Oldfan

penguinofgreatness said:

Turisu said:

I hope you reconsider the special edition; the extra scenes kill the perfect pacing of the film and the theatrical version is Cameron's original director's cut since he had final cut of the movie on release.

Actually, for Aliens, the Special edition is Cameron's director's cut. He prefers that cut of the film and the studio forcibly created the theatrical cut. (Of course it's up to you what cut you prefer.)

In the case of Alien, the theatrical cut is the director's final cut, and the so called "director's cut" is just an alternate cut Ridley Scott did for the dvd.

Correct. The Special Edition of Aliens is Cameron's preferred version (and mine too). Shame the blu-ray is so blue.

dvdmike said:

Turisu said:

dvdmike said:

We have the 1080 hdtv version of aliens 

I've seen the HDTV version and it can't hold a candle to the amount of detail in the bluray transfer which would be amazing if the colour hadn't been so badly messed up.

Would love to see a spoRv version, though I hope you reconsider the special edition; the extra scenes kill the perfect pacing of the film and the theatrical version is Cameron's original director's cut since he had final cut of the movie on release.

I disagree with some fake grain it comes bloody close 

Fake grain doesn't replace the detail lost in the original grain.

Ady, as usual your latest clip looks astounding. It's ridiculous that you have to put up with such nonsense from youtube over your clips. What's hilarious is I can just use my addon to download the entire clip anyways. I hope you had a great Christmas and have a wonderful New Year too! Very much looking forward to the final release!

You_Too said:

Yep, the Japanese BD has just a little bit more grain "preserved", though I suspect that grain to be fake. When using such heavy DVNR on a film, how do you keep the grain at the same time? There's simply no way that grain can be real in my opinion. What do you guys think?

Either way doesn't matter though, since the movie will go through our little special treatment! That is reduction of "edge-enhancement", then sharpening the rest of the details to get a nice balance, then blurring it just a little to match the look of the other BDs and adding the grain from one of those releases to cover up all the DVNR.

Here are some early samples of a test I did with some screenshots a while back: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/54630

We might add just a little more blur before adding the grain though, since I think that might make it look even more natural.

EDIT:

Here's an additional thing some might find interesting. It's an article about the restoration done to the extended (German theatrical) version. After reading it, I just can't believe they were actually talking about using such heavy DVNR. It makes me feel as if those guys really did an amazing job and then some newbie came along and added a filter over the whole thing before sending it to the film company. Unbelievable.

 I agree. It looks like they did an amazing job with the remaster, only to ruin it all in the final stage with DNR. The behind-the-scenes featurette on the German disc shows them restoring it, and it is clearly visible at one point that they have DNR selected on their computer software - you can see their monitors with DNR selected. Usually you don't actually see evidence of them applying it like this.

From what I understand, the Dutch blu-ray version of The NeverEnding Story has the best picture quality. The US blu is way too dark, and the German/Japanese extended cuts released recently have been DNR scrubbed to within an inch of their lives, removing any hint of grain it once had.

Great news! I never heard of Befana before. I learned something today!

Some awesome titles in the works here! The Black Hole is especially interesting to me - that film has some gorgeous special effects and should look pretty amazing in HD. Looking forward to Critters also.

I'm thrilled that this has been released. I bought the 35th anniversary disc the day it was released, and though I thought the image was superior to the previous blu-ray in terms of detail, the color left me very disappointed. There's just no way I believe that it originally looked like that when it was released originally in theatres. I can't wait to check this out now. Thanks a ton for working so hard on this!

I'm very excited to learn about this project. I had no idea that the blu-rays look so bad. Wow, the US disk is waaay too dark. What were they thinking? What happened to "perfect picture, perfect sound"?

It sounded like the slice technique was becoming too much of an issue so I'm glad to hear you gave up on it. It was a great idea but it wasn't worth so much effort, but thanks for trying so hard just the same. I'm sure the final outcome using the HDTV source will look much better than any blu-ray out there. Your comparison shots look fantastic. Can't wait for it to get released!

chyron8472 said:

Concerning blank media, what is the best manufacturer of blank Bluray discs?  I am aware that the best DVD5s are from Taiyo Yuden, and the best DVD9s are from Verbatim's manufacturer in I think Singapore. What is the best manufacturer of Blurays to go with?

Yes this does matter. I tried burning Kerr's 6-disc Lord of the Rings set onto disc, and had to go out and buy more discs after I wasted a whole 20 pack spindle only to get 4 of them to work reliably on a standalone DVD player. I know it was the fault of the discs, not the data.

 

I don't have any experience with burning blu-rays as I don't have a blu-ray burner, but I've been using strictly Verbatim DVD+R DVDs for years without any issues. They burn reliably and stable.

That's too bad. It's been downloading all evening since 6 hours ago and it's only on part 5. It's coming over at half the speed of 56k dial-up. In 6 hours it only downloaded 4 files. And free users can't make multiple connections either to speed up the downloads. I've got 140 left to go. This could take close to a week, and that's if I leave my PC on 24 hours a day, which I don't.

Is the blu-ray available anywhere besides the dreaded Rapidshare?

I just loaded the links up in my queue but part 1 is coming over at a laughable 25-30 KB/s. There are 144 parts. This will take ages to download. I gave up on premium Rapidshare years ago after they turned to crap. I appreciate the upload and I look forward to seeing this, but Rapidshare is awful.

Is it on usenet perhaps? All I could find on myspleen or usenet is a small 1.5GB 720p re-encode.

Harmy said:

Well, it wouldn't be much of a problem to do that but it would create an awkward gap :-D

Anyway, here's the flac mono-mix.

I was quite pleased to find that my BD player plays flac without problems as well.

Hey, thanks for the lossless flac track. That should take care of the incompatibility since my mede8er player handles flac fine. I'll just mux it in. I'm still waiting to hear back from the mede8er forum but I guess maybe it's a hardware incompatibility.

Also, just a note, the depositfiles link is down. Not sure why. I noticed the same thing when I tried to download the mkv from Depositfiles - all the links were gone. Not sure why as all the other links were up.

Harmy said:

Yeah, I'm pretty sure you extracted track two (which would be track 3 inside the MKV, since track one is the video). Because audio track three is 470MB.

Yup, that's exactly what I did. I just checked.

I'll ask in my media player forum if it is supposed to support DTS-HD-MA 1.0 mono. I'll see what they have to say about it and report back here.

Harmy said:

OK, Mavimao, I'll be sending you the scripts as I finish them :-)

As to the third track, I tested the MKV in my Samsung BD Player and it plays just fine, including the mono mix, so there's probably nothing technically wrong with the track and your hardware players probably just don't support DTS mono. If I knew this, it would have been good to include the mono mix in AC3 (the one in the AVCHD is only like 100MB) but it's too late now.

I have a different problem though and that is that my BD player only shows ten audio tracks (and for some reason, it shows the 1st nine and the last one). I hope this is just the player's restriction for MKV and not some general BD format restriction. I can't remember if any of my commercial BDs has more than 10 language tracks, but the most I can recall is around 8. This could be why Encore won't import more than 8 tracks. I hope not.

EDIT: I just found a commercial BD that has over 12 audio tracks, so it should be fine.

@michaeldc: There will be a nice menu and more lossless audio options on the BD, so that would be the only real difference.

Regarding track 3 - I extracted track 3 and looked at it separately in mediainfo, and here is what is listed:

Format                                   : DTS
Format/Info                              : Digital Theater Systems
Format profile                           : MA / Core
File size                                : 889 MiB
Overall bit rate mode                    : Variable

Audio
Format                                   : DTS
Format/Info                              : Digital Theater Systems
Format profile                           : MA / Core
Mode                                     : 16
Format settings, Endianness              : Big
Bit rate mode                            : Variable
Bit rate                                 : Unknown / 639 Kbps
Channel(s)                               : 2 channels
Channel positions                        : Front: L R
Sampling rate                            : 48.0 KHz
Bit depth                                : 16 bits
Compression mode                         : Lossless / Lossy

It's 2 channels - so I don't see why my media player would play 2-channel stereo DTS-HD-MA fine but not 2-channel stereo. To the media player it's the same thing - 2 channel DTS-HD-MA. It shouldn't matter if the left and right channels are the same mono track or stereo - it's still 2 channels. So I still think there's something wrong with track 3.

EDIT: Wait, that's wrong - i was checking the wrong audio track. The mediainfo above is for the stereo track - track 2.

CatBus said:

Well, I think VLC and MPC both just fallback to playing the lossy core, so maybe that's the difference.

Oh, I didn't know that. That might be why VLC and MPC seem to play the track then, if it's just defaulting to the core audio. My external media pleyer supports DTS-HD-MA so it would be trying to decode the full audio, not just the core. Can anybody else with an external media player with DTS-HD-MA support try playing track 3?

Track 3 plays fine in VLC and MPC-HC, but my external media player crashes on it every time, so there may be something wrong with track 3 that software players like VLC can ignore but external players can't for some reason involving the decoding.

CatBus said:

Oldfan said:

Just finished with all the parts of the fixed 2.5 mkv. I have a question about the audio tracks - is there something different about audio track 3? Because I'm playing the file in my mede8er media player and if I select any other track it plays just fine, but if I select track 3 there is no audio and the player freezes after just a few seconds and locks up and I have to pull the power plug to reset it. It really doesn't like track 3. Is there something wrong with it?

 

Well, I know my ArcSoft DTS Decoder threw an error and wouldn't decode it, but I figured it was the software's fault for not understanding DTS mono.  Anyone tried track 3 in a hardware player that does DTS-HD?

Thanks for the reply. Hmm, I'm wondering if there's something wrong with track 3 then. I've never seen my mede8er player crash that bad before every time I try to play track 3, so there must be something about that track that can't be decoded.

I wonder if a fixed audio track can be uploaded if that's the case so we can just mux it in?

Just finished with all the parts of the fixed 2.5 mkv. I have a question about the audio tracks - is there something different about audio track 3? Because I'm playing the file in my mede8er media player and if I select any other track it plays just fine, but if I select track 3 there is no audio and the player freezes after just a few seconds and locks up and I have to pull the power plug to reset it. It really doesn't like track 3. Is there something wrong with it?

EDIT: I see track 3 is listed as:

TRACK  3) 1.0   DTS-HD-MA   [English]        (1977 35mm mono mix)

My player handles DTS-HD-MA fine and it plays tracks 1 and 2 which is also DTS_HD_MA so I can't figure out why it won't play this track.

Nice to hear you're still keeping at it. I wasn't aware there was an HD version of this, but of course it was only a matter of time before Disney got to scanning it in HD. If it's online then it's only a matter of time before Disney releases it on blu-ray. You know Disney though - they could sit on it for years before they decide the timing is right for a retail release.

Ady, I just had to say that your talent seemingly has no boundaries. That sculpture looks outstanding. I really don't know how you did it, but wow! And like others have mentioned, this will be replacing a big shot. I can't wait to see how this works out.

Sorry to hear about your bad luck with the camera but glad to hear some generous people helped you out.

Also awesome to hear about the spider thingy maybe making an appearance. That ought to be cool.

Glad to hear 2.5 is finished rendering. I know rendering is very time consuming. Nice to hear everything is coming along for you.

Very much looking forward to this. I was afraid it had been abandoned but I'm glad to hear it's still happening.

Is this on a.b.starwars? If not, will it be eventually?

I'm a huge fan of this film actually. My initial thought is that I'm not really that into the idea, since I've loved it all these years as it is, flaws and all. But it's late and I'm on my way to bed so I'll think on it and post some comments later. Being a favorite of mine, even with all it's flaws, perhaps some ideas will pop in my head. I admit there are certainly flaws in the film.