The.Day.the.Earth.Stood.Still.2008

 Continuing the run of really bad movies was The.Day.the.Earth.Stood.Still.2008.  Holy hairpieces, it was the 1st full length movie lions fast forwarded through. Can't believe IMDB gave it 3 more stars than Snow White 2025.  It was manely an attempt to reprise Keanu Reeve's visuals from the Matrix: super powers, interrogation rooms, agents.  Matrix super powers were a common theme in those days.  

Kind of amusing to see the table top screens of those days getting promoted.  That concept went nowhere.

 Never forget the early 2000's OLED aftermarket car radios.  When the motorized door broke, the bling was gone.

The reimagined robot was even bigger.

John Kleese didn't do much.  No-one did much of anything.  Old lion won't remember ever watching it.

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An HD copy of the original finally landed on the hard drive after years of contemplating it.  Seem to recall it got a lot of air time on the old VS-457R because the old lion said he knew the kid in it, Billy Gray.  It doesn't make sense because the kid lived in Calif* & was 10 years older.

That car chase with the projected background always was the low point, a moment of all telling & no showing.  All of it is generally campier than low definition.

The unsuspected interview with the alien was a wittier scene, only possible because no-one could see him on the radio.  He stayed in character as the alien & the interviewer was so clueless he blew him off.

Contrary to young lion's impressions, it was sunny in the flying saucer introduction, if hazy.  B&W always made it appear cloudy & cozier.

 

 

 25 year old Patricia Neal was easier on the eyes than chain smoking John Wayne banging 39 year old Patricia Neal.  That generation aged faster because they smoked & because they were skinnier.

That robot encounter was kind of scary for younger lion.  A generation memorized Klaatu barada nikto out of fear.  It came back in Army of Darkness as verata instead of barada.

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Back to disposable bags.  A lion without a robot would be in a pretty sorry state.  Having to store & transport a reusable tote bag everywhere you go is a pretty depressing thought.  Animals who bake the pavement still have to store the empty bags somewhere.  Car independent animals would have to carry an empty bag everywhere.

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The problem of multiple instances of Cinelerra overwriting each other's preferences reached critical mass with customizable playback speeds.  It already would be a disaster with some complicated settings like the render farm, but that setting is no longer used.  The remaneing settings were simple enough to not be a disaster if they got stepped on.  Not so with customizable playback speeds.

The key need is a way for every instance of Cinelerra to pick up the latest settings when 1 instance changes something.   The leading idea is for the big old multimap to gain a new date field for each entry & the file to gain a last saved date.  In the save routine, it needs to compare its last save date to the date of the file on disk.  If the file on disk is newer, it needs to load the file, take in all the fields with more recent dates than its own fields, then save the new file.  This assumes the save is done right after the latest change, which is probably the most common sequence.

 The mane problem is it won't pick up any changes until the user saves the file.  Then the user won't know what changed.  Another way is to find every place the preferences could change.  Theoretically, that just happens in the preferences window so when the user goes into preferences, it needs to pick up all the more recent values than its own from disk. 

Some values are going to have to be classified as safe to step on & not updated behind the user's back.  These would be the window panes, the visible automation, the window positions, the playback loop.  The default setting might be to not update behind the user's back.  The critical ones which can't be stepped on are few in number, the playback speeds, the render farm, the batch rendering.

Playback speeds might be rarely updated enough to neglect.  The kaboom case is the user configuring 1 setting for rendering, then another setting getting overwritten during the readback before the start of the rendering.  The single value granularity is the problem.  The granularity might have to be the entire file.  When the user goes into the render window or the preferences window, it needs to read back right there but this would overwrite the window positions.  

The preferences file might have to be split up into multiple files, each file to be read back when the user entered its setting window, based on only the file date.  For now, playback speeds, render farm, & recording would become new distinct files.  Nothing that the preferences window would perform a rerender on should be updated from disk.

Batch rendering previously had its own file.  It would now call a readback function when the user entered the batch rendering window.  Preferences would read back only the relevant files which didn't allow stepping on while leaving settings like playback alone.

It definitely needs a dictionary wide last change time & a read before write to avoid the case of newer values on disk getting overwritten by older values in a save operation that wasn't preceded by a load.

There was a signal idea where all the cinelerra processes would reload their preferences when they got a signal, but it's not safe to reload the preferences everywhere.

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A few days with the configurable playback speeds & lions weren't feeling any drawbacks from the historic preferences behavior.  So that leaves the whole IPC for preferences in the range of unnecessary complexity.

A new thing that might help is an indication of the current playback speed somewhere.  That would show if the preferences were what you thought they were.

The leading candidate is the tally light in the compositor, but that is rarely visible.  The compositor generally needs to get its clock back, but it's low on space.