msycamore

SilverWook said:

But which logo did he score, the WB or American Zoetrope one? Can you time it to the DC?

There ought to be a way to degrade the logo a bit to fit in better. Play it out of an old DVD player set for a non-anamorphic tv and record it to tape perhaps? I'm still analog in my thinking. ;)

I'm not sure, it's a 8 second piece and it fit the WB logos length, but I noticed that the film versions we are used to have the main title theme playing under the logos so it was either dropped or maybe used for the '71 theatrical cut. Maybe there is some info on the original CD, I have only a rip of it.

I'll try to degrade the original logo somehow.

SilverWook said:

I found out how to contact the LDDB seller, and sent him an email. Cross your fingers!

That's great! :)

My knowledge in this area isn't really good, but I think g-force did it to get rid of the bad discoloration etc. at the edge of the frame in the Gout telecine.

Great to know that modern displays are better at resizing than before, I still got a CRT TV so that is news to me.

SilverWook said:

I was also thinking it would be nice to restore the proper WB logo for the era. The LD has the usual 90's logo plastered on. One thing the DVD got right was to use this...

This is actually from the Dirty Harry DVD, but I believe it's the same logo I saw on the Director's cut. Maybe I should have held onto it. ;)

You read my mind. :) I actually tried to post that earlier today but imagehack didn't let me somehow, it's the same logo on the new DC but with black background. A small detail perhaps but it would make this preservation even more beautiful. I got it but you'll almost need to degrade the quality of it to fit the Laserdisc footage. ;)

I also listened to the soundtrack for the first time in a long time, and the first track of the CD is: Logo, and it's a very short fanfare done by Lalo Schifrin that I don't recognise at all, I wonder if it was part of the original 1971 release somehow or if it was dropped entirely and just restored for this CD.

Thanks for the caps, SilverWook. I'm actually surprised how good it all looks. Ok, there's some edge enhancement and dirt and it looks a little washed out sometimes but I think this is overall very good for a transfer that old. Now, I'm really excited! Ok, anyone qualified and willing to step up and help out with this? Please!

It should be 16:9, also set dc prec at 10 if you're doing a high bitrate encode. You could also take use of the luminance gain and the AQ strength settings for better results.

Looking damn good to me! Much better than I thought it would. :) Perhaps a little improved black level should make it look even better. What do you think?

Harmy said:

Well, you can tell why they used so much DVNR on the later transfers, the dirt is apparently beyond cool on the IP they must have used on all the 3 releases. I think those 90s video releases might be beyond saving. The 1995 PAL still seems to be the best of the 3. It seems to have a balance between keeping too much dirt and overdoing the DVNR.

You know, DVDNR doesn't necesarily need to be a bad thing, when used carefully. In 1993 the DVNR was something new and actually at the time of it's release the 1993 LD was cosidered really good. I've read a contemporary  review of it from some home video magazine and they said that it was the ultimate release to show off your home theater system... And no wonder it seemed like really good picture when watched on a small CRT TV and being compared to a dirty noisy picture of LDs like the JSC...

Yes, but this DVNR is very bad and have always been, it looks like shit even on a CRT TV, and I thought the same when it was released back in '93. That landspeeder shot however is supposed to be grainy, it's part of the special effect technology of its time due to repeated optical compositing. But I agree, the JSC is very dirty and noisy but I much prefer that to the horrible smear of the Gout in those scenes and those caps doesn't really do the JSC justice. But that is just the two most obvious scenes, as we know the films are full of those moments, here's a favorite of mine. ;)

Yes, I've seen it. A new Avisynth plugin would be very helpful.

Fantastic purchase rsortor! Damn! I'm jealous.

I can fix them very easily, just send me the files. The video is definitely a keeper. ;)

The main subs are correct, it is the drop shadow that is slightly adjusted to the left in frame, which looks very bad.

You could always download the free VLC media player:

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

There's an easy snapshot function on it.

I'm quite sure it will work with a good capture, the problem with the '86 JSC/'92 US LD are the huge differences in colors to the '93/'95 masters so a good '95 pal transfer would be much easier to splice in I guess.

Here's just a quick color adjustment I did to a capture of the Japanese Special Collection, just to give you an idea of how it may look.

GOUT

JSC

GOUT

JSC

The color correction/contrast must be much better if it's going to work of course.

Good job dark_jedi! I think it looks great, an improvement for sure, unfortunately the subs I did for you have been adjusted due to the different framing, look at the drop shadow and you'll see what I mean, but that's an easy fix.

Chewtobacca said:

As to Blade Runner, mysycamore, are you comparing the archival versions to the 1997 DVD?  On reflection, I can see that their colors are different from that release, so I suppose I was wrong about them having the original color timings, but I cannot see where they are worse than the Final Cut.  The 2006 DVD release colors look different from the original release too. 

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDReviews24/bladerunner.htm

I like the look of the 2006 DVD actually.

Here's what Charles de Lauzirika said, (one of the producers of the set)

"As for the color differences, it all really boils down to the fact that Ridley Scott personally supervised and approved the color timing in the Final Cut to his liking -- something he was never able to properly do in the past -- while the other cuts are presented as close to their previously-established look as possible. Ridley worked directly with colorists Jill Bogdanowicz and Stephen Nakamura at Technicolor for the Final Cut, while Skip Kimball (a vet of many Ridley Scott transfers) handled the archival versions at Modern VideoFilm. The Workprint was in such bad shape that it went through two passes, first at FotoKem and then again with Skip at Modern."

It's a fantastic set but it's sad they didn't get the archival versions exactly right in how they're supposed to look, here is some of the worst examples.

'97 transfer

'06 transfer

'97 transfer

'06 transfer

I don't say that the shitty '97 transfer is correct either, it isn't (too red for example) but these caps show clearly that something isn't right. I don't have any examples to demonstrate the final cut unfortunately, but in some scenes it's closer to the original photography than the '06/archival versions imo.

ImperialFighter said:

Too many directors are fouling up their originals with all this colour-grading nonsense.  It looks like I'll be sticking with more and more DVD originals at this rate... 

I think the reason behind this is that many modern homevideo releases goes back to the original negative when producing the new transfers and instead of bringing in the original DP again to do the colortiming, the producer of the sets do it themselves or sometimes the Director of the film, very disturbing. 

Chewtobacca said:

I am in two minds about the new color timing of Bladerunner.  At times it is closer to the workprint than the other cuts, but at other times it is too blue, and I find myself sick of the blue by the end of the film.  When directors recolor-time they never seem to know when enough of one tint is enough.  At least the other cuts have their original color timing on the five-disc set though.

I disagree, the archival cuts included in the Blade Runner set sports a different colortiming than the original one that sometimes looks even worse than the Final Cut.

Great job with the site zombie! I love your dedication.

A few things that I think needs to be done on the site:

The main page text describes that the original films are not longer available, but some of the average persons reading this will maybe say to themselves "what do they talk about, it's available already on the DVD bonus discs." I think you'll need to adress clearly why these aren't up to standards even though it's perfectly clear to us. I've actually heard some younger people who believe that the original films actually looked that way in the cinema. And that is a horrible truth which leads directly to the second suggestion, The Changes. The Lucasfilm changes comparison you link to is incomplete, faulty and sometimes even wrong in its descriptions. In fact, the whole article reeks of Lucasfilm propaganda that help reinforce younger people to think these beautiful films looked like shit.

I know you're planning to put this article directly on your page, when you do, my suggestion is that you write your own descriptions and fill in the blanks. I can help catalogue the changes if you want.

SilverWook said:

I wish somebody could tell us if the Japanese LD was a different transfer. It came out a couple years after the U.S. disc.

Yes, it would be nice to know. If I understand it correctly, the Japanese is from '94? my bet is that it's from the same master but it could look better of course, I've heard the '86 JSC Star Wars should be better looking than the '92 US LD even though they use the same master.

They are sourced from the same pre-DVNR master that the Japanese Special Collection LD comes from I think, very dirty and bad colors in many scenes.

This is very interesting, never thought the difference in smearing was that huge between the Pal and NTSC versions, this can be a better alternative than using JSC LD/US '92LD footage as the colortiming is basically the same as in GOUT.

Ok, I did manage to find some info about this problem here:

http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/Sampling

and here:

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/the-dvd-benchmark/179-the-chroma-upsampling-error-and-the-420-interlaced-chroma-problem.html

It seems like it can be fixed or maybe reduced but this is a little over my head actually, maybe you could try to fix it, I don't know if it's really worth it. I have compared these two versions again and I now actually thinks Reivax looks almost better when you fiddle a little with the contrast/sharpness but I can also understand if you're not going to bother with it.

Moth3r said:

It looks like some sort of chroma sub-sampling issue.

 Ok, thanks for the tip, maybe it's fixable.

Take it easy d_j, I'm not attacking you, I was just curious why my encode of it came out differently, it could as well be my encode that's wrong. It could matter as I am doing the subs with g-force's cropping in mind. Oh well, nevermind.

skyjedi2005 said:

Yeah i am surprised someone has not done a isolated score for Graffiti or THX.  But the change in the forum rules would make that a custom DVD and not allowed.  I guess the only thing allowed is a how to guide if you have the official CD's whether they are out of print or not.

As for the lalo schiffrin score i was under the impression some of it was different on the CD than how it was in the film.

Yes, the score is presented a little different in the final film, but I was just thinking if I could offer SilverWook something for the kindness of him capturing this LD.

This may be a little late as I know you're already done with it, but have you noticed the problem with the color red in the Flunk transfer? It's throughout the whole film and it doesn't seem to be any regular colorbleed either. Any ideas to what's causing this.

Flunk

Reivax

dark_jedi, I checked the sample you posted and noticed that your encode had less cropping than mine, I find it a little weird, wasn't this clip done with g-force's latest script? Just curious.

from my encode:

from the sample clip:

Looking good, LexX.

This is my attempt and it looks now almost exactly like the original poster hangin on my wall.

This is my all time favorite movie poster, I know it comes in at least three different color schemes due to different printings.

I would really love to have the original Tom Jung artwork in hi-res before the droids were added by another artist, the same thing was done on the half-sheet.