THX 1138 "preservations" + the 'THX 1138 Italian Cut' project (Released) — Page 19

Nice, thank you again for doing this!! :)

SilverWook said:

One last transfer to complete things, (the U.S. disc on the LD-V4400) and I should finally be finished this weekend. I don't really like the way the 704 transfers look, but the more we have to work with the better.

I confess I'm burning out a bit from watching the movie so many times in a row, and really want to get back to preserving some other discs in my collection. (Not to mention the S-VHS tapes I have left to do!) Might start a thread about another preservation idea tonight 

Nice, SilverWook! The more the merrier! I can understand you're getting tired of seeing the same footage over and over again, hopefully it will be worth it in the end. Thanks for the effort you've put into making the best possible captures of these. Much appreciated! You deserve a break.

I'll give you a PM.

SilverWook said:

I also looked at the DC DVD again, and I think using everything from the WB/Kinney logo all the way through the opening credits is a good idea. The Buck Rogers clip looks way better, and the "Tragedy on Saturn" title card is actually readable before the fade out.

Yeah, I've also noticed that, that segment and its title card is pretty blown out. And I agree, degraded DC-footage is probably the way to go, we will just have to fix the windowboxed Buck Rogers clip to match the pillarboxed original.

Also, I got a little sidetracked and have been occupied by another project lately, sorry about that. But I'll focus on this entirely now, and get the Italian TV-cut done.

Maybe I should take this to the "how to section" but I'll try it here first.

Maybe a stupid question, but how the heck do you treat a video with several different aspect ratios in Avisynth? is it even possible to set various resize/crop/addborder-commands for different parts of the video within the same script? Please help out a newbie!

Thanks for the help, d_j! :)

Me too, Bloodnose. Just to have a watchable copy of the original Director's Cut, will be awesome. :)

One unfortunate thing with the Italian TV-cut is that the entire opening flashback have completely crushed black levels, but the same scenes later in the film looks a lot better, a few examples:

(these are unfiltered, the final video will look better)

In fact, the entire film is very inconsistent in its contrast/brightness/colors. I don't know, it almost looks like it was cobbled together from several different sources. Sometimes the whites are green/yellow and sometimes the film has a very blue tint. But I really don't wanna mess with the colors on this, I've tried to bring out some details in the opening, but there's nothing there to bring out unfortunately, you just get a washed out gray instead. You could of course use re-edited LD-footage and splice that in as it is in letterbox but then this becomes something entirely different. I don't think it's worth it to be honest, maybe with a better Italian source. So I'll leave everything as it is if that's ok with everyone.

The video is rendered with Leo's nice filter suggestions which makes it more watchable, just encoding left and this one is done.

SilverWook said:

Been trying to find DVD cases where the discs are less likely to bounce around loose in transit. I've had discs get mangled just in domestic mail let alone international!

 You could try placing some kind of material inside the case to help i from getting thrown out of place. Some kind of cloth or something maybe, just an idea. I don't even buy dvds if i shake the case and can hear that the disc has gotten loose.

SilverWook said:

Looks very good considering what you have to work with. :)

msycamore, I hope to get the discs out the door this weekend. Been trying to find DVD cases where the discs are less likely to bounce around loose in transit. I've had discs get mangled just in domestic mail let alone international! 

Those screen-caps are unfiltered, straight from erri_wan's avi, so the final output will look much better.

Nice to hear, we don't want those beauties scratched. :)

SilverWook said:

In the meantime I stumbled across a recent THX reference...

http://www.out.com/slideshows/?slideshow_title=The-Gayest-Robots&theID=12#Top

You can probably guess what other famous Lucas robot made that list. ;)

Nice gay-list. ;)

You could also ship the discs in those plastic bags for CD's and DVD's.

Just a little update, I noticed some additional ugly artifacts in the chroma on the Italian video, so right now I'm trying to solve that issue with the help of Leo.

SilverWook recently sent his captures but they haven't arrived yet.

Just wanted you guys to know that, Nerfherder kindly offered to send me his capture of the UK LD of THX 1138, so now we have all three letterbox transfers to work with! according to him, the UK transfer should have less haloing and edge enhancement than the US transfer, so it could prove to be very useful! Thank you, you scruffy looking Nerfherder! ;)

Still haven't solved that damn chroma subsampling issue on the Italian video. :( Leo, I'm counting on you! ;)

Hope you don't mind, Nerfherder.

Here's what he PM'd me:

I have a capture I did myself of the UK laserdisc (on the Tartan label), using a stand-alone Panasonic DVD-recorder. Unfortunately I should have captured each side of the LD to a seperate disc to max out the quality, but it really doesn't look too bad at all to be honest. Pretty sharp picture and the grain is even visible without causing loads of blocking.

Looking at the screen caps of the US LD in the first few pages of your THX thread it looks like there's quite a bit of edge enhancement & halo-ing, which aren't present on the UK laserdisc.

I'm sure he will pop in and join the discussion himself later.

Very interesting that the same weird editing choices are on that one as well... my head hurts... then these editing choices maybe originated in US for TV or what?

Try http://www.sendspace.com/