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MWilson

User Group
Members
Join date
29-Nov-2016
Last activity
4-Feb-2019
Posts
51

Post History

Post
#1242280
Topic
The Place to Go for Emotional Support
Time

My life hasn’t gone too well. I’ve been afraid to tell people but my anxiety has been hurting my everyday life. I was bullied in school to the point that I wound up homeschooled in eighth grade. I’ve tried to do things and failed more often than not. I haven’t been able to talk or make eye contact with people for the longest time. I know now that my scripts were stupid. I’ve been breaking down more and more. I’m starting to think things can get better now. I’m getting help. I want to apologize for bothering anyone, that’s a gigantic fear of mine. I want to let you all know I’m sorry.

Post
#1207132
Topic
Tales From The Darkside
Time

Jay said:

Loved this show as a kid. The pilot is a classic and it’s stuck with me all these years.

And the talking fruit episode, though I’m not sure why.

Ha! The end of “Love Hungry” (talking fruit) was actually pretty sad. I mean, she wasn’t some awful character. Oh, and I just remembered another one that really freaked me out : “Halloween Candy”! (The one with the goblin)

Post
#1204476
Topic
REVENGE OF THE NERDS (* unfinished project *)
Time

SilverWook said:

The Beta tape unfortunately suffers a lot of background noise. The noise level goes up immediately after the CBS/Fox intro and the file begins, gets worse somewhere in the middle and down a bit the rest of the film. I have no idea if this is from the ravages of time, exposure to magnetic fields or just really poor mastering. I dug out some other Hi-Fi tapes I have just make sure the deck was working properly. It is.
However, I think the audio for the phone number scenes can be cleaned up. Here’s a sample, and this is pretty good compared to other parts of the film.
https://mega.nz/#!6081VBZT!Mfth37o0q4m6qBBw9-BioSla_BeyXvzzWOg317TxKGk

If the LD audio is better, than this is academic of course. But I’d be up for capturing a VHS Hi-Fi as there are some sealed early 2000’s copies on Ebay. The phone scenes could be patched from the Beta.
On a side note, did the Mission Impossible theme music always seem to start a second late into the panty raid seqeunce? This occurs around a reel change and may simply be a video mastering error.

The LD is pretty nice sounding, I’m not noticing what you’re describing from the beta. The LD has no chapter stops, so I’m on my third capture of the film but I’ve been able to capture the deleted scene 7 times (thanks to rewind). Hopefully I’ll be able to median the caps and get it as close to the master used as possible. Here’s hoping it does turn out to be a good year!

Post
#1203634
Topic
The Original Trilogy restored from 35mm prints (a WIP)
Time

poita said:

Yes, it goes quiet here from time to time 😃
Sometimes a month or two can go by without an update, I try to only update if something worthwhile is happening.

My personal life can get a bit chaotic, I have ongoing health issues (which is a bit of an understatement) , I have 4 kids ranging from 5-17 years old, and the 12 year old is permanently at a cognitive age of around 18-24 months old, so free time is challenging, as is earning a living, as I am the primary carer for the kids.

Currently, I’m out of time and money, I have some paid restoration work this month that is eating around 16 hours a day, which is good to pay the rent, unfortunately restoration doesn’t pay very well, even at the commercial level, and the work is gruelling.

The last month or so has been particularly busy.
I’m recovering from a mild heart attack, and this month has seen the youngest need a tonsillectomy and adenoids removed, and the hospital is a 3 hour drive away, so it meant extra nights away, and the recovery was rougher than I’d hoped. I also do casual work to make ends meet, and I’ve had to take a few shift the last two months to feed the beasts.

My eldest is sitting her HSC exams this year (similar to the SATs or GCSE A-Levels) so a lot of the remaining spare time is spent helping her study and with assignments and essays, and the youngest needs stories at bedtime and isn’t at school until next year, so parenting takes up any non-working waking hours.
My 12 year old is fully-grown, so is the size of a fully grown woman, but has the temperament and abilities of a toddler aged 2 years or less in some areas. This is immensely challenging and time consuming, and creates a lot of safety issues for the 5 year old as you can imagine. When a ‘grown-up’ has a tantrum and lashes out if you take a toy off her, the results can be literally deadly to a small child, so managing them all can be, well, interesting to say the least.
She needs help toileting, bathing, with stairs, getting in and out of cars, pretty much everything you have to do for an 18 month old, and it will be that way forever sadly.

So my work on restoring films here comes in fits and starts. There are times when I am out of paid work, and can throw a reasonable amount of time and energy into it. Sometimes I get some better paid work and can sink some more funds into getting prints, getting them cleaned and scanned, so that stuff tends to happen in chunks as well.

Lately, equipment has been a real PITA. High end scanners are temperamental beasts, and the main unit had a focus motor problem, which took a while to get fixed, then the focus motor blew completely, which required the whole optical assembly to be removed and sent away. This creates a backlog on the commercial jobs and pushes the stuff here back a bit until the backlog is cleared.
Then sometimes the scanner unit is available, but physical exhaustion kicks in and you just can’t drag yourself to do it that night. (it all happens from midnight till dawn typically).
Cleaning a reel costs around US$200, and freight is annoyingly expensive as well, purchasing or renting the prints is also costly, and you always take a bit of a punt as to what condition the film will be in.

Scanning a reel at triple flash, with infrared at 4K full frame takes about 12 hours per 20 minute reel, and is around 4TB per reel, (and another 4TB to back it up) so it is a big undertaking of time and resources, and then sometimes the film will unspool due to a dodgy splice, or some crap will get in the gate and you have to rescan, or the scanner will just decide to be a recalcitrant old fart and not co-operate, and you have to wait for another night to scan that reel.
The restoration work once the scan is done then takes a huge amount of time and resources, just moving the files around can take ages. I’m currently waiting 12 hours for a file transfer to finish - backup two reels from my server to another hard drive so that I can clear enough space to load up the next scanned reel to start work on it.

So that is a long way around of saying that best laid plans sometimes go a bit off track, and that sometimes life and money get in the way, and things go quiet for a while.

At the moment, I am waiting on scanner access again to get the ANH SE scan finished, and I have five reels of a commercial restoration due in 3 weeks, and I’m going to be struggling to meet that deadline, but it will pay the rent, so I am working mostly on that. In the background I am transferring files around to make enough space so that I can get back to ESB as soon as that job is out the door.

Don’t expect to see much from me until May is done, then hopefully ANH might be scanned and I’ll have some time to get some progress on the original ESB.

poita, I don’t know you, but reading this makes me wish I did! Seeing all the things you have accomplished, and now knowing this about your life, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. My parents helped me through autism, I can only imagine how it feels on the other end. I wish you the best and a speedy recovery.

Post
#1197650
Topic
REVENGE OF THE NERDS (* unfinished project *)
Time

SilverWook said:

MWilson said:

Deleted Scene Comparison

Here is my first go at the deleted scene.
The entire capture went smoothly, but the encoder dropped a few frames on the “enhanced” version. I can share the raw cap if someone wants it.

Can you do a side by side comparison with the cut version? Just so those of us who haven’t seen the movie in a long time get a sense of what needs to be restored?

I haven’t ripped my blu-ray. I can, but it should be fairly simple. This is the first frame before the deleted scene, and IIRC the part where they start cleaning the house at the end should be in the cut.
Imgur

Post
#1197451
Topic
REVENGE OF THE NERDS (* unfinished project *)
Time

SilverWook said:

MWilson said:

The Griff said:

So, there’s a laserdisc up for bids on eBay.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Revenge-of-the-nerds-80s-comedy-LASERDISC-LD/183179598885?hash=item2aa65adc25:g:kCsAAOSw9uNa0wC-

Is there anyone willing and able to capture and share this (preferably in the US) if I throw a bid in? I’d need their delivery details up front.

Hopefully it goes for a little less than the 16mm print did…

I’ve got that very laserdisc. I can capture it this week.

Can you turn off CX noise reduction in your player? Some later models make this difficult to do.

I am planning to use my CLD-D504. It shouldn’t be a problem, but if it is I have a couple of older (backup) players that I could use.

Post
#1197358
Topic
REVENGE OF THE NERDS (* unfinished project *)
Time

The Griff said:

So, there’s a laserdisc up for bids on eBay.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Revenge-of-the-nerds-80s-comedy-LASERDISC-LD/183179598885?hash=item2aa65adc25:g:kCsAAOSw9uNa0wC-

Is there anyone willing and able to capture and share this (preferably in the US) if I throw a bid in? I’d need their delivery details up front.

Hopefully it goes for a little less than the 16mm print did…

I’ve got that very laserdisc. I can capture it this week.

Post
#1183846
Topic
Star Fleet/X-Bomber (1980) Remastered Edition (a work in progress)
Time

Bladez636 said:

What did you do this on? virtualdub/avisynth?

Avisynth, you need masktools2 and hqdn3d. Just add those to your plugins directory. You can auto load the script easily by saving the text from function to the last } as a .avsi file. Place it in your plugins folder and all you have to do is import your video and type in the function name.

It’s easier done than said 😉