The label on the reel suggests some time between 1990 and 1995 - based on the old London area codes.
But of course the film material itself could be older...
Checkout 'Spleen. There might be something of interest there. Just sayin.
Antcu,
Since your source was a DVD player, it's output luma phase must have jumped 180 degrees between captures (a bit like pal).
Won't help you with LD captures, since the phase is already baked in.
I am surprised it canceled out so neatly. If you can get the same trick to work with a laserdisc capture - i'd be extremely surprised.
Currently working on a way to post it somewhere anonymously.
Probably usenet. Otherwise it will be available on a torrent site for a limited time only.
ETA October. Will post in this thread when it is available.
Actually it just occurred to me 86 minutes is a little short for an average 1971/72 movie, all the other films in that issue are in the 92-125 minute range.
It's possible either the studio or the distributor wanted to avoid any negative stigma around a short running time, and gave an 'approximate' running time of 95 minutes to anyone who asked.
We can only speculate.
FremenDar said:
Well project is at a stand-still. Needing an audio program which will let me change the timecode and length of the AC3 track from the PAL discs which I have to match with the video of the NTSC DVD release.
Decode to wav, adjust duration (with or without pitch shift), re-encode as AC3.
You may have to cope with the fact the underlying video is of different duration. And that is going to get interesting.
And again in April 1974 on CBS:
http://www.dvddrive-in.com/TV%20Guide/cbslatemoviearticle.htm
UMatic tape would have been available from 1971.
Just ran across a review of THX 1138 in a March 1972 issue of the UK film magazine 'Films Illustrated' (Three stars out of four)
Nothing particularly amazing about that - but it lists the running time as 95 minutes !
Probably a typo, does anyone have a copy of 'Monthly Film Bulletin' from 1972 to cross check ?
msycamore said:
DisgruntledFan said:
I got a few 35mm film cels from a THX 1138 trailer recently and I've scanned them at decent resolution. I'd be happy to upload them somewhere if anyone was interested. PM me.
Did you get my PM? I would love to see your scans.
Still in orbit - we de-orbit in about a week. Need to find somewhere to upload em'. Watch your mailbox then.
Bah - any suggestions for a host ? (pm me)
I got a few 35mm film cels from a THX 1138 trailer recently and I've scanned them at decent resolution. I'd be happy to upload them somewhere if anyone was interested. PM me.
If you head over to 'spleen. You might find something to your advantage.
SilverWook said:
Damn. :(
Have all the Laserdisc volumes been collected now?
This is the only LD that seems to be on Ebay right now...
http://www.ebay.com/itm/BABYLON-5-SEASON-1-TWO-EPISODES-FACTORY-SEALED-/110314038330?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item19af3aa43a
I have everything except the Season 1 disc that has Voice in the Wilderness Part 2 on it (I have two or three copies of every other episode).
I've got the Season 4 discs (all three of them), nicely ripped and packaged as MKV files. But I'm waiting to get high resolution scans of the laserdisc covers. ETA would be late next month.
gadlen,
That's awesome !
I do have some NTSC S-VHS capabilities - but I am at a slight geographic disadvantage.
Anyone else on this thread have decent NTSC S-VHS gear, and capture capability ?
I have a D-VHS deck (JVC 30k), which is okay as I understand it - but it's not as good as a panasonic AG-1980.
Can you remember what make and model your S-VHS deck was ?
Just to chime in. I'm currently having some some success with using an Edirol R-44 standalone digital recorder combined with a Sony EP9ES to get bit perfect Dolby Digital and PCM rips from Laserdiscs.
The Edirol has a coax digital input, which it can capture bit perfectly at 44.1 and 48khz.
The Sony EP9ES is a standalone Dolby Digital decoder, which also has an AC-3 RF input (for Laserdiscs), and an optical digital pass-thru output, which with the addition of a 10 dollar optical to coax converter can be hooked into the R-44.
It's simple to slot in an 16GB SDHC card, and just load laserdiscs one after the other into the player, and leave it running while I do something else on the computer.
The R-44 isn't cheap, but is endlessly useful for other things, and the EP9ES is actually cheap on ebay compared to a simple laserdisc demodulator.
AC3 is easy to split out of the .wav using Besplit.
Anyone else have any technical 'recipes' to share ?
Have uploaded my personal VHS rip on 'spleen. It's MKVs rather than DVDs and the overall size is pretty big.
As per usual: Buy the (very reasonably priced) DVD set, then download the rip.
If you want DVDs, you are probably best looking at See No Evils set.
On the other hand, my set does include a rather nice scan of the front of the VHS tape.
It looks like the laserdiscs 7.5IRE 'setup' got left in the encode. I can take it out pretty accurately, the only issue might be that any 'blacker than black' in the image will get crushed to absolute black.
I can also mask the video noise at the top, which I suspect is the closed caption line.
Does anyone have any experience pulling closed captions from AVIs ? I've tried CC extractor, etc, and haven't got anywhere. It would be nice to have the subtitles as a SRT track.
Will probably take a crack at the rest of Season 4 shortly.
Okay.
I've put a sample up on 'spleen. Would appreciate some technical feedback before I launch into the rest of the project.
Basically size is 4.7 gigs per episode with the PCM soundtrack ripped directly from the LD. I've stuck some color bars I pulled from Video essentials at the end of the episode.
Still on my mind.
I'm planning to do a straightforward preservation of the laserdiscs, which I've been slowly acquiring.
Capture methodology has been an issue, I was experimenting with a standalone lossless recorder - but that didn't work out.
The primary issue is tying up my PC for long stretches while capturing, and capturing the digital audio track in sync with the video.
Regarding how best to watch it. NTSC DVDs are probably the best compromise available, albeit with a lot of dust and crap on the picture in the live action segments.
Various streaming services have a mixture of 4:3 and letterbox versions of the episode, which look reasonable, but tend to macroblock, and generally make a mess of the 60fps effects.
The Laserdiscs look soft compared to the streaming services, and not every single episode is available on laserdisc (see earlier in the thread).
If someone was going to do a restoration you'd probably take the 24fps 16:9 live action from the DVDs and the 60fps 4:3 special effects from the Laserdiscs, and somehow wedge into together in a MKV container.
For now I would suggest that you enjoy watching the PAL DVDs.
Actually - that doesn't look too bad - what's the quality like when it's in motion ? Much macro-blocking ?
If someone has access to the Vudu episodes - and can post a screenshot - I would be most grateful.
I suspect the quality is going to be comparable to the itunes episodes however (i.e. bad).
Half of Season 2, and all of Season 4 are unavailable on Laserdisc.
Just a quick status update:
I've managed to get my hands on most of the available Babylon 5 laserdiscs.
I'm only missing the following 5 discs (first episode name listed only).
If you have these discs (or know someone who does) can you pm or email me through the forum please.
Okay - I just discovered after effects doesn't have RGB waterfalls (but Premier does - how odd). Doing it using the curves adjusted by eye.
Red curve was pretty flat.
Possibly needs a touch more red in the shadows - but hopefully you get the idea.
dj,
It's pretty straightforward - basically it's just which part of the image the color balance adjustment will affect - i.e. the dark bits, most of the image, or the very bright bits.
You may find it easier to work with the RGB curves - set the view to 'RGB Parade' - and then flip backwards and forwards between the two things you are trying to match - start off by getting the bottom of the of R,G and B in the same place in both shots (only adjust one of them) - then adjust so that the tops of the graph match. Once you've done that you should be pretty close.
Use the 'master' curve to add or remove contrast by making the middle curve up or down.
Goodluck.
Asaki said:
Surely some of the more able members here could cook up an un-interlace/re-interlace AVIsynth script to replicate what this guy did?
http://www.modeemi.fi/~leopold/Babylon5/DVD/DVDTransfer.html#030421proof
It's nothing that challenging - the effects are just 30p.
The real problem is that the live action is 24p, while the effects are 30p. This makes it difficult to produce a progressive video stream because the frame rate would need to vary shot to shot.
I think this is possible in an MKV container, but I think you'd end having to put it together on a command line.