firehose

Only the best movies get rereleases from Criterion, but it often takes a lot of polishing, editing, and preservation to bring older selections into the beautiful condition that viewers expect. To see a bit of that restoration process, Gizmodo dropped by the Criterion offices in New York as it was beginning work on Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent. In a video, Criterion staff describe how they take a film from negatives to a digital print. In this case, its staff had everything they needed to produce a good release: "When you can get the original negative and it's in good condition, you're in great shape," Lee Kline, a technical director for Criterion, tells Gizmodo.

There's still plenty to be done though. To start, scanning the negatives at 2K resolution is a two-day process — scanning negatives at 4K resolution takes closer to a week. From there, the film undergoes color correction. In the case of Foreign Correspondent, Criterion gave the film far more contrast than what came off of the negative: Criterion's staff can have a dramatic impact on the look of a film, so they study other movies by the director and cinematographer to determine just what an image is supposed to look like. They also need to edit out any damage to the film, and because sound runs alongside the filmstrip, any dirt brought in will cause shrill clicks, pops, and hisses in the movie's audio, which need to be edited out as well. To see the full process — including a look at how Criterion's famously stylish cover art is made — check out Gizmodo's full video above.

According to a new job advertisement posted this week, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is currently seeking a contractor to build and operate a national license plate reader database.

While license plate readers are on the rise by federal and local law enforcement agencies, they typically are not linked together into a one-stop shop beyond federally-funded "fusion centers," which depend on are fed by local data. Apparently that is not enough for the feds anymore.

The DHS further posted a 29-page document (PDF) outlining its requirements, including "featuring Smartphone technology based application for at least one Smartphone type, i.e. Android/iPhone/BlackBerry etc. currently in use by [Department of Homeland Security / Immigration and Customs Enforcement] allowing for license plate pictures to be taken and uploaded. Any positive matches shall return to the Smartphone an alert notification indicating to the User a positive match."

On Monday, the creators of Cards Against Humanity, the cult “party game for horrible people,” announced, then promptly sold out of a House Of Cards-themed expansion pack in advance of today’s second season premiere. But don’t worry, you can still download and print out your own versions, as there’s some pretty great ones in there. “Forcing a handjob on a dying man,” and “Strangling a dog to make a point to the audience” are some particular standouts.

Even better, the folks at Cards Against Humanity gave the $50,000 Netflix paid them for the cross-promotion to the Sunlight Foundation, a thematically appropriate non-profit group dedicated to government accountability and transparency. This isn't the first, or even the second time that Cards Against Humanity has given large sums of money to nonprofits, but this is the only time it seems to have been done out of ...

Prosecutor Erin Wolfson explained Saturday night that each attempted second-degree murder conviction carries a minimum sentence of at least 20 years. There's also a 15-year sentence possible on the conviction for shooting in the teenager's vehicle.

"You are looking at basically at life in prison," Strolla said, even as he vowed to challenge the convictions. "At 47 years old, that's a life sentence regardless of count one."

The decision to convict on these counts, and not on murder, didn't come easily for a jury that had deliberated for about 30 hours since getting the case late Wednesday.

Judge Russell Healey acknowledged earlier Saturday that the jury of four white women, two black women, four white men, an Asian woman and a Hispanic man was "struggling, obviously."

"But it's not for want of trying to reconcile all of this," he said then. "I think we've got some analytical people in there who are trying to do just that -- trying to analyze this from every possible angle."