hairy_hen

Saw the Christmas special of Doctor Who.

What an incredible episode!  So much better than the majority of series five, because it had heart and depth and real character focus on top of the time travelling cleverness.  If that is an indication of what is to come next year, I'll be looking forward to it much more than I had been.  Michael Gambon's performance was amazing . . . really it was the first good Christmas special they've done, and a definite highpoint of the show as a whole.

Having Neil Gaimon do an episode for series six was an inspired choice: I'm definitely eager to see that one.

Been watching season 3 of Mission: Impossible.  Such an awesome show; very sixties, but in the best sense.  I've been familiar with it for a long time because it was my mother's favourite when she was a kid, and she had us watch them whenever they were re-run.  The Tom Cruise films are an abomination, utterly ruining everything that made the tv show great, so I shun those and refuse to watch them, but the show is one of the best things that's ever been broadcast.  It's pretty much a heist show with a lot of clever mind games--the focus is nearly always on fooling the enemy and outsmarting them through elaborate deceptions and subterfuge, and the intricate plans are completely dependent on teamwork to carry out properly.  (Sort of like the recent Ocean's Eleven on a weekly basis, but the characters as secret agents and not so much with the wisecracking.)  If you have a short attention span and little patience it won't be your favourite thing ever, but if you want something that will engage and thrill your higher functions it's really worth getting into.

Yeah, I've noticed that all three films were pretty much equally blue-cast.  If that has been dialled down I've no doubt that it will be much more watchable.  The 2004 video also has a problem with oversaturated reds in various places, particularly in Tatooine scenes, although they're not as large a grievance on the whole.

My mixes were put together by Satanika and I by upmixing a slightly edited version of the '93 pcm track from Belbucus, and combining it with a level-adjusted and GOUT-synched LFE channel taken from the special edition, then encoding to ac3 at 448 kbps.  The primary goal was to recreate the 70mm mix of Star Wars in 5.1 (which Harmy used for his PDE version of that film), but I also made 5.1 for the other two movies to go along with it.  Understandably, he decided not to use the one for RotJ, because I added the deleted music in the scene with Obi-wan on Dagobah.  To me the scene is immensely improved by this addition, but obviously not everyone will agree, and since this was not actually a part of any original mix, it isn't really a preservation per se.

It does, however, have an excellent sound, due to the superior balance of the '93 mix over the special edition (the surround does not become deafening every time something moves to the back), and the addition of LFE gives greater impact than a stereo track alone.  It synchs perfectly to the ntsc version of the gout, so it should also work here, assuming this has the same frame count.  For my own part, I'll probably mux it to the ntsc dvd video, but I completely understand wanting to keep things as original as possible, so I recognise that it won't be of interest to everyone.

Darth Mallwalker is correct that the one on usenet is a rough older version.  The perfected track is linked to at the end of this post, if anyone else wants to use it: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Star-Wars-1977-70mm-sound-mix-recreation-stereo-and-51-versions-now-available/post/403997/#TopicPost403997

I'm pretty excited to see what Harmy has come up with.  Between this and adywan's ESB, there's only the original film left to do in high quality.  Out of curiosity, how much colour correction was done for this project?

Went to see The Nutcracker yesterday.  Not just the music, but the whole production with the ballet.  Pretty effin' awesome!

I love Deep Space Nine--it may actually be my favourite Star Trek series.  It's really the one that dared to be different, with great results.

Just wait till about halfway through season 5; the show really goes epic in an awesome way . . .

Merci beaucoup.  ;)

Hey, can anybody PM me a link for the third cd of this set?  I have the first two but am missing the third--I'd really appreciate it.  :)

Once again I'd like to commend ABC for his awesome work on this.  He's definitely gone above and beyond in preserving and restoring the ESB score.

lolz @ butt sluggo & bum bytinz

Ha, I wish I could have never seen the SE's.  To think I actually preferred them before the 2004 versions were released!  *head-desk*

Hey, thanks to everybody who PM'd me for how to find this.  I'm going to be getting an external hard drive soon, and once it gets here I'll be able to check this out.  Sounds like there are a few minor flaws, but overall it's probably the best version of Empire out there as of yet.  :)

My post is more reasonable than your post.

lol @ Leguman

Oh, I didn't dislike Prince Caspian; I just found this one to be superior.  The first and third seem like they have greater rewatchability, and the focus is more on the adventure and less on battle, which I think suits the material better.

Now you mention it, I did notice his voice was different, but Simon Pegg did a great job with it, so it wasn't a problem.

Phrinke wishes he could make adult films with Ash's mom . . .

:D

Just saw the latest Narnia film.  Twas rather good, certainly more enjoyable than the second one.  Nothing like seeing big adventure movies on a 70 foot screen!

Sign me up for interest as well.  ;)

Looks like even the basic models have HDMI and support decoding for all the new audio formats, so you should be set for that.  If your Bluray player supports it, you may want to set it to bitstream the lossless audio and let the receiver handle it all just to be safe, as there are sporadic reports of minor problems with multichannel PCM.  If you use HDMI for the audio, you'll need a second cable to go from the receiver to the tv, and by default the receiver will have to be on to get a picture (though there is apparently a way to change this in the settings, so that it will pass through the video even in standby).

Of course, you can still get great results from standard 5.1 over coax or optical, which some people find less problematic to use.  If you cannot bear the thought of anything less than lossless, keep in mind that Bluray discs from Warner Bros that have Dolby TrueHD audio will for some reason default to the 640 kbps AC3 track, even over HDMI, and the TrueHD option must be selected manually in the menu.

Funny thing is that those speakers are about as small as they can be to get down to 80 hz, which is the recommended frequency at which to redirect bass from the main channels to the subwoofer.  With smaller ones you'll have to go for a 100 or (more likely) 120 hz crossover instead, which may make the sub a localised source of sound depending on its placement in the room and the surrounding acoustics.  It is possible to minimise this problem with appropriate setup, however.  (For reference, 80 hz is approximately the pitch of the E below the bass clef, while 120 is closer to the B above that, rather higher into male vocal range.)

Amusingly, audiophiles often lament the inescapable influence of WAF (wife acceptance factor) in making their purchases.  I'm grateful not to have been restricted this way--though I did make sure to get nice-looking speakers.  ;)

Anyway, receivers--I haven't really been keeping up with the latest developments or specific models, but I can recommend Onkyo receivers without hesitation, as I own one myself.  They deliver good sound quality and are well put together, even in the lower models, and are also quite user-friendly.  Don't underestimate the importance of this--while Denon makes good quality products also, their interface and user manuals are nearly unintelligible, and I avoided them for that reason.  You should be able to get a good entry level Onkyo for $200 if that's the way you want to go, and I think you'll be happy with the Energy system.

I haven't actually heard either of those, but I think they will be about as good as can be expected from small satellites in that price range.  They should both exceed an HtiB in quality, particularly the Energy system, according to what I've read.

If you're not dead set on satellites, though, I'd recommend another option, which will be superior in sound quality to either, and not too much more expensive: get two pairs of Polk Audio M10 bookshelf speakers, and a CS1 center channel.  Then add an Hsu Research STF-1 subwoofer, and you will have a real 5.1 setup.  With the holiday discounts they've got going at the moment, this whole system will only set you back a total of $486, and it will deliver greater results than anything that will come bundled together in one package.  The Hsu subwoofer in particular is a high fidelity component, offering superb sound quality that makes it a great choice for listening to music, in addition to movie bass.

Polk M10: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16882290224

Polk CS1: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16882290211

Hsu STF-1: http://www.hsuresearch.com/products/stf-1.html

Even without being on sale, these would be great choices.  Of course, you will need a separate 5.1 receiver to power any of these systems.

Definitely, the whole Fred and Wesley story is so sad it's hard to even think about sometimes.  It was also one of the things that benefited most from extension in the After the Fall series--I was glad they gave them such a good sendoff.

I think Wesley was intended to be killed off after only a few episodes on Buffy, as Spike was originally.  Thank goodness both of them got to stay on and evolve so much over the course of both shows.

Simultaneous gay boobgasms?

er . . .

Watched the Angel episode 'Waiting in the Wings' tonight, the ballet episode with Summer Glau.  Cool stuff.  Also saw the one with Gwen the electric girl.  The scene with Wesley and Lilah--goramn, I'd forgotten how intense those two were!  lol

Well, Yoda's ESB description of the Force seems to fit.  'Life creates it, makes it grow' and so forth.  So Leia using all of her own life force and everything it could channel goes right along with that concept.

Also, the way she envisions the chain digging into him is an analogue to what Luke says in his training in the first movie: 'You know, I did feel something--I could almost see the remote.'  To me at least, not only does this pertain to being able to "see" without looking, but also envisioning what you want to happen and then bringing it about, consciously or otherwise.  Leia, of course, does not know that she is using the Force, but in making such effort causes it comes to her aid when she has real need of it, I suppose.

The similarities are far too great far it to be a coincidence that he chose to describe Jabba's death this way.

Being already fake to begin with, the prequels will probably look better in 3D, but the originals will likely be somewhat worse.

Obviously, no amount of visual trickery will solve the central problem of rubbishy plots and bad dialogue and so forth (which relates to why the original movies are superior even in crude GOUT form to their jazzed up SE equivalents).

I can't tell if you're talking about simultaneous orgasms or gay sex, Phrinke.

Or maybe both?  :p

Watched Inception last night.

I love, love, love this movie.  It is one of the most inventive and mind-bendingly excellent things to come out in quite some time.  Of course its visual impact is somewhat diminished on a 24" 4:3 crt rather than projected onto a large screen, but really cranking the 5.1 sound helps make up for that.  ;)

At the end of the film, I'm about 90% certain that what we just saw actually took place, but the remaining ten percent is remembering the little strange details and trying to come up with alternative explanations.  lol

In addition to the sheer excellence of the ideas, one of the things I like about the movie is that the central problem of the story is character-based.  As cool as the plot is, it would not exist without this aspect, and everything that happens is that much richer and more meaningful because of it.  When I was young I vastly underestimated how important this actually is to storytelling, but now having occasionally engaged in writing myself it is all too easy to see when something fails to deliver any real depth.  Fortunately, Inception has it in spades.

I've heard some kerfuffle about the PAL dvd being of horrible picture quality, filled with jaggies like other recent WB dvd releases, but the NTSC version seemed to be just fine.  I saw only perhaps two instances of very minor aliasing, nothing at all like the horrific jaggies that plague The Dark Knight dvd.  Now obviously it's much harder to see that on a small screen, but The Dark Knight is often at GOUT levels of aliasing or worse, while Inception looked just like a dvd is supposed to look as far as I could see.  By all means get the Bluray if you can, but at least we seem to have been spared the blatant dvd-sabotage WB intermittently inflicts these days.

I really need to get adywan's version of ESB one of these days.  I keep meaning to look for it, but I've been holding off watching any Star Wars films until dark_jedi's v3 GOUT project is ready, so I don't get burned out on them and can enjoy all three as films without worrying too much about the technical aspects.  Still, I should really get on that . . .

We've been re-watching various episodes of Angel, mostly in the Darla resurrection storyline in season 2.  Haven't gone to very many beyond that, though, because season 3 is weird and 4 is just plain awful most of the time (the Faith episodes were good, but the whole Connor/possessed!Cordelia storyline was the wretched and rancid lowpoint of the entire show.  Thank goodness they practically rebooted in-universe for season 5 and got things back on track--and of course bringing in Spike just made it all that much better.

The description of the Buffy comics as devolving into wtf-ery is an apt one.  I've only looked at a few here and there, because generally speaking I am really not interested in comic books, but the early ones seemed to have promise while the later ones just plain sux'd.  The Angel: After the Fall series was fantastic, though; it gave a lot of closure and completion to the show's unfortunate premature cancellation.

Firefly is definitely my favourite Whedon show by a considerable margin, though.  Actually, it's pretty much just my favourite show, period.  Saw those again a few months ago.

Utterly despised Dollhouse--watched about three episodes and gave up in disgust.  Not a trace of what made his earlier shows so great, and it's next to impossible to give a damn about any of it when the main character doesn't have the first clue what the hell's going on about anything . . . *head-desk*

Watched the two-part Doctor Who episode of The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit recently.  I always liked that one a lot.  (And holy crap there's some loud bass in that when the drilling equipment shuts down!)

My girlfriend wants to get me into Twin Peaks.  Only seen the first episode so far, but it seems strangely interesting.  Also been watching some Moonlighting and Remington Steele to fulfill our silly detective show needs, and of course Castle since we love Nathan Fillion.

I always went by the thought that it needed a lot of time to charge up its capacitors enough to blow away a whole planet.  Also, even if they had destroyed Yavin first, it may have still been out of effective range of destroying the moon from over there.

The novel of Star Wars mentions that the Death Star gets to about six planetary diameters distance of Alderaan at the point they fire the superlaser.  Going by the size of Earth, this would be about 50,000 miles, which is rather less than the distance from here to our moon.  In the potentially much larger orbital system of a gas giant, it seems unlikely they'd be able to fire from the far side of Yavin and get the job done.  Now it's probably safe to assume that this number was arbitrarily invented by Alan Dean Foster when he wrote the book, but the concept of effective range is valid regardless of the exact value.

For the second Death Star, not only could they recharge faster, but also it would require far less power to destroy a ship than an entire planet, enabling a much higher rate of fire at the Battle of Endor.

Yep, that's it exactly.  You wouldn't really get that from the movie alone, but from reading the book that concept has been in my mind every time I watch it.  It gives it a whole new depth, I think.