Matthew Dessem

Matthew Dessem

@matthewdessem.bsky.social

I’m the enchanting wizard of rhythm. I came here to tell you about the rhythms of the universe.

1.5K followers676 following404 posts

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

“The Blob” is one of those movies where every dollar is on screen. Specifically, zero dollars were going to the off-screen camera operators, and that’s why it’s so out-of-focus.

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

Sometimes you watch a scan from the original camera negative and discover you haven’t been watching bad transfers all these years but rather pretty good transfers of a movie with a terrible focus puller.

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

Running for Governor of California on a one issue platform (streaming services have to respect the original framerate and color space of their material and also let us watch the credits without scrambling for the remote to get Ted Lasso’s giant face out of the end of Killers of the Flower Moon).

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

I agree that computers must never make management decisions, but I suspect IBM was mostly interested in tricking us into accepting the false premise that a computer can never be held accountable. They can be held extremely accountable!

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

So I guess the question is does the national media think "the president of the United States is a rapist" is not news or do they just think "Donald Trump is a rapist" is not news? No way to know for sure until the Democrats hand their party over to a cabal of rapists!

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

The Fluke 87V multimeter is on sale at Amazon right now, so I'm gonna be able to run 220V right across my sinoatrial node in just a few days. Just call me the Dixie Flatline!

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

The new Criterion Channel app still ignores frame rate and color space, and its color conversion is not transparent. Watched some of “The Hitcher” ported to Dolby Vision without realizing it and, yeah, it is a bad transfer of a movie with some dodgy lighting, but it isn’t THAT dodgy.

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

Since AFIAK Criterion Channel only streams in SDR it is easy enough to fix the colors. But the framerate—they have some stuff at 24 and some at 23.976 and there is no way to figure out which is which without pulling it up in a browser. They are supposed to be the streamer for film nerds!

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

People have no problem understanding that a collage of different texts necessarily has a point of view. It speaks to the immediacy of motion pictures (and the ubiquity of Voice of God instructional films) that it is difficult for people to wrap their heads around the same idea re: documentary films.

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

Three-strip technicolor does so much better with closeups than long shots. Dunno if that is because it is difficult to get enough light into the background or if the closeup lenses did a better job of avoiding registration errors but every now and then you get hallucinatory levels of detail.

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

Maybe the registration errors get worse with distance / longer lenses? Seems like it would be technically difficult to split the image while preserving perspective over a large depth of field (and those hallucinatory closeups all have a short focal length).

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

Also the three-strip process soaks up so much light that the backgrounds get desaturated, more like Army of Shadows than I thought. The reds still pop but yellows and off-whites get dingy unless they are in the foreground.

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

Does anyone know which tools specifically were used to create the animated photograph sequences in this movie? It’s always just some kind of blurry “AI tools,” but they never get into the weeds about which tools. It isn’t Izotope, I will tell you that for free.

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Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

So how do you shoot something as desaturated as Army of Shadows with nothing but normal color film stock and no digital color timing? It looks like they underlit and pushed the film pretty far, and the sets and costumes help, but there must be more to it than that.

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

I mean, it is not a rare look in the 1960s, nor is this the most desaturated film I have ever seen, I just have not thought through how you would suck that much life out of the color in an analog workflow. So how do you do it? Vampires?

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

Your daughter is CREATIVE and EMPATHETIC and DESIRES WASP EGGS. You will certainly not regret placing WASP EGGS UNDER HER BED. Your daughter LOVES ANIMALS and dreams of being ENCASED IN A COCOON.

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

The vast majority of mono mixes in film these days are editors mixing down the audio on distributor logos to play before mono restorations. (The FX-heavy Studio Canal logo, which is supposed to have a lot of surround sound bells and whistles, fares pretty badly.)

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

It’ll only matter to a very small number of people, but the 90s era of digital recording, mixing, and mastering, which locked most recordings into a relatively low sample rate, will someday be a strange historical backwater of low fidelity.

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

The mono mix of Chet Baker’s “Chet” is another high-sample-rate streaming standout, but as with “Kind of Blue,” the tape hiss makes it very clear this is just approximating the reel-to-reel experience. RETVRN.

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

Create the change you desire through a discreet partnership with the CIA. Create the change you desire through a discreet partnership with the CIA. Create the change you desire through a discreet partnership with the CIA.

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

Watching movies at home! Listening to recorded music at home has gotten better in the last 20 years but the median home audio setup was better in my childhood. Recording music is an entirely different thing now, better in many ways, but taste enters into that.

Michael Druker 🇨🇦@mdruker.app

Social media loves talking about how everything is getting worse. But what’s something that you’ve seen get _better_ in your lifetime?

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

In all the hubbub over the cruelty of the death penalty, I missed that one of the people Alabama executed last month was the guy who shot James "Orion" Ellis, a singer who performed in a mask to play up rumors that he was Elvis Presley and had faked his own death.

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Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

He ended up running a pawn shop in Selma and was killed in a robbery in 1998; the man who shot him, Jeffery James Lee, was executed Sept. 17. Elvis Presley is also dead. A strange, sad story.

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

If you want to mourn some lost hypothetical art, Kaleb Horton loved this guy’s story and wanted to write a movie about him. In some other universe it’s winning awards.

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

In all the hubbub over the cruelty of the death penalty, I missed that one of the people Alabama executed last month was the guy who shot James "Orion" Ellis, a singer who performed in a mask to play up rumors that he was Elvis Presley and had faked his own death.

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

His record company encouraged this, had him record Elvis songs, dubbed his vocals over old Sun sessions, etc. He toured that way, had a crisis of identity, decided to be himself and perform without the mask, people were not interested, eventually he put the mask back on.

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

They call you “Tarzan of the Apes” because your name is Tarzan and you were raised by apes—your diet of bananas, coconuts and grapes doesn‘t really enter into it. And where are you getting grapes in the first place?

Matthew Dessem
@matthewdessem.bsky.social

If Trump started sending goons to search Chuck Schumer’s house, I feel pretty confident that regardless of their disagreements, Ilhan Omar would speak out against it.