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.: The XØ Project - Laserdisc on Steroids :. (SEE FIRST POST FOR UPDATES) (* unfinished project *) — Page 45

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Originally posted by: netgurucr
Zion, MeBeJedi, and Laserman: I donated a good amount of money to this proyect with the hope that something great would be created from it. All you guys have given Me and the rest of the Fans here are lame excuses. I am very disappointed in you! Please return my money to my PayPal account asap! I now wish to use that $$ in something real and truthful.

You lose at life.
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Originally posted by: kaine23
Originally posted by: netgurucr
Zion, MeBeJedi, and Laserman: I donated a good amount of money to this proyect with the hope that something great would be created from it. All you guys have given Me and the rest of the Fans here are lame excuses. I am very disappointed in you! Please return my money to my PayPal account asap! I now wish to use that $$ in something real and truthful.

You loose at life.

I think you meant to say "lose" not "loose"....LOL

I love everybody. Lets all smoke some reefer and chill. Hug and kisses for everybody.

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Originally posted by: netgurucr
Zion, MeBeJedi, and Laserman: I donated a good amount of money to this proyect with the hope that something great would be created from it. All you guys have given Me and the rest of the Fans here are lame excuses. I am very disappointed in you! Please return my money to my PayPal account asap! I now wish to use that $$ in something real and truthful.


Such as the GOUT?

Okay, how bout they refund your money so YOU and YOU ALONE can create a project BETTER than what the X0 will be?

Sounds like a good deal to me, bring it on... idiot....

Seriously what did you expect? That you give them "a good amount of money" and suddenly overnight they finish their work? These kind souls have lives too. It's not like they're devoting 24/7 to the project.

Going thru the films frame by frame takes time. Patience is a virtue you obviously don't have.
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Originally posted by: starwarsfan8376
Originally posted by: netgurucr
Zion, MeBeJedi, and Laserman: I donated a good amount of money to this proyect with the hope that something great would be created from it. All you guys have given Me and the rest of the Fans here are lame excuses. I am very disappointed in you! Please return my money to my PayPal account asap! I now wish to use that $$ in something real and truthful.


Such as the GOUT?

Okay, how bout they refund your money so YOU and YOU ALONE can create a project BETTER than what the X0 will be?

Sounds like a good deal to me, bring it on... idiot....

Seriously what did you expect? That you give them "a good amount of money" and suddenly overnight they finish their work? These kind souls have lives too. It's not like they're devoting 24/7 to the project.

Going thru the films frame by frame takes time. Patience is a virtue you obviously don't have.



I agree, Im very disapointed someone has this attitude towards the X0 team, they have made a lot of sacrifices to take on this project, and it is upto them how long they take........
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Originally posted by: netgurucr
Zion, MeBeJedi, and Laserman: I donated a good amount of money to this proyect with the hope that something great would be created from it.

So... how much did you donate???

Fez: I am so excited about Star Whores.
Hyde: Fezzy, man, it's Star Wars.
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I think it was like 10 yip, or maybe 5 pesos, or maybe 50 rubles......

I love everybody. Lets all smoke some reefer and chill. Hug and kisses for everybody.

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The people netgurucr should be demanding a refund from are the fine folks at LFL, who were happy to take money offa fans in 2004, 2005, and now 2006 for the same lame product, and who still haven't done anything better on the OUT than their 11-year-old LD transfer.

At least the X0 Project is doing good work, however slowly.
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What an outrageous post. The X0 team is doing super high quality work on the whole trilogy, and that takes time. They are putting a lot of effort into this, it's not easy to achieve the level of quality and accuracy they are going to have. X0 team, pay no attention to stupidity like this. Anyone with any sense in their head knows you guys are doing a great job and the end result will be fantastic.

The Star Wars trilogy. There can be only one.

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I wrote some e-mail to the Canadian Cancer Society today, asking for my donations back. Those bastards have been working on a cure for how long? All I hear from them are lame excuses. I now wish to use the $$ I donated in something real and truthful.
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Jeez Mr K, your posts always crack me up

I can understand that people get somewhat frustrated with the wait from time to time, but I can promise you that we are ten times as frustrated with it. I really hoped it would be done by now and I could sit back and watch it rather than still be working on it, but a lot has happened this year that ate up a lot of time that could otherwise have been spent on the project. The tyranny of distance also is a factor, if the four of us were in the same town (or even the same continent) things would go much faster.

I know it doesn't look like much is happening, so at the risk of turning this thread into a blog, I thought it would be good to give everyone a heads up!
This is a quick rundown of what has been going on behind the scenes with the project in roughly the past month.

We purchased the PAL and NTSC GOUT and took a good look at it. It was obvious that the DVNR problems were all still there.
A high quality capture of the SC was going to be required to fill in any scenes destroyed by DVNR in our X0 capture (same scenes that are crappy in the GOUT are crappy in the X0 capture of the definitive LDs).
So I posted my PDI card over to our 4th Member (He who shall not be named) where the LD player is, and we purchased a second set of the SC laserdiscs so that we could TooT the capture to save cleanup time and improve the picture etc.
It takes about 2 weeks for the card to get there from Australia. Zion posted the Colourimeter over as well to make sure the capture system was calibrated correctly.
Then we did a bunch of tests using the Video Essentials laserdisc to calibrate and get the best capture we could. A couple of days were taken up getting the capture ready to go and comparing the PDI to a newer card - but we ended up using the PDI again.
Doing the captures is no small undertaking when each capture is over 80GB, and we had a few hiccups getting it all to work, but got there in the end.
The LDs were then captured for ANH, and checked for dropped frames and any other problems. It was then cut into segments, aligned and then TooTed and burned to a stack of DVD-Rs.

They were then posted to Zion, who went through and IVTCd the capture to get it back to 24fps which took a while because of cadence changes etc. and then timecoded it for reference, then joined it all into one file.
Zion then burned the result to DVD-Rs again to post the capture back to me.
In the meantime he extracted a couple of scenes for me to get started on and I downloaded them and started working on noise reduction and getting them ready for the BlackMagic system, and see if we could make them fit in seamlessly with the X0 definitive capture.
I spent probably about 40 hours or so on the two scenes getting them set up, colour matching, warping and aligning and trying different methods so that when the discs arrived I would be ready to go. We posted images back and forth to each other for critiquing and I kept making adjustments accordingly.
I drafted two articles about noise reduction and the BlackMagic system and Zion went about making them presentable and capturing images to use for them etc. We all proofread the articles and made a ton of changes, there is still a little bit of editing to do on those.
Zion also did some astounding new work on the menus for the disc and we went through a lot of changes for them as well. It isn't like anything I had seen before - very very cool.
In downtime or when I got sick of staring at my nest of shake noodles I got on the site and answered as many questions as I could, and for the first time really read some of the fan edit threads to see what was happening there and see if there were any developments that might be useful for us, as well as join the discussion on some of the edits.

Mebejedi was away for most of the month, so he had a well earned break from this stuff.

So in the past 30 days or so we effectively did nearly all of what (for example) Cowclops did in putting together a set from laserdisc, as well as prepping the BM system for the SC footage, writing two articles, and spending a fortune on international postage (which is what the donations go towards).

In the midst of this Zion had to find somewhere to live and moved house, I had to spend a week up in Sydney for tests (it is a 4 -5 hour drive from my house to the hospital, so it eats up a lot of time each time I have to go), "Voldemort" was away for two weeks after doing the capture, and MBJ was away for most of the month.
Still, it was a fairly productive month even with the disruptions, but we didn't get as much done as I would have liked.

Unfortunately we can't do this for a living, so available hours each week are limited.
Three out of the four Members are married, so our inconsiderate families often want some of our time that we could be spending doing this
Family life eats up scads of time.
If I was single and living in my parents' basement we could probably knock the whole project over in 3 months.
Just as an example I was expecting to get a ton of work done today but we woke this morning one to find one of our pipes broken and the water destroyed our vanity unit, so I spent from 9am till 8pm or so replacing plumbing in the house. (We are too far from the nearest town to call a plumber).
No big deal, but its the sort of thing that happens and throws the project out for another day.
During the week I had Kiddie school stuff to attend to and all the usual family stuff to do. That pretty much leaves the occasional weekend day and the middle of the night to work on this stuff after the rest of the family has gone to sleep. That is when most of the work happens, between about 11pm and 4am.
It isn't unusual for time allocated to be working on this to be stolen by a family emergency or having to fix something or get the car registered yadda yadda yadda, but if you asked anyone in my family they would say "You're always working on that bloody Star Wars thing - isn't it finished yet?"

So that is pretty much what has happened in the last month - we have been toying with the idea of a blog or similar for the site so you guys can see a bit more what we are up to, as prepping articles for the site takes a very long time.
Wadda you think, good idea/bad idea?
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Thank you for the update Laserman...
I humbly think a blog is a wonderful idea. I am also relieved to hear that MeBeJedi is ok and is just taking a break....it sounds like then that the work MeBeJedi was doing is complete and the footage has been handed over to you? Would that be a fair assumtion?

I love everybody. Lets all smoke some reefer and chill. Hug and kisses for everybody.

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Originally posted by: Laserman
So that is pretty much what has happened in the last month - we have been toying with the idea of a blog or similar for the site so you guys can see a bit more what we are up to, as prepping articles for the site takes a very long time.
Wadda you think, good idea/bad idea?


I don’t have much weight around here, but after such a good explanation I wouldn’t want you guys to take away more time that could be used editing the movie rather than keeping us at bay. Unless you would enjoy the blog you could do it, but don’t take more time up working on nonessential stuff, after your post I would hope anyone would agree time is hard to come by for you guys so use it wisely. So in conclusion...Mind what you have learned save you it can

"The Empire can't stop us now..now its our turn" -Luke-

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I agree with GhostAlpha26, it's much better to spend the time available finishing the movies than typing up stuff about it. This last post gave a very good update for now. Better to get A New Hope done first, then you guys can put those articles and such up on the site. Then onto The Empire Strikes Back.

The Star Wars trilogy. There can be only one.

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Ghost & Dune: Didn't you read what Laserman said? He said that a blog would actually take LESS time than posting updates here.....

I love everybody. Lets all smoke some reefer and chill. Hug and kisses for everybody.

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Thanks for the great update Laserman. I love reading about the nitty gritty details.

I came across this earlier today, from maxunderground.com:

" Tools | Video enhancement - at a price
As reported earlier, MotionDSP's software reconstructs "high-resolution" video from low-resolution footage. The company has recently announced its first offering derived from this technology: "Ikena systems capable of real-time processing of input video start at $30,000". Read the whole PR for more (at) http://www.motiondsp.com/2006_10_30_Release.html"

Early days for the technology, and a very prohibitve price tag, but though you guys might be interested.
It reminded me of your starfield recovery process, and seems like a logical progression from that PhotoAcuteStudio 'increased resolution through multiple-images' software, which I think got mentioned around the time the 'Black Magic' process was first talked about.

The rest of the motiondsp site is worth a look for the potential of the technology. Makes me itch to see what it could do with Star Wars footage.
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Originally posted by: vbangle
Ghost & Dune: Didn't you read what Laserman said? He said that a blog would actually take LESS time than posting updates here.....

Originally posted by: Laserman
we have been toying with the idea of a blog or similar for the site so you guys can see a bit more what we are up to, as prepping articles for the site takes a very long time.


I thought they were talking about the main X0 site, not posting here on originaltrilogy.

To me updates don’t really matter, yeah it shows progress but even Laserman said he’d much rather be watching it then still doing what he’s doing and doing any nonessential side work , blog, updates is not getting to the ultimate goal of enjoying the movie for their selves and the fans to watch.

"The Empire can't stop us now..now its our turn" -Luke-

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Originally posted by: Zion
Good summary Laserman. You forgot the part though where I synced up the SC to the TC print and found it has about 100 less frames than the DC and 9 telecine cadence changes.


I have trouble keeping track of all the voodoo that you do.

So that is about 4 seconds less footage than the definitive.

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Well, as long as those 4 seconds don't come from the few places where the SC footage will be substituted for the DC, then it's not a problem.

The Star Wars trilogy. There can be only one.

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That motiondsp stuff is interesting, our blackmagic system does almost exactly the same thing, but add the capability to use multiple sources as part of the process.

I didn't think anyone else was working on this type of image recovery, as its application (I thought) would be so limited - but I hadn't thought of the 'mobile video' market.
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My gut reaction to netgurucr's post is that they are trolling, or at best a maladjusted teenager, and the X0 shouldn't even consider replying to comments like that.

as to Laserman's suggestion of a blog, yes only because it would hopefully reduce the amount of time the team has to spend on informing those lucky enough to be benefitting from the generosity of the X0 project (assuming the team still feels they want to do this).
In fact I think it should only be done if the team gets the same satisfaction from it that people with blogs or diaries do, i.e. never because someone is whining about the project's progress.

Thanks again X0 for your painstaking efforts and above all, your time
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I thought the blog might be interesting, and may turn out not to be too much effort - won't know unless we try it I guess.
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Originally posted by: Karyudo
I wrote some e-mail to the Canadian Cancer Society today, asking for my donations back. Those bastards have been working on a cure for how long? All I hear from them are lame excuses. I now wish to use the $$ I donated in something real and truthful.


Ha ha ha! Awesome.

http://img143.imageshack.us/img143/1113/userbar381851ln2.gif
http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/8653/userbar381853dp6.gif
Super Mario Bros. - The Wicked Star Story
"Ah, the proverbial sad sack with a wasted wish."
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I suggest that when the Star Wars movies are on Cinemax this month in HD that members of the X0 team in the U.S. record these in the highest quality possible (with no loss of video quality), as having even the 2004 even-more-SE version of the trilogy in a permanent HD backup form could prove very useful down the road. Because who knows what further changes they will make in the 30th anniversary set? If you could then burn each of the movies onto a Blu-Ray BD-R (writeable) disk, that would provide a safe backup that is not subject to hard drive crashes and such.

Also, anyone who would like to have The Phantom Menace in HD without the expected changes that will be made for the 30th anniversary set, this might be the only chance to get it in HD like that. Since we're not sure if when a HD DVD version is released if it will have the option of watching The Phantom Menace without the 30th anniversary set changes. The same applies to Episodes II and III. So best to have full-quality backups of all 6 movies in HD on Blu-Ray BD-R disks, where they will be safe permanently.

The Star Wars trilogy. There can be only one.