Jonno

RogueLeader said:

As far as her powers go, I’m under the impression that the Force has literally awakened in the ST. I don’t think it is a static, non-changing energy field. Every Force-user in the ST, including Rey, are capable of powers we have never seen before until now, and I think the Force itself is playing a part in it, hence The Force Awakens. Could they have made it more nuanced or something? Sure, maybe, but it doesn’t ruin the movies for me. I’m satisfied with that and have moved on.

Yes, this seems to have come about because the current filmmakers are telling two new stories (in the films) at the same time: a character whose inherent affinity with the force is stronger than we’ve seen before, and a force-using protagonist who happens to be female.

They might have gotten away with one or other on its own (I’m not convinced by that), but to have the nerve to put them both together? MARY SUUUUUE

When was this?

Morgan the Boost said:

Nice to see it with a fresh pair of eyes.

That’s the special thing, isn’t it? I’ve been doing the same in a slightly more haphazard order with my nephews. They’re a little younger and a touch sensitive, so we’re keeping Sith on the back burner, as it were.

The crazy thing is that they already know pretty much everything before they see them. I think we tend to forget that about being that age - they’re about as far from spoiler-averse as it gets, and all the popular stories are just kind of in the ether. Or at least, on the playground.

Not at the local cinemas I frequented. Dolby Digital might have been used (immediately before the BBFC certificate) in larger theatres, e.g. in London. THX is very uncommon in the UK, due to the lack of certified screens - can’t think of a single time I’ve seen that in the cinema, in fact (and I’ve been to most of the larger London cinemas).

Well… (as I said in my PM) I was working at a cinema at the time, which means I have a general recollection of what was being used but not so much that’s screening-specific.

Toy Story had a relatively late release in the UK - 22nd March 1996. Looking at what was released over the following weeks and months, along with the standard distributor associations (Disney would have given priority to Odeon theatres but they’d have been less likely to show a Warner film, for instance), this is what I’d use.

Sgt Bilko (UIP 29/3/96)
Balto (UIP 29/3/96)
Dunston Checks In (Fox 29/3/96)
Muppet Treasure Island (Buena Vista 24/5/96)
James and the Giant Peach (Guild Pathe 2/8/96)

I found the discussion where someone remembers seeing RCR before Toy Story, and this is somewhat backed up by IMDB.

On the other hand, the print that I saw at the time had no short at all, so it must not have been a universal thing. Perhaps we should have it anyway to represent an optimum screening experience…

Great find! If it does get capped, I’d certainly find those scenes useful for my theatrical project - never mind the time it took me to painstakingly recreate them 😄

In case anyone’s still interested in this, I just had a look at the version on UK Netflix and it appears to be the theatrical. No idea about other territories.

SF01 said:

DV is still better than DVD compression, even sourced frmo lossless capture.

No argument there. It just seems unlikely that DV files will be useful for actual viewing, so some further conversion will be needed in most cases, and that’s where returns begin to diminish rapidly. But hey, at least someone’s putting this stuff out there in some form.

Sometimes the context and presentation is of equal interest to content, especially for folks who had the set originally.

I did the same with the features from the roughly-contemporary Alien Trilogy set - fifty people downloaded that, even though most of the material is already freely available from better sources.

By the way, I’d avoid DV for something like this, personally - it’s a pretty punishing codec for analogue sources. A preferable route would be lossless capture, followed by conversion to h.264 for delivery. But it’s your project, of course.

Indeed. 4K transfers should be technically superior, in terms of detail retention and consistency of performance, every time.

But that’s not what films shot in the 1970s were designed for - even TV and home video would have been a distant afterthought. It was all about rendering the best possible image on those theatrical prints, and all the creative decisions in the filmmaking process had that firmly set as their end goal.

4K (and, to be fair, Blu-ray) are fantastic at wringing visual information out of archival film materials - it’s among their chief selling points - but they’re aimed at achieving a much different purpose than the one those materials were created for. Hence my concern about claims of ‘original intent’, which is always a dicey issue with this technology.

TiddySprinklesPimpBillion said:
Theatrical Edition on the UHD is solely 4K (which I heavily prefer) and the “Director’s” Cut is thankfully only a 2K upscale. So yes, the former is 100% is as originally intended,

What does this mean? The 4K disc is a modern rendition of the film intended for digital displays, with colour grading informed by the director’s current, 21st century sensibilities.

It is not possible that that is what was originally intended, 40 years ago. Ridley Scott and his crew weren’t shaking their heads, bemoaning the limitations of 35mm photography and reproduction - they understood their medium and made the best film they could WITHIN those limitations.

4K offers tremendous opportunities for clarity, detail, depth and stability, but if you want genuine ‘intent’, you need a film print.

TiddySprinklesPimpBillion said:
Belongs on a BD25 compilation though in much better capture quality.

Not sure what you mean by ‘much better capture quality’. I’m fairly certain my rip is the best out there right now and, given the considerable limitations of the laserdisc format, it’s unlikely to be bettered any time soon (burning it to Blu-ray certainly won’t have magical improving powers).

Happy to be proved wrong, of course, but in the 25+ years since I first saw this documentary, options for viewing it have remained maddeningly few.

benduwan said:

Jonno said:

Giger’s Alien (shot on 16mm film - 23.976fps)

–> there´s a LD version on spleen:

Yeah. I put it there.

Again, US DVD/Blu-ray players and displays are known to have issues with 25 or 50 field/frame content (SD or HD) - they’re generally not made with anything other than NTSC/film specs in mind (whereas European players have been NTSC ready since the DVD era).

The sources of the fan-collected Alien materials are a combination of (true) NTSC and PAL frame rates, e.g.

Shock and Awe (UK broadcast documentary - 50i)
James Cameron: A Director and His Work (US tape source - 59.94i)
Giger’s Alien (shot on 16mm film - 23.976fps)

There’s no one disc medium that will support all of these formats and play anywhere in the world - there has to be a compromise somewhere along the line.

TiddySprinklesPimpBillion said:

I’d much rather have the content on BD25s with the content encoded in AVC, not MPEG2/PAL/NTSC, and no more DVDs.

AVC still has resolutions and frame rates that need to be determined - you’re stuck with the basic rules and limitations of PAL and NTSC, unless you’re prepared for the material to be (destructively) altered.

spoRv said:

“bag of files”, meaning all PAL and NTSC files “thrown” inside a directory/disc?

That’s the idea.

I’d go with two (or more) disc, one PAL, one NTSC (possibly including two versions, where available).

I think splitting up PAL and NTSC content would be unhelpful - it’s far more user-friendly to organise by film, not format, hence the idea of just creating a repository of files in their original form (which, come to think of it, would now include 23.976 material such as my updated Giger’s Alien rip).

This would be well-suited to format-agnostic viewing, such as desktop playback, at any rate (and presumably media servers such as Plex and Kodi too, given that they can transcode on-the-fly for TV viewing).

digitalfreaknyc said:

The previous fan docs were pretty screwed up. The now-banned individual who put it together re-encoded everything to PAL specs when it wasn’t needed. So anything that was archived probably could have fit together in a different way. It really is too bad.

I can’t speak for the individual you refer to, but when I authored the second and third volumes of Alien Appendix, I needed to reconcile a mixture of sources - some NTSC, some PAL. Since the longer pieces were from PAL broadcasts, I prioritised those.

That was the way it was in 2007. These days, I naturally wouldn’t use DVD media, but even BD video has its issues - you could theoretically combine both SD NTSC and PAL on one disc, but most US BD players wouldn’t be able to handle the 25 frame content (I don’t know if UHD players/displays have moved forwards in this respect).

I guess the only solution that would suit all users is the ‘bag of files’ option, which isn’t much fun from a user perspective but at least has the benefit of source purity.

That’s not quite accurate. There was a trend for a certain period of the 70s (and early 80s) for ‘Fotonovels’ - books retelling films via a series of stills. These were achieved via photographically enlarging actual film frames (probably an interneg?) and gave a visual summation of the film in the days before home video.

Many were small paperbacks, though some were larger format books - I have Psycho and (probably the best example made) Alien. The Star Warses never received this treatment, for some reason, but I imagine it was discussed.

Glad to hear it 😃

The simplest tool for this kind of job is probably ClownBD. It’s a bit old now, but it combines the best of the various demux and remux tools along with a pretty straightforward frontend - you’ll be able to simplify the set of video and audio streams that make it to the final disc, and (provided they’re BD compliant) they’ll transfer without reencoding.

It’s still available here: https://www.videohelp.com/software/Clown-BD

Do take note of the other tools that will need to be added to the installation folder before it can work (such as tsMuxeR).

Which trailer are you remaking?

That’ll be the one - it was sandwiched between ANH and ESB in the 1982 double bill.

I watched the film again a couple of nights ago (good old theatrical cut). It’s remarkable how effective some of the shots are, considering that it shouldn’t work at all. Matting an miniature puppet creature into live action and having it interact with actors? Pretty ballsy stuff.

So he/she has spent 5 minutes with desktop tools to superficially improve the matching of colour and contrast, then dismissed the work of the original effects artists as ‘inexperienced or lazy’ - entirely disregarding how complex, difficult and ambitious these composites were in the pre-digital age.

Cool.