Jonno

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.

It’s Machine Bold.
https://www.linotype.com/669242/itc-machine-bold-product.html

Fair enough - of course different people may have different reasons. Yours is the only one I could reasonably ask you for 😃

Just out of interest, why do folks like to include the THX logos/banners on their designs? Is it a nostalgia thing, brand consistency, or a (perceived) mark of high standards?

I can think of solid reasons not to. After 20ish years of questionable DVD releases, THX is hardly a brand of quality these days. But more to the point, it simply isn’t true of the releases we’re likely to put in these cases - Despecialized, Revisited, Silver Screen or any fan edit you care to mention have either been (rightly) reprocessed from their THX-certified origins, or never came from that source to begin with.

Just curious - I guess the last examples stuck out, because that branding is the only text on otherwise beautifully minimal designs. Fox or Lucasfilm might be more apt.

If you’re burning a disc, it doesn’t matter - whether you load a disc folder or an iso into imgBurn, the result is the same.

Yep. Start by muxing each item into its own BD folder (not iso yet). I like ClownBD for this, since it does the best job of demuxing before remuxing, but tsMuxer will be fine too.

Then drag your folders into a new MultiAVCHD project. It will ask each time if you want to reauthor them: say no each time.
When your folders are all listed in the order you want them, hit the ‘merge’ button in the middle - this will save everything as a new BD folder with a combined playlist. you DO need to do the final BD assembly after this (click the main ‘Start’ button and select Blu-ray disc) but this should take a matter of seconds if you’re saving to the same HDD.

Note that this process only produces a Blu-ray folder - no problem if you want to burn to disc, but if you need an iso version you can use imgBurn to convert.

What folder? This sounds like a different source from the OP.

Plastic Galaxy is older, but Elstree 1976 only became commercially available last November.

That it’s not for your own profit doesn’t alter the fact that you’d be harming the makers’ own opportunities to profit from their work (and before we get into daft comparisons, this isn’t Disney we’re talking about here: just an independent filmmaker with a small production company).

yotsuya said:

So the 1993 mix found in DE, Faces, and GOUT would have been the first 5.0 mix released followed in 1997 by the 5.0 Cinema DTS and 5.1 Dolby Digital for the SE.

Are you suggesting that the 1993 mix was constructed with stereo surrounds? Because it certainly wasn’t (and couldn’t have been) presented that way - those releases were matrixed 4.0 PCM all the way.

Great news - enjoy!

What size are your iso files? If they’re around the 7-8GB mark, they’re AVCHD images, i.e. HD video designed to be burned to (and played from) a dual-layer DVD-R disc.

(The AVCHD format uses the same file structure as Blu-rays - hence the BDMV and CERTIFICATE folders - but at a size that means you don’t need a Blu-ray burner or disc. You do, however, need an AVCHD-compatible Blu-ray player to view the result).

That all being the case, your Superdrive should be able to burn those iso files to dual-layer blank DVDs. I don’t know Mac software, though - presumably Toast (or whatever) can open an iso to burn to disc? If it can do that, it doesn’t need to know what the actual content is - it’ll just burn those bits.