They're never good enough -- a DP is always likely to trade a stop of sensitivity if it means higher image quality or lower noise. Just because a Red Epic can do ISO 800 + 2 stops of gain doesn't mean that setting will actually give you something you can actually use in a theatrical film, or would prefer to a less noisy image.

Remember these guys are competing with other DPs too, and you win Oscars for having the best image quality, the most brilliant colors, and the most dynamic lighting; cutting your sensor sensitivity in half compromises this.

Sometimes we do, but that's definitely a visible artifact. You can't just delete every other frame, you have to add blur and interpolation to get the same level of motion blur the 2x picture had -- the cameras can't shoot overlapping frames.

Another factor with shooting "fast" is that it halves your available light, so if you have an ISO 800-equivalent gain factor at 24 fps, it becomes ISO 400 at 48; so then either your f/stop (and thus depth of field) has to give, your shutter angle (and thus motion blur) has to give, or you gotta spend time and money putting up more lights.

29.97 if you still live in America in the 1960s.

NTSC television to the bitter end was 29.97. Many hidef television broadcasts are actually at 23.976 fps, and most feature films shot on digital equipment are at this rate as well, because it converts to 29.97 with fewer artifacts.w

I dunno :) Congress grants the FCC the power to levy fines and penalties against people that break "the rules," and then it grants the FCC the right to define "the rules," because congressmen don't want to spend time deciding if setup level should be 0 or 7.5 IREs.

More interesting is that by accepting Dolby's standard, the FCC has in fact incorporated a proprietary, black-box technical procedure into US "law."

Movies on VHS were never like this, as soon as DVDs came out this nonsense started.

HiFi VHSs only have maybe 50 dB of S/N ratio, tops. DVDs have 70dB and then 20dB of headroom.

(why they can't come up with a dialogue-prominent audio track I'll never understand).

We make these, they're what play on the Assistive Listening Devices in the theater, and on airline flights.

A "compressor" just takes the signal, attenuates it if it exceeds a fixed amplitude. It then cranks everything up.

It doesn't actually make things louder, it's just that many films and TV shows are mixed so that dialogue hits speakers in the middle range of the loudness, so the LOUD parts of the movie can actually be louder than the dialogue. Since laptop speakers are tiny, and only just audible at their maximum level, the compressor cranks up all the middle-loudness dialogue stuff, but when you get to a LOUD part, it's only as loud as the talking before it.

The trend of everybody watching everything on shitty computer speakers has started a new loudness war on Youtube videos and the "home theater" mixes of trailers, which don't have to abide by industry loudness standards. We end up cranking everything up and flattening the dynamic range so you can hear the words. I recently mixed a short that played on vimeo, the mix for vimeo have to get a full 10 dB of gain before it was comfortable to watch on a laptop, and this had the effect of making the loud scenes, which are exciting on the big screen, boring and flat. It sounds like the airline mix of a movie.

I had a directing teacher in college who used to direct the old Bosom Buddies TV show -- he went on to do this silly movie about a woman and her big fat Greek wedding. Strange guy. ANYHOO, he brought in a bunch of episodes that he'd done to show us, and the went on forever, and there were like two commercial breaks, each having maybe two commercial, tops. It was amazing how much time you had in a half-hour block back in 1980.

It was cool, but I grant that show felt flabby and slow, I'm sure it didn't at the time, but nowadays people don't necessarily expect less TV show, but they do expect the show to get to the point faster. And the style of shooting and editing lets that happen in a way an audience in the 70s might not have accepted. I'll bet if you showed "Big Bang Theory" or "Modern Family" to an audience of "Alice" or "It's a Living" it'd seem strange and avant-garde, setting aside the content issues.

ITU-R BS.1770-1 or -3 are measurement standards, they don't prescribe any limits. It gives a way of measuring the subjective "loudness" of a program based on a psychoacoustic model but it presumes total control over the speaker system (which TV doesn't provide), and it doesn't say "how loud."

EBU R128 gives a single standard, and you use it with ITU-R BS.1770. The problem is that it treats a dialogue-heavy program the same as a musical program; a musical program has a lot more signal, over a half hour average, than a dialogue one, so a musical performance will tend to sound quieter when put next to a dialogue heavy one, given they're mixed with the same level normalization scheme.

The CALM Act is actually based on Dolby Laboratories technical definitions and the dialnorm subcode metadata in an ATSC bitstream actually has to be decoded and properly enforced. It's not actually LAW but it's an adopted FCC federal regulation. Dolby's standard is to measure the average dialogue level in the program, and only the dialogue, and to use that to derive the normalization level -- EBU R128 uses the entire program mixed together, dialogue, music and sound effects. I think Dolby's approach is superior but more technically demanding, since it requires the person encoding the AC3 bitstream to have access to the dialogue mix-minus, but on professional productions this isn't an issue.

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 didn't delete the previously existing laws, it merely made them impossible to enforce by forbidding state governments from investigating warrantless surveillance, and authorizing the Federal government to destroy any records of the surveillance. It also specifically granted immunity from prosecution to participating telcos, but the government had to specifically certify them, and the certification was revokable either by a federal court or the government.

The criminal act never disappears, and the gov can always make their immunity disappear with the stroke of a pen, a state of being quite different from non-culpability.