Hacker Cinema
The Expendables 3
2014 · Film · 126 min
Part of The Expendables Collection
Directed by Patrick Hughes
Barney, Christmas and the rest of the team comes face-to-face with Conrad Stonebanks, who years ago co-founded The Expendables with Barney. Stonebanks subsequently became a ruthless arms trader and someone who Barney was forced to kill… or so he thought. Stonebanks, who eluded death once before, now is making it his mission to end The Expendables -- but Barney has other plans. Barney decides that he has to fight old blood with new blood, and brings in a new era of Expendables team members, recruiting individuals who are younger, faster and more tech-savvy. The latest mission becomes a clash of classic old-school style versus high-tech expertise in the Expendables’ most personal battle yet.
5 negative4 neutralfrom 9 commenters
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9 comments on Hacker News
My impression is that most Hollywood work is now done with Pro Tools on Windows. For example, I know for sure that Expendables 3 was mastered this way.
For classical music and bluray mastering, I hear the most from Nuendo users on Windows. Their cheaper variant Cubase is popular for audiobook production.
For music production, BitWig and REAPER are currently the rising stars. Both are popular on Linux:
https://www.bitwig.com/download/
https://www.reaper.fm/download.php#linux_download
BitWig especially fits in with the hacker spirit because you can modify and script almost everything.
They also have many features for live shows and / or DJing. That market used to be squarely owned by Ableton on Mac, but the latter has recently fallen out of favor over plugin compatibility issues with newer effect VSTs.
For broadcast, meaning TV shows and live sports streaming, I heard that BBC and the likes are using LAWO which are custom integrated hardware+software solutions capable of loading Linux VST plugins.
https://www.lawo.de/up-to-date/news/nbsp/floating_earth_uses_lawo_mc256_for_bbcs_children_in_need_rocks_live_recording.html
Gotcha. Yep, getting fancy with the end credits is something big budget films tend to do. Those have better visibility, but there's fewer of those now and more of a long tail indie downmarket developing. A few bigger films have used Endcrawl (Expendables 3 and 10 Cloverfield Lane to name a few) but beyond the occasional prestige play, it doesn't make much sense for us to focus on that corner of the market. The area under the indie film segment of the curve is much bigger. 4000+ feature films submit to Sundance every year!
Pliny talks about the "chasing prestige" trap in our IH interview. This is how the film industry de facto operates, and we only managed to avoid the trap by approaching things like a software company would -- itself mostly an accident and byproduct of our backgrounds. Lots more opportunity for software to "eat film" imo.
Note: Endcrawl does let you carve out areas for a video inset where you can add things like blooper reels. Compositing those into the scroll is still something better done in your NLE timeline. Can't solve all the problems!
Disney will certainly be quite happy to have this much free advertising for a movie that is going to start being shown in cinemas in a few days.
It's hilarious to claim that the leak of Expendables 3 was the reason it flopped on the big screen. But of course, if I were responsible for the movie, I would clutch at any straw possible.
I work in VFX, and its a little bitter sweet to see Sony entertainment on its knees.
First, various people like sony have been forcing VFX houses to go through draconian security changes to stop this kind of threat. (supposedly because one of us leaked expendables 3, despite none of us having the complete movie or sound)
These rules include three separate zones, of which only one has access to the internet. All USB storage is disabled. All internet access must go through a terminal server. (all our phonehome services for disks now don't work)
All data must go through a purgatory like intermediate stage, for the data ops guys to move out to the "outside" zone, for upload to studios.
We then have monitors to look at the data flow, to see if wierd stuff is happening.
So if they'd followed the MPAA's own advice none of this would have happened, unless of course it was an inside job. Which in my mind there is little doubt.
> Studios should have some monetary incentive to make things that people actually want. I actually had a headache after Expendables 3.
You say that like it's simple to do. The first two Expendables movies apparently were good enough that the economics warranted a 3rd. Do you think the people at the studio were thinking "let's make this one The Unwatchables, instead?" Sometimes problems are obvious ahead of time, but more often only seem so with the benefit of hindsight.
a leak of the entire film could be a disaster. Lions Gate's Expendables 3 bombed in theaters when it was released in July after a high-definition version of the movie was posted on sites that traffic in pirated films
Expendables 3 was also awful -- X-Men Wolverine was leaked very early on, and went on to do extremely well. How a leak affects ticket sales is pure speculation, I wish 'journalists' would stop talking about the harm piracy does without any substantiation.
"Expendables 3" scores 35/100 on Metacritic [1]. The original scored 45/100 [2] and "Expendables 2" scored 51/100 [3].
Perhaps it's performing poorly because it's a very poor movie. Or perhaps the leak let people find out in advance it's a very poor movie.
[1] http://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-expendables-3
[2] http://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-expendables
[3] http://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-expendables-2
Since Expendables 3 supposedly sucks, I bet a high percentage of the losses were due to people pirating/watching the film and telling their friends how shitty it was, resulting in them going to see something else.
Err, what a joke.
> The Expendables 3″ was widely seen as a litmus test for the impact that piracy can have on a film’s prospects.
How? By what metric? A movie that no one wants to see, that is predictably bad tanked. Trying to blame piracy so that you can justify increasingly anti social measures against your customers is ridiculous. Indeed most people would prob want to be paid to go and see this rather than waste 2 hours on it.
I know a filmmaker and they are fully aware that the marketplace for bad content is very small. Due to internet word of mouth failures are exponentially worse because people these days go to see specific movies and rarely go to see whatever movie happens to be on. They teach courses on this stuff.
This is a studio trying to save face.