hairy_hen

Keep in mind that when listening to an upmixed stereo track, any perceived directionality has a significant chance of being a steering artifact from the upmixing process, rather than actually being an inherent part of the mix itself.  This is especially true of older processes such as the first Prologic.

There will also be a significant amount of crosstalk between channels, especially in the surrounds, of things that shouldn't really be there but can't be entirely kept out.  Prologic II reduces these kinds of issues, providing a more stable sound field, though it can't eliminate them completely.  Only discrete channel mixes accurately represent the true imaging of the source.

If anybody wants to send me the various laserdisc tracks for Raiders, I will compare them to each other and to the DVD and Bluray versions and see what I can find out about their relative dynamics and balance.

Yeah, Lucas sure was the only one who put any effort into working on the original film . . .

*faceplam*

Well fine, I'll make my own list!  With blackjack!  And hookers!

Ah, screw the whole thing.

faysebuuk froghumps efelant butt-asplodes

I saw Rear Window in the theater the other day.  The picture was bizarrely soft, but the AMC's around here seem to have that problem on just about everything, so it didn't surprise me that much.  I have no doubt it would have looked much better at Harkins, which consistently has superior projection quality.

I'd seen it before a few times, but never on the big screen, so it was a lot of fun to get to experience that.  The colors weren't as vibrant as I would have expected, but that might have more to do with the shortcomings of the theater than the master itself.  Still, I'd expect a proper Technicolor print to outperform it by a significant margin.

The Aluminium Falcon said:

To answer your question, though, it unfortunately does have the infamous 5.1 remix, which, for my money, is the worst remixing job for a movie ever done.

I think the 2004 remix of Star Wars would like to venture an opposing view . . .  ;)

Looking good!  I would watch the hell out of that.

I'm an unapologetic Ghostbusters 2 fan, also.

It seems to me that the first film was content to be a spoof throughout, while the second one has some legitimately dramatic moments and character development in between the comedy.  It has somewhat more depth because of this, I think, despite still being very silly overall.

The reason it succeeds is that it aims higher in its writing, whereas most comedy sequels tend to aim lower in tone, trying to imitate or repeat the style of what made the original work without managing to replicate the substance.  It's a rare sequel that actually manages to add new substance to what was already there before.  Strangely enough, this may actually be what people don't like about it . . .

I really like your music, thanks for sharing it.  ;)

By the way, when recording an orchestra with that many microphones and no acoustic barriers between them, how do you take phase issues into account?  From a casual glance it seems like it would be an out of phase nightmare with all the bleed . . .

Miley Cyrus was legitimately attractive for a couple years, after being on Disney but before she became a human wasteland.

Those covers are very nice indeed.

The only thing that needs revising is the runtimes.  My audio editor tells me the soundtrack length of the first film is 121 minutes, not 124, which must be the SE length.  The others should be looked at also for this . . .

I noticed a long time ago that the starfields often moved independently of the other elements.  I briefly wondered if they might be mistakes, but soon saw that it was happening far too often and too interestingly to be anything other than deliberate.

What I never realized until now, upon seeing the video, is just how much that separate motion actually contributes to the feel of the effects.  It can clearly be seen that the motion of the ships is far more static and lifeless with the independently moving backgrounds removed, while the counterintuitive motion of the stars can create a sort of dizzying, high-speed swerving feel that really pulls the viewer into the experience.  I think it may in fact be one of the single most important elements of why the effects in Star Wars are so much more convincing than those of almost any other film.

My already great respect for the work done by the original artists has just gone up even more.  Thanks for demonstrating it all so clearly!

Pics or it didn't happen.

I have a lot of appreciation for all things British, and am frequently frustrated with many aspects of American culture, but underneath of all that I'm still too much a part of where I grew up to be able to fully assimilate into Britain if I tried to live there.

In other words, I'm too American to be British, and too 'British' in my mentality to be fully American.

Going by Post Praetorian's description above, I probably should have been a Canadian.

I also am very interested in obtaining both films.  It looks awesome from what I've seen so far.

When it comes to garbage mattes, I think the safest assumption is that they were invisible, or very nearly so, on the equipment the film-makers themselves were using.  They may have shown up anyway on some projectors, most probably associated with luminance and contrast errors in the screening conditions or other technical reasons, but were not intended to be seen and under ideal conditions should intrude minimally on the visible image.  Therefore dialing them out into the black is the way to go in a proper digital restoration.

"Now there are two of them!"

"That's what your mother said last night, Trebek . . ."

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a hole is just a hole, but sometimes a cigar just wants to go in a hole, so I'm afraid I have to ask:

Did you put the cigar in the hole?

TV's Frink said:

Why am I reading about a rash in the random thoughts thread?  Actually, why am I reading about a rash at all?

*sigh*

 Cool it, Warbler.

Oh dear.  This again?

Short of relying on overly harsh censorship, society is always going have to enforce its own sense of discretion and good taste.  Unfortunately this means there will be plenty of rubbish produced, since there are many people with no sense of either, but it doesn't necessarily follow that everything resulting is degenerate and void of all artistic merit.

After all, as we know from Sturgeon's Law, ninety percent of everything is crap, and ninety percent of people lack the ability to distinguish between what is crap and what is not.  The key here is to ignore the bad and concentrate on what is good; because in simply being bad, the rest is not worth taking seriously in the first place.  The best thing to do is to focus on cultivating the ability to distinguish the good from the rubbish—in order to do so, it may be necessary to re-examine one's own criteria.

For my part, I'm far more offended by crass portrayals of violence than of sex, because violence is a much more disturbing and harmful thing.  I don't really care if people are aroused by portrayals of sex, since being aroused is kind of important to the whole idea of having sex in the first place (lol), but it is generally more artistically justifiable to include it when it is suitable for story purposes, rather than for its own sake.

It's great to see you posting so many videos now.  In the past you always said that not hearing from you was a good thing, because it meant you were busy with doing the work.  Now that you're close to being done, we can finally see how that has paid off, and be suitably impressed by it.  ;)

And yet, neither are you alive.

According to mverta, the separation masters for Star Wars are incomplete, and therefore unsuitable for use in a restoration.  I don't know if some parts have been lost, or were never made to begin with.

These kinds of differences are due almost entirely to the quality of the masters used, and the different techniques used in mixing the albums.  There is nothing wrong with the CD format in and of itself, and there is no reason why a CD copy from an identical master should not outperform a vinyl version.

The fact that it often does not is a reflection on how badly the format tends to be abused by so-called engineers or producers who do not understand how to properly use equalization or compression.  It does not mean that CD sound is inherently bad, or that vinyl is automatically better simply by being vinyl.  The superior quality or 'life' is usually due to the fact that it was a good recording that was allowed to pass through to the end medium without being screwed up somewhere along the way.  Frequently CD versions do get screwed up by being made to appeal to the lowest common denominator (ie, forced to be crazy loud), and the sound quality suffers for it.  But CD's that are mixed and mastered well can sound every bit as good as vinyl, and quite possibly better depending on the source and the equipment used.

Older CD's cannot be used as an accurate measure of the format's quality, because early analog-to-digital converters were crap and put a lot of distortion into the sound.  With newer converters this is no longer a significant issue.

The sample rate doesn't have a whole lot to do with it, because the Nyquist theorem clearly shows that all audible detail within the range of human hearing can be represented within the CD bandwidth.  Top-notch conversion is needed to ensure there are no artifacts, which is why higher sample rates can sometimes be beneficial (lesser converters have an easier time with them), but the main reason to record at a high sample rate is to capture ultrasonic frequencies, which are usually low-pass filtered out of vinyl anyway.

I'm not attacking vinyl as a medium; I grew up with it, and have a lot of appreciation for it.  But some of the mythical properties attributed to it don't have a whole lot of basis in fact, and I am interested in understanding why things actually sound the way they do.  Without making direct, level-matched comparisons of the same recording from the same master on different end mediums, general statements about which is better don't actually mean a whole lot.

The DTS-HD track in the mkv file is not lossless, because there is no uncompressed source for the '97 mix outside the Lucasfilm vaults.

It comes from the theatrical DTS CD-ROM's, which are lossy.  Since the cinema DTS format encodes audio at 44.1 kHz and runs at 24 frames per second, it had to be converted to 48 kHz at 23.976 frames per second to fit with home video standards.  So that's two stages of destructive processing being performed on a source that is already lossy to begin with—the final result is only encoded into DTS-HD MA format to keep it from having to undergo any additional degradation.

Transcoding this into AC3 would be another destructive stage which is best avoided altogether.  Any improvement over the laserdisc version would be marginal.  Far more noticeable is the discrepancy in playback level caused by the laserdisc audio having a DialNorm value of -27, meaning that it is 4 dB quieter than the other versions.  Turning up your receiver's volume by 4 dB to compensate when listening to the AC3 track will cancel this out, and it will sound very similar to the DTS.  In fact, it may actually sound better due to the laserdisc audio having a discrete LFE channel, unlike cinema DTS which stores its LFE information in the surround channels and low-pass filters it out to the subwoofer.

The mkv file has the DTS, AC3, and stereo PCM tracks, and of the three, the stereo PCM clearly has the best sound quality due to being true uncompressed audio.  The other two each have their own advantages and disadvantages.  For best quality, you have to give up the discrete channels and extra bass offered by the 5.1 tracks, since no lossless multichannel version of the '97 mix was ever released by Lucasfilm.  As Harmy indicated, AVCHD does not support DTS audio, only AC3 and PCM, and the PCM track is too large to fit into a file size intended to be burned to DVD.  That left the AC3 as the only viable option; but as I have explained, the difference is less significant than may be supposed at first glance.

I'm not one to argue over inane definitions of musical genre, but when I think of 'best classic rock album', there's really only one thing that springs to mind: In the Court of the Crimson King, by King Crimson.

Yeah yeah, it's 'progressive', blah blah whatever.  It is a rock album, and it is undeniably a classic.  It is also completely awesome, especially for its use of the mellotron.