Horizon - How To Film The Impossible - Remastered (Released) — Page 2

Wow, this was so incredibly cool! Thank you for preserving this Harmy, I’d never heard of it. It was incredible to see exactly how matte paintings worked (I always wondered how exactly they composited in the live action pieces into this black holes…). And seeing how an optical printer works in such detail was just wonderful. Wonderful. I’ve read about how optical printing worked and had a pretty good idea of the process, but there is just no comparison to actually seeing it demonstrated first hand. What a spectacular treasure trove of information!

I have to know, what was your source for the ESB clips of Luke and Vader dueling? It looks better than any copy I’ve obtained…

Also, not that I’m asking you to do this (you’ve already done so much and I’m eternally grateful for your efforts), but if you were to revisit this doc one more time… I wouldn’t be opposed to a “16x9” version made specifically to conform to today’s tv standards. As in, rather than window boxing the 4x3 material, use the maximum available screen real estate for each image. So the CinemaScope images would be letter boxed but use the full width of the screen; and the academy ratio stuff would be pillarboxed, but use the full height of the screen. That way each image would be as large as it can on today’s standard 16x9 screens without cropping anything. Sure you’d have a shifting aspect ratio, but the doc as is already has that anyway…

But regardless, amazing work as always and THANK YOU for making this available! Easily one of the coolest Sfx docs I’ve ever seen!

Hmm, maybe so. I was watching it in VLC on my iPad so perhaps it wasn’t displaying quite properly. For one, my iPad (like most, or all?)is actually a 4x3 screen when in landscape. So when watching it, the scope shots filled the width of the screen but were letterboxed. The academy ratio shots were windowboxed with black on all four sides and a tiny image.

For my purposes I just zoomed in so the 4x3 image filled the screen and the scope shots were cropped (which probably pretty closely recreated the original viewing experience anyway).

I wasn’t able to get it to play directly from google on my tv, so I don’t know how it actually looks on a 16x9 screen… (speaking of, is there a guide somewhere for converting mp4 to an AVCHD disc compatible file so I can burn a copy of this?)

Duly noted, I should’ve thought about the screen ratio of my iPad before I said anything.

So… Is the source for those clips of Luke and Vader dueling in Cloud City unique? It doesn’t look like the grindhouse or the copy of dreamastered v2 (which is just the grindhouse cleaned up) that I’ve got…? What other 35mm source is out there?

Thanks for the restoration of that Horizon episode, Harmy! As a layman that doesn’t work in special effects or the film industry, it was amazing to see what analog tricks people could do back in the day! Also cool to see the analog origins of terms like matte etc.

I have 3 questions for you:

• was there any reason you used H264 instead of H265/AV1 as a video codec?
• was there any reason you used AAC instead of Opus as an audio codec?
• is it OK if I put your 2 restoration versions and your 5-min intro into a torrent and start seeding it for more people to grab it?

Thanks for the great work again!

Harmy,
Your restoration of How To Film The Impossible is great.
I still have the original pre-DVD DV transfer if you would like a copy and you were thinking about doing a version 2.
Let me know,
babyhum

Harmy said:

That would be great!

PM me and let me know where to send it. It’s quite a large file.

If for any reason somebody’s after a non-Google link for this, I’ve just repackaged it for MySpleen and I’m seeding it now. Included both versions (blurred border and Purist Edition) alongside Harmy’s now-deleted YouTube video, with playlists to put the YouTube video before each version as a nice wee intro.