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maxima says: “The hologram effect is pretty simple, IMO. It’s just a filmed element off of a television.”

Just replying to a very old thread with a question. Were they initially vertical or horizontal?

I vaguely remember seeing vertical scanlines on Leia’s hologram at one point, and that makes more sense to me than horizontal scanlines as I can picture them happening as the result of an optimized process for getting that footage using commodity video equipment.

I imagine an enterprising ILM VFX person shooting Carrie Fisher as Leia with a video camera, displaying it on a CRT screen, and then shooting that CRT screen with a film camera. You’d get better resolution out of this process if you shot the vertical Leia with a vertical format (3:4 rather than 4:3), which you could achieve by turning the video camera and CRT monitor 90º. This would result in vertical scanlines in the final composite.

I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but it would make sense to me to shoot it this way in order to waste less of the CRT screen on empty space. It’d be interesting to note if the 1977 versions have vertical or horizontal scanlines on Leia’s holographic plea, if they’re perceptible.

Of course, if Fisher’s performance of the plea was initially captured on film rather than video and then a film loop was projected and captured on video, one could achieve the same optimal resolution by rotating the film projection 90º rather than rotating both video camera and CRT. And then the scanlines would be horizontal. Were I them I’d have gone with vertical scanlines just to make the effect look a a step removed from normal earth technology, but that might be overthinking it.

Reasons to wish one could just find a public .torrent file and start downloading and seeding?

• one’s last Myspleen account disappeared (even though they thought they seeded more than 1:1, maybe there’s a timeout?)

• can’t seem to find a multi-part downloader that doesn’t arrive in a haze of pop-up windows and doesn’t have a whiff of malware/adware about it (the recommended ‘FreeRapid-0.9u4.dmg’ won’t mount on mac, if the response is to ‘Disable GateKeeper’s Unidentified App Developer Prevention’, as with JDownloader, that’s a no-go.

Not sure why these multipart .rar methods still exist, reminds me of late 90’s usenet.

But in any case, thanks for making these awesome historical preservation projects. Am not meaning to look a gift horse in the mouth, as it were.

I’ve burned a number of blu-rays from ISO/DMG on mac using both Disk Utility and Toast without issue. Toast is often more successful.