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cubebox

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8-Dec-2003
Last activity
1-Feb-2005
Posts
48

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Post
#83851
Topic
Would KoToR work as a movie?
Time
Hell yea, that's the ONLY SW game that would work as a film.

I can't imagine Kyle Katarn as a real character, it's so shalow, or any of those
characters. But KOTOR is full of realistic characters.

Well the story can be a bit chessy here and there, but the ship, and the characters
could be a great basis for some adventures on film. And it's a great time to explore
4000 years is a lot of time.

Post
#83240
Topic
a question for DVD experts
Time
I'm rather new to DVD playback technology, and I have a question or two:

I've made a backup of an entire DVD, so now I can play it from the disk.
First time I watched the film was directly from the DVD, and it was ok,
but when I copied everything to hard disk, I noticed that one of the VOB's
of the main movie is skipping, and I checked the same VOB on the original disk,
and it skipps there too.

It's kind of strange though because the timer shows linear progress and the seconds
just go on even though the image and sound are returning.

My question would be this:
1.Why does my player (powerDVD) play smooth in the regular playback and skipps
on the VOB files of the SAME footage?

2. Since there is no trouble when I am playing it as a full DVD from hard disk, should I
keep this rip, or try and find some undamaged copy of the same film?
(I'n other words, will this damaged VOB cause me any trouble on different systems in
the future?)
Post
#83239
Topic
'Anatomy of a Dewback' videos
Time
Ifve tried Offline explorer, but it seems SW.com forbits it.

but I did make some compromise with QT pro...the save function doesn't work, but
I didn't even see that there was an export function.
Now this is sort of rerecording rather than copying of the file. You play the file and set to
export at the same time. The file plays out and compresses the video in the same time.
It won't record audio, but I can record it myself and dub it in the video file.
It works like that.
Post
#83149
Topic
'Anatomy of a Dewback' videos
Time
Anyway, I have pro now.

And I tried to save it as a file, but it just saves it as a source.
The file is about 900Kb and it's not real footage, just a link, and it starts streaming.
Am I missing something?

I mean if this is it, then I could have done this without QT pro, just
copy the file from the temp folder and there you have it.
I thought it was supose to really save the file itself.
Post
#82337
Topic
Thought on de-SE'ing the DVD
Time
Ok so what does the cost of one of these IB print's have to do with today's DVDs?

In 1997 the new master positive was made using those technicolor prints as a reference,
and the HD video master was allso corrected the same way. So they allready had
a digital reference. Therefore, in creating these new HD masters for the DVD's, they
didn't have to use the technicolor prints anymore. If they wanted to check for the
color balance, all they had to do is look at the old SE HD master.
The technicolor prints had nothing to do with the new DVD's.


By the way that article is a bit misleading.
The faded colors were not restored for the 1997 release. You can't restore faded colors
in the conventional restoration process.
The color were restored only in the video and TV
release. The 1997 SE prints were made from faded negatives. What Lucas relied on
was the higher saturation and contrast of the new intermediate film stock made in 90's.
This new filmstock compensated a bit for the faded colors. But the negative itself is
as faded now as it was in 1996 before the restoration.

Post
#82315
Topic
Thought on de-SE'ing the DVD
Time
Originally posted by: tellan
came across something when viewing the 2004 SE DVD extras last night that we may find useful.

hint. watch the 1997 re-release trailer. it's been sharpened up but the color values haven't been messed with.

ie, we can use it as a comparison shot to establish color values on the SE DVD to get it back to how it should be. the 1997 trailer has no blue caste to it at all.



This is what my point was all about.
Rather than say "haven't been messed with" you should say "have been messed the same way as before"
Film images are ALWAYS messed with one way or another.
Post
#82313
Topic
Thought on de-SE'ing the DVD
Time
Originally posted by: Laserman
Of course colour is a subjective process, but you can tell when it is just plain wrong also.

If people's faces are bright orange, and white walls are leaning towards blue then you know the process has gone off the rails. As for setting the greyscales/gamma then that is totally subjective - In theory you want all levels of grey clearly visible, but a creative decision might be to darken up the shadow areas for 'mood' and so lose detail in the shadows that was there on the original film.
Also, a CRT cannot display the same colour space as film, so they are radically different.



True to life colors are not always a good measure either.
The balance is not always intended to be towards white. (remember matrix)
Take hoth blizzard scenes for example, they are blueish, yet it was shot in
day where there is enough light.
They couldn't possibly shoot it with 100ISO in the early evening in the middle of a storm.
There just isn't enough light in artic storm conditions to shoot it in the evening. It had to be
white day light to get enough exposure.


Post
#82310
Topic
.: Moth3r's PAL DVD project :.
Time
The aspect ratio of panavision anamorphic is actually wider than 2.35:1
The 2.35 number became so popular because it was an atempt to standardize the
anamorphic format (different anamorphic systems have sligtly different ratios), so it
was taken as the ratio of the crop used in cinemas and in DVD transfers.
Cinema projectors allso crop the image a bit with masks.

The image is usually cropped to hide splices if they appear too obvious in the negative.
It allso reduces the "vignette" effect.

I have a scan of the original negative from Alien (1979, panavision gold, same system as SW) right here,
and I have measured the ratio of the original image.
The left edge of the frame (which is reserved for soundtrack) has a slight fade to black rather than
a clear black edge. The actuall image details are visible up to 2.44:1 (after that it is all black, reserved for soundtrack)
But if you cut out the soft fade-to-black edge area (and you have to cut it for transfers) you end up with
2.39:1 which is the real aspect ratio for panavision anamorphic systems.










Post
#82209
Topic
Thought on de-SE'ing the DVD
Time
I have closely examined the screenshots from both versions (SE and 2004 DVD).
All the little textural variations of the glow "field" are identical, it is the same glow as it was in SE.
The original glow was allso greenish, but with a lot less saturation and more leaning to cyan.
I believe that they corrected the sabre locally by boosting its saturation and correcting it to a more pure green.
But I am sure that it was not a newly repainted glow, it's the same old glow, but with a new
color.

Anyway, it has nothing to do with scanning or whatever, the cyan-green glow was there from the begining,
it was just not as pure as now.
Post
#82193
Topic
Thought on de-SE'ing the DVD
Time
Thanks for the grammar corrections, English is not my local language...

Anyway, to clear the things a bit more. This is a very popular analogy:
Take your SLR film camera, shoot the same subject under sam light several times
using different exposure setting on the camera, each time increasing the exposure by one stop
(open the iris by one stop). Give it to the lab, they will process the negative and
make prints out of each of these frames. All the prints are going to be identical in
sense of exposure. The minilab printer meters avarages every exposure on the paper.

The negative has a very wide range of tones, and it is up to filmmaker to decide
what smaller range is he going to extract out of the negative for his prints.

For example, you shoot a scene of a man in a room filled with daylight comming through the windows.
The difference between the shadowy interior and a sunshine lit exterior is HUGE.
You are exposing for the interior details.
The negative will record the interior details as well the exterior seen through the window.
So if you print that scene to print film for projection at normal printer setting, you will
get the image as you exposed it: white windows with almost no detail, and well exposed interior
showing normal colors.
But if you set the printer to a different setting, you can have a black interior with no detail,
and a normaly exposed exterior showing the scene outside the window with normal colors.

So basicly , you could say that you can "squese" two normal (viewing contrast) images into
one image on the negative. The range is that big.
In other words, the original negative holds a LOT of brighter tones than the brightest tone
on the cinema print (pure white).

That is the main reason for all the lightsabre troubles in the new DVD's. Some people think
that they recolored the cores so that they are pink rather than white now.
They didn't, they just used a different "printer setting" for the original image.
The pure white you see on the screen is not the brightest color in the negative.
So a film transfer is just a matter of chosing your white point and your black point in
this greater range.

The new DVD's are "printed down" a bit, the white point has been moved a lot higher,and
because of that you can see a lot more detail in the white corridors, bright sabres and other
bright tones that you did on previous transfers. This is basicly a good thing because
you can always go from higher dynamic range to lower (more punchy blown out highlights) by
making your own adjustments, but you can't go the other way around.
You can't retrieve a blown out highlight from a video file.

I think people expect the original "elements" (as they put it in articles) to be like some sort of
slides that you can look at on a lightable and see the "right" color balance and contrast.
But if you broke in the Lucasfilm vault, you would find unusable orange, ultra low contrast
images that require color timing and show nothing about the original color balance.

So what I was really trying to say is that people who are trying to restore the trilogy to its original
look need to be more specific about what do they consider to be "original" color and contrast.


Here is a perfect example:
If you took the original camera negatives of the scenes in Jabbas palace or sandcrawler interior
and scan them on a film scanner, you would not get what you see in cinema or video transfers.
Instead you would see a brightly lit scene where there were hardly any deep shadows.
All those sets were lit very brightly (it was 100ISO film for ANH and ESB) with strong lights,
and exposed as that. The images were then darkened in post production in the stage of color timing.
It was Lucas's creative decision. The Jabba's palace looks dark in the preprint copies, and in the prints.
But it is bright in the originals. Film is exposed for shadows usually, so what you see as shadows
in the print were actually normal mid tones on the set and in the originals.

So the question of what is original is quite a phylosophical issue.






Post
#82186
Topic
Thought on de-SE'ing the DVD
Time
About color correction...

Every video transfer get's its own color timing, every newly printed interpositive get's its own color timing,
so what do you consider the original color timing then?

Every time you run the film through telecine machine,
you have to color correct the video data because film images are not really "compatible" with video,
so you need serious contrast corrections and color corrections. And there has to be someone
there to supervise the transfer, I supose Lucas was there every time (I don't think he would let anyone else
fine tune his films) and he made corrections.

The thing is that the raw interpositives have an orange low con image, and to view them you have
to correct them. Telecine machines have a default way of correcting this, and sort of emulating
print film contrast. But still there are numerous ways of rendering this raw footage.
There are 4 "flavours" for cinema print film today (2 Kodak, 1 Fuji, 1 AGFA) , each one has it's own
contrast, color etc. Therefore, not even direct one-light prints from a negative are objective.
And there have been a lot of print films in history, each with different look to it.
And as for video transfers, things are even more relative and subjective.

There IS NO "original" color balance and exposure setting.
The negative has over 10 stops of exposure, if you show all 10 you end up with a very very low contrast washed out image,
you can choose how many stops to show, and which stops to show.
The negative has an orange mask, and all the colors are way off to cyan-ish, a cyan-blueish nightmare to be exact.
So chose your color balance because the original color balance is unwatchable.
There IS NO standard way of rendering this raw footage. Each print film has it's own
way, and each telecine transfer is a matter of choice and taste.

I guess if you consider the original color balance and contrast, that which was in the
prints in 1977, then you are in trouble because where will you find a non-faded SW
print today, or a SW print at all. The only surviving evidence of original color timing today
are a few Technicolor prints made in 1977, Lucas has one, Gary Kurtz had one etc.
These never fade and are a good color timing reference.

But video transfers are very subjective by nature, and never show what is
on film really. video transfers are "subjective interpretations of film images" so to speak.

All you can do really is correct the images on your own taste, because there is no
way that you can see the original timing today.
Post
#81338
Topic
about these latest versions...
Time
It's kind of vierd now that all the alternations that have been done have been done only
on the video master. So if he wanted to complete his film, why didn't he did it in film resolution
(at least 2K) and keep the files as a digital archival copy, or record it to a new clean negative.
because now if there are any future cinematic releases, they'll have to do it again.
Rerender the Jabba, repaint all the stuff they did. It's silly.

If this is the final edition of SW (as SW has said himself), then why do it in HD?
Or worse, does he actually consider this HD data as his new "original"?
That would be dumbing down beautifull images to HD data. I guess the opticals are
not very glorious, but there are a lot of clean nonFX images that deserve better
than just HD resolution.
Post
#81283
Topic
looking for specific BTS images...
Time
I was wondering if anyone knows of any behind the scenes images showing the sets of the interior of sandcrawler (with all the droids and junk and stuff)
either at the time of shooting some shot, or at preparation, set building, anything, just as long as it shows that specific set.
So if you know some links, or you have it on your disk, and don't mind private sharing, post here and let me know.

thank you