logo Sign In

INv8r_ZIM

User Group
Members
Join date
3-Aug-2004
Last activity
14-Feb-2016
Posts
275

Post History

Post
#281314
Topic
The Empire Strikes Back - The Vintage Edit (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/281314/action/topic#281314
Time
Hmmm...okay, I've now had a chance to sit down and watch the first 45minutes of the film straight through, and since no one else seems to be chiming in I thought I'd add to my earlier impressions. It's pretty obvious now that the histograms are really only going to be a beginning to solving the problems with the official transfer, and not the magic bullet many were hoping when the first examples were being put up months ago. While they fix some of the problems, they often don't seem to take care of everything within a frame, and create other entirely new problems. The obvious stuff that springs to mind is in the "lost in the snow" and medical center sequences, and the horrendous blue/cyan artifacting going on there, and the inconsistent colour from shot to shot. It almost would have been better for those sequences to have left the DVD footage alone, or to CC and time them without the histograms being involved at all. There is also a great deal of oversaturation in certain details with a shot (mostly blues and reds it seems, stuff like the flight suits, buttons on control panels and stuff, also have a look at when Han is welding in the BG during the pilot briefing - the welder flashes consume a MASSIVE amount of the screen, much like the bacta weirdness actually - very weird), and funky stuff happening like the Ion cannon shots turning yellow, half of laser, lightsabre, and other animated effects bieng partly coloured, and then totally desaturated in another part of the same frame. As has been pointed out in the other CC thread regarding the histograms, the asteroid sequence is badly brown/yellow. I think if you do another pass at Empire, and if you do end up doing the other films, you should think about using the histograms fairly sparingly and as a base from which to work, shot by shot, sequence by sequence, rather than letting them run straight through the film. There is definetly potential there, but again, by going shot by shot, I think you'd get a better result.
Post
#280723
Topic
The Empire Strikes Back - The Vintage Edit (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/280723/action/topic#280723
Time
Had a chance to look at some of the first half, and as requested on the 'noid, wanted to make some observations, PaulisDead2221. First, overall the colour looks MUCH much better than the Official DVD release, it doesn't feel so much like a screwed-up mastering of the film. And thank you so much for keeping this as a DL release! There are a couple of little things though which I noticed while watching on the PC through VLC. First, the title card and opening crawl seems a bit dark and red to me. I guess it's open to interpretation what colour the text actaully is, but it SEEMS to me like it should be more yellow. similarly the establishing shot of the stardestroyer after the pan down seems very dark. Not sure whether this is due to the source or not, as I haven't opened up the LFL release of Empire in a while. I don't think it's a player issue, as the Hoth stuff immediately after looks great - nice, bright and overall white! There's a couple of shots at twilight and evening which I was a little suspicious of being a little "LFL creative-decsision blue", but I guess you can always argue that it's night time. The first shot of the Imperial fleet has some weird black crush issues which renders parts of the BG ships BLACK. Don't know if you guys pushed the contrast on these, or brightened up badly contrasty source material which just revealed the problem, but I don't rememeber it being there before. The shot of the transport and Xwings leaving Hoth looks really desaturated, almost to the point of being grayscale. Again, is that the LFL DVD which has caused the problem, or the histograms - who knows? The other issue which I'm kind of on the fence about is the cut and paste of LD material into the edit to replace altered scenes. I love to see the original stuff back, but the grain suddenly jumps out at you like crazy, since Lowry pretty much destroyed the film grain in the film. It's probably a choice between grain or some combination of blurs and softer, less detailed replacement footage, so I can see the dilema. OCP's approach of creating mattes of just the needed areas of each shot was I think a little better, if not as "authentic" and certainly more time consuming. Lastly, I guess we're just going to have to come to terms with the fact that the lightsabres are more or less totally fucked in the carbon chamber. You guys have fixed the pink, but they remain a little dirty-orange, and witthout creating CC mattes for each blade for each shot, I think they may not be salvageable.
Anyways, after all that niggling and nitpicking, overall a really nice job, the best of the released colour correction projects, and a great addition to the few real restorations which have been done. Thanks for sharing this with the community, and bring on ANH and RotJ!
Post
#279644
Topic
The Empire Strikes Back - The Vintage Edit (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/279644/action/topic#279644
Time
It seems like quite a chunk of storage. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I didn't think the official encode was more than about 7 gigs. However, if you've been able to maintain the quality of the DVDs, then personally I don't think it's excessive. Since this is supposed to be an improvement over the DVD, then anything up to and inlcuding a DL disc is fine. Hell, I just want to SEE it
Post
#279505
Topic
Looking for a good magazine about 3D imaging.
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/279505/action/topic#279505
Time
Yar, a good good thing it be. Speaking as one of the great unwashed CG animation students who graduated in the late '90s from a school which DIDN'T particularly emphasize traditional skills, I can tell you how hard it was to get a job that way; techinical skill, but no formal grounding in design, drawing, or anatomy. If you don't get it at school, count on having to spend more time and money afterwards to aquire those skills, or you're pretty much toast. It's no fun to graduate AND THEN go back to school. Actaully, it's probably a good idea to find yourself some extra figure drawing groups outside of school anyways.
And to each their own inspiration, but I guess my love of the Muybridge stuff is not so much in how many keyframes and poses it gives you, but rather the overal demonstration of the body in motion, and the understanding that gave me of just how weight transfers and the body moves in and out of balance. You might never really need to animate a guy baling hay, but no matter how many times someone tells you the pelvis is generally up here at this point, and swaying left there at this point, for me I found that there was no substitute for SEEING it, and being able to step through the how and why of motion. Plus they're just plain gorgeous vintage photography
Post
#279188
Topic
Looking for a good magazine about 3D imaging.
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/279188/action/topic#279188
Time
On the same note that Laserman was hitting, I would start your motion library by having a good hard look at the Muybridge books if you can find them - those are the single most useful resource I've ever seen for studying realistic movment, balance, and the body in motion; I don't think they've been equalled yet. Each volume is fairly pricey, but if you're serious about animating, indespensible. I've never really seen much in the way of truly useful magazines. Most of the really interesting stuff I've ever learned has been through colleagues, or figure drawing and anatomy for the artist classes. The vast majority of mags I've seen cover kind of a general overview, and summary of how something was appraoched, but aren't terrifically helpful for teaching the specifics of anything. The siggraph stuff is very cool if you've already got a grounding in the field, and will defineitly give you some awesome ideas about how to approach a problem.
Post
#279184
Topic
STAR WARS: EP IV 2004 <strong>REVISITED</strong> ADYWAN *<em>1080p HD VERSION NOW IN PRODUCTION</em>
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/279184/action/topic#279184
Time
Yeah, thanks Zion, that was a meanignful post. Damn forum with no edit button.

<EDIT> Well WTF, there it is...it wasn't there when I tried to edit that first post. Anyways, what I was GOING to say was huzzah for the window fix - I can't believe it took Lucas until the preproduction on RotS to notice that one.
Post
#269539
Topic
Requiem for a Clone War dream... (2003 series) (* unfinished project * - lots of info)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/269539/action/topic#269539
Time
Great, and I'm looking forward to it. The shorts just never caught my interest as they aired - they just start and end to damn abruptly. One teeny-tiny, utterly nit-picketey suggestion about your crawl though; try "In the aftermath of Geonosis, the duty falls...". The grammar of all of the film crawls are immediate and active, no past-tense, which fits in with the cinematic idea the films follow of in-media res beginings. Keep us abreast of your progress!