Sorry for dropping off the map the last couple of weeks. My internet went down at home and my modem still isn't working. I'm actually posting from a Kinko's right now because my cable modem is currently running at the blazing fast speed of about 56K. :|
Now, to answer a few questions:
bkev said:
Luckily, those are two of the shots that needed the work the most! Thanks, Zion. I still hope one day we'll see a raw capture, at least, but I think these two shots are more important to the community.
This is exactly the reason Laserman chose them. The worst shots are the easiest to demonstrate what a great job the black magic process could do.
none said:
Zion since the thread is yours, might want to update the first post with the recent 'here's where things stand post' link.
http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/The-X-Project-Laserdisc-on-Steroids/post/461494/#TopicPost461494
and if you can find the Laserman post alluded to.
It's not going to make the bumps go away, but it'll make the explanations easier, "go see first post".
Done.
boba feta said:
I'm curious to know how the untouched capture compares to the GOUT, both pre and post g-force script.
It's much better than the untouched GOUT. I'm not sure how it compares to the g-force script, as I have yet to take a good look at the output of the script, but you'll soon be able to judge that for yourselves.
pittrek said:
BTW guys do you plan to put your website back online ? Or post it to some free webhosting service ?
I've archived it to my personal site, but that's down right now as well. Once I've got it back online, I'll post the link.
Harmy said:
"I want it all, I want it all, I want it now!!!"
No seriously, these two shots would be awesome to have, especially this one:
In GOUT this shot looks like sh*t (possibly the worst shot in the whole thing), so it would be extremely valuable for any future reconstruction (I would have loved to use this in my SW PDE to get rid of the stupid dinosaur but the GOUT quality was too bad) so maybe in v.3.0...
Sadly, this is the shot I'm having trouble locating at the moment. I'll have to do some more digging on my other drive and see if I maybe saved it to a different location than the other one. If I can't find it, it means I never actually got it from Laserman, or that he never actually sent it to me in the first place, which would suck.
Darth Editous said:
Zion, can you give any more detail as to what such a piece of software would specifically need to do?
DE
A little history on Black Magic:
As far as I know, "Black Magic" was the name of the workstation (yes, a workstation, not just a software application) Laserman was able to borrow from his office. If you guys didn't know, Laserman used to work for Weta Studios in Australia, so this had to be built on some sort of cutting edge in-house software that the public didn't have access to.
Obviously, since it wasn't just a piece of software, Laserman couldn't copy it and send to anyone. And I'm assuming he eventually had to take the workstation back to the office, so I'm guessing it's back in the hands of Weta Studios.
What Black Magic actually did was take several different sources of the same video (e.g. different LD captures of Star Wars), analyze them for similarities and differences, and output a new pristine version of the video mostly free of any analog noise or other nasties, and with outstanding detail.
I recall one of the last things Laserman suggested on our private forum was to try and use an application built on MatLab to emulate the output from Black Magic. I downloaded it once upon a time, but I never had the time to devote to teaching myself another programing language to get the thing running, much less learn how to use it. I'll try and see if I can find some more specifics on that and post them here.
And for your viewing pleasure, Laserman's Black Magic version of the "Look sir, droids" shot:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=82CNJW13 (This is an AVI either uncompressed or in HuffYUV. I don't know for sure because this machine won't tell me.) Enjoy. And here's hoping I can find the other one.
At some point soon (probably in a couple weeks), I'll try to see if I can't upload ANH to a.b.sw.