Category Archives: Film Markup Language

The Final (?) Take on Film Markup Language

Leave a reply

As some of you may know, I sometimes project films at the Draken cinema when I’m not busy doing XML stuff. Also, as I’ve noted before, film projection is moving from analogue to digital and it’s all happening very, very fast. The commercial cinemas, multiplexes all of them, now run films on hot-swap hard drives in servers coupled with ugly digital projectors, and the one remaining 35mm cinema, an art house, is rumoured to close soon.

So today, after a call from the city council’s school cinema group, I started thinking and realised that while I did consider the advent of all things digital when I first wrote Film Markup Language, even updating the DTD to include some rudimentary support for 2k and 4k projection for my 2010 presentation on it in Prague, it’s too late to actually modernise the DTD or the spec for what’s actually going on today.

See, the digital thingies do use XML. It’s inconsistent and looks like some weird kind of committee hack, though, the kind of XML you might find in Java config files, but it’s XML and it seems to be enough. So, Film Markup Language is dead for all practical purposes.

It’s kind of sad.

Digital Shows, FML and XML

Leave a reply

Ran my second DCP show at Draken, earlier. The film is stored and handled by a Dolby server running a modified Debian Linux with XCF as the window manager producing a lightweight interface with only the bare necessities, but very, very functional necessities. There is drag and drop to handle show components, there are ready-made cues, and it’s all reasonably well designed. Every time I use the touchpad/keyboard combo to build or run a show, I’m struck by how similar to my Film Markup Language concepts everything is. I presented my ideas at XML Prague in 2010 but after that, I couldn’t make much headway with the hardware so the project sort of died.

Supposedly, the shows are indeed handled using XML files. I was planning something very much like Dolby’s interface so I’m dying to know if their XML is anything like my DTD. The components are all there so I’m half hoping it is. I bet they don’t use XLink, though.

Back from XML Prague

Leave a reply

I’m back home from XML Prague. It’s been a fabulous weekend with many interesting talks and lots of good ideas, and I’m still trying to sort my impressions. So many things I want to try, so many technologies I want to learn. The feedback from my talk on Film Markup Language alone is enough to keep me busy for a few weeks.

More later, but for now, suffice to say that I’m already thinking of a subject for a presentation next year.

Automating Cinemas at XML Prague

Leave a reply

I’ve been busy writing my presentation and some example XML documents for my presentation on Automating Cinemas Using XML at XML Prague in about a week and a half. I’m slightly biased, I know, but I think the presentation actually does make a good case for XML-based automation of cinemas. I know how primitive today’s automation is, in spite of the many technological advances, and I know where to improve it. The question I’m pondering right now is how to explain the key points to a bunch of XML people who’ve probably never seen a projection booth, and do it in twenty minutes.

The opposite holds true, of course, if I ever want to sell my ideas to theatre owners. They know enough about the technology (I hope) but how on earth will I be able to explain what XML is?

There’s still have stuff to do (for one, it would be nice to finish the XSLT conversions required and be able to demonstrate those, live, at the conference) but the presentation itself is practically finished and the DTD and example documents are coming along nicely. I suppose I need to update the whitepaper accordingly and publish it here, when I’m done.

See you at XML Prague!