Sounds like someone woke up on the wrong side of my Mom's bed.
She said she was hoping that Jar Jar Abrams was going to start paying her with laserdisc audio, and I'm afraid I didn't take the news well. My apologies. ;)
Those pictures were of me convincing Fink's mom to continue accepting laserdisc audio as payment.
Not off-topic at all . . .
Species have been digitally altered to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.
The newer films can never replace the Thrawn trilogy. Those will always be the true episodes 7, 8, and 9, the way I see it.
Maybe the movies will be good, maybe they won't. I lean towards the second possibility . . . but regardless of their potential quality, just the fact that they exist pisses me off.
Nothing that Jar Jar Abrams and his cohorts do will ever be worth a damn, because these movies are not sequels to the real original trilogy. They are sequels to the special editions and the prequels, and since I've already negated the existence of those, the new movies are relagated to the same apocryphal status.
The real story of what happened after the original trilogy was already told by Timothy Zahn over 20 years ago. The fact that most of the rest of the EU sucks dog balls does not in any way diminish that. This is my final word on the matter and opinions to the contrary leave me entirely unmoved.
Pretty sad that 'better than anything else officially available' still has to mean 'full of aliasing, DVNR smearing, excessive gate weave, badly faded colors, and general low resolution'.
It is only used as a source for the Despecialized Edition because it has to be. Once there are 35mm sources for all the missing pieces, those sections will be replaced.
Expecting a theatrical trailer to sound like the final version of a film soundtrack is an exercise in futility. It is highly unlikely the same sound effects would have been used, and extremely likely the trailer was not mixed by the same people.
Therefore, the existence of such differences proves nothing.
Also, Gary Rydstrom was the sound designer for the original mixes, not just the redone version.
I see no reason to doubt disclord's information that the early DVD used the CDS 5.1 master. Somebody should find a laserdisc PCM track of the Dolby Stereo version and see how that sounds—chances are it is pretty similar.
I thought about Fink's mom while posting in this thread.
In all the time I've been working on these things, I think that's only the second time anyone has ever said I put too much bass into it!
I hate to ask, but . . . well, are you sure everything in your system is calibrated correctly? It is not at all uncommon for the surround channel and subwoofer levels to be set too loud in home theatre setups. I recently recalibrated my own system upon discovering I had not done it quite correctly the first time around, and hearing the proper balance between all the speakers is essential to presenting a mix the way it is intended to be heard.
The proper way to do this is to use an SPL meter to individually measure the output of each speaker at the listening position, and adjust the levels of each in the receiver until they all measure exactly the same. Pink noise test tones, which have equal energy per octave, are usually used for this measurement. The calibration is done so that the RMS level of the test tone should play back at 75 dB on the meter for each individual speaker. (85 dB is the standard level for cinema calibration, but this tends to be unbearably loud in a smaller listening space.) The SPL meter has to be in exactly the right place for this measurement to mean anything: pointed up at the ceiling, and positioned exactly where your head would be when watching a movie. It isn't enough to sit at the listening position and hold the meter in front of you; it needs to be receiving the exact same signal as your ears. Otherwise the levels will be off, and you will set the receiver incorrectly in compensation for the inaccurate measurement: consequently, you won't hear the mix correctly. (This information comes from Roger Dressler of Dolby Labs, who absolutely knows he's talking about!)
Once all the speakers measure the same, it's time to set up the LFE channel. Pink noise is again used, but for this it is band-limited at 120 Hz since a subwoofer is not expected to play any higher than this frequency. Adjust the level until the SPL meter reads approximately 79 dB. The band-limiting knocks 6 dB off the energy level of the pink noise, taking it from 75 dB down to 69, and the in-band gain of the LFE channel is then boosted until it measures 10 dB higher than the output of the main channels. (One possible source of confusion may be that if the user was directed to calibrate their subwoofer 10 dB higher than the main channels without accounting for this reduction in level, and measured the band-limited signal at 85 dB rather than 79, they would then be hearing the mix with the bass playing back 6 dB too loud, which would sound bloated and just plain wrong.)
Note that the LFE doesn't necessarily have to be 79 dB exactly, since due to the Fletcher-Munson effect, our ears require greater bass levels to sound balanced with higher frequencies. So if the SPL meter reads slightly higher than 79, it's probably okay. But going much over 80 or so is pushing it too far.
Note also that even with these accurate measurements, what you hear is still greatly affected by the acoustics of your room. Bass frequences in particular are notorious for creating phase additions and cancellations in various locations throughout the room, especially in small spaces where their wavelengths are longer than the dimensions of the room itself. If there are standing waves at the listening position, acoustic treatment using bass traps and diffusion will be required to get the frequency response of the room under control, even if the subwoofer itself is ideally placed. Adding a second sub can help in spreading the bass around the room more evenly.
With my system recently recalibrated using proper methods, I'm confident that what I've put into the 5.1 mix represents an accurate balance. Certainly it is also a pleasing one, at least to my ear. It is of course possible that not everyone will agree with this, and that any disagreement over bass level has nothing to do with system calibration at all, but rather aesthetic preference. I'll admit to being curious as to which other films are being referenced, in terms of how much bass you think a movie ought to have in it.
If the LFE level just doesn't work for you at all, you could always try listening to the 1993 mix on its own. The main channels will sound the same, but the amount of bass is more moderate.
Editing to add: I forgot to mention that when making SPL measurements, the meter should be set to 'C-weighted' and 'slow'; otherwise the numbers will be off.
I'll add also that I do have an idea for an alternate version of the 5.1 that wouldn't use the special edition as a source for the LFE channel at all, and that such a version might be more to the taste of those who would prefer a different approach to bass. But I haven't started yet because I'm still figuring out the best way to do it, and have a bunch of other things to work on in the meantime, so it won't exist for quite a while yet.
The Lowry stuff definitely didn't happen until 2004.
The reason that shot in particular looks so bad in the official release is because it is one of those Harmy alluded to earlier: scanned into the computer using outdated 90's film scanning technology, composited into frame along with outdated 90's CGI, printed out to film, then rescanned into the computer again in 2004 and subjected to additional degraining for the Lowry process. It has been through significantly more generation loss and destructive processing than a typical projection print, as exemplified by the -1 scan.
The whole movie doesn't look that bad, just the parts that have been through all the stages of crappy digital alteration.
How would you like an isolated score to go with it? I actually made one a few years ago using the Intrada 2-CD set, synched with the 2003 DVD release; though it has never been part of any fan project. With a bit of further editing it could be made to line up with the Bluray video.
Some official releases of Alien do have music-only tracks, but the editing isn't always right and the sound quality is not as good as the Intrada CD version, which came from the master tapes and not from higher generation duplicates.
Since the film underwent a lot of editing after Jerry Goldsmith completed scoring—and because he and Ridley Scott had very great creative differences in their approach to how the music should be used—many scenes differ greatly from how the composer had conceived them. I had to do a fair amount of editing to get the original score to line up with the actual movie, but this is the closest way to experience the music the way it was first intended to be.
If there is interest in including such a track in this project, I shall be glad to provide it.
They never said it wasn't a creature: that's what so brilliant about it.
The reason certain copies of the film look more like 'real life' is that they were made from scans of the negative, and the actual, unbalanced colors of what was really on set are coming through.
Film prints are made from interpositives, which have the final color timing embedded into them. This is what you'd actually see in the movie theatre, not the negative's raw colors. Going back to the earliest generation source for a home video transfer is good for detail, but bad for color, because all the color timing information is lost and has to be done over again. As we have often seen, the original colors are frequently disregarded when this happens, and the result looks nothing like it did on its initial release—even if it subjectively appears good or 'realistic'.
It would definitely be better for us to do such conversions than let people try it on their own, because it's pretty much guaranteed that the format is going to get screwed up in some way if they do. See the above post about the sound not playing correctly.
Editing to add: we should also be promoting the DVD conversions as a viable option, since it is by far the most compatible way of watching them at this point.
I forgot which thread I was in; the part about not being able to fix it was in reference to the first movie. For ESB, yeah, 41.7 milliseconds of delay should do the trick.
Of course, that may render you unable to keep seeding the torrent, but . . .
I've noticed it before, I just never said anything because there isn't a way to fix it without altering either the audio or video to account for it.
It is visible, but certainly not as much as a 2 frame difference would be. If you're not looking for it, it won't ruin the film. The GOUT itself may not necessarily be perfectly synched between audio and video at all times.
Next time we put something out, I want to make sure there aren't any errors, for the sake of being as professional about these things as possible.
The NTSC version of the GOUT is missing one frame at that spot (which is a reel change) compared to the PAL version. Since the audio is synched to the NTSC, there will will be a corresponding loss of synch in the Despecialized Edition at that point, with the audio being one frame ahead of the video.
We really need to be more vigilant about this kind of thing so there aren't any synch errors in the future.
For the record, I find Revisited to be completely unwatchable, for all the reasons the OP mentioned.
Also the fact that it uses the '04 sound mix, making it completely unlistenable as well.
The actual plot hole in ESB is that without a working hyperdrive, there's no way the Millennium Falcon would be able to travel between star systems without taking many, many years to do so, given the inconceivably vast distances between them.
I believe on TV Tropes they refer to this as "Scifi Writers Have No Sense of Scale". ;)
About that missing snowspeeder crash: I believe the explanation for its being missing in the 1993 mix is because it is not present in the 4-track master from which it was derived. The theatrical printmasters had it, but this earlier generation copy did not, so when the '93 mix was being made for the Definitive Collection, they simply didn't notice its absence. The track feels very quiet without it, which is probably why the 35mm version has it mixed very prominently (compensating for its prior absence). Later copies, such as the 16mm mono and the SE, dialed back the level somewhat.
I shall make my tracks available for download together once I've finished them all. It would be good to have them in a torrent or something, perhaps in various formats to be easily used with different kinds of video.
The better the fidelity of your equipment, the easier it is to hear the difference between lossy and lossless. For most people, the main barrier to hearing the difference is not any deficiency in their hearing per se, but the simple fact that great quality analog gear tends to cost quite a lot more than they are willing to spend. Once you have the opportunity to do some A/B comparisons on a real hifi system, you may well surprise yourself with what you can actually perceive.
Note that these kinds of differences are easier to hear with music than with sound effects.
For a really good explanation of the effects of different audio resolutions, watch the presentation called "Lost in Translation" by mix engineer Andrew Scheps: link
I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Scheps when he gave this talk again a few weeks ago, and he's a really cool and knowledgeable guy. As part of the presentation he set up various listening comparisons between lossy and lossless formats on some ridiculously good speakers, and in every case the uncompressed versions sounded better. His theory as to why this is true is that it's not even because the lossy was 'degraded' per se, but because removing too much information makes the sound more fatiguing and less engaging. Lossy audio forces your brain to work harder to fill in the gaps, and over extended listening periods this will tire you out mentally, making the experience less enjoyable. Higher quality audio, by contrast, can be listened to for a long time without any associated unpleasantness.
The mkv does have my fixed 1993 version as a 224 kbps AC3.
To clarify, there aren't many glitches I'm talking about. The sound quality pretty much craps out for a second when the Falcon attacks the Avenger; there's a jump-cut in the music at the beginning of the carbon freeze scene; and a few instances of clicking and clipping scattered throughout. All the laserdiscs I've heard contain these flaws, but the GOUT corrects the jump-cut and the Avenger flyby. The '95 Faces vhs may have also had these fixes, if I remember correctly. My correction of the Avenger scene sounds better than the GOUT, because I think they spliced it in from a different mix to cover it up, while I was able to use the Spectral Repair and the Decrackler tools in iZotope RX 3 to eliminate the distortion while keeping the rest of the sound intact. I was pretty amazed it worked as well as it did, though it took several tries to get it right.
I did have to do some restoration on the 35mm stereo track also. The main difficulty there was that the older laserdiscs were missing so many frames at reel changes compared to the GOUT, such that the cuts in the audio were quite noticeable. The flow of the music would be totally interrupted in these spots, if a music cue was playing over a reel change. To avoid loss of synch and to eliminate these annoyingly bad edits, I ended up patching segments of the 1993 mix into the 35mm to smooth over the gaps and allow it to play continuously throughout. These patches were meticulously matched in level and EQ, as well as having their stereo width narrowed by 12%, in order to seamlessly match the rest of the 35mm.
I also used some denoising at the very beginning and very end of the track, since these parts contained excessive hiss. Everything in between is largely untouched, except that mild limiting had to be employed to prevent the loudest parts of the track from clipping once the overall gain had been raised to match the 5.1 version. These edits are all carefully integrated and I very much doubt if anyone will be able to hear them (I certainly can't).
In terms of content, the 1980 and 1993 versions only occasionally differ, having come largely from the same 4-track source. The '93 is more dynamic overall (though the '80 isn't far behind, surprisingly), and has more bass, while the '80 has more emphasis in the midrange. Each has a different vibe, but both sound great in their own way.
I agree that the second film is pushing red far too much. This needs to be dialed back significantly to look natural.
It seems there is some confusion about the various sound mixes, so I think I should clear it up. According to this post by disclord on the LaserDisc Database forum, the version of the Alien soundtrack heard on the THX laserdisc is not actually the 70mm mix that was used for the theatrical release. It is, in fact, an early test mix made for the Sensurround format, which contained more bass and surround usage than the final version. It was never released to the public in 1979, because 20th Century Fox didn't end up going with the Sensurround format for various reasons, opting to use Dolby Stereo instead as they had done for Star Wars. This mix was never publicly heard at all until it was put on laserdisc many years later.
This means that the text on the laserdisc advertising that is uses the 70mm version is actually mistaken. Technically it is correct, because the mix was indeed made for 70mm prints, but it is not "the" 70mm version—at least not the one that anyone who went to see the film actually heard. It had likely been sitting in an archive forgotten and unused, and whoever transferred it to home video probably didn't realize that they'd actually unearthed a rough mix, rather than the final version.
Note that since it is an early test version, this explains why it has differences in music and dialog editing than other mixes of the film.
The 70mm mix that actually ended up being presented to the public in 1979, then, would have been a 4.1 track with identical content to the 35mm stereo version. Such a track can be found on the official Bluray release, as 640 kbps AC3. The surrounds are mono and the amount of bass is somewhat less than in the test version, but it is more finalized in editing and content than its predecessor.
Taking this into consideration, for the sake of authenticity I would say that any project proclaiming to be Alien in 70mm should include both the laserdisc 5.1 and the Bluray 4.1 versions, and that they should be clearly labelled for what they are.
Editing to add: Furthermore, we can also infer from this that the 4.1 track on the Bluray of Aliens really is that film's 70mm mix, as well.
The DVD and Bluray versions of ESB and RotJ are essentially the same as the 1997 mixes much of the time. They just have additional edits and changes piled on top of them whenever they felt like adding something to the later versions of the movies. There are some additional surround effects in some places that the 1997 versions didn't have, as well as being in a 6.1 format (or 5.1 EX) instead of the standard 5.1 from '97. But in all unedited sections, they seem to be virtually identical.
There isn't a lossless source for the straight-up '97 versions, but the Cinema DTS does sound rather good. It would be easiest to just use them as the primary source, with perhaps a splice from elsewhere to remove Luke's scream as he falls, since it is rather ghastly and nobody I know of would be in favor of keeping it.
Keep in mind, of course, that the Cinema DTS audio is at 44.1 khz at 24 frames per second, while video formats must be 48 khz and 23.976 frames per second. So this conversion must be made prior to any editing work. To avoid degrading the sound quality further, it should be performed at 24-bit resolution or higher, and dither should be used if it is to be cut back down to 16-bit again.
For someone accustomed to watching the SE, which has only one saber ignition, it would certainly seem like a glitch.
Whether they did it on purpose, or if it actually is a mistake, is impossible to say for sure. But every mix ever made of the original version of the film has the double ignition, so there's no way I'd ever try to remove it.
Actually, the funny part of it is that by removing the double ignition, the SE introduces a far worse glitch into the scene, which is that the subsequent sound effects become out of synch to the picture. They now happen too early, by the same amount of time that the removed first ignition sound would have been. Consequently you can hear the sound of Luke cutting himself free from the ice before he is actually seen to do so, as well as deactivating his saber while it is still obviously lit onscreen.
That's just plain sloppy work, and this mistake has been there since 1997. Yet another example of why redoing something that is already complete can be a very slippery slope—you forget why you did things a certain way the first time, and in trying to correct perceived imperfections, greater errors may easily be introduced that were never present previously.
The laserdisc colors look the best by far. I definitely recommend using that as the primary reference, since not only is it the most pleasing to the eye, it is much closer in 'feel' to what movies back then looked like, generally speaking. If it is the closest to the appearance of film prints, as Jonno says, then that makes a great deal of sense for why it feels right.
You shouldn't necessarily adhere to it slavishly in every detail, of course; after all, old home video masters are not known for perfect accuracy in color or contrast. But get it looking pretty close to that and I for one will be very, very pleased.
You're going to have to be more specific to get any meaningful answers on this. What kind of sound system are you using, and how is it hooked up? Are you trying to bitstream multichannel lossless audio to a home theatre receiver with an HDMI cable? Is the playback software supposed to be decoding it to multichannel PCM? Multichannel analog? Are you downmixing it to stereo? More information is required. Please be as specific as possible so I'll have more to go on.
Also keep in mind that the difference between DTS at 1509 kbps and the full uncompressed track is going to be a subtle one. Unless your analog gear is of sufficiently high quality, it will be very difficult to tell them apart in a blind test. You don't have to feel like you're missing out too much by listening to the core DTS track, because it will still deliver the soundtrack quite excellently.
I can't tell if you think that's a good thing or a bad thing . . .