@hairy_hen: I considered that but unfortunately all shots in the EoD doc have some kind of weird ghosting issue. It may be some interlacing thing but I don't know how to get rid of it.
@WShawn: Actually I'm using a much older version of AE (AE 7.0) and I can't really afford to upgrade. And also, these programs change so much with each new release that I feel like I have to learn to work with them all over again (exactly the reason I'm still using and older version of Photoshop as well). Rotobrush sounds good though.
@Mattman: I don't have it and have never seen it (although I know what it is from reading about it). It could be interesting - from what I gathered, the transfer should be much better than the GOUT.
OMG, I just checked out the roto brush on youtube and it's amazing!!! I'm actually considering an upgrade just for that. And also AE doesn't seem to have changed as much as photoshop has.
@Mattman: I don't have it and have never seen it (although I know what it is from reading about it). It could be interesting - from what I gathered, the transfer should be much better than the GOUT.
I just completed a 720p upscale of "WOW" which I had intended to include with "Hyperspace" set (though that's still up in the air). If you'd like me to upload it somewhere for you, let me know. It's only about 5 minutes long, so it shouldn't be too large of a download.
Great, I just got it from joshdv but only in NTSC DVD res and quite heavily compressed, so an HD upscale would be awesome (assuming that it's from the THX WOW DVD and not a LD transfer). I went through it and there may be some shots which I could use.
THX WOW PM sent.
@hairy_hen: I considered that but unfortunately all shots in the EoD doc have some kind of weird ghosting issue. It may be some interlacing thing but I don't know how to get rid of it.
Are you using the PAL release of EoD? It could be a botched standards conversion. I just checked my NTSC copy and it seems fine...although the pulldown pattern changed with every new film clip, so it would take some time to IVTC.
Now that I think of it, I seem to recall posts on here about EoD on the PAL DVD being field-blended. I recently got hold of the 2004 extras disc off eBay for £1, but haven't had the chance to check it out properly yet. I guess I'll have to now source the NTSC version.
I posted a few images from the WOW! montage in this thread. I think that the original laserdisc master was letterboxed, and that it had been upscaled to anamorphic for the THX Demo Disc DVD. I also don't think that there are any complete shots in the montage. Still, some images might be useful because of the absence of DVNR (the film grain in one of the shots of the Hoth battle is beautiful).
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Thanks for the THX WOW Mattman, it looks awesome.
I do indeed only have the PAL vesion of the EoD doc. Could someone maybe PLEASE get the battle of Yavin clips (and anything else potentially useful you can find) from the NTSC version for me - preferably already upscaled to 720p? They look so much better than the GOUT except for the interlacing in the PAL version (and it's also a definite proof that there are viable materials for a new OOT transfer).
Well, that's a huge disappointment, I just downloaded a trial of AE CS5 and it only works with 64bit computers and there doesn't seem to be any way around it :'-(
Harmy:
I was going to suggest you download the trial version of CS5 or CS 5.5, so I'm sorry to hear that it won't work on your system. We're in the process of upgrading all of our plugins to 64 bit on our Mac Pro systems.
At this point it's hard to tell how much of a time-saver rotobrush would be. There is a bit of a learning curve with it, and I don't know how well it would handle complex scenes. I'm not super-busy with client work at the moment, so if you'd like me to do a rotobrush test on a shot let me know. I could tell you how long it took, and you could compare that to how long it took you to roto the shot by hand.
For what it's worth, After Effects really hasn't changed much over the years. I've been using it since around 1997. You still have a comp window and timeline, the same basic layout and tools. Most of the later iterations are enhancements, not major rewrites.
Keep up the good work.
Shawn
Harmy said:
Could someone maybe PLEASE get the battle of Yavin clips (and anything else potentially useful you can find) from the NTSC version for me - preferably already upscaled to 720p?
More than happy to do so. It'll just take some time because of the constant pulldown changes.
Awesome Mattman, thanks.
And Shawn, I actually found that in many cases the roto brush probably wouldn't work so well anyway becuase even I can't tell where the edge should be, so how some automated system could. But for a few shots like eg. the one with the stormtroopers in the corridor it would probably work really well.
Right, rotobrush isn't a magic bullet. It can help in certain cases (as shown in the online demos) but is useless in others. For those other shots it's just tedious masking and painting.
Shawn
Speaking of rotoscoping, I wasn't very happy with the roto work I did on the forest shot, so I decided to redo it. I think that while it's still not 100% perfect, it's pretty damn close ;-) Check it out here.
Impressive. Most impressive...
It looks fantastic, although the cloud detail below the planet seems less detailed than the GOUT version. Is that intentional?
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Well, I had to do that in order to make it fit with the rest of the image.
Stinky-Dinkins said:
On a completely unrelated note how the fuck do you make these 24p? I noticed when playing back Empire it was flagged as 24p. Do you use some kind of wacky 2:3 pulldown on the interlaced broadcast/DVD/LD sources?
Sorry, I somehow overlooked this before.
I work at 25fps progressive and if some video isn't 25p, I convert it before I use it. I usually use TS Muxer for it, because no reencode is required and it has a remove pulldown function, so I use that when necessary.
And then, when everything is finished, I use TS Muxer again to convert the final output file from 25fps to 23.976fps (which is what ESB is in, not 24p).
This isn't exactly on-topic, but I've always wondered, why is it 23.976 instead of just 24?
To be honest, I don't know, it's something to do with the way old TVs and monitors work I think. Blu-Ray supports true 24fps but there's not much to be gained as the difference is absolutely imperceptible and it's risking compatibility problems, so I just stick to 23.976fps for my projects.
I think the slightly slower rate is because of issues that arose when adding colour to the previous black and white format. It used to be exactly 60 fields per second to synch with the AC electrical frequency, but with colour there was visible interference so they had to make a slight alteration to 59.94 hz in order to keep NTSC colour backwards compatible with black and white sets.
Theoretically, such concerns of analogue television should be largely obsolete, but the resulting 23.976 frame rate for film material is still here to stay because it is so entrenched.
OK, I'm entering the editing and colour correcting stage, while waiting for some clips from the battle of Yavin from Dark_Jedi's project blu. Here is a clip of a quick assembly of the 1st 5 minutes, it isn't final but should be quite close.
Pretty fucking cool, if you ask me.
Harmy said:
Stinky-Dinkins said:
On a completely unrelated note how the fuck do you make these 24p? I noticed when playing back Empire it was flagged as 24p. Do you use some kind of wacky 2:3 pulldown on the interlaced broadcast/DVD/LD sources?
Sorry, I somehow overlooked this before.
I work at 25fps progressive and if some video isn't 25p, I convert it before I use it. I usually use TS Muxer for it, because no reencode is required and it has a remove pulldown function, so I use that when necessary.
And then, when everything is finished, I use TS Muxer again to convert the final output file from 25fps to 23.976fps (which is what ESB is in, not 24p).
Yeah, by 24 I mean 23.976.
If you're working with all (LD, DVD, and broadcast) interlaced sources meant to refresh at 60hz, converting everything to 25p and then to 24p in the final stages, how exactly does this work? Is it able to take the two halves of the interlaced image at every 1/60th of a second and combine the data to make one solid frame? Wouldn't that leave you with it running at 30p?
Are frames dropped?
Stinky-Dinkins said:
Yeah, by 24 I mean 23.976.
If you're working with all (LD, DVD, and broadcast) interlaced sources meant to refresh at 60hz, converting everything to 25p and then to 24p in the final stages, how exactly does this work? Is it able to take the two halves of the interlaced image at every 1/60th of a second and combine the data to make one solid frame? Wouldn't that leave you with it running at 30p?
Are frames dropped?
Frames themselves aren't dropped, but fields are. It's called inverse telecining.
Usually, there are 2 interlaced fields for each progressive frame at 30fps (29.97). But, when 24fps film is converted (telecined) to 30fps, extra fields are added to preserve timing. These are invisible to the naked eye. So, instead of a field pattern of 2:2:2:2:etc., we get a pattern of 3:2:3:2:etc.
Inverse telecining is literally removing those duplicate fields which restores the 2:2 pattern and results in a speed of 23.976fps.
Stinky-Dinkins said:
Yeah, by 24 I mean 23.976.
Yeah, sorry, I thought you meant that, it's just that true 24fps is also possible with AVCHD and BD standard, so I wanted to avoid confusion.
And like I said I use the remove pulldown function of TSMuxer wherever necessary and until now I had no idea how it worked but I know it works aces :-)