Spaced Ranger

If you find time and if this helps, here’s a short Avisynth script to put one, or the other, or both numberings on the frames. If iMovie can import/handle .avs files, you could watch it from your timeline. Otherwise, you might be able to view it in a videoplayer:

file name (completely arbitrary): THX_numbered.avs

##=================
## video w/ frame numbers
##=================

## Video path & name
## ----------

movie = "THX1138_35_stabilized_HD\THX1138it.mov.mp4"

## Get video & enforce format
## ----------

film = DirectShowSource( movie )
\ .ConvertToRGB().ConvertFPS( 24 )

## Add counters
## counters slow the display
## remove "#" from only the one to show
## ----------

#film = film.ShowFrameNumber( x=100, y=50 ) # frame number
#film = film.ShowSMPTE( x=100, y=75 ) # SMPTE
film = film.ShowFrameNumber( x=100, y=50 ).ShowSMPTE( x=100, y=75 ) # both

## Display
## ----------

film

Well, major slow-down at the “malfunctioning officer” shot. Both 35mm & 16mm have missing frames, much of the area of interest is the walking-away-from-the-camera character (little movement to compare), and … someone putting his 16mm counters in picture (industry standard?), right over the walking legs.

Help me, Obi-Wan AntcuFaalb. You’re my only hope … you and your THX laserdisc capture, that is (is finished?). 😃

No sign of any extra inscriptions near the mint-marks (at least in the 1/3 & 1/2 of the circumferences that the photos show around those numbers. Definitely not Technidisc then.

It had the proper disc labels printed Fox Video, Special Wide Screen Edition, and 1130-85. But, for example, disc “side 1” had a mint-mark of B21B13975 (or something close; fuzzy photo) and “side 3” had D30D00816 (sharp photo).

Gut feeling says Mitsubishi because they start with letters (Techidiscs start with numbers), but those numbers are undocumented in our main resource (LDDb).

It was dat right toyn, doc …

.

@ Anonymous105

These newer encoders do a nice job. And I did watch the vid … looks great. Time to bid a fond farewell to MPG2.

I was trying to see how well banding was handled (but I’m not aware of any particular shot where it may originally show).

.

poita said:
Broadcast HDR monitors are still crazily expensive, I think the Sony is the cheapest at around $42,000 Australian Dollarydoos, for their BVM-X300 30" monitor.

Sounds very affordable … in cartoon currency (at least Australia has bigger numbers in their bucks than has the U.S.) 😃

Thanks! I guess it’s going-to-HDR-school time for me. (Another week of free time – shot.)

LOL

Okay, okay … It seems less fewer splices as we move into the reel.

@ poita
Very cool! I guess we’ll have to beware when reading the specs, like HD-TVs and their phony “refresh rates”, if we want “the real thing”.

@ Anonymous105
So you encoded from 8-bit to 10-bit and it plays back at 8-bit? And that processing is enough to mitigate banding? If so, that’s unexpectedly good. Could you post a before-and-after screenshot that may demonstrate this? (Of course, I also like the idea of smaller file size at same/better quality.)

Harmy said:
I tried reading up on it but to be honest, I find the whole thing quite confusing …

That’s what happens when step-up technology is put into the hands of the Ad department.

Who would junk their present HD-TV for some step-up technology that shows all the present media … looking the same? So it gets some hot-new name that lets the imagination fly. (Ever see a store demo of a UHD-TV? The picture “pops”! Wow! Is that the new technology? Well … no, because the store-mode setting is “high-saturation” and “high-contrast”. But you can do the same thing at home with your lowly HD-TV, because 1 (UHD) panel is what they manufacture to break up into 4 panels for 4 HD-TVs.

It really is more like this . .

. . more visible spectrum being saved in a bigger container, to hold the extra range. Digitally speaking, a few more bits for the extra colors. (Because our technology can’t affordably do more right now.)

That’s about as much as I can perceive without technical details – slow in coming because “an extra bit (or 2) per Red, Green, and Blue” wouldn’t sell more TVs. 😃

It seems less splices as we move into the reel:

sync 35mm to 16mm - as 2 parallel streams matching where they can
2nd 1000 frames

35mm frames . . description
09219-15933 . . begin match @ mall-hall
15934-16074 . . begin 35mm-Italian LUH-report
. 00000-00145 . spacer for 16mm-English LUH-report & spliced-out LUH-cabinet (2 frames)
16075-19191 . . begin match @ LUH-cabinet

16mm frames . . description
09962-16676 . . begin match @ mall-hall
. 00000-00140 . spacer for 35mm-Italian LUH-report
16677-16820 . . start 16mm-English LUH-report
16821-19939 . . begin match @ LUH-cabinet (-2 frames)

Thanks for these couple of topics on the Star Wars SWSE Technidisc LD (1993), on which I was recently coming up to speed. I had been looking around and came across one that didn’t have the mint-marks of either of the 2 same-cover, FOX Video-released laserdiscs, as described at the LaserDisc Database:

LaserDisc Database: Star Wars: A New Hope (FOX) (1977) [1130-85] wrote:

Mint Marks sample

Mitsubishi (1992):
C1130-85 A 03 A20E05213
C1130-85 B 03 B20E05217
C1130-85 C 01 C20E02637
ADD M 69 D40J2175

Technidisc (1993):
#433-083278B 08/21/93K FOX VIDEO “STAR WARS” SIDE A
#433-083279B 08/21/93O FOX VIDEO “STAR WARS” SIDE B
#433-083280B 08/21/93G FOX VIDEO “STAR WARS” SIDE C

Additional Information by svenge (1) 19/10/2011
According to the OriginalTrilogy forums, the Technidisc pressing actually has a different video master that fixes the “Incredible Shrinking Ratio” problem and has less DVNR, albeit with the downside of high cross-talk levels that Technidisc was (in)famous for in their pressings…

Would there be any accounting of mint marks that don’t match these documented ones?

[removed observation 😃 ]

In this emergency situation, no 5¼" half-measures … we must go for the full 8" floppy!

I’ve update the 1st 1000 frames post (above). Suggestions (especially from poita, as he’ll be referencing this) for better clarity and more useful formatting are welcome. Otherwise I’ll continue this format.

ADDED:
@ Mavimao

Don’t know if you’ve logged all your match-edits, but does it look like I’m catching what you’ve already found so far? (And if you have a log of matches, would you post them here? I’m using both frame-counts and SMPTE, so in either format is workable.)

I believe it!

<rant on>
In fact, while rerunning my script after working in/out the Italian-changed text in the movie, I received an inexplicable “I don’t understand” error about one variable, which was called once. Impossible! After trying different things (without any success), I change one character in the name (in both places), and, inexplicably, it runs again. Worse, I change that one character back to it’s original character (in both places), and now it works when it didn’t before! Grrrrr!!

And then there’s always those testimonies of those who try to run scripts (which most people run just fine) but can’t get it to work.
</rant off>

There. I feel better now. I guess the next thing to check into would be memory integrity (shudder).

I know, and I was stunned at such a problem surfacing. (And, yes, it should’ve been v.2.5.8 . Been having typos lately. 😃 I’ll correct it above.)

Thanks for the things to consider. The video files were originally extensioned .mov (which wouldn’t read), but a quick web-search suggested changing the extension to .mp4 (which then did read). I had a few versions installed/removed but don’t recall installing anything special for file reading. Also had v.2.6.0 installed once to try something from OT (with a few recommended plug-ins), but it wouldn’t work the script as it should’ve. (Sometimes I hate Avisynth.)

Well … after looking around for something to replace Avisynth and finding programs only useful for editing video, I’ll just move along with Avisynth with the caveat to look where I found missing areas and verify them independently.

In the first 1,000 frames of the 35mm, I found these:
[UPDATED for fixes & presentation:]

sync 35mm to 16mm - as 2 parallel streams matching where they can
1st 1000 frames

35mm frames . . description
00000-02265 . . start: 35mm-Italian (titles; missing counter & medicine-spycam)
. 00000-02973 . spacer for missing 16mm titles & counter & medicine-spycam
02266-02330 . . begin match @ medicine-spycam
. 00000-00011 . spacer for spliced-out medicine-spycam
02331-02377 . . begin match @ medicine-spycam
. 00000-00000 . spacer for spliced-out medicine-spycam (1 frame)
02378-02647 . . begin match @ medicine-spycam
. 00000-00004 . spacer for spliced-out print-out
02648-05027 . . begin match @ print-out
. 00000-00006 . spacer for spliced-out control-room
05028-05345 . . begin match @ control-room
. 00000-00000 . spacer for spliced-out manipulator (1 frame)
05346-07297 . . begin match @ manipulator
. 00000-00044 . spacer for missing 16mm radiation & sparks
07298-07340 . . begin match @ sparks
. 00000-00000 . spacer for spliced-out sparks (1 frame)
07341-07670 . . begin match @ sparks (NOTE: frame wobble)
. 00000-00003 . spacer for spliced-out THX-adjusting
07671-09218 . . begin match @ THX-adjusting

16mm frames . . description
. 00000-02265 . spacer for 35mm-Italian titles
00000-04305 . . start: 16mm-English (titles)
04307-04341 . . begin match after skipped duplicate frame #04306
04343-09961 . . begin match after skipped duplicate frame #04342

(I just realized that I should’ve treated all Italian-language video-changes like the opening titles. Will redo the “radiation” section and edit here.) Done.

TheQuazz said:
wat even is this

Chinese animation? Well …

Wikipedia - History of Chinese animation reads:
The history of Chinese Animation began in the 20th century in the Republic of China when the people became fascinated with the idea of animation. A lengthy history interlocks between the art, politics and the ever-changing economy. Chinese animation has long been under the shadow of Disney and Japanese animations, but it once played a very important role in world animation.

By the end of the millennium, the Internet opened up the Chinese animation industry a great deal. … CGI special effects increased to the point where many new Chinese animation movies and series had begun to be adopted by mid-2000s with some example of DragonBlade: The Legend of Lang and Century Sonny.

I was going to show the results of this Avisynth script to align the 2 scans. On double-checking before posting, I noticed the video of one film was shifted by 1 frame even though none of the settings had changed (and were printed onto the picture). Going back and running it again, they then were properly aligned, with the same settings . .

Clearly something in Avisynth (this system is running v.2.5.8) is wrong and cannot be relied upon to serve up the correct images. Sorry this approach turned out to be useless.

(Normally I’d put a cool, animated smiley here, but my smiley resource site "http://www.freesmileys.org/" completely disappeared a several days ago …

… and a lesson for us all -[as spoken by Tony "Felix Unger" Randall].) 😉

I’m using the 16mm scan as a base and aligning the 35mm to it. One problem I came across is the 16mm has duplicate frames here and there. I’ll check out the full-sized (I work reduced-sized for reduced-lagged) to see if the frame code increments on the dup’ed frame, too. And as you mentioned, the 35mm has groups of frames missing … just to make things more fun. 😃

BTW, what software are you using?

Great idea! I’d like to compare/align the 35mm IB Tech (Italian) & the 16mm scope (English). [If we have any “official” names for these projects, can someone list them? I don’t know what to label anything.]

I’m using Avisynth to align everything (it’s all manual, so don’t think computers make things easier). Aside from coding and debugging the code, I’ll watch and try to sync the video streams, and point out missing frames and changed edits … roughly this way:

The 35mm shows a jump in the action (THX's 1st time in his medicine cabinet) in the top row. The next rows show the 16mm frames going out of sync and coming back into sync. All frames are numbered from the start of their respective files. So a little math will reveals how much is missing and where.

I’m working towards 2 film strips that will play with placeholder frames as the sync changes to maintain sync between them to the end. That will take a while, so I’ll put up pictures like the above just to get the info out as soon as possible. So, anyone else doing this, don’t wait for me. Just post your findings, too.

It’s slow and I’m normally short on time (not to mention all of us, but that’s another story). Anyone – please duplicate my effort your way because poita needs such information to meet his more crucial deadlines.

OK, just sent for Frank to suit up and EVA, to type the “Private Topic” on the antenna keyboard. In the meantime, I’ll keep HAL busy in a chess game. ;D

update:
Well. Frank came back, mission accomplished. And I beat HAL in chess.

Doesn’t seem right somehow. Script-girl, where’s Stanley's latest script?!

Hmmm . . .

ww12345 said:
I’m hoping my print (the complete print) will have a little more color … the scanner does need some of the funds for the scanning, so if you have any extra cash lying around, it would be greatly appreciated.

My poor pockets say "go for it!" For these things every little bit adds up to move the projects along. Will click on your name to send a Private Message for contact/details . .

“Xray Delta One, this is Mission Control. Roger your one-niner-three-zero. We concur with your plan to help the project with a donation. And we’ll get more info to you just as soon as we work it out.”

After poking around a little bit, I discovered that this older Firefox v.37+ actually has a Responsive Design View mode in it’s Web Developer section. I activated it (only in the present tab) and must say that the website does not look broken in that mode:

So this whole thing is indeed a downward-compatibility problem. Perhaps, like with the reply default-post stating “This editor uses Markdown syntax” instructions, a note could be added about such a Responsive Design View mode in some browsers that don’t automatically switch to it. Just a thought.