As ocp quoted me saying (aw shucks), from all that we can gather at this point (1 press release and a couple sentences in interviews) it looks like we are going to get pretty much the same print used in the 93 DC/Faces releases, the print we (up until 3 days ago) considered to be the absolute best possible transfer of the OOT we would ever get to see. This was the transfer that everyone was using for their preservation projects. So, in essence, the best we can do to preserve the OOT is:
UP UNTIL NOW: Buy best LaserDisc player one can afford and mod it if neccessary (X0), buy the best analogue video capture card one can afford, capture it to lossless AVI and then work from this as our RAW Master. Time to do all this and messing around tweaking players and capture cards = a LONG TIME (even longer depending on how obsessive you are in getting the best possible capture, the X0 team have done several captures already!) Cost = a HELL of a lot of money, most people here couldn't even begin to afford!
FROM SEPTEMBER ONWARDS: Buy new OFFICIAL OOT Discs, rip them onto our computers (DVD Decrypter), convert the MPEG2 files to lossless AVI (VirtualDubMod and huffyuv) and then work from this as our RAW Master. Time to do all this = probably a day, tops. Cost = Price of the DVD's.
SO, bearing in mind I'm generally a very positive chap, I'm hoping (and it sounds like) that what we get in September is a nice simple straight transfer to DVD of the same stock they used for the DC/Faces LaserDiscs (from what we are lead to believe with comments like "state of the art circa '93 quality", this sounds like what we are gonna get, no messing with anything, just straight from film to DVD... even they can't mess that up, SURELY!) For a fraction of the cost/time we are having to deal with currently, we get a MUCH BETTER RAW PRINT TO WORK WITH! Blatantly people are gonna see ways to improve it ala the exhaustive frame-by-frame clean up work of the X0 and colour enhancement etc, then those wanting to go beyond preservation into digital remastering/enhancement, get rid of garbage mattes, fx glitches, compositing shoddiness etc can do that with their projects.
Also, as an aside, sounds like the OOT DVD's are gonna have a nice high bit rate as they won't be coming with extras or anything on the DVD's with them, so hopefully we won't have to deal with much/any MPEG2 compression artifacts when we convert them to uncompressed AVI to start editing them. Speculation atm, but that's the way it sounds from the press release.
AS far as I'm concerned (all things happening as I have described) this is the best news we could have hoped for! There is no way LFL were gonna spend loads of time remastering this print just so they can slap it on as bonus feature in the new boxset, so instead, they are gonna just give us the best raw capture we could ever hope for of the source we have been working with for the last few years, so we can then go on to remaster/add all the extra soundtracks to it ourselves
Roll on September and the beginning of a whole wave of "LaserDisc Is Dead" projects
Exciting times!ps ocpmovie: I'd say lay off posting things about this in the X0 thread, I'm sure you mean well and you're not really wishing to cause trouble, but I think you're just gonna piss people off needlessly, and I'm sure all those guys will be observing threads like this. Also (and completely no disrespect to those guys and their impressive skills) the only thing which had them before as the bastions of the OOT effort was their beautiful RAW capture, from September hopefully that will be rendered moot, and then anyone with the same dedication and willingness and skill to clean/remaster the OOT can do so too! Things here have basically got to the point where everyone was only interested in what the X0 team were doing, from september, I'm hoping, loads more cleanup/remastering efforts will begin and things here will be more exciting than ever! Everyone will be given the same opportunity to work on this and produce the best possible results, regardless of financial support or equipment resources, how beautiful is that! Of course if people want to still continue to create their own definitive take on the best LaserDisc conversion that is possible with this technology, purely for their own satisfaction and amusement, then sure, go ahead and do it, no one can criticise that, please yourself first and if others love what you're doing then that's a bonus. Personally, my interest will be squarely centred on what people can achieve with using this new wave of LID preservation.
Or maybe I'm just being too optimistic
meh, keeps me happy