poita

Mielr said:

Not to be a wet blanket, but according to Robert Harris, Tech prints can't be transferred satisfactorily because of their density & they best serve as color reference, not much else.

There are some dissenting views out there & you can take it up with Mr. Harris over at home theater forum, if you care to. ;-)

I'm not sure what he means by that, The Battle of Britain was transferred from an IB print as the 3 strip masters were in bad shape, and it looks great. Perhaps he was talking about striking a new neg from an IB print, or maybe on flying spot telecine systems.

It is more difficult to scan, and with older scanners you would get noisy shadows, but a current sensor and light source like I am using has no trouble. An automated system might struggle though.

Actually, I have one MUSE disc, 'A League of their own', it was jammed in the player when I bought it. I got the player cheaper because the disc tray was jammed closed.

ilovewaterslides said:

poita said:

I have a Muse player, decoder and hidef capture system. Just don't have any discs. If anyone wants to send me discs, I'll happily capture them.

The hell!? You have the money to buy a Muse player with a decoder and you can't even afford a disc?

I mean, what's the point of buying an expensive outdated and rare Hi-Def system if you do not plan to buy any movie to enjoy it?

Anyway that's good to know, not a bunch of people have this kind of equipement, i'd love to see how Back To The Future looks on a Hi-Vision LD.

Thanks for the offer, if i ever have the chance to get one of these and if i am 100% sure you'll send it back to me... well why not :)

I saved up for two years to get an X9 to transfer the SW movies, the one I bought happened to come with a MUSE decoder.

I have sunk almost every cent I have over the last decade getting setup to preserve Star Wars. I was just offering the gear up if anyone has MUSE discs they want transferred. I can't afford to buy any, all my money has been sunk into the original trilogy, and I don't earn much!

Anyway, anyone that wants MUSE discs transferred, I can do it and am happy to do so. You could probably buy them, get them transferred and then resell them and not lose much if anything in the process. They seem to hold their value well.

The main reason some LDs sound better is that the surround mix was done purely to be a surround mix.

When DVD came along one of the priorities was that if the doofus that bought the DVD only had TV speakers or a mono or stereo setup and chose the surround track to listen to, that the dialogue would still be intelligible and the sound would still be okay. This led to many DVD soundtracks having severely compromised 5.1 mixes compared to the LD mix which was only ever designed to sound great in 5.1

Heat was one of the titles that really suffered in DVD vs LD.

Now BD sound quality craps all over laserdisc from a technical standpoint, but LD can sometimes have a better mix, especially on films that came out before they started doing 7.1 etc.

I think the issue is, are you trying to recreate the viewing experience of Cinerama on a 2D screen , or trying to create a 2D texture map, that would look correct if projected onto an actual Cinerama screen?

Sitting in a good seat at Cinerama, the image doesn't look compressed or much skinnier at the sides, because you turn your head to see it and you are looking at that curved section of the screen 'head on' so to speak.

I see what you are doing mathematically, but it doesn't look right to me. When I went to Cinerama many moons ago, the screen was very much wider than this. The 2001 image looks too tall and not wide enough.

These look closer to the screen dimensions that I remember:

The ones below look too narrow and too tall to me.

 

There, that did it quite well for this rough rendering. And here is how it would look on your widescreen TV:

 

 

 

dlvh said:

I bet that was nearly a thrill of a lifetime, being able to actually thread in the movie Star Wars in 1977. I can only imagine that you were giddy with excitement!

Actually I was just standing on a milk crate and quite blase about it.

On Tuesday nights Dad used to set the first two reels up and then leave me to do the change-overs, keep the carbon-arc rods at the correct distance (our were manual and used to throw a small rainbow pattern on the ceiling that looked a bit like a spaceship from close encounters, you would gradually wind them in as they burned down during the showing, keeping that pattern roughly the same as a guide) and rewind the reels when they were done. He had a 2nd job and used to leave me there while he typeset the local newspaper on Tuesdays. He was usually back in time to thread reel 3, but sometimes he was late and I would do it.

I think I saw nearly every movie released between 76 and 79, and saw Star Wars countless times. Dad had to convince me to come that night, I only saw the name and thought it was going to ba a war movie that would give me nightmares, he assured me I would like it, and promised I could go home if I didn't.

Well, I went along....and two hours later I never wanted to leave the cinema again!

That is correct, the US IB plant had closed down years before. The only IB prints likely to exist are the ones made in the UK.

Yes, the cinema you saw it in, the light source of the projector, size of the screen, film stock, ambient lighting and even your seating position would mean that every one would have a different viewing experience. You would see different colour depending on the lamp colour temperature and film stock, you would see different colour intensity depending on the size of the screen and the number of foot lamberts output.  I was the son of a projectionist and actually got to thread and screen Star Wars as a child, the handling of film is pretty rough, but it is usually lubricated and the threading etc. is just the leader tape which doesn't have any of the movie on it. Film is very hardy, you should see how it is treated by the film editors when cutting a film!

The IB print will be a pretty good indication of how the film was *meant* to look and would have looked at the first screenings in a small cinema with a great screen. It is as close to the original negative as we can get, but it won't necessarily be the way any given person saw it.

That is why I don't get too tied up about reproducing the *exact* experience, there is no such thing. Some cinema screens would have been so dark that the garbage mattes would be invisible, others so bright that they would have been clear and bright. Some projectors would have terrible weave, others pretty stable etc. etc.

However, the overall colour balance and tone would have been much the same, so the IB print allows us to know if the greys were actually a little green, if Uncle Owen's hair was nearly black or more browny-grey, if the monsters in the Cantina were dimly lit with dark shadows etc. etc.

While everyone's experience would be different, we can at last answer a lot of questions about how it looked in '77 if you happened to see it from a great print in a good cinema.

and I'll put money it didn't look much like the bluray release....

I have a Muse player, decoder and hidef capture system. Just don't have any discs. If anyone wants to send me discs, I'll happily capture them.

What about the MUSE version? Anyone have it? I can capture MUSE discs in hidef if someone has the discs.

This is how to find out how tom make your own film platter damaged:

http://youtu.be/rT_aFmimPWU?t=2m43s

go to 2mins 43s if it doesn't start there.

Mielr said:

 

poita said:

That is true that they are not emulsion based and are printed, and will not fade the same way that other film types will, but they still fade. Just the way a print in a magazine can fade over time. Dyes are still chemicals and react to heat and light, both of which are there in extremes in carbon arc and other forms of 35mm projection.

For our purposes the fade will be so small as not to be an issue.

Oh, for sure. If the Book of Kells was displayed in a window for the last 500 years, it would be badly faded, no doubt. The same would happen if IB prints were exposed to sunlight or fluorescent bulbs, but since they're mostly sealed up in dark cans, they're protected from most of the bad stuff.

Of course, the Kodak stock has all those nasty chemicals stuck to it, altering and changing away, as chemicals tend to do.

 

Exactly, as long as the print has been stored well, it should look lovely, and the shots Mike has posted so far look like it has.

Thanks so much for the sunset images, it answers some colour questions for me already.

That is true that they are not emulsion based and are printed, and will not fade the same way that other film types will, but they still fade. Just the way a print in a magazine can fade over time. Dyes are still chemicals and react to heat and light, both of which are there in extremes in carbon arc and other forms of 35mm projection.

For our purposes the fade will be so small as not to be an issue.

Princess Bride?

Do you still need help with this? BD Rebuilder should do what you require pretty much automagically.

http://www.jdobbs.net/Freeware/BD-RBV04409.zip

It is probably Harmy's versions and he is ripping you off. I could be wrong, but be wary of sellers.

Ah, just had a look at the images, definitely CA. How was it transferred?

Is it chromatic abberation or a misregistered print?

The saturation is too high even for a technicolor print, especially in that last image. The original was very intense though.

captainsolo said:

Okay since the DTS track has surfaced here's an idea for a Goldeneye restoration.

Use the 720p UE master HDTV rip as a basis which as-is is immeasurably superior to the BD. It does have the revisionist color timing (not as bad as the UE DVD) and cropping in addition to a redone title sequence. What we could try to do is marry the cropped information from the DNR riddled master and the re-timed HDTV cap. The crop stays petty solid and doesn't move so what it will essentially look like is a projector with the edges of the image running off of the screen and slightly out of focus. But this way we can have an HD image that matches the theatrical, maintains grain and doesn't lose the cropped material. Drop in the original titles sequence and the DTS track and it's set.

Do you mean to add the cropped sections back in, so the HDTV rip in the middle and the Cropped bit from the DNR master composited on?

Get the laserdisc and play the commentary from the DVD at the same time.

I love the shot of Luke, he is so surly :)

I remember matching the typeface way back for the French release, the type family was Helvetica.

I have also seen IB prints where the masking area is darker, especially where a print played at one cinema for a long time, the projected area has lightened compared to the area that stayed behind the gate-mask.

But anyway, most well preserved IB prints look fantastic, if a little contrasty and have great colour.