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WXM

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Join date
2-Nov-2007
Last activity
3-Mar-2024
Posts
198

Post History

Post
#1507922
Topic
The game <em>SCORN</em> (reminiscent of Giger's <em>ALIEN</em> material)
Time

I’m surprised there’s no thread for this game since ALIEN is rightfully a popular subject on this site. Here goes…

Surely some of you have bumped into this game in the past — such as seeing it as part of a “upcoming horror games for 2018” reel or similar — as it’s been in development for many years (passing its target completion dates over and over). For those who don’t know: Very generally, some designers and devs took H.R. Giger’s art(/style) along with some similar-feeling inspirations from other artists to make a full, living world. Have you ever looked at one of those strange paintings and thought, “It would be fascinating to see this brought to life as a place one could walk around in!” then here you go with such an interpretation, one that had a lot of work and thought put into it (Kickstarted 9-24-2017).

This “game” was fiiinally released just a couple of nights ago. I put game in quotes because a number of people who have played it refer to it more as an art piece than something an average gamer will find fulfilling (<-to put it diplomatically). I won’t comment on that debate; there’s plenty you can read and look up to yourself on Kickstarter, Steam, etc., so I’ll let most of that do the talking (and absolutely the debating as to whether this game, art piece, whathaveyou, lives up to what it should for all the time spent on it by the devs).

However, for cinefiles (into sci-fi) who’ve not heard of this title at all, watch a couple minutes from this cued-up point in this video/link. (Unless you watch for a good number of minute) It doesn’t really spoil anything, mostly just shows off how SCORN shines very nicely in many people’s eyes, is akin to some of the moments in almost everyone’s loved film ALIEN and/or some of that amazing 2D artwork ala certain paintings/illustrations…

https://youtu.be/5d7ozOjAlS0?t=5372

.
Disclaimer: This post isn’t some plug that will earn me $ somehow, I’m not the maker of that video fishing for clicks, not a dev of the game, am absolutely not urging anyone to buy this game. I don’t have a rig that can play it so I haven’t even bought it! I just thought a look at this (cinematic) footage was on-subject enough to mention here for those interested, was worth a post. 😃

Post
#1507306
Topic
Enhancement of a deleted EMP scene
Time

That’s incredible! When I saw the source I wouldn’t imagine that was possible on non-pro/non-studio set-up.

For the color (ala your cheap laptop) I went and did a quick tweak that I think takes it closer to realism, but maybe not? I just reduced saturation a decent amount and also shifted the color a tiny bit from the red/magenta toward the green/yellow. This isn’t remotely belittling your efforts. Just seeing if you agree and if it’s perhaps a smidge of help (or maybe it’s just not)

https://mega.nz/file/ikZgCT7B#wHTZUKyerRw6KAZbfwgmFcHaqM-i9X6ISgWM7k5C4c4

Post
#1506597
Topic
Help wanted: Walter Hill movies (original color timing)
Time

This is just a mild, not-remotely-definitive reply for you. I don’t have any LDs, caps of them or anything, but I have the BD of The Driver, that I haven’t looked at in a long time. I opened it up in VDub and it generally looks like blanket teal was applied (as you’re rather saying/showing above). I did a quick try at overall cancelling the teal and the whole thing (well, what bits I bopped through) went from looking strange to much more natural…but this is the main reason I’m posting…

One exception was the car garage scene (with the orange Mercedes). That was still very teal, didn’t look at all like the DVD frame you have above, so that’s a mystery! My casual observation is most of the BD seems recoverable(ish) for a regrade except for the car garage scene. I can’t imagine getting colors like the DVD above without the quite elaborate technique of pulling chroma from another source to replace it in that scene (a technique currently outside my wheelhouse, but I’d love do be able to do it).

Sorry I don’t have anything more solid for you, but no reply after half a day so I figured I’d offer this FWIW.

Post
#1505568
Topic
DVD ripper recommendations?
Time

Oh, just a few trims to that third act showdown. I find it important to the catharsis of Tinky-Winky’s character at this point.

😄

.

I don’t know if it’s weird to care this much about the visual and audio fidelity of such an old anime like this, but I put so much time and effort into it, I want it to be as perfect as possible by the end of it all.

I’m of the opinion (oh, not that anyone cares!) that if you have a passion like this for something then sap it for all it’s worth, such as getting experience with achieving a higher/highest level of technical proficiency. So at least I say it’s absolutely worth it to go that distance you’re pushing for here.

Are you starting with keeping the VOBs as is and editing Womble style (no re-encoding) or are you IVTC’ing (have a good/great method for that), shooting for higher res right away?

Post
#1505566
Topic
DVD ripper recommendations?
Time

Yay, glad it worked out for you!

Now, I just have 24 more disks to rip (for the 3rd time), then replace my old rips with the new ones in my projects and hopefully I should be golden!

Hopefully all your replacing those Teletubbies and Care Bears episode VOBs for your epic edit will go smoothly because I can’t wait for this! Yeah, I’ve long hoped that someone would do something like the extended Lord of the Rings trilogy but with Dipsy, Proud Heart Cat, Po and Lotsa Heart Elephant leading a perilous journey to the Baby in the Sun (instead of Mordor). This is going to be awesome! But my big advice for your edit is to tone down the katana fight between Professor Coldheart and Tinky-Winky. It’s just way too gory in the original. I hate censorship, but we really don’t need to see that scene of Tinky trying to catch his intestines in his purse. Yuckipoo to that!

(J/k everyone!…unless my random jokiness just happens to really be what this mystery edit is 😃)

Post
#1505318
Topic
DVD ripper recommendations?
Time

I’ve been using old DVD Decrypter for ages.

For setting it up I use Mode->IFO. In the settings: Under the “IFO mode” tab I turn file splitting to NONE. I think that’s all that’s needed for it to give you one full VOB for a movie instead of the standard, annoying 1GB chunks.

I could be wrong but I think that’s about all you need for it to give you a nice VTS folder of a good rip. Been a long time since I set it up so I can’t remember if I checked or unchecked anything else, but of course you should look around yourself for kicks, if you even want to use DVD Decrypter.

Post
#1505020
Topic
Mac equiv of WOMBLE (mpeg editing software)? mainly NO re-encoding of the VOB files for exporting...
Time

Hi!

I have a pal (on Mac) who wants to start out just tooling around with some light fan editing, the likes of which he’s never done before, and the DVD realm is fine. The goal is for the process to be easy and great for learning, NOT to output some 2k/4k seamless fan edit masterpiece with 5.1 surround.

I always loved Womble for quick, easy, efficient fan editing, especially how (as long as you don’t use filters) there was no need to do any rendering or processing for the export. The output is just a 1:1 data copy of the original VOB file for all the bits you’re keeping, so fast, easy, saves drive space, etc.

So, yes, I’m seeing if anyone can report to me if any (simple) editing software on Mac is like ol’ Womble MpegVideoWizard. (To be clear, I don’t have a Mac; I want to help him set up/choose since I generally know more about the digital video than he does, but not when it comes to the Mac platform software.)

Thanks for reading!

Post
#1504274
Topic
Millennium (1996 FOX TV) DVD Restoration/Upscale Project (RELEASED)
Time

TVArchive said:

The VOB files were indeed 29.97, but were encoded such that every piece of software I dropped them in to deinterlace said the framerate was 24.172. In all my years of ripping/encoding, I’ve not seen that one before. The second episode on the first disc was 29.97 but the other 3 were reporting back 24.172. Strangest thing I’ve seen. Pulldown was extremely weird! I had to run them through Hybrid to get a reliable 23.976.

Egads indeed, I’m glad I’ve never come across something like that!

Thanks for the replies 😃

Post
#1503998
Topic
Millennium (1996 FOX TV) DVD Restoration/Upscale Project (RELEASED)
Time

TVArchive said:

Yes, they’re the standard old NTSC DVDs. The framerate is kind of wonky on these so I had to do some cleanup work on that as well.

I can’t help but be curious what the issue was. The framerate of the VOBs must be 29.97, right?.. so do you mean there were extra or missing frames throwing off the pull-down pattern?.. and/or fields swapping? I’m not well versed in dealing with those kinds of things so hearing others’ stories of how they overcame IVTC issues is interesting (to me at least), might be great info to help expand my bag of tricks in the future.

But if you’re too busy to elaborate, don’t want to go into things not having to do spec. with the upscaling, etc., no prob.

Post
#1503886
Topic
Millennium (1996 FOX TV) DVD Restoration/Upscale Project (RELEASED)
Time

TVArchive said:

Here are some screenshots from the pilot episode, up-scaled to 1440x1080.

Okay, here are my criticisms of your up-scales. You see, when I do my up-scaling of SD material I try to be sure to… Wha-what I’m aiming at is when ya upscale ya should try to avoid… I guess I’m saying you should consider changing your techniques here by implementing… Oh, NEVER MIND (and j/k!) PHENOMENAL results! 😃

The third one’s trees’ details in the b.g., and the strands of hair in #5, wow just wow! When I clicked on the fourth one I was actually kind of expecting to be able to read the tiniest print of the newspaper clipping. Not at all a slam on you that I (of course) couldn’t. Just expressing the effect I’d already gotten by then that full/native HD was the territory we were in. And this is 2.25x vertical enlarging of mpeg2-compressed material (assuming your DVD are NTSC and not PAL?). Amazing

Post
#1500637
Topic
Project DEVO [WIP]
Time

Great update, thanks for the details.

I have a suggestion that I think would solve a lot of these issues: Just get the original 16mm negatives of all that material and have Peter Jackson’s company scan it all in 4k for you, and let them know what you do want done and not left alone on the scans. Yay! So simple, bet you’re kicking yourself for not thinking of it 😉

Post
#1498416
Topic
The Brave Little Toaster (1987) 4K 35mm Film Scan! (WIP)
Time

Bridger12 said:
The Archive.org version will be fully uncompressed, right?

Maybe someone will correct me because I’ve missed or not considered something, but I’d suspect a fully uncompressed file of this, even only the video — high bit depth to keep the color and all — would be over a TB. Even using Lagarith lossless results in a HD feature file being over 200GB, and fully uncompressed (at least what I’ve seen in my playing around) results in MUCH bigger file sizes than using Lag.

So, I’d assume Venny wouldn’t be trying to upload things in the 200GB-2TB range onto Archive.org … but if anyone throws info at me to correct me on any of that above I’m all ears in my mere hobbyist-ness. 😃

Post
#1495391
Topic
Star Trek: The Motion Picture - Director's Edition HD Recreation (V3 Now Available.) (Released)
Time

Fullmetaled said:

@WXM can you improve the shot like what was done with the empire strikes back scenes in revisited like what was done to the green screen scenes etc.

I’ve ceased doing elaborate help because I’ve kind of fallen behind the times on software; I’m far from a lot of the fan effects gurus around now, and honestly I’ve just learned that for me it’s a little too thankless in the end to put so much mind power and such into these kinds of things that can take a long time and/or are elaborate (unlike cleaning up specks/scratches from a couple of minutes of Brave Little Toaster).

However, I’m guessing there will be at least one talented fan who’ll tackle the lounge shot and do a great job of it, surely better than I could do with my limited software. With the 4k of the TR/SLV to give everyone great foundation footage, yeah, don’t worry, someone will tackle it and have it look awesome 😃

Post
#1495371
Topic
Star Trek: The Motion Picture - Director's Edition HD Recreation (V3 Now Available.) (Released)
Time

Fullmetaled said:

It was possible to update the effects in empire strikes back with adywan doing hoth with revisited so how is this impossible for a fan or even a major studio to do?

[Edit: Oops, this turned out long, sorry!] Fans don’t have time constraints and budgets restrictions and more. Pros have to coordinate with other individuals and other departments and deal with hardware set-ups that may not be their first choice, and they have to show their output to studio higher-ups for approval, and more. It’s a complicated web, mess, of interaction surely always walking a tightrope due to time constraints, rarely with a blank check safety net.

A fan, on the other hand, can work on only what they want, at their leisure, pick projects to begin with that are within their parameters of full comfort/desire, use only their fave software on a computer system they built themselves, do all this without having to answer to anyone else. A fan can seek help from others on their own terms (without legal hassles/contracts or even without paying someone) if there’s a bit they personally can’t quite do something themselves. (Because he couldn’t do such himself I did CG shots on Adywan’s New Hope Revisited — the Death Star plans graphics and the “40 Tie Fighters flying in” — I worked on those bits off and on for ten months; so he got targeted skill goals met for those shots of his project without having to pay anyone, deal with paperwork, etc., unlike professional studio environments that have to coordinate and juggle all that and more, especially budget.)

These guys/gals at studio departments surely have MASSIVE lists of things they have to get done within a time frame. One bit of my work on Adywan’s New Hope was making a Death Star mesh from scratch. That took me about a month, me working on it when I was in the mood, only when I felt charged to do the work. I could take a month “having fun” with it because there was no deadline. What if I had a five-day crunch to do it, couldn’t “hire” anyone to assist me for the more tedious parts of the modeling (couldn’t get help even for free because of legal reasons) and on my workload list for the whole project was also to make meshes for the three Star Destroyer types, Tie Bomber mesh, several beat-up variant meshes of X-Wings, Luke’s landspeeder with 100% matching damage to what’s in the film, and an AT-AT? Yes, I will have accepted the work because I thought I could do it, but what about any snags cropping up (like Covid or whatever)? What if I was locked to a partner on the project — he does texturing while I do modeling — and it turned out he was tripping up and dragging me down like an anchor while we’re on deadline and I couldn’t just replace him as my partner due to seniority structure? And if he and I tripped up, took longer than we were supposed to, the cost might be that the scene layout/rendering department would have to make up time by implementing some unfortunate shortcuts like sloppy compositing and shittier-quality rendering.

Getting a fan to help… There are pipelines that work certain ways; I imagine it’s not as easy as just getting a fan to do this shot or that and wallah, put their work into that of teams of professionals. Yes, one would think, but for reasons I’m not privy too it rarely seems to work out this way.

The solution of course is for Paramount to spend more money, hire more people to spread out the workload, but… When it comes to big studio spending, who knows what’s going on? So much messiness when it comes to that kind of thing. Let’s compare real quick the new Obi Wan Kenobi series and the latest Orville ep 4. I’m not a big fan of The Orville overall, but one has to admit that at times — yeah, I have s03xe04 stuck in my head — Orville looks a LOT better than pretty much everything in OWK, even though the latter has a budget of $25m per episode. What’s the excuse? OKW is official modern Star Wars, starring cast from Lucas-directed films, and freakin’ Trek parody Orville has much better effects (and a kicker is that ultimately both are Disney shows so one can’t even point out the studios making just have different philosophies). There’s surely a lot going on when having to coordinate thousands of people under contracts and such that make it messy in ways that are hard to both comprehend.

I’ll cease my rambling now. 😃

Post
#1495273
Topic
Star Trek: The Motion Picture - Director's Edition HD Recreation (V3 Now Available.) (Released)
Time

Fullmetaled said:

What the heck were they going for but failed with the 4k version of that scene?

I don’t recall the why’s behind it, but this is what they were going for… In the DVD version the windows are supposed to be ones on the (back right) edge of the saucer (these windows can be seen on the model IIRC). I believe this location of the lounge is the case for the TR as well, but the effects team didn’t have time to composite in the nacelle as would be proper for that view (so the 2001 DE team tried to fix that “incomplete effects shot”).

For the 4k they have switched to having our people in the area at the back of the large lump atop the saucer, which has different shaped windows (as per what we see behind our characters in the 4k version). Again, I don’t recall the issue that prompted this change, but hopefully that explains a little what you see in those pics.