WXM

A couple of people above made “coming soon” mentions of it, but now up on Amazon for pre-order is the (KL) new HD version of the theatrical cut. I’m worried about putting a direct link as it could change or the like, but on US Amazon search for

• “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century - Theatrical Feature”
  or
• “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century - The Complete Collection”

Release date: November 24, 2020.

DJPitaB, yeah, I’ve done similar. When wanting to average/median five or so VHS captures of the same thing I’d have five or however many VirtualDub instances open, would comb through…

I guess I was hoping you had some magic software to share, but wishful thinking. Thanks for the reply.

DJPitaB, your (solid) way of dealing with any dupe frames in video… Real quick so as not to de-rail this thread (I don’t have a way to do your wanted capture 😦) what is your method for that if you don’t mind sharing the info? Thanks.

Chase, regarding the Dobby shots…

I’m not any kind of authority on HP. I’ll just say that your version looks neat and cool except for the lurch when the supposedly seamless cut happens (to your effects work frames).

For the first shot there’s a little bit of a zoom in. For the second, everything in the b.g. shifts to the right a little (the window frame and bed and such, plus Harry eyes go from open to closed instantly, plus the focus for him goes pretty soft). Can you easily enough get those two lurches in difference out with a little more work? If it wouldn’t take you too long…

It seems like you’re really close to having a great shot here and it’s just this side mess, not the main effect itself, that’s hampering things. I understand that for the second shot it might mean masking Harry out as his own element (and having the b.g. linger so that it doesn’t shift) and maybe that’s beyond the amount of effort you want to put into this. (Off the top of my head also, if you could get Harry as his own element you could do a two or three frame dissolve at the cut area to solve the eyes open-closed issue.)

Just my thoughts. Again, your main effect with Dobby looks pretty neat to me! 😃

Oh wow, that’s quite impressive!
Could I use virtual dub for a first correction then use Premiere Pro to do some tweaking?

VirtualDub doesn’t let you do pieces of a file, only the whole thing (that’s loaded) and you’re talking different scenes needing diff work. Ultimately if Premiere is to be in your workflow for sure then let’s hope it can do everything that VDub could do to keep your life simpler. I don’t have Premiere (!) so I can’t say what it will and won’t do for you with this, but I’d imagine AP could surely kick some pretty serious color correcting, contrast adjusting, etc. butt here in 2020.

But let’s say Premiere fails to go the distance in some spots and you want to give those bits an as-suggested pre-boost in VDub. If you do coloring work in VirtualDub you really should save it out as a lossless (avi) file, using the Lagarith lossless codec, so that you lose no quality (well, more or less; it’s up to you not to overdo the filters and jack up the image). If Premiere insists you turn that avi file into something else before it’ll read it… 😦 You’re talking a lot of hard drive space and computing power. A 45 minute BD rip when turned into a lossless avi will be about 100GBs. 😮 But if you have a powerful as hell computer and empty terabytes on more than once drive in your system then perhaps…? Or if you need only one or two scenes with such a pre-boost?

There’s also scripting (Avisynth) which is the better path apparently for things, but that’s out of my league to a large degree so I won’t suggest or comment. On this note, let’s see of others chime in with better advice and knowledge than my simple little mind is trying to offer. 😃

Who is Dr. Dre?

A feller known in these parts for being a wee tad decent-plus at working with movie colors. Here’s where he’s a bit active recently (currently)…
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Harmys-STAR-WARS-Despecialized-Edition-HD-V2-7-MKV-Released/id/12713/page/673#1366137

He created a legendary tool (although I haven’t used it myself) called Dr. Dre’s Color Matching Tool that’s used by people on many sites it’s that good apparently
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Color-matching-and-prediction-color-correction-tool-v13-released/id/18128

Me again

I’m not a master color grader by any stretch, but I put your BD image into my VirtualDub and used just three primitive-ish filters, and think the end result is passable, natural enough now, hm? So it would seem with better tools you could do better than this quick job. (I know it’s not a perfect match to the SD side, but that side looks a tad dark and over-saturated to me, but maybe that’s just me.)

My criticism of my own work here might be the flesh tones are a smidge pink-ish, but I personally don’t know how to pull so much yellow out from the (BD) image and keep yellow in the skin. Maybe Dr. Dre knows. 😃

Hi ykarus1974

I would convert the resulting mkv to MT2S files

I’m pretty sure MakeMKV can make verbatim copy of your BD straight to M2TS, a “pure rip” so to speak; it at least gives you m2ts files. (For the longest I assumed that it couldn’t do this, would only give you MKV container’d output but…)

Use “Backup” (second icon from the left). 😃 Then you’ll save a whole step of converting MKVs to MT2Ts (and likely losing quality).

My two cents…

I have a pal who’s a professional movie audio guy, and the studio he works at — which does sound mostly at the documentary/indie films level (not huge Hollywood) — has lots of high-end sound software to (try to) accomplish all kinds of weird clean up of audio that low-to-no-budget indie and docu filmmakers throw their way. For some of my movie restoration work I’ve thrown him small clips — less than a minute long — for cleaning out dialogue or music from something already mixed to stereo or mono, and while this is totally in his wheelhouse and while his results were decent-to-good (but not perfect) some of these bits took him an hour to do; an hour of his time using all the resources at his studio/work to clean out music or dialogue from a .wav file under a minute long.

So my two cents is that it seems things aren’t there yet as far as your initial request and that you look well into the alternative mentioned by ThatPixarGuy as your solution…although it would be cool if someone chimed in here with a cleaning method that works really well and is not nearly as time intensive.

The owner is looking into the price of shipping it to me vs getting it transferred locally.

When it comes to capturing VHS, I hope you’re aware of “averaging,” “merging”…I think the technique has another name too. I personally never capture from VHS without doing this as the benefits are so very worth it (wiping out tape noise plus increasing detail without using de-noising or sharpening filters/tools). You are likely familiar with averaging, but since it seems you’re only going to get one stab at acquiring this footage I figured I’d mention this just in case. Great stuff, good luck! 😃

I haven’t seen this edit yet, but already the thought and effort you’ve put into this is dynamite…even more than what took care of Bond’s poor LE in this movie. 😮 😃 Looking for to this one!

Sincere thanks for your detailed entries/information regarding your efforts here. I love seeing this kind of work being done. :)

One extra you could have is a section with scans of the box tops from every Macross toy and model kit ever produced.  Why, I think you'd have at least ten scans in there in the end! ;)

Ripplin said:

...looking at the nice disc art for ANH:R (red wire-frame Death Star model)...

Here are two great war movies, on opposite sides of the spectrum. The first one is a great "movie" movie. You know, a great time at the movies! The second one is a war movie will sink you into freakin' hell, possibly make you feel ill at times it's so disturbing (and it achieves this with very little gore effects!).

As already mentioned by FanFiltration, "Kelly's Heroes". All star (big!) cast, great writing, great location shooting and costumes and sets, great action... It's funny, exciting, tense, at times it will practically make you cheer...! Even the music is awesome! This flick has it all! Really, if you've never seen it, you must! This is what having fun at the movies is all about! :)

And on the other end of the "war movie" spectrum is "Come and see" (a USSR movie, original title "Idi i smotri".) I'm one of those people who really didn't like Saving Private Ryan. I give Dale Dye a huge amount of credit but all the contrivances, the bad writing, the overwrought John Williams score in that flick... >:P
A few years later "Come and See" was at a local theater, and seeing it I couldn't believe that this film was made in '85! (I really suspect that Spielberg saw this before making SPR; there's one thing in SPR that had "never been seen" in war movies before, but it's here in CAS 13 years earlier!) Truly ahead of its time. I don't want to pump it up too much as some people say it's overrated. (but I'll still take a jab at such people and say they're out of their mind.) It's not a fast-moving film, not full of great characters who you'd like to be your pals if you were plopped into a crisis. It's just a slice of one of the most terrible (surrealishly so) times in human existence (and this is not a prison camp movie). Alright, shutting up now on it. :)


To throw one more out there, one not seen too often: "Stalingrad" (1993) Not quite a great masterpiece of a film due largely to its veering off from what the subject matter should supposedly offer (the battle of Stalingrad!), but pretty darned good, very worth a look for the harrowing atmosphere, epic scale/scope of the production, and the brutal/realistic graphicness on display in the battles and such. Probably goes without saying, but don't watch the dubbed version.

When you have time to watch something beyond movie length, the HBO mini "Band of Brothers" mini is excellent, highly recommended! (this coming from someone who basically hated SPR!) It's the highest rated thing (that has over a few thousand votes) I've ever seen on IMDb: rated 9.6 out of 10! :O I've watched all ten hours twice now.

That's my two cents. ;)

Mr. Ghostface,

I see your points and, I myself, am enjoying hearing them. :) But I guess I'll say in response to seeing things getting possibly (more?) heated that the point of this edit was to "correct" all of the little things that people deemed inconsistent, a mistake, etc. (plus to add a couple of flourishes that the editor himself really wanted to add). To rag on Ady's fixing little things is like ragging on the "grindhouse feel" Jaws edit at fanedit.org for looking too unclean. It's the point of that edit to look unclean, as it was the point of "Revisited" to gather and listen any little thing that anyone has noticed and take a stab at correcting them. (And this whole idea was general seeded in the minds of fans by George Lucas himself, was it not? So you can't even "blame" Ady for the general idea of such "fixing.")

Note that I'm not jumping down your throat; just tossing this out there that it's east to forget that fanedits are something where you need to consider the intent behind them (and the human resources behind them). Ady has done exactly what he set out to do, and put a huge amount of time doing it. And if an element didn't work out, it's not because of lack of really trying, and generally people who come here know and really respect that. As roundaboutly stated in the last couple of pages (and you probably know this), if you have a DVD of a movie, a computer with a DVD drive, and Womble installed, you can do a professionally clean looking fan edit. That's all the resources you need in this day and age to get a clean/nice edit! Ady (and me to a tiny degree to fill in one gap in Ady's huge arrays of talent) utilized much, much more, put in huge amounts of effort, and the community here really likes that, hence they want to stick up for him. As far as I know, Ady is not a pro. I hear bits and pieces that say that he absolutely has the skills to be a pro, but pros usually also have a support team behind them. As far as I know Ady has pretty much done everything (except the smidgens of custom CG) on these edits by himself. And people know that, respect that, and cut his edit slack if 100% perfection hasn't been achieved.

Again, personally, I like hearing much of what you have to say. :) I see it as different point of view, but in the interest of wanting to see things kept "nice" on all sides, I felt like saying all that. Hope that's okay to you and everyone else. :) What do you work on by the way? Can you tell us? That would be cool to hear a little about! :)


Ady, hey! I think I might be too busy to do more. :( I did build a new computer though, a (cheap!) Core i7, that I'm going to OC (if I don't get cold feet!). It should render in one-freaking-sixth the time of my dual core! :D I'll chat with ya soon for kicks via PM. :)

Maybe I can give some sense of scale to the amount of work that goes into something like this for those questioning it? :)

As you can see in my sig, I'm the mysterious "guy" who did the from-scratch CG on this project (who was amusingly referred to as a whole "team" it seems by MojoLA! :)) For just the small handful of shots for Ep IV Revsted I put work into, I spent about 500 man hours plus about 1500 rendering hours, work done on and off over ten months. Obviously, Ady did not do just a few shots of Episode IV but the entire freaking movie and all the sound and DVD work by himself too!... worked on it almost every day (and many hours of those days) for over two years! :O So, I can tell you for sure that my household put in about 2000 hours in, and it can surely be surmised that this number must be absolutely completely dwarfed by the time Ady put in, probably to an exponential degree! :O Just to back up what some others have said. :)

Wow, more replies came in!

Wstrwald, I discovered 8x8 Tweaker awhile back, and was all jazzed, but I tried it for two days and I just couldn't get it to work right. I forget the exact problems, but I remember crashing or the changes just not taking effect in the captures themselves (and I always use VirtualDub as my capping software). But, yeah, resetting was happening, so I will try what you said and cross my fingers. Still, my bigger problem was much more the randomizing of what field it grabbed first, but if I could fix one problem of my two, that would be awesome. :)

Mother, I haven't tried videohelp, so I'll give that a try soon. :)

Thanks for the reply, Jonno. I just would have thought that all restrictions/options would have opened up over the years (such as option for uncompressed) as the tech advanced, but I was wrong apparently. People were just satisfied with not-the-best results when it came to capping SD analog I guess (largely thanks to a lot of ill advice out there, which I'll go into toward the bottom of this post).

Jonno said:

it sounds like the work you're doing is considerably more interesting than most of our existing clients!

Jonno said:

Shame you're (presumably) not in the UK

Mother,

I saw that thread last night, and others around the net. Most reviews and such I saw don't address the specifics I seek, as you've found as well; I saw the thread about minimal support you were talking about. I might just have to buy an Intensity Pro and see for myself how it works/compares. That was an older thread, and maybe they put some fixes in the newer cards to make them better in the analog capture department.

Jonno,
Yeah, I use y/c connection of course. I actually am just a little technically ignorant enough not to know if what you say is correct. Mother, do you know?


I must say I'm amazed that the reply to the topic isn't a simple, "Oh, almost any card that from these companies that can capture video now will be better than that old thing!" Think about a hard drive from seven or eight years ago, or a USB drive, or just about anything else you can throw into a computer from that long ago...
If only I could get my PDI to shift down a few lines, and especially always start capture from the same field, it would basically be fine enough to keep using forever (both of these problems have been asked about at Doom9, no response -- but maybe I'll try again soon).

Not that I can afford it in the slightest, but what's people's thoughts on this? I'm guessing it would do pretty well! :) http://www.google.com/search?q=%22matrox+mxO2%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sa=N

Hi all!

My PDI Deulxe card, while great, is pretty old. Also, I have had a couple of issues with it within my set-up that I've never been able to solve over the years of my using it. (1. Cap area shifted off-center enough so that I lose a couple of scanlines of image area from the top. 2. Randomly picks between even-field-first or odd-field-first capping with start of every capture! Especially since I do averaging of multiple captures, this is a pain, wastes lots of time!)

So, is there a newer card for about or under $200 out there that can give me the benefits of the last seven years of advancements in technology, that will make it easy for me to "upgrade" my cap card without any sacrifices in the quality I've gotten used to with the PDI Deluxe (perhaps new cards can actually do a bit better)? My need is pretty simple, just straight 720x480 lossless/HuffYUV capping from VHS or S-VHS tapes (i.e, near maximum quality preservation on a budget, which I've been able to attain with my current set-up except for the hiccups noted above).


One modern card that has caught my eye (and I suppose would be overkill for VHS capping) is the Intensity Pro. It would seem to me that it should be able to blow the PDI Deluxe out of the water in every regard...but perhaps not? Anyone here use that card? Any other cards that might be a good choice for an upgrade from a PDI?

Thanks for taking time to read this :)

Hi readers-of-this-post

Very recently I told a pal of mine about fan edits, and when he heard that there was a cut like ADM's of Pearl Harbor out there, he immediately went to Amazon and bought a 2 disc special edition set of the official thing so he could watch ADM's version (in the supportive-to-fan-edits manner requested by fanedits.org). He has the Amazon recepit to prove he made the purchase, will show it to anyone...

It seems this one is really hard to come by now in DVD/anamorphic, but: Does anyone have a DVD version of ADM's Pearl Harbor Strength and Honor who could share a copy with my pal? He would of course gladly pay the postage and blank media costs to anyone who could help him out. Again, he's really hoping for an anamophc DVD so as to get the big-screen(-TV) experience, rather than a reduced-file-size non-animorphic avi file the likes of which was apparently torrented awhile back. Thanks for listening! :)

-1, come on, WALL-E is fine for what it is; is better than fine compared to most of what is being produced now (based on what I've heard). Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't believe your biggest complaint is really lack of big technical advances. I believe your beef more lies with the idea that the best stuff out there just doesn't quite have the great magic of works from decades past. More than advances, don't you really just want your socks to be blown off from some great inspiration (even if not via a huge leap forward in technology), and much of what's out there just doesn't do that for you? Well, that's what I want anyway, more umph

-1 mentioned TRON as a film that he still holds in high regard. What?! That old thing, with CG that an N64 could practically blow out of the water?! Well, yes! :) There are some scenes in that movie that just "nail it," know what I mean? Namely the lightcycles and tanks scenes; scenes that you make clips of and watch over and over because they're just so damned cool! The filming angles, the motions of the cycles (and tanks), the editing... When Empire Strikes Back came out, the whole SDs/TIEs chase asteroid field scene :O It was like you were swirling around in your chair in the theater! One scene in a somewhat recent film that also did that for me was the "Gandolf rides to/into Minas Tirith" scene in ROTK. Very impressive stuff!

It seems that so much in the movies these days is in the realm of rehash/watered-down homages (or extreme but hollow shock value). So -1, I offer that something in the larger sense is lost and that picking on Pixar and WALL-E isn't exactly fair, although I can see the temptation as they are "at the top" of the animated CG field right now. I know that it is kind of the unwritten job of the one on top to blow us away, but unless they have implicitly stepped forward to make that claim...

To the others, surely you can see a frustration in some with what is supposedly the best that is out there. Great things in the past are ignored or blown-off (largely because they are not watched in a theater in 35mm film IMO). I'm not the best judge for WALL-E as I've seen only about 1/2 hour of it (two 15 min. segments at a movie theater), but those chunks didn't really draw me; I was not blown away and ready and eager to return to see the entire film. Does that make WALL-E a bad film to me? No. But for someone really wanting to be taken on a fantastic ride, does it offer the full goods? For me anyway, perhaps not (unless I caught two "unlucky" sections of the movie), but officially I have no opinion on the film as a whole. :)

Regarding the Pixar papers provided on the link, I kind of agree with -1 that for the most part they aren't anything too jaw dropping. A number of them are simply clever ways/shortcuts to reduce how long it takes to render scenes, which is nice to the production team but is literally a 0% difference on screen in the before and after sense. (and AOTC had pretty good CG cloth flow physics, before Ratatouille...)

There's my few cents. -1, I've obviously perhaps put some words in your mouth here so correct me if I'm off the mark. :)

Octorox said:

vbangle said:

Octorox said:

I personally think that ESB needs the most effects work of any of the OT. Lucas barely touched the effects (unlike ANH, where many shots were replaced with CG). And thus, ESB feels very dated (effects-wise I mean, the story is great). ANHR has a very pristine feeling because Ady chose to keep all of Lucas's CG as well as touch up and clean up the effects himself. Coming off of ANHR and watching ESB 2004, the movie looks like it was made 30 years earlier. If Ady wants his OT to feel consistent throughout, then he needs to do a LOT of work on ESB. The only elements that aren't noticeably badly composited are the walkers, and even they could use some stop motion blur or something. Everything needs it's color tweaked for consistency and I think Ady needs to really clean up all of the effects scenes. As long as we get at least as much work as was done on ANHR it should be great. This is a Revisited project, not a Preservation effort.

Adywan replaced GL's CG (or added to it) with his own CG. Adywan also dumped quite a bit of it into the bin.....thank you Adywan. :)

Actually, the only cg Ady added were new TIE fighters in the Yavin battle and the only CG he removed were some of the silly and intrusive creatures and robots in the sequence entering Mos Eisley...

lordjedi said:

Yada, yada, yada. What people don't realize is that Ron Paul is a true blue Libertarian. So if he did get elected, sure, he wouldn't take corporate money, but you can bet your ass that he also wouldn't put any regulations in that hamper business. If people think corporations are evil right now, wait until you live in a world with Ron Paul as President. He'd remove most taxes and remove all kinds of regulation. The free market would be truly free and I bet people would hate it. Conservatives would love it. In fact, if it weren't for his stance on Iraq, I'd support him.

Oh. Well, if I smoked weed then I might just be be doing as sean wookie is on voting day I think. Ugh. The one set of people I wish could be made president and vice next term is Bush and Cheney. I would sincerely like to see them in the white house for another four years to deal with the big fallout from what they've caused that's very likely on its way (to me it's mostly about the debt -- I am very anti-big-debt -- as Mister Mackey would say, "Debt is baaad, m'kay?":)). As it is now, the next president is going to have almost no choice but to raise taxes to do something about the debt, and that president, whoever they are, is going to get hammered for that, which I don't think is fair (while Bush and Cheney will be retiring on some pretty big nesteggs/gifts I imagine). I am actually surprised anyone wants to step into that post right now; I can't think of anything more thankless than to become US President in 2009. Anything they do to try to address most big problems will make them f**king hated and despised by huge numbers of Americans I imagine. What a terrible situation to put ones self into, isn't it?

Does anyone here have thoughts on this Ron Paul guy? One of my pals says he's going to vote for him, but I haven't looked into his views in detail yet myself.