Mavimao

This looks really great Dr. Dré! Thank you for all your hard work.

Dude Where’s My Car? is comedy gold. Come at me!

LeLwrence said:

Is the 81 crawl just like 77 but with the added Episode IV A New Hope lines?

The starfield is different as well as the timing. The moment when the camera pans down to reveal Tattoine is not the same. The 77 is spot on but the 81 version is off.

Wow! How does this even work??

poita said:

Didn’t the Blu-Rays also have the original shots cleaned up as well as the new shots?
I thought you could choose the version when playing them?

That is correct but the quality of the shots are a bit rough. I honestly think it wouldn’t be worth the trouble because there’s more wrong with those shots than just the occasional speck of dirt: you’ve got grain, loss of detail, matte lines, sometimes the ship is opaque and you can see the stars through the ship…

Honestly, you just have to realize that these effects are not going to look like a modern show and should enjoy them for what they are.

“I’m gonna give you an engine low to the ground… extra thick oil pan to cut the wind from underneath you. It’ll give you thirty or forty more horsepower. I’m gonna give you a fuel line that’ll hold an extra gallon of gas. I’m gonna shave half an inch off you and shape you like a bullet. I’ll get you primed, painted and weighed, and you’ll be ready to go out on that racetrack. Hear me? You’re gonna be perfect.”

Ah I see… The bluray would probably have to do in this case. The 16mm is cropped and has no color so that would be more trouble than it’s worth to fix.

thxita said:

For the quick English release, the titles and infographics from Bluray will have to do I guess. They’ll just be cleaner 😛

What graphics did they re-do!?

Dek Rollins said:

Mavimao said:

I could make a quick English version edit from the grindhouse version. Shouldn’t take me too long. Would people prefer…

1. The original theatrical version or the 1st director’s cut (the LD version)?

2. is there anything inherently wrong with the LD audio? I would think it would be the highest quality version available…

I’d say go with the LD version, or just whatever will be easier/faster.

I’d think the LD would be easier: better audio and less worries of lost frames.

It’s relatively simple to do: just get a rip of the English version, say the laserdisc, along with it’s high quality audio, and load it on your timeline. Resize the ld video so it only takes up a corner. Then import just the video of the Italian print and cut and paste the shots so both images are in sync. Erase the video of the ld and then export. Voila.

For this particular project, you’d need to also find a different source for the titles and the Buck Rodgers serial at the beginning.

I could make a quick English version edit from the grindhouse version. Shouldn’t take me too long. Would people prefer…

1. The original theatrical version or the 1st director’s cut (the LD version)?

2. is there anything inherently wrong with the LD audio? I would think it would be the highest quality version available…

suspiciouscoffee said:

Mavimao said:

suspiciouscoffee said:

SHOWS
TOS
TNG

Slowly working through those two on Netflix. TNG may surpass TOS if the rest of the seasons are better than S1 like everyone says.

Haven’t watched the rest.

Oh my God! Season One of TNG is a trainwreck! There are 2 or 3 episodes I can watch from time to time but it’s rough. Season 2 is a little better, but it really picks up steam starting with Season 3.

Tell me, does Q ever become less irritating? I cannot stand him as is.

There are times when I just really want to skip this season and go on to S2, but for whatever reasons I just can’t bring myself to do it.

Well, they definitely have better stories for him after season 1 and he usually only appears in one episode per season at that. In any case, don’t skip season one. There are some good ones here and there.

suspiciouscoffee said:

SHOWS
TOS
TNG

Slowly working through those two on Netflix. TNG may surpass TOS if the rest of the seasons are better than S1 like everyone says.

Haven’t watched the rest.

Oh my God! Season One of TNG is a trainwreck! There are 2 or 3 episodes I can watch from time to time but it’s rough. Season 2 is a little better, but it really picks up steam starting with Season 3.

I’ve been on a sort of Trek binge, going through every TOS and TNG episode, and I have to say that while it has its moments, The Original Series can be a real slog to get through. I’ve lost count of how many episodes consist of an alien being/artificial intelligence that their sensors cannot comprehend who somehow tranforms itself into a beautiful human female (complete with midriff and soft focus close ups) that Kirk seduces and then obliterates by the end of the episode (and no one gives a shit that it’s the last of its species).

TNG, on the other hand, I feel, had a greater variety of storylines and really took the franchise to a new level. A shame those movies were crap.

Are you sure you want to use de-interlacing? You’re effectively throwing away half the resolution and filling in what’s missing with what’s left.

Apart from the Italian dubbing, the big difference is that there is no Buck Rogers and it begins with the end, with THX in the car with voice over saying something like: this is the future and I’m escaping. Here is my story. It then goes to the beginning of the plot and takes up with THX climbing out of the tunnel.

Poita, wiser words were never said.

Like the big man said: THX 1138 has also had the Lucas Touch done to it and quite egregiously so. These prints are extremely rare, especially a non faded one! Save a piece of cinematic history and donate today.

Wow! Those samples look amazing! We should remember that this was shot in the early 70s in Techniscope - so that’s half a normal Academy 35mm frame to create a widescreened image - and then blown up and squeezed to a normal anamorphic standard. Grain haters need should leave now…

TheHutt said:

Shifting aspect ratios is quite senseless, IMHO. Christopher Nolan started it; no reason for other directors to follow in his footsteps.

It’s not senseless: he wanted to use as much screen real estate as he could with the IMAX scenes which are more of a square than the long rectangle of the 2.35 aspect ratio.

So he had three choices:

1. Crop (and letterbox) the IMAX scenes to 2.35.
2. Crop the IMAX scenes to 1.76 (less cropping. No letterboxing. Uses all available resolution of your television)
3. Letterbox the IMAX scenes to 1.43 (you get the entire IMAX frame but you have big black lines on the left and right side of the screen)

There are pros and cons to each of these choices and Christopher Nolan picked the one he felt was the best to display the large format photography.

PS: Did anyone see the Dark Knight in 15/70 IMAX? I didn’t care too much for the film, but the EXPERIENCE was out of this world. The detail was jaw-dropping.

What the hell is going on around here? I leave OT.com for 10 years and I come back and I find out that the X0 project has been canceled?! Oh my god my life is over and I now have to live with sub par laserDisc transfers!

flametitan said:

Being that they used both Vistavision and Technirama, and I assume a third camera for non effect shots, I wonder how hard it was to mix the negatives, seeing that to my knowledge you’d have three different anamorphic scales for the shots.

VistaVision and Technirama are, for all intents and purposes, the same format (35mm, 8 sprockets wide, vertically loaded - exactly like a 35mm still camera). I seriously doubt they used the Technirama anamorphic lens and instead used a normal aspherical lens. The anamorphic system is quite poor for analog special effects work because of the reduced depth of field, the soft edges and the anamorphic squeeze being inconsistant across the frame. All it does is introduce more errors in your work flow.

They more than likely filmed all of the special effects shots and composited them using the flat 8 sprocket format, then cropped the top and bottom, added a 2x squeeze and printed it to 4 sprocket anamorphic 35mm.

Dreamaster said:

Harmy said:

Oh, yeah, most old home video releases were undersatured with unnaturally boosted reds.
As for Grindhouse, the point there is that the print was faded and so it had to go through color correction and they had no good reference, so they had to do it by eye and just decided to make snow white, which all evidence points to that it wasn’t in the original ESB prints.
Also, when a snowy landscape is dark, it does usually appear bluish, even in real life.

Interesting photo, which almost leaves it just as unresolved because it does show some blue lighting but the main carcass snow is perfectly white:
http://dimmerlightstudios.com/screens_med/tfu/e5s_bts_48_r.jpg

I respect your decision sir, I had to at least try! 😉

Before DI grading became the norm, DPs would use gels and filters to achieve a certain look. Now every DP is different, but I once worked on a film where we wanted a warm look and asking the lab to make all the shots warm was too expensive so we used warming gels on the lights.

I could show photos from the shoot and everyone would look normal. I could also get the original negatives scanned and make everything ‘normal’ but that’s not the effect we were going for.

You can’t trust photos from the set.

During the 50s and 60s the studios were coming up with all sorts of widescreen formats and would often reuse older cameras. That technirama camera could very well have started out as a three strip camera but gutted and refurbished.

Do an image search on Google with “technirama camera” and that particular model is everywhere.

Found it! According to this article linked at the bottom it’s a Technirama camera which was basically VistaVision with an anamorphic lens. I’m sure they simply used aspherical lenses on the camera.

http://www.cinematographers.nl/FORMATS3.html