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?