poita

Lots of neighbours were peering out their windows :)

BTW, here is a simple wetgate test, I have installed a wetgate onto the Super8 scanner.

The first file is the film after cleaning, the second one is the same sequence with the wetgate installed. It does a pretty nice job.

Just a few seconds of footage, it is low quality, just a quick test to see if the wetgate works.

http://we.tl/VjgaTXH6Bt

Well, I am a bit late with posting these, had some sad news recently that has taken up quite a bit of physical and mental time, but here as promised is the scanner 'unboxing'.

The $1000 scanner has ended up costing me nearly $5000 with delivery, import duties, taxes and a rapidly falling Aussie dollar, but all 900lbs/400+kg of it made the journey from Korea to its new home in country NSW Australia in one piece.

Turisu said:

penguinofgreatness said:

Turisu said:

I hope you reconsider the special edition; the extra scenes kill the perfect pacing of the film and the theatrical version is Cameron's original director's cut since he had final cut of the movie on release.

Actually, for Aliens, the Special edition is Cameron's director's cut. He prefers that cut of the film and the studio forcibly created the theatrical cut. (Of course it's up to you what cut you prefer.)

In the case of Alien, the theatrical cut is the director's final cut, and the so called "director's cut" is just an alternate cut Ridley Scott did for the dvd.

Can you link to your source? I have never heard of any studio intervention in the theatrical cut of Aliens. Cameron had final cut on all of his movies during this period and has only subsequently stated that he now prefers the special edition to the theatrical cut. He did the same thing with T2 on which he also had final cut.

http://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=2558663

"The original version, however, was too long for the producing studio so it demanded several cuts to tighten the plot. Especially the American audience was not trusted to have the ability to sit through a movie of 148 minutes. So Cameron went to the cutting room, again, and lost more than 15 minutes of footage. It was mostly character development of Ripley or background information about what had happened to Newt's parents. But also some of the action got cut out, it might not be elementary but for people who want the entire experience it is still part of the movie. Among the fans there are two fractions, one preferring the Theatrical version and one preferring the Director's Cut. The advantage of the Theatrical version is that it is more flowing and faster. The Director's Cut, however, offers more depth and information. This is also the opinion of the director James Cameron who prefers the Director's Cut, also called "Special Edition", because he thinks it is the better and more exiting version of the movie. Also leading actress Sigourney Weaver made clear which version she prefers. She threatened to never shoot an Alien-film, again, if the longer Director's Cut was not released, as well.:

You can easily check the primaries with a colourimeter, and see if your fire engine reds are indeed red.

Well, all hidef material is REC709, so a wider gamut than that is wasted anyway if watching commercial releases.

CRT was capable of very rich reds, the NSTC system did have a knobbled colour system compared to PAL though. Some CRT projectors had trouble with Red, especially Sony projectors, NEC projectors gave gorgeous reds and very nice skintones. An NEC XG CRT projector is still my preferred way to watch a big screen movie.

A well calibrated CRT TV hit the primaries pretty well, so red should look pretty red.

PAL releases sometimes weren't calibrated properly, NTSC Red is a pinky-purple on PAL, any Atari owners in PAL territory probably wondered why games set on Mars were always pink!

A calibrated PAL release tends to have better colour than an NTSC release, but sometimes the releases were sloppy or were conversions and the colours were way off.

If you want a good read about it, then plow through this:

http://www.ece.rochester.edu/~gsharma/papers/lcdvscrtprocieee.pdf

The source is an International negative, all films for international release usually require a neg that is free of any subtitles so that subtitles can be added in the required language.

The Derann Super8 print uses the International master and is a straight print from it, so it is lacking *any* subtitles, so the poor viewer has to guess what Greedo might be saying.

This does make it a great colour reference though, as it is straight from that neg.

I don't see any smearing on the JSC ANH, and I have been over it a frame at a time more times than I would care to admit. I would suspect it is the player or comb filter as AntcuFaalb has suggested.

If you have any frames with smearing I'd like to check them against mine.

I have the 750 card, but it keeps crashing. I'll have another go sometime and see if it has AGC issues.

ex507 said:

Hey guys! First, hello! I am brand new here and i am stoked about what you are doing. Great work. I come from germany so i hope you will forgive me my bad english.

 

Actually, i already have some questions. I have trouble playing the v2.1 avchd on my macbook. i burned the iso file to a dvd and i am able to play it on my bd player (although it does not run it in 24p but that's a player issue).

 

So i already downloaded vlc and other stuff. I just cant open the iso file. Is there a problem with mac computers? If anyone can help id really appreciate that!

 

thanksmuch

It plays just fine on my Macbook. You don't even need to burn the ISO, just double click on it and it will mount.

Yes please!!!

Do some motion tests on the Pioneer, I have a 560H and it creates chequerboard artifacts on fast moving items.

It works great on test patterns, but I have had a lot of issues on scene-changes in real life use.

Does your PC have a thunderbolt port?

_,,,^..^,,,_ said:

poita said:

The best demodulator is this one: Yamaha APD-1

I agree that is a good AC3 RF demodulator, but as I investigated a lot before buying one, I discovered that all AC3 RF demodulators use the same chip (licensed from Pioneer)... so, it's not possible to assume that this is the best (nor the worst): the all do the same jobs, quality-wise, while others have some interesting features, as the Pioneer RFD-1 has 1 AC3 ins, two digital ins and two digital outs (two optical and two electrical) and could act as a switch... I actually have both of them, along with the Pioneer SP-D07 DS&AC3 processor, and, apart features, sound quality is the same...

And 249US$ seems a quite high price, as you can find the same at 1/3rd of the price...

I only meant best as in most reliable. Every other model I have has eventually died, the two Yamahas have never missed a beat. I agree that the sound quality is the same across all of them though.

Yes, you have the speedlight off camera and reflect-bounce it through the film.

The LED light sources have a terrible colour temperature (They are blue LEDs doped to give off an approximation of white light, you would be better off with an RGB array of LEDs). The speedlight will have the perfect colour temp, allow faster you to stop the lens down a bit which makes achieving focus easier and the light is consistent frame to frame.

For the film gate, the perfs on the film are the same spacing as 35mm photography film. You can take an old 35mm camera, remove the lens assembly and the backing plate and you will have a plate that will keep the film nice and flat and sprockets to align the film.

The camera is a better way to go. If you have a flash head (A Strobe) it will give better results frame to frame than that light source. It will also freeze any motion in the frame and give you a really sharp picture.

An old non-digital 35mm camera can be cannibalised to make a film gate, good SLR bodies are basically free these days and a great source for parts.

It's not, don't stress.

My daughter has asked to watch this, so if there is a better version out there I'd love to know too!

It is the film stock used unfortunately. I haven't seen a 70mm Jedi yet that has not gone over to the pink side.

This would be a great luma reference though.

I'd love to see some concept art, or a few seconds of animation to see where you are pitching this.

I was an animator for a few years, and this sounds rather, well, ambitious!

Yeah, my uploads weren't exactly speedy either, if you were in the same country I could have walked them there faster :)

It must have been close!

I screened Star Wars multiple times, and it was never what I would call 'vibrant'.

Eastman stock when new had good colour saturation, it just didn't hold its colour over time.

An interesting 1980 article mentions that when ESB came out, that compared to Star Wars,  The lighting schemes are bolder and the color saturation richer.

This would suggest that the cinematic release of Star Wars had somewhat muted colours, which would be in step with most films of the day.

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/review97/empirestrikesbackarnold.htm

There will be gate weave in all the scenes, it is inherent in the cameras used. The only reason to remove it would be to be able to 'lock down' the shots for recompositing/reconstruction work.

You can save the weave out and replace it again when you are done though.

The images in that other thread have crushed blacks and incorrect gamma curves, so it is hard to compare one to the other.

The sample I posted is straight out of the scanner, I haven't yet gone through and adjusted colours to match the film yet. It is a purposely wide gamut scan to allow colour correction later. So it is not a good colour reference yet either.

A lot of people don't realise that a full scan of a film will look nothing like the original projected image. It will look somewhat washed out and very flat. This is required to ensure you capture *all* of the detail from the print or negative.

Much like the output from a video camera that shoots in raw. You capture the full range then colour correct in post.

If the aim is to make it look like the print, you then use the print on an editor as a reference and take readings directly from the print using a calibrated light source if that is the aim.

Plus, every print will be slightly different.

Unless a colourist has gone back to the original print and done a grading pass to match it, what you get out of any scanner will be rather different.

As for the process for this particular scan (as requested by pittrek), the sensor is a mono sony ICX694ALG, three 16bpp exposures per frame, using a Red, Green and Blue light source spectrally matched to the CCD, to allow full resolution and the full dynamic range to be captured.

Capturing this way is slow and eats up a *lot* of storage, but gives the best quality.