It's hard to think of any action film from the 80s and 90s that hasn't been lambasted by movie critics. Try finding a good review from a critic for an action movie that isn't Die Hard, ALIENS, Terminator, and some of the more high profile action movies. You'd have a better time trying to find bigfoot. Movies like Timecop, Last Action Hero, Cobra, Tango and Cash, etc. were not received well by movie critics. Even today action classics are described as "cheesy" and "dumb" by reviewers and critics. What are your thoughts? Do you think these movies deserve more respect?

Saw this on Facebook:

I'm involved in a run of fully assembled and flashed Domesday86 Duplicator kits: these can be used to directly digitize your LaserDisc media and even VHS tapes! You can find more information about how it works and what it is at https://www.domesday86.com/?page_id=74

We've a large number of slots open, so we're hoping to  be able to meet the demands of the community for not only kits, but also completely assembled, individual parts such as the LD-V4x00 calibration board, and DomesDay86 duplicator board.

Let me note that I'm open to having conversations on a individual basis for larger or special projects if other considerations need to be made: please contact me as opposed to staying silent!

Price List

$400 = 1x Fully assembled and programmed DomesDay86 kit (assembled and  soldered DdD board, FX3, DE0 FPGA, and LD-V4x00 calibration board)
$267 = 1x Fully soldered DomesDay86 duplicator board.
$130 = 1x Calibration board

Please note the following:
- We will ship anywhere locally or internationally (from the Pacific Coast of the US).
- Prices do not include shipping (we'll request a second payment for  shipping and materials once the package is ready to be sent to you).
- While we're trying to take weeks at most, please plan around not receiving a unit for several months.

-- Why such a long lead time?
We're setting expectations to give buffer time to the fine chap soldering and assembling all this so they don't burn out, stress out, or have a passion and hobby meant to help the community, turn into a chore. This is also meant to plan around further stoppages or slow downs in shipping from China due to the Coronavirus.

Please message me if you're Interested!

--Noah

PS This run has the blessing of Simon Inns (though he is not responsible for it nor involved in any way) who is the creator and primary developer of the DomesDay86 project. He also noted that "for a full  stack of boards ready-to-roll; it's a very reasonable price imho" See attached screenshot for further confirmation.

So I've started work on this project. Both of these movies have only been released on VHS and LD, the source for each is the LD with uncompressed audio. A fanres user kindly transferred the first movie from laserdisc, but the disc had some pretty bad laser rot in places. Been playing around with several manual and automatic filters and I'm pretty happy with it now. The picture has been zoomed slightly and re-centered to remove the black bars, cross colour and dot crawl removal, noise filter, dirt and laser rot clean and some sharpening. 

Before:



After:



Before:



After:



Before:



After:



Next stage is to work on Part 2, although that doesn't seem to have any laser rot. 

The plan is to produce a blu ray with both movies on, both with uncompressed English audio and Italian compressed audio, plus English subtitles and a few extra features like trailers.

Hello out there,
I am looking for the extended ABC Television cut of Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979) which has over 20 minutes of footage. If anyone could help me out on getting this cut, that would be much appreciated!
Thanks,
J.C

Looking for a sci-fi series, I stumbled upon "The Orville". I remembered that it was a kind of Star Trek spoof, so I put it apart at the time, but I wanted to give it a chance this time.

And, well, it was great! It has all the good things Star Trek has, plus some comic relief and "normal" things we always asked ourselves (or, at least I did) like "does anyone go to the bathroom?" or "do they have sex usually, apart in very rare episodes?"

The comedy parts were very well dosed, and serious topics were threated in the right manner - a-la Star Trek. Quite some actors from the former show appeared as guest starts, plus famous stars like Charlize Theron, Rob Lowe, Liam Neeson.

SFX were mostly great, apart in very rare cases; acting was very good, music was right, stories mostly original.

A pretty perfect show that every sci-fi lovers must watch!

9/10

Could any of you please help to donate money to this person? He is working on Adywan's "Return of the Jedi: Revisited" fan edit, and he needs the money for a new camera that was stolen from him a few months ago. I would really appreciate it.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-my-camera-was-taken

While I usually prefer 2.35: 1 movies, especially when it's their original aspect ratio, I have a problem with this movie. On the DVD (Dutch edition) I had the 1.85: 1 open matte version, showing more vertically, then I did the blu upgrade, where we have 2.35: 1 and it turns out that framing quite often looks wrong. I have the impression that there is too much free space above, while below it is cut too much, and this can be felt especially in combat scenes in which sometimes kicks are hardly visible ...
This is probably the first film in which framing 2.35: 1 irritates me.

Comparison between 2.35:1 US Blu-ray and 1.78:1 dutch DVD:



The 2.35: 1 frame most of the time shows the top of the 1.78: 1 frame, which is generally pointless. Especially in shots with kicks.
Cropping even gives the impression of being auto-framed with a fixed frame position almost at the top, although sometimes in 2.35: 1 at the top we can see even more ...


Is there a HDTV version in 1.78:1 available? That's something that could be fixed by reframing the movie shot by shot as I did with Avengers, but I am not aware of proper HD source.

Hello,
I was wondering how do get hold of the color regrade of Aliens (1986) Fundamental Collection?
I own the blu ray but prefer spoRv color regrade.

Thank you for your time

I'm considering a project for which I would need someone to record something out onto a VHS tape and then capture it again. Even better, but not obligatory: A second pass with a VHS-to-VHS copy and then capture that, and maybe even a few more times, to get samples for various depths/generations.

I haven't prepared anything for this yet, I would only do that if there's any way to actually do this.

My idea is to train a neural network to upscale VHS content of variable generations (copies of copies) to HD. I have some very high quality Prores material archived, from all kinds of sources, that would be perfect for training this. So basically, I would cut together useful snippets, maybe some 20 minutes of material or so, then send that over for copying to VHS in lossless format (or ProRes), and then it would be captured again (ideally with multiple different generations) losslessly, and I would then apply various typical compressions (MPEG-2, DivX, Xvid) to the lossless capture and would create a dataset with a big variety of source qualities, but always the same reference HD image. I've done a similar thing for just normal XviD/MPEG-2 material; it's not awe-inspiring, but it's pretty neat, and with VHS it would probably give the added advantage of maybe reducing some of the VHS artifacts, as reduction and detection of artifacts seems to be a side-effect of the training.

Of course it wouldn't end up being all too mind-blowing, seeing as VHS is a really limited format, but even if it can get there just a few steps that would be nice, and could allow a bit of a restoration of some old workprints and such. Some of them look really rough, with all kinds of color bleeding, obviously low resolution, low saturation, weird colors etc. Would be nice to at least have some mild improvement. The final output wouldn't have to be HD of course, it could be downsampled to DVD quality, but for the training I think it would be a good idea to use the highest possible destination resolution.

Now, I could of course just try and take a Blu Ray and a VHS of some movie, but the problem is that for this to work, the sources need to be pretty much aligned perfectly and that would be a hell of a lot of work to achieve, if not impossible. So going from a fixed HD source to VHS and back seems like the best option.

If anyone is interested in helping out, let me know and I'll start thinking about assembling the footage.

I've just recently run into an issue I'd never seen before.  I had an old Dolby Digital 5.1 track from a DVD that I wanted to use for a project.  I did some very minor editing in Premiere, and then exported to six mono wav files.  I then encoded the files with DTS Encoder Suite.  The resulting audio seemed to contain some sort of volume limiting when I played it back on my receiver.  Sudden loud noises seemed to get quieter, and then louder again once they stopped - sort of like my receiver's "late night mode" was cranked up to 11 or something. I'm trying to sort out why this may have happened, so here's what I've attempted thus far:

1. DD5.1 > Premiere > six mono wavs > DTS Encoder Suite
BAD FILE

2. DD5.1 > Premiere > 5.1 LPCM (w64)
BAD FILE

3. DD5.1 > six mono wavs (eac3to) > DTS Encoder Suite
GOOD FILE

There seems to me to be two possibilities at this point: either Premiere needs to be removed from the workflow, or eac3to needs to be added to the workflow (seeing as both of my bad results involved Premiere, and my one good result involved eac3to).  DTS Encoder Suite was involved in both good and bad results, so I'm sure that isn't the issue. eac3to IS removing the dialnorm encoded into the original DD5.1 track.  I'm wondering if that might be the culprit.  So for those who understand this, I have a question...if a DD5.1 contains dialnorm, will it be read incorrectly by a receiver if a) dialnorm is not stripped and b) the file is then put in a different codec (LPCM or DTSHD-MA 5.1)?  My theory is that the dialnorm information is not being read/decoded correctly by my receiver, because it's not seeing a DD5.1 file once I throw the audio in a new container.  So I'm thinking that when I strip that out in eac3to, it's allowing me to use those alternate containers without screwing up the decoding at the receiver's end.

Any help on this? My next test will be to run the DD5.1 through eac3to and then import/export via Premiere to see if removing dialnorm is fixing this issue or if Premiere is introducing it.