Joel

Ah, yes, good point. 

I suppose I meant - will someone be sharing a complete capture of this on a popular torrent site that we sometimes use to share stuff that we own the rights to? 

So... is whoever bought it planning to share it?

NeverarGreat said:

 

Now don't be hasty, I'm uploading it now, so you can decide for yourselves whether it's worth the hype.

Yep, totally worth the hype! Again, great work! 

SKot said:

Joel said:

Tasjo said:

As for version 2 of WHIO, I will be doing the first transfer using the 1980 this week. I will also try running one of my WMAR tapes trough it to see if I can get decent quality copies of the commercials.

Hoping to get this out by Life Day, Tasjo?

If all goes well, we may have more than one Holiday Special-related surprise by Life Day...

--SKot

Whhhhhaaat?! 

NeverarGreat said:

Knockout settings for Leia Reconstituted Audio:

Vocals plus music on top, left panned. Right music channel on bottom, right panned.

Select both tracks, start Knockout. Extract Centre off, R input gain 13 dB, Output gain 8 dB, all other settings off.

preview section, record with windows audio recorder.

 

The moral of this story: It is quite possible to isolate the Leia hologram speech, with some effort.

WOW, Nice work! 

As snother audio person, I will add that unless you actually enjoy the trial-and-error process, your time might be better spent trying to locate un-mixed soundbites. The M-S processor concept seems to be a more advanced version of the phase cancellation techniques mentioned above (albeit with more fine control over the phase of the signals). 

If you DO want to work on it -  go, man, go! You will definitely learn what works best, what you can live with and what you can't.

Having never listened to the isolated center channel of the DTS Master Audio from the Blu-Ray - can someone verify that the music is present?

Tasjo said:

Note: I don't know if it is a fault of the tape or my reel to reel player, but the audio plays back at an extremely high rate. I fixed this in audacity by decreasing the speed by 48% as decreasing it by 50% made it sound too slow.

Reel To Reel players have several recording/playback speeds - typically, single speed home machines play and record at 3 3/4 IPS (Inches Per Second), but higher quality ones had a 7 1/2 IPS option - and professional ones use 15 IPS. 

Tasjo said:

As for version 2 of WHIO, I will be doing the first transfer using the 1980 this week. I will also try running one of my WMAR tapes trough it to see if I can get decent quality copies of the commercials.

Hoping to get this out by Life Day, Tasjo?

kk650 said:

Do you think that the downmixed BD audio would be noticably better than the downmixed dolby digital 5.1 audio though or is the difference likely to be very subtle?

If I might pipe in, here:

One man's "very subtle" is another's "Night and Day."

For this man, the DVD sound is so irritating that it causes listener fatigue and makes me want to turn it off. The BD Master audio is way, way better and easier on the ears. If you must have stereo (why stereo only?) I'd request a full-res 96k/24bit stereo downmix. 

Not officially, no. I remember seeing this when it was released, and noted at the time that IMAX probably wasn't ideal for this type of effects shot. It was fun to see, but all that quality/resolution seemed to show more clearly that the ship was just a large model. That said, I'd be curious to see it again!

I'm excited to see the Hulk/Wonderwoman preempted card. It's that more quintessentially 70s! 

Thank you for buying this and thank you in advance for sharing. 

Papercut said:

I can confirm there were SE VCDs produced in Asia. I owned a set that unfortunately has been lost in the sands of time...

Can one garner an invitation to the private screening? I'm in Los Angeles, no idea where Team Negative One hangs out...

This might sound obvious to some of us, but it just occurred to me:

The aspect of this most intriguing to me is that, while the DVDs and Blu Rays of these films (my favorites since I was a little kid) leave me cold, watching the trailers, the Puggo versions, and the clips here and in Poita's "Star Wars On Super8" thread is still very exciting. 

I don't know if it's because they just look different or if there's something about them looking more "correct" (the way we saw them originally in the theaters), but whatever it is, my inner 7 year old is just unbelievably impatient and excited about these projects.

poita said:

Actually, the assumption is correct.

This is why Leia looks like she had the make-up gun set to whore in the bluray releases and why we have lobster-men and other weird colour anomolies.

[...]

It is interesting to watch, but it isn't how the film was shown at the time, or intended to be.

 

I stand happily corrected. 

Brooks said:

 THAT was acceptable, and not dvd??).

That's a neat story about your involvement with the dvds.  Were the star wars scans used for the dvds (and apparently blu rays) stored there on standard def digit-betas?  What an awesome sounding job you had! 

RE: VHS vs DVD, yeah, that was the first crack in the seams, wasn't it?

I think (and this is conjecture based on how I understood the normal processes at the time) the digi-betas were just the sub-masters for the DVDs. The Hi-Def (2K or 1080, not sure how they're stored) masters were, IIRC, D5 tapes. 

And the job was SUPER fun. Low paying, but maybe my favorite job ever. As you an imagine, getting to be the Star Wars gate keeper was an exciting honor, even though it just meant not telling anyone what was in the new safe for a few days. 

Fair point, when the O-neg is damaged and they have to go back and look at original elements, that particular O-Neg does have to be reassembled. 

I took your question re: O-Neg not having SPFX as a general attribute of original negatives.   

AntcuFaalb said:

Doesn't the O- have none of the SPFX?

 

No - you might be thinking of workprints? 

No one's talking about going back to original film elements and making editorial choices-where the multi-track analogy would be totally appropriate- In this case the O-Neg we're talking about is more like the finished 2-track master. 

msycamore said:

Do you really want a film look like a 4k scan from the original negative, when nothing close to that was ever seen in theaters? The generational losses that occur in the stages from original camera negative to release prints works miracles for sets, costumes, models and special effects. I fail to understand why anyone would like to see these films straight of the negatives when they were never made to be seen that way, that's making the films a huge disservice. You would see mattepaintings, make-up and effects work for what they really are instead of blending in nicely with the rest of the footage.

[edited a bit so I don't sound so cranky]

There is an assumption here that the print is the intended product, which isn't totally accurate. [Surely] just because people don't see the O-Neg in a theater doesn't mean that the print is the ultimate viewing experience?

[Isn't} the O-Neg is the intended finished product, not an unfinished product waiting to be somehow "corrected" by generational loss?

To make an audio analogy, HD audio releases come from the master tapes because that is as close to the original event as possible. They don't come from a recording of the released vinyl or cassette whether those were the intended release formats or not.

So to answer your question: Yes - I, personally, want to see the O-neg scanned in 4K because I want a document that is as close to the original event as I can get and that has suffered as little generational loss as possible. 

Brooks said:

ferrari486 said:

... It's interesting how the first special edition used 2k scans but the DVD/Blu-ray is a 1080p scan

It's weird how Lucas, a special effects guy and early adopter of digital, was so short sighted about the progress digital resolution standards would make.

I don't think it was so much short-sightedness as a cavalier attitude about the DVD and Blu Ray releases.  Which, as you said, is weird! 

In the early 2000s, the talk was that George didn't want to release the DVDs, he was waiting for all 6 movies to be released and then to release them on whatever high-def format prevailed at that time (source, anyone?). The choice to even release DVDs seemed like a giving-in to public pressure.

I was very, very peripherally involved in the DVD process - I worked in the vault at Technicolor (the entertainment industry's mailroom) and I was in charge of the safe where the digital masters (mostly standard def digi-betas) were kept- I had access to retrieve stuff and return it for about a week while the DVDs were assembled. 

During that time, I had a chat with the main colorist (whose name is escaping me, sorry!- it's in the DVD Easter Eggs somewhere) who did Star Wars and Jedi for the DVDs. (Someone else was in charge of Empire).

He described the conditions: temporary tables set up in a rented room. Fast turnaround times. I guess I naïvely assumed that this was quick and dirty only for DVD. The fact that the same masters were used for the Blu-Rays was a real downer, though they do look pretty good!

Still,  this didn't sound at all like the 70s and 80s George Lucas talking about 1100 lines, high-definition, and the necessity of film preservation, does it?

poita said:

Hoping to have the Derann print completed with wetgate buy the end of next week.

 

Woooot! This will be the new (if temporary) reference for me. Awesome!

pittrek said:

Wow, I hope the -1 team will send you their prints :-)

Any chance of this happening?

I don't mean to discount the years of work people have put into their homebrew captures, but the slow speed, complexity, and just-good-enough image quality  of the Team -1 project seems redundant when there's a real, professional machine that can do the job in a day or two now. 

I'd really like to see a wet-gated, hi-def capture of Puggo's prints, too? 

Finally, what's the status with that Technicolor IB print?

Papercut said:

Do DVDs and LED/Plasm/LCDs still have this red limitation?

No - The red limitation was, AFAIK, a CRT issue only. I'm trying to find a scientific or other article to verify this, but I haven't found one.  

Hmmm. The video is really, really blue - there's no white at all, and everything looks blue-ish. Somehow, what used to be white is also blown-out looking, but it might have been blown-out in the original?

The still might not be a great color-reference...