Video Collector

SilverWook said:

And that’s amazing you have the Major Effects special, VideoCollector! I haven’t seen it since 1979. As a good chunk is from Jittlov’s Wizard Of Speed And Time, it could probably be patched from another source. Wish I had it on Laserdisc, as it’s still not out on DVD.

Yeah, that’s the internet for ya. And this forum in particular 😃. Someone somewhere has the very thing you’re looking for!

dark_jedi said:

How much of it is actually on The Black Hole?

I’d say all of it and none of it. It’s hosted by Black Hole star Joe Bottoms and uses The Black Hole to branch off into demonstrations of several different types of effects, both practical and VFX (including several snippets of Mike Jittlov’s stuff). It is clearly a promotional piece made to tie in with The Black Hole but not really about The Black Hole. Does that make sense? Runs 46 minutes sans commercials at PAL speed.

djsmokingjam said:

I have no idea where you could locate these, but even outside of the project I’d love to see two Disney TV specials commissioned to tie into the film’s release in 1979 - The Adventures of Major Effects and Black Holes: Monsters That Eat Time & Space. Both feature effects work by Mike Jittlov, and I’ve never been able to find copies of either despite my best efforts. (A 20-minute excerpt from Major Effects is on YouTube, including some of the Black Hole tie-in footage - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6PBnuA-yWc)

I actually taped the Major Effects special when it was broadcast on Qatari television back in the early 80s. It’s in PAL, the colours are weak, and there are burnt in arabic subs, but you’re welcome to it if you’d like. Drop me a PM if you’re interested.

Here is a Force Awakens update to my “White set” of Star Wars covers:


PM me for downloads.

It should come as a surprise to no one that I’ve made a custom cover for Star Wars The Force Awakens. (And will probably do a few more in the upcoming weeks.)

Available to share with all you forum-folk 😃

This one uses the Adam Relf poster artwork. (Good as it is, the absence of Han Solo is a major oversight, and the prominence of Luke is quite misleading.) I reformatted the poster to fit on a Blu-ray front and adjusted the colours more to my liking, otherwise I left it alone.

PM me for links.

Oh shoot, how do I paste images into posts now? I really loathe this new forum software!

When rewatching some select episodes (on Blu) recently, I was disappointed to see noticeable DNR in every episode. I never noticed this on the first viewing back in 2009, but that was on a 42 inch, 720p display. With my 1080p projector the lack of fine detail was apparent.

I remember seeing a screenshot comparison between the season 1 Blu-ray and HD-DVD, which revealed slightly more DNR in the Blu-ray, but I can’t find it now.

Perhaps HD-DVD rips would be the best starting point? (At least for season 1).

Zion.

While I applaud your efforts on the whole, in a side-by-side comparison with the EditDroid version the G-force cartoon loses quite a lot of the linework due to the heavy DNR. Even with the EditDroid’s serious aliasing (source related), I feel it is the better option.

Looking forward to seeing your future efforts with this project.

Regards,
Fritz

Gorramnerd said:

Darth Lucas said:

Hobbitjedi said:

GeckoTH said:

Man, I love seeing all these covers that have been created – really fantastic work all around!

Does anyone happen to have a link to this set of covers made by Video Collector that they’d be willing to send me?

I tried PM’ing him a while ago, so far no dice.
Oh, and if you happen to have the Despecialized variants he made for the OT, that’d be a bonus!

Same for me please!
Thanks!

Video Collector has made it pretty clear he doesn’t want people distributing them on their own. I know it can be annoying having to wait, but be patient, sometimes people take a couple days to reply on here, but Video Collector has been pretty good about replying in my experience.

I’ve been waiting patiently for nearly a month. I think it’s fair to try to find them here.

Sorry guys. After the new forum software was implemented I plain didn’t realize I had PMs waiting. (That speech bubble thing up there ain’t exactly intuitive.) I also had to upload several of my covers to a new server before sending out links so…

Anyway, I thank you all for respecting my wishes to not take on any distribution of your own. All courteous messages will receive a response eventually.

And please specify which cover set you want when you message me. I can’t enter into a back-and-forth with everyone who just asks for “those Star Wars covers”.

JayArgonaut said:
Thank you! That’s more than adequate. I always enjoy seeing rare/curious stuff like this. 😃

Just a thought but it might be worth sending that image to Star Wars on Video so they can update the AOTC VHS category. http://swonvideo.com/vhs/vhsforside.htm

Thanks for the shout-out, but for the moment my site is for displaying items in my personal collection only.
http://swonvideo.com/
In the future it may change into something which catalogues all items in existence, regardless of whether I own them or not, but I have enough trouble updating as it is 😃

jimbotron235 said:

I edited this once..... never again. :D

Is this an extended cut like my Quest for Coherence cut?

The Quest for Coherence disc is an awesome accomplishment. I have seen the original film so many times it was quite a revelation to see the deleted material put back in its proper place. In addition to the International Cut restoration Booshman has done here, this is the final word on Superman IV.

Just downloaded Booshman's International cut preservation from the 'Spleen.

Excellent work on integrating the LD footage into the cut! There's no mistaking it for the HD footage surrounding it, but I don't think theres more that could be done.

The colour-correction and the isolated score were a welcome bonus too.

Thanks for doing this.

I've just compared Satanika's files to the ones I have.

We both have the film split into two AVIs which fit on a CD-R. They both have the same resolution and frame rate.

When comparing the two versions side by side, Satanika's is quite a bit sharper. Satanika's version seems to have better compression with less macroblocking too.

The files are split differently, but cut off the end credits in the same place.

These are obviously different encodes from the same source.

Here are a few screengrabs. Mine top, Satanika's bottom:

The very last frame of both sources:

I don't know, I just don't know.

Apart from the different cropping and extreme contrast difference, I see no changes.

Every element seems to be in exactly the same place, even the windows in the foreground. I believe things just appear to shift because of the extremely heightened contrasts in the HDTV shot blowing out the edges of the elements.

That one shadow difference along the bottom is the only thing I can't account for.

towne32 said:

Looks decent! Is it... available anywhere?

So the audio is english, are there hard russian subs over it?

AFAIK its no longer "out there". I just hung onto it as bootlegs have a certain historical significance and I try to keep them for posterity. I'm sure one of the other pack rats on here will have the full DVD files stored away somewhere. None, I'm looking at you :-)

There are no russian subs, but I don't know if this was originally dubbed in Russian and just had its audio replaced from a different source.

The end credits are all English too.

Here's the final addition to the "White Set", a cover for the bonus discs from the Blu-ray set.
PM me for copies.

I have this as a two-part .avi file. 640x272 resolution, PAL.

Here are a few random screens. It's dark, but was pretty good for its time. Audio is good as well.

I assume the French DVD from 2008 has the untouched credits. Worth looking into?

La Flute à six schtroumpfs

GoboFraggle1983 said:

What about the audio on the 35mm print? Does it have the other version I mentioned with Johan being called "Johan" instead of "John" and Papa Smurf's deep voice?

 Good question. Perhaps you can message the eBay seller and ask?

Okay, I stand corrected on the aspect ratio of the recent DVD "restoration". My bootleg was indeed cropped instead of opened up like I thought.

I made a few comparisons with the 35mm print available on eBay, and even though the new DVD's framing is a bit tight here and there, it seems to be accurate to the hardmatted print. 

I also found that the UK and Swedish DVDs were from identical masters. The 2011 DVD is letterboxed widescreen, with hard mattes top and bottom, unbelievable!

--------------------------------------------------

Here are the comparisons: 35mm first, 2011 DVD, and my bootleg from the US VHS.

The title sequence is very different, as you can see.

#2

Some of these don't have a 35mm equivalent, but here you can see how tight the DVD is on the bottom compared to the US VHS.

#3

#4

#5

#6

In this set you can see the bottom of the feet being cut off in both the DVD and the VHS, and how much image detail is hidden in the dark areas of the contrast boosted DVD "restoration".

#7

Too bad we don't have a 35mm frame to compare, but as you can see the UK (and Swedish) DVD resorts to more damaged source material for the English credits. I suspect the French DVD has proper French credits with no generational imagequality loss.

The credits are different between the UK DVD and the US VHS too.

Fantastic news! Never thought I'd see the day!

Hat's off. Donation sent.

I'd love to hear more details about your sources and how you combined them.

Wasn't the UK DVD awkwardly cropped top/bottom to make it 1.78 widescreen? Maybe I'm misremembering? (They used the same master for a Blu-ray release.)

I have a straight bootleg of the US version I bought off eBay back in 2004, which is fullscreen. Obviously copied from VHS, but still very watchable.

I also have a Swedish release which is 1.66:1 widescreen, but not anamorphically enhanced.

Hi JF.

I'm certainly interested in seeing these. If you can manage an upload to the 'Spleen I would grab them in a heartbeat. You can never have too much 'Zilla.

Thanks.

Here's one I did for the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special. This is a supplemental cover to my previous "White set".

As you can well imagine, artwork for this programme is limited. What I found was either too low quality or just too drab. Other cover designers have used images of the matte paintings or just a still from the show, but I needed something to sit well with the painted artwork I used on the other covers in the set.

The only available "official" artwork for the Holiday Special is the print ad used at the time of the original airings. Unfortunately it is in black & white and only available as a murky print (see below). I ended up recreating it from scratch in colour with approximate stills I could find. I know someone else already attempted this, but I found the quality and workmanship lacking for my purposes. If I wasn't tied to keeping the artwork consistent with the other covers in the set I would have gone a different route, but I felt I needed to adhere to the original print ad as closely as possible.

To approximate the look of painted artwork I had to manipulate the images quite a bit. First, I boosted the colours significantly and smoothed out gradients and details, then I applied a Dry Brush filter to all the elements. At varying settings this gives them a somewhat simplified, painterly look, and somewhat averages out the different quality of the source images but it's still a far way off from being seamless. In hindsight I wish I researched appropriate Photoshop filters to recreate a more painterly look. All tips appreciated.

I pimped the final composite by applying a Radial Zoom blur to varying degrees across the image, and added a nebulous star cloud to the background which adds a bit of life to the otherwise stale composition.

It's not often I create artwork from scratch like this, but in this case there was just no way around it.

PM me for downloads.

Good initiative, Andrea.

I have a separate page for laserdiscs om my Star Wars on Video site, too.

The link is in my signature.

dark_jedi said:

It is but I ended up not finding the files I got and had to buy the DVD to include it.

What about the straight DVD-rip I sent you in April last year? (Along with the making of Robocop). I took some comfort in believing I had contributed to this project even though I couldn't do the covers.

Anyway, congratulations on finishing another great project.