hairy_hen

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!  The great Skynet has spoken!

I'm still irritated that The Sarah Connor Chronicles got cancelled.  That show had a lot more going for it than any of these wretched sequels do.

TV's Frink said:

Wazzles said:

iRed4321 said:

Hello, I'm new (and french) on this forum. 

 Are you French off this forum too?

 No, but we do kiss that way.

Team Olie

 Pics with you and Stinky or it didn't happen.

It doesn't necessarily mean the Empire didn't exist before Vader turned evil, though.  It could have already been there a while before he joined up and the Jedi were destroyed.

The surround channels most definitely need to be attenuated by 3 dB in order to provide proper balance.  I explained why in a post in the other DTS thread, which I will copy/paste into here:

hairy_hen said:

Theatrical sound systems are calibrated such that a -20 dBFS pink noise tone will play at 85 dBSPL from the front left, right, and center channels, while the rear channels measure at 82 dB.  This is to maintain backwards compatibility with Dolby Stereo analog tracks, which have a monaural surround capability rather than stereo rears.  In Dolby Stereo, the entire array of surround speakers is treated as one unit, which together measures at 85 dB.  So when 5.1 came along, they essentially split the existing surround in half, with the left and right each playing the same signal at 82 dB instead.  When heard together, the combined result of all the surround speakers is at 85 dB as it should be.

What this means is that because the surround channels in movie theaters and post-production stages are deliberately set to play back at a lower level than the front channels, the content of the surrounds will end up being 3 dB louder than it otherwise would be.  The mixers will set the level of the surround effects to sound 'correct' to them on the system they are listening on.  When this is played on home theater systems, which are calibrated with all channels set equally to 85 dB, the surrounds will end up being 3 dB too loud.

Because of this, a theatrical mix played on a home system must have the rear channels lowered by 3 dB in order to sound the way the mixer originally heard it.  5.1 encoders typically have a selectable option to do this automatically when creating the files for home use, but this was not always the case.

Note that calibrating the surround channels at 82 dB instead of 85 applies to all theatrical 5.1 formats, not just DTS.  Playing the same signal out of each surround results in a doubling of the acoustic power, which increases the total level of a mono signal by 3 dB.  It's the same thing that happens with the phantom center in a stereo mix.  Double power results in a 3 dB boost, but this must be distinguished from doubling voltage, which is what occurs when summing electrically—this creates a level increase of 6 dB for phase coherent signals.

So the surround channel calibration is easily explained when looked at in this manner.  When it comes to the LFE channel, however, things become considerably more complicated.  I tried to figure it out a while back and couldn't quite arrive at a satisfactory explanation for everything in the DTS system manuals, because we have no idea exactly what the analog chain inside their hardware actually is.  I am going to go back and open my Pro Tools session for the '97 SE DTS again, so I can take another shot at giving you guys an exact method to reproduce the LFE calibration and crossover.

Bah.  Come on, we all know that Kyle Katarn stole the plans for the Death Star back in Dark Forces.

I think you broke SilverWook, dude.  ;)

Brian Daley's novels are the only stories that are ever needed to portray Han Solo before the first movie.

Besides, Disney has yet to prove they are capable of making one good SW film, let alone several.  Count me as largely uninterested.

Recording at 192 kHz is entirely useless, unless for some reason you need to record extreme ultrasonic information, like bat sonar.  When it comes to actual audible information within the range of human hearing, there is no detail that lower rates cannot capture.  Higher sample rates do not improve anything within this audible range—they just allow gentler anti-alias filters to be used, as well as giving more headroom if further digital processing needs to be applied later on.  Even 96 kHz is overkill for many applications, though it may be helpful in some cases.

Really the results depend on the quality of the conversion that is used.  Top quality A/D converters will give better results even at 44.1 kHz than any lesser design could do at a higher sample rate.  The important considerations to look for are the quality of the anti-alias filter, which aims to prevent high frequency non-harmonic distortion while minimizing time-smearing artifacts, and the signal-to-noise ratio of the converter chip and its surrounding circuitry.  If the equipment is designed and implemented well enough, the sample rate will ultimately prove to be mostly irrelevant.

According to Dan Lavry, who designs high-end converters, the theoretical 'ideal' sample rate is right around 60 kHz.  This allows for capturing all audible detail while still leaving enough room for successful anti-alias filtering without creating any significant artifacts.  However, since this rate was never adopted as a standard, the most practical rates to choose from are either 48 or 88.2, in my estimation.

It is also worth noting that many digital processing plugins will oversample to higher rates to perform their calculations and then downsample back to the original rate again.  So in many cases it isn't even necessary to have recorded at a higher rate in the first place, since the oversampling gives the needed mathematical headroom while not wasting hard drive space by recording ultrasonic information without purpose.

Theatrical sound systems are calibrated such that a -20 dBFS pink noise tone will play at 85 dBSPL from the front left, right, and center channels, while the rear channels measure at 82 dB.  This is to maintain backwards compatibility with Dolby Stereo analog tracks, which have a monaural surround capability rather than stereo rears.  In Dolby Stereo, the entire array of surround speakers is treated as one unit, which together measures at 85 dB.  So when 5.1 came along, they essentially split the existing surround in half, with the left and right each playing the same signal at 82 dB instead.  When heard together, the combined result of all the surround speakers is at 85 dB as it should be.

What this means is that because the surround channels in movie theaters and post-production stages are deliberately set to play back at a lower level than the front channels, the content of the surrounds will end up being 3 dB louder than it otherwise would be.  The mixers will set the level of the surround effects to sound 'correct' to them on the system they are listening on.  When this is played on home theater systems, which are calibrated with all channels set equally to 85 dB, the surrounds will end up being 3 dB too loud.

Because of this, a theatrical mix played on a home system must have the rear channels lowered by 3 dB in order to sound the way the mixer originally heard it.  5.1 encoders typically have a selectable option to do this automatically when creating the files for home use, but this was not always the case.

These are the type of hard drives often used in professional recording studios:

Glyph 7200 rpm

I was born as a chick with a dick, but recently I had an operation to turn me into a regular dude.

I like to plunge it plunge it

I like to plunge it plunge it

I like to plunge it plunge it

I like to . . . PLUNGE IT!!

(anthem to clogged toilets everywhere)

I'm starting to believe that -1 is actually just one guy with multiple personalities.  That is why the entire team is always in agreement.

I've been revisiting the Kyle Katarn series recently.

I owned the original Dark Forces and Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight (as well as Mysteries of the Sith) back in the late 90's, when I was still using a Windows computer.  I always had a good time playing them, but found the level design to be confusing, so I couldn't get into them as much as I would have wanted.  Also, the graphics performance on that computer wasn't the best, so I was hindered in the gameplay experience.

Once I switched to a Macintosh, I was no longer able to play any of them at all, and given the not-entirely-satisfactory experience I'd had with them, I set them aside and moved on to other things.

In 2003 I went off to college, where I was introduced to Jedi Outcast by a friend, and this reawakened my interest in the series.  The graphics and gameplay were in every way a major upgrade over the previous installments, and with Jedi Academy coming out a short time later, I soon had more fun than I'd ever had with a Star Wars game before.  The amount of time I've spent playing both of these is fairly epic, though nearly all of it has been single player, since I rarely find the experience of online gaming to be satisfactory.  My current Macbook Pro runs them with an excellent framerate; and with the source code having been released a few years ago, I now usually use the fan-made version called OpenJK, which eliminates the need for the CD-ROMs as well as providing various bug fixes.  I also have a mod that allows for the Outcast levels to be loaded into Academy, and though it has a few minor issues (not nearly as many as earlier attempts at such a mod), going through Outcast and being able to use all of Academy's improvements to the lightsaber and Force powers is a lot of fun.

By all accounts, playing Dark Forces 2 on a Mac has always been highly problematic.  Recently I discovered that it is now (finally!) possible to run it with excellent performance in Crossover, the WINE loader for OS X.  While figuring out how to install it, I found the JKE mod which provides upgraded high-res models and textures, and well as a vastly improved lightsaber animation.  So all these years later, I'm at last able to appreciate this game for what it is, and enjoy it as I never did before.  While I still find certain things about it somewhat frustrating, it is not nearly as opaque to me as it used to be, and quite a bit more fun than I remembered it.  At first I was troubled by the lack of music, which is meant to play from the CD-ROMs and is simply silent on most modern computers, but I discovered that someone went to the trouble of creating a mod to restore the music during gameplay, which was the last link to completing the experience.

One notable difference from the later games is that DF2 is very much a shooter with lightsaber and Force powers added, while Outcast and especially Academy place extensive emphasis on the Jedi aspects, with the guns being almost an afterthought.  Since I started with the original Dark Forces, which is a shooter only, there is something quite nostalgic about this.  On my most recent playthrough of Outcast I found myself wanting to use the guns a lot more—sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't.  I started making my own sound mods to replace a few of the changed sound effects with ones from DF2: the concussion rifle, in particular, sounds far cooler in its original incarnation than in the Academy revision, and some of the saber sounds were also better.  (As a sound guy I'm sensitive to things like that, so I like to take whatever steps are necessary to make them the way they should.)

One of these days I'll look into getting the first Dark Forces going, as well . . .

I am currently reading Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

I really like it.

I call first dibs on working with 70mm audio if viable sources for it ever turn up.  ;)

I've been busy and haven't had time to listen to the examples, but in my experience there isn't really anything out there that's better than Dolby Prologic II.  To me it strikes the ideal balance between channel separation and overall sound field stability.  Other processes either have too much crosstalk between channels, or sacrifice stability and let sounds move around between speakers too much when they shouldn't, which sounds strange and can create distortion in some cases.

I've never been able to detect any difference between the results of hardware decoding as opposed to software.  Jim Fosgate's original design was an entirely analog process, but Dolby has only ever released Prologic II in digital form, for after licensing the design they analyzed it via computer and came up with an exacting digital representation of the circuit behavior.  Hardware decoder chips and software program versions are running the exact same algorithm, and will therefore come up with identical results.

As the name indicates, Movie mode is ideal for playback of most film soundtracks, especially those that are Dolby Surround encoded.  The dialog is concentrated in the center channel, and the surround effects are sufficiently diverted to the rear speakers to provide a convincing representation of their intended placement.  Music mode is ideal for any 2-channel soundtrack, music or film, that is in regular stereo does not have Dolby Surround encoding, since it focuses centrally-panned sounds less into the center speaker and uses the left and right to a greater extent, and uses the surrounds more for low level ambience than for panning purposes as in Movie mode.

He himself might be trying to do that.

Is it weird to want to karate-chop your own asscrack?

We're just sad we never got to find out who was Team_Edward and who was Team_Jacob . . .

Team_ThreePeriods

We only have one question:

Who here is Team_Edward, and who is Team_Jacob?

So . . . which is the horse and which is the clown?  -1, or Team -1?

I'm currently on vacation and do not have the files with me, but I can upload my tracks again, since the previous links have probably expired.  I actually meant to do that a while back, but was busy with many things and forgot to do so.  For now, though, the easiest way to hear them is to obtain the newest releases from Harmy or dark_jedi and watch/listen to the films that way.

It is my eventual intention to make one more version of the 70mm soundtrack, since there is a possibility of gaining access to a better reference for what it should sound like.  I can't say any more about it currently, but I'm very much hoping that I'll be able to do it.

The idea of making a new version is not so much to better the sound quality, since any improvement over the existing version would be incremental at best, but to fulfill my goal of getting it as close to the sound of the actual original mix as I possibly can.  There is definitely still room for me to make it more authentic in this regard.

The Bluray is the main source for most of the video.  Shots that were altered for the SE are being replaced, either partially or completely, with material from other sources.  The aim is to use 35mm film scans whenever possible, since the increase in resolution over the GOUT is enormous; but not every shot is currently available in 35mm, so other sources have to be used instead in some cases.

Shots that were altered with CGI are the highest priority for despecialization, but restoring original composites and mattes is also an important goal, in order to get the movies looking as close to their original appearance as possible.

As more 35mm material becomes available, future releases will include more and more of it, assuming Harmy has time to make new versions.