poita

We are lucky to have found an IB print at all, I'm keen to see the finished product.

CA is common on the Shadow unit, misregistered printing as part of the technicolor process usually presents quite differently, and the one-light transfer is responsible for the crush.

Do you still have the print BTW? i.e. could it be scanned again?

Ahhh Miss Hayworth....

Oh no, I literally deleted a widescreen HD transmission of Drop Dead Fred just last night to make room. Had no idea there was no widescreen version released.

This bloke apparently has most titles:

http://home.q03.itscom.net/nsa/muse.htm

Sorry if I came across as mean myself, no intention there at all. Just throwing out ways it might work. My 3 month old is waking every 45 minutes this week :O so my writing style may be a bit more direct than usual :)

I was just trying to point out that if enough people are interested, they could buy a disc pretty cheaply if they all got together. Drink water instead of one's beverage of choice for a week or two and it would probably cover it, and have healthier kidneys to boot!

The key is, are there plenty of people interested? If so it works out cheap.

If enough people were genuinely interested I would be willing to buy a MUSE title or two and resell it again when done if people were willing to commit to cover the difference if any.

Maybe someone should start a thread to see if one title is of more interest than another?

Anyway, sorry if I came across as a bit short, I am stupidly tired...

Ah, if it was done on a shadow then that explains some of the issues I am seeing.

CA stands for Chromatic Abberation (if my spelling is off, forgive me, I have a newborn that wakes every 45mins this week and my brain is custard).

The dynamic range would be crushed somewhat on a Shadow with an IB print, which is what I am seeing here. It is lovely to know that a good IB print still exists, I wish I could get my hands on it to scan it!

As for recovering the 16mm print I am scanning now, Reel 1 is pretty much a lost cause as far as recovering colour goes, the Cyan and Yellow have faded too far, but there is a lot of detail left in the magenta. It is possible to take another source, say the VHS tape, and align the capture perfectly with it, using something like Elastix. You can then use the colour information from that other source to help restore the film with pretty good results.

Reel 2 and 3 hold a lot of promise for being able to recover the colour that still exists in the print. BTW Zip Doodah, I sent you a PM :) and thanks so much for letting us know an IB print was scanned, that is the best news I'd heard in ages.

Cheers

-Pete

When is/was the 30th Anniversary BTW?

SilverWook said:

poita said:

Just BTW, the only MUSE disc I have was the one that was jammed in my player when I bought it. :D

Yikes! How did you get it out? I had to send one of my players in for repairs a couple years back when some sensor mechanism failed, stalling the stop/eject cycle, leaving a disc stuck inside. Lucky for me there is still a dedicated reputable LD repair business left in the states.

Had to pull the X9 completely apart. The only way I could afford one was to buy a broken one and repair it. I had no idea it had a disc in it until I got it apart. Didn't realise it was a MUSE disc until a few days back!

Well, 5c now, we did away with 1 and 2c pieces quite a few years ago in Oz..

Jetrell Fo said:

poita said:

That would be cool if a lot of people are after BTTF, then perhaps they could group together and purchase a set to offset the cost? I don't know how much it is, but for example $200 divided by 20 people is only a tenner each. It might be the best way to get discs of interest unless you can find a collector out there who is interested in transferring their library.

The only problem here is who retains the physical source once the transfer is complete and who covers the cost of the media for those 20 people? 

Jeez, I would imagine the 20 people could each pony up the $1 cost of a BD25 blank each.

As for the ctual laserdiscs themselves, that would be up to the group to decide up front. You could stick them straight back on ebay with a buy it now until they were sold, or donate them to the guy doing the transfer (LOL) or hang them on a Christmas tree or offer them to the highest bidder that wants to buy them within the group. I don't know really, just throwing it out there, there is nothing in it for me except unpaid work anyway :P so it was just a suggestion as to one way to make it doable if it is something people want to do.

To me, it doesn't really matter, if I was only paying 5 or 10 dollars, and getting a nearly impossible to find transfer, and not having to do any of the work, I would personally consider that pretty good value and wouldn't care much who ended up with the original discs.

e.g. If I could give someone $100 today as part of a group to get an IB print of ANH, have someone scan it and return me a copy of the scan, I wouldn't hesitate. Wouldn't bother me in the slightest who ended up with the physical goods at the end of the day.

Just my 2c.

Just BTW, the only MUSE disc I have was the one that was jammed in my player when I bought it. :D

That would be cool if a lot of people are after BTTF, then perhaps they could group together and purchase a set to offset the cost? I don't know how much it is, but for example $200 divided by 20 people is only a tenner each. It might be the best way to get discs of interest unless you can find a collector out there who is interested in transferring their library.

DragoonClawNZ said:

The footage came from the Silver Screen Experience trailer negative1 released last year.

Is that still available somewhere?

I'm not sure A League of their own is a particularly good quality disc. But I will cap it once I am done with the film stuff.

It was great to watch. BTW where did the footage of the home made scanner come from?

I'm yet to find a 3D comb filter that doesn't do that unfortunately to varying degrees.

I don't own any, just offering a service up to anyone that might have them.

They hold their value really well, so I guess people could buy them and resell them again when finished and end up not losing much or even making money if they were lucky.

In simple terms the sensor is triggered via a laser that counts sprockets and the light source flashes in synch with the sensor basically. The length of the flash is adjustable, as is the LUT used depending on the density of the film.

The film transport is sprocketless and the film tension is adjustable in real time via software. Anyway, I don't want to derail the thread further, but that it the overview of how it works.

As the links from Mike show, IB prints can transfer beautifully as long as you know what you are doing.

Check out the Battle of Britain DVD if you want to see how an IB transfer looks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ-2X609LRE

As a result of discussions in other threads, i thought it would throw this out there.

There are a lot of movies that were released in Hi Definition on laserdisc. I have a laserdisc player, muse decoder and lossless hidef capture gear that can transfer MUSE discs if anyone wants it done.

The list of MUSE discs is here:

http://www.lddb.com/list.php?format=laserdisc&list=muse&max=117

table { }.font0 { color: black; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; font-family: Calibri,sans-serif; }td { padding: 0px; color: black; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; font-family: Calibri,sans-serif; vertical-align: bottom; border: medium none; white-space: nowrap; }.xl64 { font-weight: 700; vertical-align: middle; white-space: normal; }.xl65 { color: blue; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: middle; white-space: normal; }

Do you have the Video Essentials on laserdisc as well?

frank678 said:

Re: the flatness of faces, i wonder if in part this has to do with the fact that they used gauze in front of the lens (which i read about in the making of star wars book) to give the film a soft retro look.

No, it is from botching the scanning and subsequent grading. Film has so much latitude for peak whites to be 'whiter than white', such as the specular highlights on a chrome bumper, the little highlights in people's eyes etc. are what make film seem alive.

When you scan it, if you don't take into account the toe and shoulder of the film, you end up setting your white point at for example at 255/255/255 (in 8bit) and have nowhere to go for the bits of the film that are whiter than that. This leaves you with flat, leathery looking faces and no life in the eyes and a matte feel to everything in the film, and crushed blacks.

When we used to do conversions, black was set at 95 and white was set at 685 (the scale was from 0-1023) that left lots of headroom for lovely shadow detail and lively highlights off the skin, eyes, metallic surfaces etc.

Just copy it and do a search

The light source is a pulsed array of Red Green and Blue LEDs, it can pulse incredibly quickly so acts like a 'flash' or strobe and will freeze any film movement. This allows for a continuous speed scan, but the rig also has the ability to stop the frame in place, pulse each LED array in turn to a 2K mono sensor. This gives you 3 images, one red, one blue, one green.

If you use a colour sensor, your colour resolution is reduced by the bayer mask, and you get 50% of the resolution in the green channel and only 25% each for Blue and Green. Some of this is recovered via clever algorithms, but you never get the full resolution that you can with using a mono sensor. Each channel is captured in either 12bit or 16bit per pixel, and a LUT is applied to ensure the full dynamic range of the film is captured, as the toe and shoulder of the film needs more 'steps' to be captured fully.

The 3 mono images are then combined into a single colour image.

For important scans each channel is captured 3 times and averaged to remove sensor noise, so there are actually 9 images per captured frame.

If speed is of the essence, then a 2K colour sensor is used and the film is run at 24fps and captured in real time at 48bit colour. This still gives an astoundingly good result, and is a good choice if the film is already graded and you just want an accurate transfer. The mono setup is really for when you want the headroom to do corrections in post.

Awesomesauce! I'm downloading it now.