hairy_hen

God is Burt Reynolds playing dice with the universe.

Murry Sparkles said:

Seek And Destroy - by Metallica.

:)  I used to be nearly obsessed with this song for some reason.  Later migrated to Creeping Death and Master of Puppets, but now I just like them all.

Listening to various Bach organ works now.

It's my understanding that you really shouldn't do actual pulldown to film sources--just leave the real film frames alone and tell it to run at the proper speed, adding pulldown flags during the encoding stage if need be.  Hard-interlaced material wastes space and bandwidth by having to encode duplicate fields, and is just that much more difficult for de-interlacing to sort out during progressive playback.

Looking more closely I think they are the same stars, but in some shots they're positioned way differently in addition be being very dull, so it's hard to recognise sometimes . . .

Thanks Harmy, that was the shot I was referring to.  Looks much better than the '04, which has nearly no colour at all.

I don't really know what the shot before that is supposed to look like--if I remember correctly it's pretty much a bright white in both versions.

Yuck, those starfield replacements in the Avenger scene are very screwed up.  I noticed them before and they bothered me considerably, because the movies are supposed to have big and bright stars where in the '04 versions they are usually small and dim.  And it isn't even the same element composited in at all; there are far fewer stars and it just looks ridiculous.  (Not to mention that nasty aqua haze over everything is even more obvious in a direct comparison, but that's a whole other thing.)

Check out the power generator explosion--in the original it has bright orange flames; in the SE it is nearly black and white for some reason.  Did you do anything about this?

My interest in most forms of popular music is minimal, and I get impatient at the way its ubiquity causes other genres to be ignored and passed over, but you won't find me trashing other people's interests.  Let's not descend into douche-baggery here, folks.  ;)

I do rather enjoy older heavy metal--Metallica's first four albums in particular are mind-blowingly awesome and amazingly intricate.  Iron Maiden is another group I find very interesting; and Cliff Burton and Steve Harris respectively were/are truly superb bass players.  Unrelated to metal, I love Weird Al for his humour and verbal dexterity.

Mostly, though, I find myself listening to much older styles.  Most people lump it all under the label 'classical' music, but that name specifically refers to only a small portion of it, from around 1740-1810 or so.  Generally speaking a lot of my favourite works are from the earlier Baroque period, by composers such as J. S. Bach and Antonio Vivaldi and their contemporaries, though I'm fond of many other composers from different times as well.  I am usually drawn to recordings made using period instruments, either authentic or recreations, with the musicians using older playing techniques.  The sound of the original instruments and tuning is quite different from their modern counterparts, and in many ways purer and more natural, if somewhat less 'sweet' sounding.

Though I wouldn't really consider myself any kind of expert, I have studied music theory in some depth, and accordingly have composed a fair amount of material myself, both for assignments and for my own benefit and enjoyment.  I also learned to play the organ on a basic level to further my understanding (and to be able to play what I'd written).  Eventually I sort of hit a wall in how far my intuitive grasp of the subject could actually take me, so I haven't done as much of that as I'd like lately, but it remains a strong interest, one that I renew when inspiration strikes.  If I'd started younger and had more extensive ear training, I probably could have gone farther with it, but I still have fun regardless.

Twilight: the story of one girl's choice between Bestiality and Necrophilia.

Rick James, Frink's mom is yo' baby daddy . . .

The hairy_hen believes that The TV's Frink needs to refer to everyone with the 'The' in front of their name, as do The Homestarunner, The Strong Bad, The Cheat, The Frink's Mom, and The Asscrack Bandit.

I'M RICK JAMES, BITCH!

. . .

Just kidding.  Your mom is Rick James.

*flees*

Yeah, that's a good idea, try to do the best possible transfer of parts that were replaced outright in the SE, and merge them with colour corrected HD footage.  Wouldn't be a perfect match, of course, but a heck of a lot better than using the GOUT for such things.

I are please to manglificate the proper speechifyins.

Well, that blows . . . lol

Whew . . . this is very exciting indeed.  I almost don't know what to say about it except that it's wonderful to see that the prints are in as good condition as they are, and that things are progressing further than I expected.  The preliminary colour correction looks rather good.

What about sound? Will it also be restored? No chance for 6 track dolby?

Being 35mm, the audio being the Dolby Stereo matrixed 2-channel mix seems a given.  Perhaps we could try to get Belbucus back here to do some restoration work on it if need be?  Assuming it gets that far, of course.

Having the actual 6-track mixes is out of the question without access to 70mm prints, but for my part I'd certainly be interested in pairing them with my own 5.1 tracks.  Doing that would largely be a question of getting the synch right, which would depend how many frames were actually missing from the laserdiscs/GOUT and matching the playback speed, and how best to account for things of that nature . . .

When Luke falls into the Rancor pit, it sounds a lot like Jabba is saying "Stinky Jedi!  Stinky Jedi!"

Has anyone else noticed this?!

I am very concerned about the deadly substance known as dihydrogen monoxide!  Why hasn't there been more effort made to raise awareness and ban the use of such a horrid chemical?!

http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html

Bum Buccaneers pillage defenceless hindquarters.

Arse Bandits craftily steal but leave intact.

Butt Spelunkers plunge unexplored depths.

Bum Smythes hammer and anvil as art.

Mystical Ass Wizards call upon sorcery to work their wicked will.

Posterior Pirates work closely with Rectal Raiders.

Ass Goblins are frightening indeed.

Butt Savages destroy outright.

But, Intestinal Invaders just go too far.

Real Genius.  Pretty funny 80's comedy about scientific types, with a young Val Kilmer who was cracking me up through the whole movie.  The guy with no dick from Ghostbusters is in it.

Now that we have them all, soon we're going to watch all the Pixar movies in the order they were made.  Can't go wrong with Pixar . . .

I did a bit of experimenting with the AviSynth filter ColourLike: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=96308

Works by generating histograms from one source and modifying another to more closely resemble it.  Tried it on the rancor scene in RotJ, modifying the 2004 version based on the GOUT colours (with a saturation increase and hue shift away from red) and the results seem promising.

I have a feeling it probably works better when the sources aren't too radically different--the scenes of Luke lost in the snow in ESB looked pretty terrible; the colour was mostly right but some elements became inexplicably bright purple(?!) and there was crazy blocking going on in the backgrounds sometimes.  That whole sequence is so screwed up in the SE, it's like there's a thick blue haze over the entire image; so manual correction is the only way to fix that, but it works better elsewhere.  I don't remember if this is the same method that was being discussed a couple years back or not.

Of course this filter can only work with the data that is already present in the SE images.  Parts that are completely desaturated, like the Star Destroyer laser blasts in the beginning of ANH, can't be rescued with such a method.

I put up a few images for comparison.  I'd be curious for any opinions.  Right now I'm just experimenting with this, but I might continue if it works well enough.  As I've said, I'm not really wired towards video the way I am with sound, but it's interesting in its own way.

Jabba GOUT: http://img689.imageshack.us/img689/6792/gout2.png

Jabba SE: http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/4076/se2h.png

Jabba test: http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/9264/test2o.png

3PO GOUT: http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/4723/gout3.png

3PO SE: http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/3185/se3.png

3PO test: http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/4089/test3c.png

Luke GOUT: http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/1589/gout1.png

Luke SE: http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/1327/se1v.png

Luke test: http://img703.imageshack.us/img703/706/test1zf.png

Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Iron Maiden.

Pretty freakin' epic . . .

awl yur rektums ar belong to my taypwrmz?

Interesting.  The smear in the GOUT can be really bad, even more noticeably when put up against the other versions, but then you can see the video noise in those is at rather a high level.  The colour is quite different in each, too.  The smear-free '93 colouring is making me think of the '92 vhs tape that I grew up watching; it seems very familiar in that way.

By the way, does anyone have any (relatively) high quality footage from the JSC for the 4-eyed stormtrooper and the Mos Eisley sequence that I might be able to obtain?  I'm thinking of putting them into a possible edit I have in mind, mainly just to see if I can actually do it, but if it works I might end up using them.

I'd be curious to know how much of an improvement there actually is with using lossless for the 5.1 mixes over ac3 448.  Might affect how motivated I am to try to mess with newsgroups again (props to Satanika for uploading them).