clint Johnson's Latest Comments

Blog Activity
Blog# of Comments
Engadget2 Comments
AOL TV1 Comment
Cinematical2 Comments
Download Squad1 Comment
DV Guru3 Comments
Joystiq Xbox1 Comment
Blog Maverick1 Comment

Recent Comments:

Warren Buffett , Taxes and the Presidency (Blog Maverick)

Dec 16th 2007 2:48PM Mark, you make way more than I do and what you pay in taxes compared to me is disgusting. In no just society would you be paying anywhere near as high a taxes as you are. The politicians want to take from the rich to buy votes by pandering to the greed of the middle and low income classes.

I refuse to try and get the state to take from those who have made smarter financial decision to cover my failings. I've been below the poverty line and my current job puts me comfortably in the middle class. That job is coming to an end just after Christmas and I may be slipping back into that poverty class again... this isn't your problem Mark and you have no obligation to do anything about it unless you want to hire me to do productive work for you.

The rich would be paying WAY to much if they had a 0% income tax... just from the regular sales tax on whatever they purchase. You rich guys and gals are the force that allows the less talented and intelligent to have a comfortable living rather than starving in a ditch, so you have no reason to feel guilty about what you are already doing.

Michael Rosenbaum leaving Smallville after next season, report says (AOL TV)

Feb 24th 2007 8:04PM Always was and always will be Superman VS Lex Luthor. All the other comic nemesi just don't carry the arch of Lex.

And I'm afraid that Chloe Sullivan fills the same roll at the Daily Planet that Lois Lane needs to get into sooner rather than later and Allison Mack better be looking for another roll ASAP. This is a simple fact of the writer's room and no slight on the fine actress (as a matter of fact she would be great as the female lead in "Saving the Dead", a feature that I am speccing).

The show can stretch comic canon to set Lana Lang on the path of "evil"... as long as she doesn't see it as evil. They've already fiddled with the past lives and dark powers... not much of a stretch to get to The Countess.

They have to keep following this same self rightous path with Lex as well, he has to believe that what he is doing is for the best. They have built the character well and to turn him into a caricature villain at this point would do all that hard work a disservice.

And Brainiac isn't going to take Lex's place as the chief villain- Superman and Lex need to be forced into an alliance as the only way to defeat Brainiac... if I was showrunning Smallville that would be this season's cliffhanger. Set it up so that Lex sees Clark as responsible for the death of the child that Lana is carrying and Clark sees Lex as responsible for the death of Chloe... and now can they force themselves to work together to save the world from AI run amok?

And yes, as someone who wants to create television, I tend to analyze it rather more than most.

The Guardian Review: Rocky Balboa Is Racist (Cinematical)

Jan 13th 2007 10:54AM And if Rocky Balboa had been fighting only white guys could you imagine the screaming fit Queenan would have thrown? Some people have a pathological pattern recognition system that is grossly predisposed to find racism in anything and everything they come in contact with.

Evidently Sly's biggest sin is not having been born black- since that is the only thing that could have saved this franchise for Queenan... and that is ALL it would have taken. But of course that isn't racism.

Wonder Woman Casting Rumor #438: Sophia Bush Says Maybe ... (Cinematical)

Jan 8th 2007 3:51PM Actually, she is about ten years too old for the part. Joss has stated that he is looking for someone in their mid teens to run with this as an origin story. Not saying that it couldn't be a 25 year old playing a sixteen year old but the 25 year old should be able to pass as a teenager at least.

Video: 360 v.2 HDMI in action (Joystiq Xbox)

Jan 6th 2007 5:33PM HDMI was never there to make an image better, it was created to meet the demands of the media companies in an act of self-deluding anti-piracy. You will barely be able to tell the difference between 1080i and 1080p while flipping back and forth repeatedly, sitting really close to the display and being wrong almost as many times as you are right.

Don't worry that you are only using your xbox 360 with a 1080i monitor. The difference isn't worth the money of "upgrading"- buying a new game or three would be a far better use of your dollar.

HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray: Do you have one? (DV Guru)

Dec 27th 2006 1:34PM One thing to keep in mind is that most people (in North America especially) sit way to far away from their television. If you have a 50 inch 1080p LCD and you are sitting ten feet away from it then you pretty much wasted your money. Unless you have VERY good eyesight you will not be able to tell it from 720p let alone 1080i- 20/20 vision can't resolve the difference any further out.

Standard definition sucks badly enough that anything closer than 15 feet shows an appreciable difference from 720p.

I have a 48 inch 1080i display as the primary TV and with a satellite HD PVR, their is very little I watch any more that isn't high definition... it would just be nice if the MPAA didn't treat us like the enemy by default so that I could watch my HD-DVDs on that rather than on the 17" laptop.

Time to get an xbox 360 and the HD-DVD drive I guess. Or I could just use a high definition video camera to record the image off the laptop and convert it to a format that I can actually use. I won't let it out into the wild of bittorrents but I am less prone to see pirates as the bad guys when the MPAA lumps me in with them.

Maybe we could just look at the money we lose getting a new display and then download the equivalents worth of ripped HD content to balance the scales? I don't even pirate MP3s but that's starting to sound fair to me.

RED Digital Cinema burglarized, $100k reward for leads (Engadget)

Sep 25th 2006 12:18PM There is no rational way to come to the conclusion that Red is a scam or sham. Jim Jannard simply stated a target set of capabilities for a camera that he would love to own himself. To gauge how much interest there was in production of said camera he offered to accept fully refundable reservations for the cameras IF they are produced. The request for money was to weed out people who weren’t really serious so they could plan for production runs. He has said all along that it is a tough design and engineering task so there is the chance that they won’t be able to get the camera off the drawing board. If they don’t, he will simply issue a mea culpa and return the money. And yes, he will return the deposit if you simply ask for it. I find it hard to believe that Jim would skip town with a little less than a million dollars when he has a net worth in the billions.

They’ve show it to a few people from inside the film industry and some of the online experts like Mike Curtis over at hdforindies.com. They showed footage from the test mule at IBC 2006 and the first fully functional prototype is expected for December with the hope that they can go into production in the early part of next year. These are all targets and Jim has been honest in saying that it may well slip. Everyone is getting confused because the level of openness Red is showing is unprecedented and people aren’t used to seeing this much information on a work in progress.

The robbery was probably committed by amateurs thinking that they would commit the crime on spec so they could turn around and sell the information to Sony, Dalsa, Grass Valley or Panavision. Jim subsequently upped the reward to $100,000 for information leading to the conviction of the perpetrators.

How to Sell Your TV Show (DV Guru)

May 20th 2006 1:24AM Reading over some of my favorite websites, I came across this entry and since I am trying to break into the film and television writing business I thought it would be just the type of article that I would be interested in. I clicked on it and for a moment I figured I had hit the wrong button since my own website opened up... but it appears that this is actually a link to my site. So it also appears that I?m not the only one who reads my website... I guess I should really work on keeping my site more up to date and not so dusty.

Westinghouse's 56-inch 4x 1080p LCD (Engadget)

Jan 12th 2006 5:25PM I'm prettty sure that $10,000 price would be what the display manufacturer will be paying to get the glass from Chi Mei. I will now pull a bunch of numbers out of my... hat. Add another $2,000 or so for their cost on the case, electronics and assembly gets you to about $12,000. They in turn sell it to the dealer for maybe 20% markup which gets you to $14,400. The MSPR will be set with about a 60% markup from that so it will be about $23,000 which will translate to about $18,000 street price.

That should clear everything up.