I would like to capture PCM audio from a Laserdisc Player (PAL), I had thought about this card, does anyone know it?, do you know if it's bit-perfect?:
These are just some movies I know were shot Super35 or at least not anamorphic if they are digital, but I have never seen them available in Open Matte. These are some of my favorite movies, as well.
Session 9 - I have seen this open matte/cropped on Cinemax in HD. It is also one of the first movies to be shot digitally, which is interesting. I am not sure if it was open matte or cropped, but it was filmed 2.39:1.
The Descent - I have never seen this open matte, but I know it is not anamorphic, since the lens flares are spherical.
Doomsday - another Neil Marshall classic, also have never seen this in anything but widescreen but I know it wasn't shot anamorphic.
Sinister - I have this seen on Showtime in HD, but they only play movies in OAR. Pretty sure this was shot digitally like most movies these days, but it doesn't look anamorphic. How cool would it be to see the 8mm movies in open matte.
Go - a Pulp Fiction-like plot, but it has a style of it's own. I have seen this in Open Matte on Starz in HD, I think it was. It was shot Super35.
Kalifornia - I have seen this on Starz in HD in Open Matte. Filmed in Super35.
There are so many more that I haven't thought of. Most of these do look or would look so much better in Open Matte.
This site is awesome, and it is cool to see other movie nerds like myself. Am I the only one who prefers Open Matte versions of movies to the widescreen ones? I hope not.
My open matte collection currently includes 8mm, 300, Gladiator, Minority Report, Oblivion, Pandorum, Reservoir Dogs, Silent Hill, Terminator 2, The Fifth Element, and Watchmen, among others.
I also enjoy alternate versions of movies, or original versions of them. Like the Star Wars Original Unaltered Trilogy, for example.
I hope to meet other like-minded movie nerds like myself. 8)
Since the saturation is so low in the original, there's lots of obvious chroma blocking when raising the saturation, which is why I applied a grainplate for each RGB channel separately. This results in some extreme grain/noise in some areas where there is strong chroma contrast, which I kinda like. Looks better than the blocking, anyway.
Audio is the lossless 5.1 DTS-HD MA audio from the Blu Ray transcoded to FLAC 5.1. On top, you get a FLAC 2.0 Dolby Headphone track rendered from the lossless 5.1 soundtrack, with amplification set so that there is no clipping. This track basically simulates a 5.1 surround setup on your headphones.
Encoding & Files for your own re-encode
Final encode is done by applying the 3D LUT through ffmpeg in 16-bit, then piping into and encoding with 10-bit x264. If someone wants a blu-ray compatible encode, I have included the .avs-file, grainplate, 3D LUT and a .bat script using ffmpeg for the LUT application and piping into x264 (that took some tinkering to get it to work), so you can just make your own version with your own encoding settings. I personally don't have a Blu Ray player, so I don't care about compatibility much.
I know that not all the choices I made with the 3D LUT may be to the liking of everybody, so feel free to adjust the 3D LUT any way you like for your own encode to make it more to your liking. An example of this may be the intense red tones, which I chose because I liked the look and also because there are some red elements in less saturated scenes which otherwise don't pop nicely. Another may be the dark yellow patches on the skies, which were originally green and brighter. I like it this way, but maybe you don't. Partly the choices were also dictated by scenes that would have looked bad if I had done it differently, but you can figure that out for yourself.
Trailer
Also included is a trailer which I created to give a sneak peak at the colors and picture quality. For this I recreated one of the movie's trailers (I think it's called Trailer #2) with scenes from the Blu Ray, then applied the same processing and LUT as for the movie. Shots that were trailer-exclusive were first regraded to match the Blu Ray as best as possible, for example by creating a conversion LUT for other shots of the same scene that do exist on the Blu Ray, using DrDre's ColorMatch software, then also had the same final LUT applied.
Since the best quality trailer source I could find had an Apple logo, that one was patched out with a Youtube trailer. That one had slightly different color, but I was able to fix that with two passes of the ColourLike plugin (Planar & RGB).
The best audio I could find was a 318kbps 2.0 English DTS track from the German Blu Ray (despite the video only being in letterboxed SD there). I retimed it from 25 fps to 23.976 fps by interpreting sample rate as 48000*23.976/25, then resampling the result to 48000 with a good SRC. Normalizing was applied before resampling. Result was saved as 24-bit 2-channel FLAC. That one I ran through the Dolby SDU4 Hardware decoder using a good audio interface, from which I created a 5.1 FLAC track (BC minus 3dB, split to SL and SR, LFE created from low frequencies of all resulting channels, without removing them from those). From that 5.1 I also created a Dolby Headphone track, which is a FLAC stereo.
So the trailer comes with 3 audio tracks:
- Original DTS 2.0 retimed and resampled and saved as FLAC
- SDU4-decoded 5.1 FLAC
- Dolby Headphone 2.0 FLAC
Video encoding process is the same as for the main video.
This was a funny undertaking in general. Many of the scenes in the trailer were unfinished, missing matte paintings and VFX. For example the original trailer was missing an error arrow piercing someone's throat and a head being chopped off. The remade one has all these ... beautiful things.
I did not recreate the title cards (is that what they're called?), so their quality is as good as the original trailer allows.
Release
Project has been released on Blutopia. Feel free to share anywhere, as far as I am concerned.
This could be an extremely tough project. What we need to do in order to realize it is to capture every single 16:9 (as in, filling the whole screen) broadcast of SW:TFA from here on out, look at the "Escape from Jakku" sequence to see if it's open matte, and check it with the 3D print already circulating since just over a year ago.
OK, this movie is into my HDD since many years... I thought to start a project about it several times, but any time there was the announcement "Blu-ray will be released..." and I left it behind, and regularly the BD never appeared, so... maybe it's time to do it!
This will use the WEBdl as main source; the logo is deleted using HDTV; film scan is used as color reference and, despite the fact it's letterbox, color regrade *seems* quite good - should check the whole film when it will be ready - quite close to film; this is also one of the rare full open matte versions - where the whole letterbox image is included, so there are no cropped parts, apart very few shots (I spotted only the Harrier take off, so far).
Regraded version is also often very close to trailer (even if all we know trailers can't be taken as absolute reference, color wise, they could be taken in account somehow): https://diff.pics/2_OMj9L-18bx/1 - would be great to find out the full screen DVD, maybe for an AAP-AR version
I have the Italian AC-3 track, along with the English and Russian ones. I'd like to add the Cinema DTS track, plus English DTS-ES 6.1 from DVD, and the usual other languages (Spanish, French, German) audio and sub tracks; if anybody would/could help, please chime in!
I have grasped by now that some movies are filmed anamorphically, so they will never have an Open Matte.
While I understand the concept of anamorphic filming theoretically, I am not very familiar with all the established technologies and terms used for this in the film industry, specifically 35mm-related (I do understand the somewhat separate topic of anamorphic video encoding, so no need to delve into that).
It follows I have neither yet grasped how to derive this information from imdb's Technical Specs. Can anyone perhaps give me a quick rundown over the most basic terms and anything that might be necessary to grasp this subject in its entirety? I'd like to know enough about the process to look at imdb's Spec page and quickly find an answer to whether that movie was filmed with any option to later Open Matte or not.
Currently I end up giving up googling all the various listed film stocks and listed lenses and whatnot, as I kinda lack the basics.
I originally joined here with the intent to provide useful information and get help to finish some projects I've been working on and off for a while. However, severe personal issues just came up which means I won't have time to finish anything nor be on Fanres much, and I don't want to cause problems and come across as a leach to some people who helped me if I can't contribute anything on my end due to time constraints. I was going to have an admin ban my account, but he was against the idea and told me to write this post and just not log in, but the thing is I probably won't be coming back at all from this point on and I don't people hanging or wondering what happened to me. I'm not sure if anyone is with me on this.
It was nice being with you all but life is life and don't want to cause any problems if I cannot provide in return.
The Matrix - AXIS-ALIGNED POLYGON ASPECT RATIO™ - EXPERIMENTAL VERSION
Are you curious to watch an entire movie with more image than both the letterbox and open matte versions?
Are you ready to watch it with a "strange" aspect ratio?
This version is AFAIK the first full lenght movie release with an AAP-AR; thanks to random.next and his plugin, the alignment is perfect in almost all shots (I'd say 99.9%); it used HDTV and DVD as they have very similar (but not identical) color grading.
Problems:
sometime the alignment is completely wrong (first 52 frames are my fault) for a whole shot, or just for a frame or two at the beginning of a shot
colors in the "slices" are different sometimes, due to not identical color grading of the sources
there is at least a glitch which was present in the HDTV source
no end credits
All in all, a nice presentation; after few minutes, the empty angles would be barely noticed - until you'll notice a problem, at least!
The video file has not audio, but it's in sync with the BD (until the beginning of the end credits), so you can mux a track from BD in any language; I've added the workprint track (fixed by jerryshadoe) so you can experience an even more strange version.
Have fun, and do not forget to leave some feedbacks!!!
Video (no audio included) - Audio (from workprint)
