Started watching Chuck from the beginning. Never seen it before, but it's good fun. Rather silly, but with enough serious elements to keep it well away from becoming a farce. Adam Baldwin pretty much pwns every scene he's in. I've been a fan since Firefly, so it's good to see more of him, and the rest of the cast ain't bad either.
It's definitely better to let the pitch shift upwards along with the audio speedup for PAL, rather than using anything to keep it the same. I really don't like the way this sounds, but unfortunately it's vastly preferable in sound quality, because short of having access to some real high grade professional equipment, nothing that keeps the pitch the same during speedup is going to sound any good. (And maybe not even then.) It's basically the equivalent of letting a tape reel spin faster during playback, instead of doing all kinds of complicated and destructive alteration.
I use a Mac, but I don't actually know of anything that will change the speed on the file directly. What I would do is split the AC3 into its individual channels using either a52decX or Mpeg Streamclip, then open them in your audio editor and tell it to speed them up by the appropriate amount: 25fps / (24/1.001) = 1.0427083333333..., so just over 4.27% speedup. Then you can edit the faster versions to synch as needed.
Huzzah, on the mic I'm droppin' scrollable science, and I'm scrollin' through the 'hood with my e-mail client. Huzzah!
Sluggo said:
A quickie random question:
Does 3PO have his own musical theme? The notes played while he and R2 were first scene in ESB (talking about how they were going to dry out all of Leia's clothes) is also heard while Chewie is putting 3PO back together in the cloud city detention cell. Thoughts?
Yep, there is a definite 'droids' motif in the score for ESB. You can also hear it when R2's periscope pops up after he falls in the swamp, when 3PO tells him "You take good care of Master Luke now, understand?" during the snow battle, when R2 is repairing 3PO's leg near the end, and there is also a dramatic/poignant rendition in the unused part of the score as R2 scans for signals when Luke is lost in the snow. The droid motif is one of the more subtle aspects of the score, one which probably goes unnoticed by most people, but it's just one of those details that helps make the great music even better.
<Animal>
WOMAN!
</Animal>
Stereo rca, yes? Then that means the digital tracks are being converted to analogue inside the player, so you're not getting the actual pcm content. To do that you need a player with S/PDIF output. With analogue the sound quality will depend on how good the DACs are, and how well the circuitry is shielded against electrical interference.
You can get DTS audio over digital connection, but to capture AC3 you need an external RF demodulator.
Considering that Mara would have been a maximum of two years old at the time of RotS, I think it's safe to say her omission was a good decision . . .
I always liked Leia with a red lightsaber too--it helps go against that whole 'every bad guy has red and every good guy has blue or green' thing.
And Bobby Jay, now I've got an image of the Sarlaac taking a colossal shist out the other end of the planet seared into my head. Forget ion cannons, the rebels should have just installed themselves a Sarlaac cannon on Hoth and taken out the Star Destroyers with that. lol
I really like Mara Jade.
Red.
John Malkovich cracks me up in this movie . . .
Where be all the sarlaccs?
lol. I tend to think of the sarlaac as being a bit lower/farther back . . . :p
Anyway, the haxxorz got to me and changed my userpic, so now my filthy eastern ways are exposed for all to see.
You could tell it to only run the script for a certain number of frames, mpeg2 encode each segment individually and then join them afterwards with a program that can do that seamlessly. Could save you a good deal of space that would otherwise be used up on the huge intermediate files, not to mention put less wear on the drive itself.
Irregardless of such, I have a bigger problem with people that say "aluminium". ;)
I think The Aluminium Falcon might take issue with that. :p
It's really nice to read SW books that are not bogged down with prequelisms. Even though some of the Bantam stuff isn't that great, it has a large advantage over anything more recent because of this. Although, the New Jedi Order suxxor'd for quite different reasons; as the OP said it was depressing and stupid and weird and just didn't feel like 'Star Wars' at all. That was definitely the place where I gave up on the novels. Apparently, what came after that was even worse.
Also, the Vong were completely ripped off from Species 8472 from Star Trek: Voyager, who were much cooler.
In that case what you should do is change the output value of the script's resizing function, so that you have it at the desired editing resolution to start with rather than piling more scaling on top of what is already there. You'd have to change the edge cropping and the borders added and so forth along with it, but it shouldn't be difficult to find the right values--if you're doubling the size of the entire image, then they should be doubled along with it, yes? Then you can make another, much simpler script to scale it back down to dvd resolution during the encoding phase.
I don't know if this would affect the size and positioning of the subtitles, though. Actually, if you're rendering a lossless intermediate file, you could probably leave out the subtitles from the initial processing, and add them to your resizing script for the encode, which would bypass any possible issues with that.
You can't take the sky from me . . .
It's kind of the same as Firefly, where people all over bonded because of their love of a show that was unjustly cancelled long before its time. Having something important taken away only serves to underscore why you need it in the first place, even if you hadn't given it much thought before. And sharing that enthusiasm can be a sort of bond you'd never discover otherwise.
I came here for the same reason a lot of others did. I used to prefer the '97 SE's, and found the prequels to be at least acceptable to some degree, but once it really sunk in how far Lucas' disdain for the original movies actually went, and that the butchered 2004 versions were meant to replace all others, suddenly the 'real' movies took on a whole new level of importance as I rediscovered them. The quest for high quality preservations also triggered an interest in the technical aspects of movies, which I probably wouldn't have thought much about otherwise.
So really, I owe quite a lot to the existence of this forum and the people who make it what it is. It would be easier to just not care and buy into the party line, but ultimately I find it rewarding to reject the revisionist crap that has piled up and just think about the context of Star Wars the way I did when I was young. Thank goodness there are others who feel the same way.
Has anyone come up with AviSynth settings that would work for this? I liked adywan's screenshots, and zombie's recent ones look great too, so settings that could replicate that would be fantastic, but someone more experienced with video than me should be the one to come up with them. lol
True, that is probably the most thorough way to go about it. I was working with the audio by itself, and then recombining with the video afterwards, so it was ideal in that case, but all options need to be covered for greatest flexibility.
It can be somewhat frustrating that there aren't always Mac options for what's available in Windows. For that reason, I got a program called Crossover, which is a limited implementation of WINE for OS X, so that I could install some applications that were known to work that way. I use Aften for AC3 encoding, and AviSynth to frameserve video for mpeg2 encoding with HCEnc (indexed by DGIndex). These programs work very well, but there are others that don't run at all, so of course it's not a complete solution.
lol. I can absolutely confirm that a52decX is capable of splitting 5.1 AC3 into six AIFF files, because I have used it to do exactly that several times. This functionality is what enabled me to make my 70mm mix for Star Wars, since editing the LFE from the special edition and adding it to the original version of the movie was one of the key concepts behind the entire thing.
There is an option in the window to select output: by default it will downmix to plain stereo, but you can also select 'Dolby' which is presumably a matrixed Prologic version, and most importantly the individual output, which gives each channel its own AIFF file. The channels are clearly named so you know exactly which one is which. I agree that it would have been very helpful if the program description clearly spelled out this capability; Mac3dec never worked for me, so I had to look long and hard before I found how to do it this way. But I promise you, it does work--it's like a hidden Mac audio gem that nobody seems to know about.
Have you ever used Avidemux? Right now I'm looking into editing options and this one seems to have a lot of the things I'll need, particularly the ability to edit mpeg2 files without re-encoding. Mpeg Streamclip can also do this but it lacks Avidemux's ability to precisely select individual frames. Current version only works in Snow Leopard, which initially caused me to pass over it until I realised that my external drive has my dad's 10.6 install on it. ;)
I wanna date my own avatar.
There is actually a much easier way to perform some of those steps. First off, in MacTheRipper you can choose to demux the audio and video at the same time the ripping is being performed, and select which items you actually want to end up on your hard drive. Six individual AIFF files can then be obtained by decoding the AC3 with a program called A52decX.
I haven't yet found how to get a precise list of a dvd's chapter timings, though, so I've always had to create new ones myself. Still looking for a way to do that.
Hey, thanks so much for uploading the mp4 of the cave scene--it looks great. I'm still working out exactly how to use it for what I have in mind, but I'm very excited. You're doing some really good work here.
Quality of dvd upscaling and de-interlacing definitely varies a lot by player. I've seen some that do it well and some that are unbelievably terrible, with most tending towards passable but not so great. Seems likely a good render in software would be an improvement over what many players are capable of. But if you have an Oppo player, or something of similar quality, then you're all set because their video processing is some of the best known to man. I myself very much want to get an Oppo when I'm able to get into HD, because I sure as heck don't plan on re-buying everything I've got on dvd, so making them look their best is a priority.
As far as the cutting off the AT-AT's foot idea goes, I do hope you all realise that they are in fact moving, and are very large? Not only would Luke have to cut through several feet of metal, he'd have to do so at a brisk jog. Not exactly the easiest way to go about it.
And I am most grateful for all the positive responses I've received, and am happy I could improve the available audio experience for these great films. :)
To continue with the subject of the LFE channel, it's worth noting that my use of 2004 bass in some places makes those particular effects sound much better than they did in the source mix. Take Vader's first appearance for example--the '04 bass is more substantial than what is heard in the '97 mix, or the '93 by itself, yet as a whole it sounds worse because the main channel portion of the sound is completely absent. That rumbling wind or rushing air type of sound, so distinctive and essential to the overall effect, is not heard at all, and by itself the bass doesn't contribute much. But when you combine it with the proper main channel sound, it comes alive and enhances the scene. The '04 mix has the same problem with the Force choke scene later on; again, only LFE is heard without the proper sound effect in the mains. Just goes to show how important it is to the mix as a whole to be able to distinguish how the different parts affect it. And, you know, to actually care about maintaining a certain vibe and not just change things for the hell of it. lol
Sitting in Barnes and Noble with my laptop, with a bunch of over-dramatic high schoolers behind me, blathering on about their romantic woes without regard to the increasing irritation their obnoxiously loud voices and conversation topic are generating in me. *head-desk*