poita

It wasn't...

Now you grab an iPod and istopmotion, you point the ipod at the scene, arrange your toys, and press the button. It snaps a shot. You can judge your framing, exposure, lighting etc. immediately.

You get onion-skinning so you can see how much you have moved the items, you can preview the movement that has happened so far, you can use another iOS device as the trigger so you aren't touching the one filming. You can delete a frame if your hand was in shot or something went wrong.

It is *so* much easier now.

Before you didn't know how the thing was going to look until a few weeks later when the film came back in the post.

Yeah, I noticed that too, I converted it using Nuke and it handles it okay.

Usually away from green just a smidge.

Being an IB print we will need to adjust the colour slightly, as it was most likely timed for Xenon/Carbon Arc projection, but so far it looks great. Much better than the colour in the BD.

I love it, if you ever want it professionally transferred, drop me a line.

I remember doing similar stuff with my old Revere Regular 8 camera, it was wind-up (clockwork driven) and had single frame advance and fit in the palm of your hand.

I love old film tech, thanks so much for sharing!

A 35mm print has become available for about $900, would anyone be interested in a 35mm restoration?

That's awesome.

Still gutted that Star Wars never got a Vectrex release.

It used to take me *days* to synch sound, now it is a few clicks and I'm done.

Kind of like this, but using the click track instead of the projector.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Sync-Digital-Sound-to-Your-16mm-Film-Projector/

The software works the same way though.

Sorry about all th e typos but my keyboad is dying!

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

Harmy finished the color corrections, and I just had the pleasure of reviewing them.  They look terrific.  As soon as I download the .avi's, my work on the project will resume.

Next up - sound sync.  Ugh, I hate that part.  Although at least this time the sound and video are coming from the same film :)  It's still painstaking, as the video is locked to the proper speed, but the audio is captured with a normal analog projector and is subject to all kinds of mechanical drift.

 I think I may have mentioned this before, but the way I get aorund this is to put a sensor on the drive shaft for the shutter on the audio projector, and use thst to record a 'click track' when capturing audio. It is only about $5 worth of components and makes synching up audio later an absolute snap, as you have one click per frame, and can adjust the audio digitally then to perfectly match the video.

Doing it manually used to make me want to jam a spoon up my nose and into my brain.

Those are some serious eyebrows.

What I find interesting now is that so many CGI effects are done that people would never even guess, from romcoms to documentaries, it is used for so many things other than in-your-face effects.

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

I think my ability to suspend disbelief (in myself) must be high, because I still think that the effects throughout Jurassic Park are fantastic.

 I agree, they still hold up really well in most places. Not quite as jaw dropping as when it came out, but still definitely impressive and good enough to not 'break you out' of the movie.

MaximRecoil said:

Harmy said:

@darklordoftech: Yes, exactly.

@MaximRecoil: I simply disagree with this - people weren't used to seing CGI dinosaurs, so they seemed much more real back then, than the seem now - I know this, because I experienced it and my dad said this as well, last time we watched Jurassic Park. I just watched the 1st Harry Potter movie yesterday and I could spot things being obviously CGI, where I never spotted them before. And the LOTR example is a very good one as well - when I first saw those movies, they seemed flawless (visually anyway) and now, I can see all kinds of things looking fake and CGIed, though I can still see less CGI fakeness there than in the Hobbit movies, because there is simply less CGI - like Neverar says, people just learned to recognize the signs of something being CGI but in the early days, most people thought it was photo-realistic. You may be the exception to that but not the rule.

Sure, some CGI always looked bad (CGI Jabba is a great example) but most CGI definitely seems much more fake now, than it did when it was created.

 Anecdotes can't establish anything one way or another. "Confirmation bias" is the biggest potential problem with anecdotes of this nature. A controlled study of some sort could give meaningful results. This would have to involve people who have never seen the CGI in e.g., Jurassic Park and therefore have no preconceived notions about it.

As for "learning to recognize the signs of something being CGI": logically, there should be no learning process required. Those signs are simply differences from reality, and reality is something that pretty much everyone is extremely familiar with.

As for my own anecdotes, I have none where I once thought a certain case of CGI looked real or good but now I think it looks fake or bad. I'm too old to have seen any photorealistic attempts at CGI as a kid, though that could change things (i.e., a child's brain isn't even close to being fully developed yet, and they are inherently more credulous than adults as a general rule). Another thing that can change things is the quality and resolution of the picture and the display, i.e., CGI that looks good on a VHS tape or even a DVD displayed on a 15 kHz CRT isn't necessarily going to look good at far more revealing levels of resolution/quality.

 Okay then, to leave anecdotes aside, and to remove the spectre of confirmation bias, one of my jobs at Animal logic in the 90s was to take the animators to each new effects film and get them to rate the effects and their realism level on a scale, and to research what we were up against with the competition. We would also take non animator friends with us and put them through the same grilling to ascertain what effects the general public found believable and what they found poorly executed to use as a yardstick for our own work.

Going back through my notes has been an interesting and somewhat hilarious and humbling exercise. Reading my notes I was a bit of a tool back then, moreso even than now, and it is pretty clear I thought I was funny and/or clever.

Apart from all that, my notes for Jurassic Park reveal that out of the 14 animators, 12 thought the opening scenes with the first reveal were 'completely real' on our scale. i.e. that the effect was good enough, that time and advances would probably not improve on it. The 'general public members' best comment was 'How the F**k did they do that' and all of them found the effect entirely convincing.

I also noted that only 3 of the animators and none of the 'general public' realised that the jeep was CGI in the T-Rex scene in the rain.

I flicked across to Dragonheart, everyone rated the shot of the Dragon in the rain as 'perfectly executed', again basically stating it was effectively real and couldn't be made better.

Now keep in mind that this was after a single viewing at a cinema, and the effects look better on film than on BD.

I could only find two of the guys now that made the comments about JP, and both of them said the initial reveal looks flat and dated now.

Going through some other notes it is interesting what people thought of as entirely convincing, and what they didn't, and the stuff that they didn't even realise was CGI that now I am surprised no one picked it at the time.

We do get better over time and more discerning, when the best thing that had *ever* been seen before was stop motion plastiscene or latex models, the CGI dinos just looked so shockingly real, that our more cynical detail oriented brain possibly got switched off for a while.

Also, after countless CGI films, and better effects, we are now more educated what to look for, quite simply more discerning. Like the first time you have wine, you have trouble discerning much about it, but after drinking many varieties, and quality levels, you learn to become more differentiating.

Having said that, the CGI in the 1997 release of ANH looked off at the time to all of us according to my notes, we had trouble believing that ILM, who existed because of Star Wars, did such a shoddy job on itcompared to the other films they worked on that same year.

The images work once you have visited the site and viewed the image.

Ouch!

Thanks Silverwook and Synnöve.

Now back on topic, the print has been inspected fully now, and it is a great print, in really good condition, and yes a chunk of it is still on my creit card :)

VHS is not a component format, so even players with component outputs will not output the standard VHS tape via component. If any did, it would be the same as using a composite to component converter anyway.

Are they pan and scan or widescreen?

Unlikely to be burned in these days, but selectable subtitles on a dubbed version would be the most likely broadcast.

So we can party like it's nineteen seventy one.

I know nothing about these films really, just let people know when a good quality scifi print becomes available as they are getting more and more rare.

From the threads on AMPS I take it there are some audio, colour and grain differences between the Theatrical release and the home releases.

There is some THX info over on AMPS that might be of interest to any true fans of the film.

See AntcuFaalb's signature for the address.

If you want the 'original' SE version, I know a collector with a 35mm print of the 1997 ANH.

PM me about the 1977, 1980 and 1983 films :) I'm sure I can help.

Print has shipped.

I have a bunch of T2 discs at home, I'll check tonight.