THX 1138 "preservations" + the 'THX 1138 Italian Cut' project (Released) — Page 18

Ok, I've installed VirtualDub now, and tried out Leonardo's excellent filter suggestions, they make the picture look a little bit softer but it's a worthwhile tradeoff, well done, Leo! if you have further suggestions let them come, I'm a VirtualDub newbie afterall. ;) If not, I think I'm gonna start to render this file soon.

I've used it before, but I have no real experience with all the various nice filter-plugins it allows. But yes, it really is a wonderful tool. ;)

erri, I'd say "Activate quartz-enhanced frequency synthesizer", it sounds better to me.

I don't know, erri, I'm a noob, I hardly know how to solder. But really, since it's just made up crap anyway, does it matter if it makes sense ?

Leonardo seems to be hanging out at the bridge of death these days. ;)

I tried a 704 transfer this weekend with the VNR full blast, and it was like the GOUT, only with bald people. Once I saw the scenes that really suffered with it on, I tried turning it down in increments, and still saw smearing and other unpleasant side effects.

Odd that the 704's VNR seems so detrimental now, as the noise reduction on my Panasonic AG-1980 is so darn useful with mildly noisy cable tv recordings I've made over the years. Maybe they are two different beasts under the hood, with regards to how they work.  Leaving the 704 settings "off" is the best option. With the idiosyncrasies all three players have at different parts of the discs, transfers from all of them will give us the best shot at a good looking final product.

erri_wan, "Activate quartz-controlled frequency synthesizer" sounds more natural to me, even if the Italian dubbers were pulling it out of thin air.  The closer to what's being said the better.

erri_wan said:

msycamore about changing the format, I was thinking what's gonna happen to the screens in Italian? Those that read "Radiation overload" or those computer screens.

Nothing, as I am just correcting the wrong aspect ratio on the intro/titles and end titles, there isn't anything wrong with the aspect ratio on the actual main feature, it was just broadcasted in pan & scan, which means that they cropped the picture to fit the 4:3 TV-screen.

Sometimes they simply crop both sides of the picture to fit the 4:3 TV-screen, and sometimes they make it pan & scan, which means that they move the 1.33:1 image inside the 2.35:1 picture, so they have more option to what they want to be in focus, that's why you have a pan inside the frame sometimes as seen here: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/THX-1138-preservations/post/445295/#TopicPost445295

Here's a few wiki articles that describes these different video formats much better than I did:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_and_scan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterbox

Yes, nothing gets altered, only opening and end titles gets unstretched.

The one film i have seen a squished picture on is the first issue return of the jedi laserdisc.  The Star Wars roll up is kind of squished to fit.

The rest of the movie is fine it is only that part that looks funny.

The studios used to do all sorts of weird things to avoid even letterboxing opening/closing credits at times. Some films had their credits totally redone with video generated titles for example.

I have a really old Laserdisc of The Black Hole that is squeezed for the entire film! (Ernest Borgnine was never so thin!) You can actually unsqueeze this and it looks good on a 16:9 television, although still cropped a bit.

Of course later there were the "squeeze" LD's that mostly came out in Japan, that gave your lonely 1990's widescreen set something interesting to do. If only there was a squeeze LD of THX in existence.

The cover of the German novelization:

The Drug Paradise.

Also, another thing with this Italian version I noticed, is that you can actually hear the original audio mix beneath the Italian dub sometimes, and it differ slightly from the mix we're used to.

Yeah, it's a little sloppy but I thought it was kind of interesting to hear some original audio in there. ;)

Also, I was wrong, the whole film is actually vertically stretched, can't believe I didn't notice that earlier. :) Well, don't worry, it will be corrected.

I actually encountered something similar during a trip to South America in the early '80's. All the U.S. tv shows were dubbed into Portuguese. Some cartoons I saw you could still hear the original voices very faintly.

My theory is that in some instances they don't have a clean music and effects track to work with, and the English voices are being filtered out.

I also discovered that Scrappy Doo is an annoying character in any language. ;)

Just spotted this on Ebay, the poster for the real Director's Cut! Haven't seen this one in decades!

http://cgi.ebay.com/THX-1138-Advance-Foil-One-sheet-movie-poster-RARE-/220733580747?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3364bf25cb

Thanks for posting that, SilverWook. Haven't seen this in decades myself. :) Was there ever other ones made for the real Director's Cut? (very fitting title Btw) I've only seen this LUH-mylar, it would have been natural to make other variations, with the character of THX on it for example.

The auction also states it's an Advance poster, any ideas?

SilverWook said:

My theory is that in some instances they don't have a clean music and effects track to work with, and the English voices are being filtered out.

Yeah, that's probably the case.

This just makes you wan't to hear how different the '71 audio mix really was. Damn! maybe someday...

SilverWook said:

I also discovered that Scrappy Doo is an annoying character in any language. ;)

:)

msycamore said:

Thanks for posting that, SilverWook. Haven't seen this in decades myself. :) Was there ever other ones made for the real Director's Cut? (very fitting title Btw) I've only seen this LUH-mylar, it would have been natural to make other variations, with the character of THX on it for example.

The auction also states it's an Advance poster, any ideas?

No idea. All I really could remember was the text touting this as being from the guy who made Star Wars.

Interesting it was re-rated PG when the 2004 reissue got a R. How times have changed!

Doing the 704 transfer of the Japanese LD tonight. VNR is turned off, and going through composite cables into the DVD recorder.

SilverWook said:

No idea. All I really could remember was the text touting this as being from the guy who made Star Wars.

Interesting it was re-rated PG when the 2004 reissue got a R. How times have changed!

 Yeah, I noticed, it's weird really. So the GP-rating is the early equivalent of PG?

SilverWook said:

Doing the 704 transfer of the Japanese LD tonight. VNR is turned off, and going through composite cables into the DVD recorder.

Love the sound of that! :)