The ‘Dune’ Screenplay Was Written in Movie Master on MS-DOS • Hacker News Board

Re: The ‘Dune’ Screenplay Was Written in Movie Master on MS-DOS

#221

Post by seanicus » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 6:09 PM UTC

scrumper wrote: post #72

Ciantic wrote: post #10

What I like about this is the 40 page limit. He actually considers it a kind of feature, and this arbitrary limit has contributed to his works. One would think that if 40 pages comes to full, the writer would just find a way to extend it, but instead he didn't bother and shortened instead.

I believe that with screenplays there's a fairly direct correspondence between the space taken up on paper and time in the movie. So a page is generally a minute. In the article, he talks about how it "creates acts" - each act is going to be about 40 minutes. I'm not in the field at all so I'm hoping someone knowledgeable will confirm or refute this.

The gold standard set out by Syd Field in his famous screenwriting book is that for a 2 hour movie this is the breakdown: act 1 - 30 minutes act 2 - 60 minutes act 3 - 30 minutes

But of course rules are made to be broken and they're also adapting a novelistic story structure.

But now kind of curious to watch some of this writer's films and time out these 40 minute act breaks.

Re: The ‘Dune’ Screenplay Was Written in Movie Master on MS-DOS

#222

Post by WorldMaker » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 6:34 PM UTC

squarefoot wrote: post #212

joeman1000 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there’s too much hype around the model M. I own one and find it too bulky and loud. It’s a gimmick. Also it has a PS/2 connector, so it’s a pain.

The hype is well deserved, it's a rock solid piece of hardware that lasts decades, something that is so rare today. I got my first one in the mid nineties and never had to do any maintenance aside normal cleaning, while the spare one I have lays unused since day one. Yes, it's loud, I agree that could be annoying in quiet office environments. About the PS/2 connector, that is not a problem since USB adapters are very…

Also, Unicomp inherited the Model M from IBM and still make modern variants directly with USB support: https://www.pckeyboard.com/

Re: The ‘Dune’ Screenplay Was Written in Movie Master on MS-DOS

#223

Post by contingencies » Wed, Oct 27, 2021, 8:37 PM UTC

shiomiru wrote: post #147

contingencies wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux console gives me the same feeling. It's partly the font, partly the focus (no interruptions), partly the lack of latency. OSX + iTerm2 is so damn laggy vs. Linux even on worse hardware. It just sux when you have to, you know, input Chinese or open a PDF. Gotta say though, Dune was a disappointment to me, having grown up with Dune 2 on MSDOS. The old Dune had, you know, deeper characters. There's nothing like ea…

> It just sux when you have to, you know, input Chinese or open a PDF. Don't know about PDFs, but for Chinese IBus works just fine with XTerm.

Console != terminal. Console means no X11/Wayland.

Re: The ‘Dune’ Screenplay Was Written in Movie Master on MS-DOS

#224

Post by pxc » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 4:36 AM UTC

yankcrime wrote: post #166

pxc wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OSX + iTerm2 is so damn laggy vs. Linux even on worse hardware This is one of those things you notice in a jarring way as a Linux user coming to other platforms, but people kinda look at you sideways and don't believe you when you tell them. What I tend to notice, especially as someone who prefers to use a full screen terminal tiled with tmux, is (1) poor availability of Quake-style dropdown terminals on macOS and…

"(1) poor availability of Quake-style dropdown terminals on macOS and Windows" This is a feature available in both iTerm [1] as well as Windows Terminal [2]. [1] https://blog.mestwin.net/drop-down-terminal-in-macos-with-it... [2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-terminal-...

iTerm2's implementation was basically unusable the last time I tried it, for details I can't remember well. One issue was that if you have iTerm swap the command key and option keys for in-terminal keybinds, it modifies them altogether when you're using the app, breaking command-tabbing out of the app, among other keybinds. (Having it swap these was something I did because it was necessary to get some combined modifier keystrokes to go through correctly, perhaps on pain of reconfiguring each of its escape codes to match xterm individually. I can't quite recall.) To get the behavior I wanted I ended up having to bypass iTerm's drop-down behavior in favor of some Hammerspoon automation. I put up with all of this because all other terminal emulators available on macOS were abominably slow, to the point that tailing a log in any tmux window makes the entire pane lag enough to make typing suck. (And the only way to get acceptable performance in iTerm2 was by enabling hardware acceleration.)

I'm glad that Windows Terminal added that feature this year. It's better than most terminal emulators on Windows in most other ways, too. I'll try it the next time I'm on Windows.