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Posts tagged with "tv"

Coming Soon: What’s New in October on Apple TV+

There’s a lot coming to Apple TV+ this month, and this is your handy guide to all of it, including trailers, and calendar links you can use to be sure you don’t miss their premieres. Let’s dig in.

The Lost Bus (October 3)

First off this month is The Lost Bus, which is premiering this Friday. The movie, which is directed by Paul Greengrass, stars Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera. The story is based on the real-world events of the 2018 Camp Fire in California and is based on the 2021 book “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire” by Lizzie Johnson. McConaughey plays a school bus driver trying to get a group of students and their teacher to safety during the fire.

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The Sisters Grimm (October 3)

Also debuting on October 3rd is “The Sisters Grimm,” a new animated series that follows two orphaned sisters who navigate a town packed with people from fantasy and fairy tale stories. The series is based on Michael Buckley’s bestselling book series and features the voices of Ariel Winter as Sabrina and Leah Newman as Daphne. The series blends discovery, fantasy and adventure designed to appeal to all ages.

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The Last Frontier (October 10)

The Last Frontier is a thriller starring Jason Clarke as Frank Remnick, a U.S. marshal in charge of wilderness in Alaska. The story follows the crash of a prisoner transport plane, which sets violent inmates loose across the rugged landscape. The series, which explores the mysteries behind the crash airs the first two episodes of a 10-episode run beginning next week.

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Loot, Season 3 (October 15)

Loot is one of my favorite Apple TV+ comedies. Now in its third season, the series returns on October 15th. In season three, Maya Rudolph’s Molly Wells and her assistant head to a remote island to embark on what will be a 10-episode season that airs on Wednesdays.

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Mr. Scorsese (October 17)

Mr. Scorsese is a 5-part documentary that follows the career of filmmaker Martin Scorsese. Directed by Rebecca Miller, the documentary follows Scorsese’s life and artistic journey from NYU film student to legendary director through interviews with luminaries such as Robert De Niro, Mick Jagger, and Steven Spielberg, as well as unprecedented access to the director himself and his archives.

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Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost (October 24)

Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, which is directed by Ben Stiller, tells the story of his parents, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. The documentary will debut on October 17th in theaters with the Apple TV+ debut coming the following week. Stiller explores what Apple calls a “home, where the lines between creativity, family, life and art often blurred,” an intriguing framing that should make the documentary a great complement to Mr. Scorsese.

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Down Cemetery Road (October 29)

Down Cemetery Road is an eight-episode thriller written by Morwenna Banks, who wrote Slow Horses, one of my all-time favorite shows, for Apple TV+. The series is based on the book of the same name by Mick Herron who also wrote the Slow Horses book series. The story follows the disappearance of a girl from an Oxford suburb after a house explosion. The series, which stars Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson promises to be an exciting conspiratorial story full of twists and turns, which is the sort of show I love.

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That’s up for now. If you’re not listening to MacStories Unwind, please give it a try. I’m sure you’ll hear more about some of these shows and movies from me and Federico in the coming weeks as they debut.

Apple Highlights the Mac’s Role in the Creation of Severance

In the wake of last week’s jaw-dropping Severance season two finale, Apple has released a behind-the-scenes video and a Newsroom story showcasing the ways the Mac was used to edit the show. Both feature Severance’s editors discussing the process – creative and technical – behind the show’s editing. It’s worth checking out both pieces because each offers interesting insights into how Severance is made.

The video shows on-set footage of director and executive producer Ben Stiller leading preparation for the season finale’s marching band sequence. It then follows supervising editor Geoffrey Richman’s process of combing through the 70 different camera angle options assembled into a single multicam clip on a Mac to find the right shot for each moment. The video also features insights from editor Keith Fraase and composer Theodore Shapiro about different aspects of the editing process throughout the season, which involved three editors, three assistant editors, and 83 TB of footage.

In the Newsroom story, Geoffrey Richman dives deep into his editing workflow across various Macs. Richman uses a combination of an iMac at home, a MacBook Pro on the go, and a Mac Mini in a post-production studio to get his editing work done. He puts a lot of emphasis on the flexibility the Mac affords him:

I can work on my laptop and I can work on my iMac, and I can work at the post facility or I can work at Ben’s office, and as long as I’m logged into my account, everything I do shows up everywhere… That aspect of Mac I find very handy — to not think about which system I’m physically at.

Richman points out other aspects of working on the Mac, like macOS’ built-in multitasking tools and the MacBook Pro’s HDMI port, that make the Mac the right tool for editing a TV show like Severance.

Lumon Terminal Pro.

Lumon Terminal Pro.

You can read the full story on Apple’s Newsroom. The video, Behind the Mac: Editing Severance, is available to stream both on YouTube and, in a fun twist, on Apple’s fake product page for the Lumon Terminal Pro. While our dreams of refining data on a real Terminal Pro have yet to be realized, you clearly can make great TV on a Mac.

Hands-On with Multiple Pinned Item Lists in Callsheet

It’s been over a year and a half since the debut of Callsheet, the app from Casey Liss for looking up information about films and TV shows, and the app has grown a lot in that time. From new app icon variations to more fine-grained spoiler settings to actors’ heights and ages, Callsheet has gained many new capabilities. My favorite addition thus far is the indicator for mid- and post-credit scenes in movies.

The app’s latest update expands greatly upon a feature that’s been present since the beginning: pinned items. Users can now create multiple separate lists of pinned items and organize them to their hearts’ content. As someone who watches quite a bit of TV and covers it regularly, I could certainly benefit from this feature, so I decided to give it a try.

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Apple’s TV App Launches on the Google Play Store for Android Users

Apple has released its TV app on the Google Play Store for Android users. In a press release, Apple stated:

Available around the world, the Apple TV app for Android was built from the ground up to deliver Android users a familiar and intuitive interface. Android users can subscribe to Apple TV+ and MLS Season Pass using their Google Play account on Android mobile and Google TV devices. Apple TV+ also offers a seven-day free trial.

With Major League Soccer beginning on February 22nd and Friday Night Baseball just around the corner, it makes a lot of sense for Apple to expand the TV app’s availability. Android users will have all the same options Apple’s users do including subscribing to Apple TV+, which comes with a seven-day free trial, and MLS Season Pass.

As for the design, the Android version of the TV app looks as expected. It’s an Android-ified version of the iOS and iPadOS version of TV, with a similar layout and functionality controlled with standared Android UI elements.

The TV app can be downloaded for free from the Google Play Store.

For more examples of the TV app on Android, here are shots of it running on Federico’s Lenovo Legion Y700 (2024), which we recently covered on NPC: Next Portable Console:

Icon.

Icon.


Episode view.

Episode view.


Episode options.

Episode options.


Subtitle menu.

Subtitle menu.


Sharing.

Sharing.


Settings.

Settings.

MacStories Unwind: An Ant BBQ→

This week on MacStories Unwind, we return to an animal kingdom to discuss invading fire ants, raccoons, and wild boar before recommending a Mario classic and Amazon’s TV adaptation of the Fallout videogame series.

Ghost in the TV

John Versus the Fire Ants

Picks

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CES 2024: Gaming, Laptops, TVs, AR and VR, Batteries, and a Couple of Oddities

Source: CES.

Source: CES.

Every year, I dig into the press releases and reporting coming from the CES show floor, so you don’t have to. The pandemic took the wind out of CES’s sails for a few years, but the show and interesting gadgets have made a comeback for 2024, with a wide range of announcements made in the days leading up to the show, which doesn’t even officially start until tomorrow. I’ll be back with more updates throughout the week, but here are some of the announcements that have caught my eye so far.

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TV Remote: Control Your TV From Your Lock Screen, Home Screen, and Live Activities

Developers have come up with endlessly clever uses for interactive widgets. I love testing them all, but one type is beginning to stick more than others. It’s the widgets for apps that require quick interactions when you’re in the middle of something else. Turning off the lights in my home office when I’m finished working for the day, toggling work timers as I switch from task to task, and then checking off those tasks as I complete them are all perfect interactions for widgets that require minimal switching away from whatever I’m doing. Hopefully, that means fewer distractions and, in turn, a more productive day.

But not everything is about peak efficiency and checklists. Sometimes, you just want to relax, which widgets can help with, too. One of my favorite apps to help with that, which recently added interactive widget support, is TV Remote by Adam Foot. Foot’s app is one I already used with my LG C2 TV, but it’s the app’s new widgets that have graduated it to a regular part of my TV routine.

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Callsheet Provides Movie and TV Details with an Uncluttered Native Interface

Today, Casey Liss released a brand new app called Callsheet for looking up cast and crew information about movies and TV shows. The app, which works on the iPhone and iPad, has a lot in common with movie and TV show tracking apps that I’ve covered, except for one very big difference. Callsheet isn’t a tracking app. Instead, it’s an app front end for The Movie DB, a website that offers a crowd-sourced movie and TV show database and an API for developers.

That’s an important distinction to understand. Callsheet is designed for those times that you want to know more about the people behind a movie or TV show but find the ads in apps and on websites, like IMDb, frustrating. If that resonates with you, and you’re not interested in tracking what you’ve watched, Callsheet offers a better experience for finding cast and crew information.

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TV Forecast 2.0 Adds Movie Tracking

The App Store is full of apps for tracking the media you enjoy, and at least for TV shows and movies, many use Trakt.tv as a data source and tracking service and Just Watch to list where you can watch something. That results in a degree of sameness in the category. What’s harder to find on the App Store is a well-designed TV show and movie tracker. There’s a lot of data available about what we watch, and as a result, too many apps wind up with cluttered, confusing interfaces. TV Forecast 2.0 by Matt Comi isn’t like that, which is why it’s been one of my favorite TV trackers for a long time, and with an update today, it’s one of my favorite movie trackers too.

I reviewed TV Forecast in 2020, and what I said about the app is just as true today as it was then:

When I stopped to consider what it is about TV Forecast that has made it stick for me in a way that no other TV tracking app has, I keep coming back to its balanced design. It has a simple elegance that makes tracking shows feel effortless and natural. For supporting an activity that I use as a relaxing escape, that’s exactly the type of app I value. When all I want to do is quickly check off a few episodes or add a show that a friend recommends, I can. Just as easily, though, I can wander from one linked show to another discovering new ones along the way. It’s that balance between utility and exploration that makes TV Forecast my favorite TV tracker.

For more on TV Forecast’s overall design and functionality for TV shows, be sure to check out my 2020 review.

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