I'll agree that some of the writing is flawed and could have been handled better, particularly later in the series. But I find her a sympathetic character, and I vehemently disagree with pretty much everything you said.
Since there's nothing else I can contribute without sounding like a snarky douche and possibly getting myself banned, I'll bow out.
You've got a good ear. ;)
I debated with myself whether to delete that sound effect or not, since it is certainly a 1997 addition created by augmenting the low end of the deceleration effect, which was originally only present in the mono mix. But in the end I decided to leave it, since it was a relatively small thing and I do like the way it sounds. (The deceleration effect is the one of the only things about the mono mix that I miss in the others.) Since the LFE channel as a whole is pretty much a 'best guess' of what it could have been, I figured I could give myself a little leeway in that case.
In the 2004 mix, that bass effect is presented at much higher volume, which sounds really cool and is one of the few things I actually like about it. While I would have liked to be able to use that one, I couldn't justify it being that loud when I knew it wouldn't have sounded like that originally, so I compromised by going with the more subtle '97 version; and also the '04 didn't have the other impacts that the '97 did. (Both of them have the high frequency sounds of debris whizzing by the ship, which were first heard in the '93 mix, but in both SE's they seem even higher-pitched, and are timed and panned differently than the '93.)
On a low-fi subwoofer, which most mass market products are, the descending frequency sweep could be indistinguishable from a generic rumbling anyway. Like a lot of things, I guess it depends on individual preference, equipment quality, and listening ability for whether it works or not.
How did you like the bass in the rest of the movie?
There is no way that Rose Tyler can be called a Mary Sue by any definition of the term. It gets thrown around a lot as a sort of blanket expression for characters that people don't like, regardless of whether it actually applies. From a certain perspective you could say that she did get put on a bit of a pedestal after a while, but the only 'criticism' anyone could reasonably make of her character is that she was young and in love with someone she didn't completely understand. I can't find it in my heart to condemn her for that, and I really don't understand those who do.
River Song is so smugly irritating and convinced of her own importance that at this point I don't care who the hell she is--I just wish she would cease to exist.
I'll easily acknowledge that Amy is the most physically attractive companion they've had on the show, but unfortunately her personality is shallow and abrasively nonexistant. If there are women like her in real life, that only goes to show that it isn't only fictional characters who lack depth.
the 2006 made for TV Doctor Who movie
I think you mean 1996.
It definitely has a lot of flaws, I'll grant. Sylvester McCoy probably shouldn't have been in it, the kid character is an idiot, the Time Lords sending The Master to be executed by the Daleks makes no sense, The Doctor is most certainly not half-human, and the Eye of Harmony is supposed to be something that was on Gallifrey, not in the TARDIS. But Paul McGann's portrayal was so good that I'm prepared to forgive a lot because of it, and (I may be painting a target on my back that says 'philistine' for this, so sue me) the Americanism of it was actually an interesting change of pace.
I made it through only a few episodes of the first year before giving up on it, though I peripherally experienced some later ones too. James Marsters in the second year seemed to give it some additional promise, but since I regard the entire premise of Torchwood as highly flawed (to put it mildly), it wasn't nearly enough to get me to care.
I have seen Children of Earth, mainly because I was in the room on my computer while it was being watched. It did seem to be better at first, but I found the ending so vile and repulsive that my anger at the previous years was nothing in comparison. Seriously, that was the only thing they could come up with? What the hell ever.
This was the moment that my view of Russell T Davies changed from being a flawed but still promising writer, and instead plunged off the deep end into wangsty nonsense; and his severe mishandling of the end of his run on Doctor Who only cemented that perception. Not that I worship Steven Moffat like a lot of people do, either: he's absolutely brilliant with scifi ideas and timey wimey stuff, but from his often-ridiculous portrayal of women (and various comments he's made in interviews) it's obvious that he's rather sexist, which probably explains why many of his female characters are caricatures with no real depth. When he doesn't let this get in the way, it becomes less of a problem. (However, there is no force in this world that will ever make me cease to despise the ludicrously horrible Mary Sue that is River Song.)
Man, don't even talk about Torchwood. It's one of the most vile, misguided, and just plain stupid shows I've ever had the misfortune of being subjected to. Bunch of pointless wangsty rubbish that means absolutely nothing, and completely wastes the potential that an interesting character like Jack Harkness seemed to promise when Doctor Who first introduced him. To hell with that garbage!
I've been watching old Doctor Who stories again, but not really going in any kind of order like I was a year ago. Tom Baker is my favourite, generally speaking, particularly when paired with Mary Tamm or Lalla Ward, but I've been branching out into the Patrick Troughton and Peter Davison years recently. Frankly, despite certain shortcomings, I'm enjoying these more than most of the newer series, because the writing displays a lot more imagination.
Dolby Stereo/SR mixes are made with the intention of being played back upmixed from matrixed two-channel. As such, compromises may be made in order to achieve the best possible sound in this configuration. I noticed that all of the 35mm stereo mixes for the SW films have significantly narrower stereo imaging than the 1993 versions, which was most likely done to reduce the amount of unwanted crosstalk into the surround, particularly since upmixing was not nearly as sophisticated in those days.
Some recent Bluray releases have been including 4.0 mixes, which are direct copies of the discrete tracks the SR versions are made from. However, they will not sound exactly the same as the two-channel versions, and according to Dolby documentation may not represent the intentions of the mixers completely, since the matrixing adjustments are still there but not combining the way they would have. Still, that's probably a fairly subtle point on the whole.
5.1 configuration would be relatively easy to obtain from this 4.0, either by having the surrounds play the same thing or by introducing panning into the rears as appropriate. The LFE channel is trickier to derive, and on principle Dolby discourages the creation of additional bass by copying and augmenting what is present in the main channels, since it can introduce phase cancellation or other errors, particularly when dealing with an upmix. LFE should be created by separate access to the sound effects.
I ran into this exact problem in doing the SW 70mm. For the most part I used the discrete LFE of the '97 and '04 mixes, but in a few cases chose to go with bass from the '93 versions because they just sounded better combined with the mains, but the level and phase required adjustment to come out sounding correct. So I guess you could say I knowingly went against Dolby's guidelines occasionally. ;)
TK-949 said:
hairy_hen said:
monolith music
What?! It's "Also sprach Zarathustra" by Richard Strauss, you philistine!!! ;)
No, no, no, no, no, I didn't mean that, I meant the dissonant howling vocals that play when the monolith appears! It's the Requiem by György Ligeti.
2001: A Space Odyssey
I won't even begin to describe how much I adore this film. I read the book again for about the fourth time a few months ago, and in the written form having more detail about the function and purpose of the monoliths and their creators works very well, but in the movie the incomprehensible vastness and wonderous mystery is much more open-ended, and probably for the best. (Although once you know what they were actually going for, it's easy to see how those ideas shape the movie as well.)
Still not sure what exactly prompted me to watch it--I was just laying around bored when I started hearing the monolith music in my head, and then I just had to. lol
Would have been the latest episode of Castle, but had to give up a few minutes in because the broadcast quality was so bad, inexplicably. Picture kept dropping out and stuttering and there was a bunch of horrid screeching going on in the sound, it was ridiculous. I'll have to catch it online tomorrow.
So instead, watched an oldschool Doctor Who with Tom Baker and Lalla Ward. Good fun, and a lot more science fiction-y than most of the new series.
The aim of the '93 mixes was to create stereo PCM tracks with a high dynamic range using the best quality, earliest generation material available. In the case of Star Wars, the 70mm printmaster was the best sounding source they could find. If they hadn't also felt the need to add unnecessary changes on top of it, it would have been a near-perfect rendition of that mix, aside from lacking discrete channels and separate LFE. For Empire, they used an early four-track master that is very close to the 35mm version except for the mistakenly missing snowspeeder crash sound. Jedi went all the way back to thirteen-track stems and was more thoroughly remixed than the others; there are no changes in content but the levels and directional placement may be slightly different at times.
I was not aware of any stretching done to the audio tracks, but it's possible if there was some damage somewhere. The spot you mention in Empire, there seems to be a rather large jump-cut in the music, probably done to accommodate a change in the edit made after the scoring was already finished, but as far as I know that's in every version . . .
Sorry if we're getting a bit off-topic in your thread here. ;)
True, by their very nature my mixes can't be called 100% accurate, mainly because the actual 70mm version had discrete channels while mine had to be upmixed from matrixed stereo; also my use of LFE is a judgement call on what the bass content could have been rather than being based on absolute knowledge, since the recordings available don't let this aspect come through clearly. The surround channel in the recordings is either greatly subdued or missing altogether, so there may also be some occasional discrepancy there, as well.
Still, despite its limitations, it does come vastly closer to the theatrical experience, particularly by eliminating the unnecessary additions made to the 1993 mix (the most egregious of which I consider to be the shattering glass in the cell bay shootout). Since the '93 mix did come directly from the 70mm printmaster and just had extra sounds dumped on top of it, it's about as close as it can be until the real thing is released (or someone of greater skill makes a more seamless version). The other two movies aren't quite as close, particularly Empire, but still very similar in overall feel.
However, I quite understand not wanting to use them, since they aren't actually the real thing. And if the video was shortened rather than patching audio gaps at the side breaks, then they probably wouldn't synch anyway. ;)
Calling the video stream 3:2 is needlessly confusing, yeah. That is technically its ratio, but a dvd will never display this way in proper playback, so it's better just to call it 720 x 480, and flagged either as 4:3 or 16:9. Once the video file is at the right resolution, the flags set during encoding take care of the horizontal width, no need to mess with it other than that.
d2v files are frame indexes for mpeg2 video. You can't create a d2v file for an avi.
HCEncoder accepts either .d2v or .avs input, so to use it on your project you'll need to install AviSynth and create a simple script to tell it what video to load. The command for this is AviSource("path for your video file"). The .avs script is just a simple plain text file with the extension renamed.
As ChainsawAsh said, 3:2 has to do with the frame rate, not the aspect ratio of the image. Valid dvd aspect ratios are 16:9 and 4:3.
If your video source is film-based, you'll want to encode as progressive video so you don't waste space with repeated fields. The rendering is still ultimately interlaced, but properly set this way it will be easily de-interlaced back into the original frames on a progressive display. 3:2 pulldown and 16:9 aspect ratio should be flagged into the video stream during the mpeg2 encoding stage. On a display supporting 23.976 fps, the pulldown flags simply identify which fields belong to which frame, but the speed alternation does not take place. However, sophisticated de-interlacers do not rely on the flags alone because otherwise errors will be seen any time there is a cadence change or other irregularity; instead they analyse the image in advance and base their frame assembly on algorithms that identify patterns of change in the video.
Any copy that's been synched to video will have undergone lossy encoding again, so the general fidelity is lower than the LD's 384 kbps ac3 on its own. It still has a good sound, but you definitely wouldn't want to base any further editing on that.
I got away with using the imperfect captures for the 70mm, because the LFE channel was the only part of the '97 mix I actually worked with, and most of that is silent anyway, so any errors pass by unnoticed.
Miss Akira and I weren't really clicking on a personal level, so I went with the excellent Lucy Pinder. ;)
I'm, er, test-driving Asa Akira.
I have Darth Editous' captures, but they are the first ones he posted, which were not bit-perfect and had a few occasional errors. I don't have the corrected versions he posted later, so if anyone does have them and could post them again I'd also be interested.
Definitely. Even aside from obvious things like Han shooting first or CGI inserts, various aspects of the editing and overall storytelling were rendered at the peak of excellence in their original forms. Why anyone ever thought they needed to be altered is beyond me. Sometimes having things left to the imagination is much more effective . . .
It's even more encouraging to see this opinion shared by those discovering them for the first time. :)
Satanika kindly uploaded the 5.1 pcm to the newsgroups, enabling the use of lossless audio on the Bluray set. The AC3 tracks already sound fantastic, but for folks with real high fidelity sound systems it will be even better. Even if you can't do the full thing with HDMI or multichannel analogue, the core DTS 1509 over S/PDIF should sound great too.
As far as the picture quality goes, how much of an improvement you'll see over the dvd versions depends largely on how good your player is at de-interlacing and scaling. Compared to lesser upconversion, the Blu set would be a significant advance; but something like the Silicon Optix HQV or ABT DVDO processing found in high end players and external sets might well be able to exceed it.
I've managed to get all three movies downloaded by now, and am seeding them back like crazy, but haven't watched them yet because I'm still looking for the best way to burn double layers dvd's. I have flipped through them a bit on the computer, and even with the built in scaling being fairly rubbishy, the improvement over the GOUT is quite significant. Definitely looking forward to being able finally see these!
I like the one about Starbucks sending out servers on roller skates to people on the street who order coffee with their phones.
I'm shocked and appalled at the lack of priorities shown by this forum's members. To think that adywan being banned was given greater consideration than the guaranteed news that Lucas was really restoring the original movies. Joke suck dickers, the lot of you.
Pixar makes very restrained and tasteful use of 3D. Nothing in your face, just an expansion of the environment. After a while you hardly even notice the effect anymore, it just becomes a part of the look of it. If it weren't for those damn glasses (especially irritating when you have to put them over real glasses in order to see) it would be almost perfect.
I saw Up in 3D when it came out, as well as the Toy Story 1 and 2 double feature, and the third one. Enjoyed all of those quite a lot, even with the glasses problem. Coraline was good that way too. But I pretty much save 3D viewing for special things only; I wouldn't want to watch movies that way on a regular basis. If they could do it without the glasses, that'd be another matter. But I still prefer the 2D look on the whole. Never did bother to see Avatar.
Now when they can do true holographic images . . . then I'll be really interested.
I have it on good authority that Lucas has actually restored the original versions of the SW movies and that they will be released exactly one year from today.