"Club Penton" - Ask questions to Hollywood insider "Penton-Man"

[Sith]

Originally Posted by merrick97

Im curious if you had the guts to ask him if he was ever going to release the original trilogy on bluray (or HD-DVD given the timeframe you mentioned).

I'm sure he was just pleased to meet him. I would just say Thank You if I ever
had the pleasure of meeting him.

[Doctorossi]

Originally Posted by SquidPuppet

And your thoughts on Le Mans?

... are underdeveloped, as I haven't had a chance to actually watch it yet.

[SquidPuppet]

Originally Posted by Doctorossi

... are underdeveloped, as I haven't had a chance to actually watch it yet.

It's freakin' Tuesday man.

[DenonCI]

Originally Posted by merrick97

Im curious if you had the guts to ask him if he was ever going to release the original trilogy on bluray (or HD-DVD given the timeframe you mentioned).

Actually, I thanked him for making "Star Wars," my favorite film as a youth and for the great childhood memories attributed to his film. Then I told him to "enjoy your lunch."

[DenonCI]

Originally Posted by Sith

I'm sure he was just pleased to meet him. I would just say Thank You if I ever
had the pleasure of meeting him.

We think alike.

[Doctorossi]

Originally Posted by SquidPuppet

It's freakin' Tuesday man.

[Jeff Kleist]

Just watch the last 10 seconds. Here's a preview of the othe 24 hours- they go around in a circle

[SquidPuppet]

Originally Posted by Jeff Kleist

Just watch the last 10 seconds. Here's a preview of the othe 24 hours- they go around in a circle

LOL. We are talking about a 45 minute motorcycle race. And it aint a circle.

[MerrickG]

Originally Posted by DenonCI

Actually, I thanked him for making "Star Wars," my favorite film as a youth and for the great childhood memories attributed to his film. Then I told him to "enjoy your lunch."

Thats what you should have done. Thats why I was curious if you did otherwise.

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by sharkshark

well, I finally got through that WW II in HD doc I was talking about forever ago (ended up being a pretty good accompaniment to Pacific, review here: https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/WWII-in-HD-Blu-ray/7595/), and there's a small little extra called "preserving the footage"

They show the filmmakers projecting this 8 and 16mm footage on a screen, and shooting the projected image with a RED at 4K straight to disc.

I guess that's one way of getting around using a dedicated 4K Telecine rig.

That caused quite the ruckus in the telecine operator’s community, which I would prefer not to get into.

[cjamescook]

Originally Posted by sharkshark

My friend, I always knew you had good taste... I used to actually teach CorelDraw, shockingly. It's still my go-to vector app of choice (yeah, I've got AI, but there's a very few times I bother with it)...

What? No Canvas 3.5?

(Talk about dating yourself... )

[cjamescook]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

That caused quite the ruckus in the telecine operator’s community, which I would prefer not to get into.

[sharkshark]

Originally Posted by Robert Harris

No reason to use 4k at all for that purpose. It adds nothing to the equation.

...It does when they call the show "WWII in HD".

Again, very little is gained by this show being in HD in the first place, it's a gimicky element of an otherwise quite decent program. Save for the interstitial contemporary interviews, most of the footage looks a bit of a mess.

One thing that it enabled them to do, according to that extra, is to "create a 16:9 1080p image without significant reduction in resolution"

Again, while it looks great, I'm not one who minds switching of aspect ratios - they did a fairly decent job of hiding any obvious panning and scanning, but given that this is a show for History Channel HD, a flagship demonstration of their fancy new channel, they weren't going to use 4:3 so that people would then complain about those pesky black bars.

Sad, foolish, but understandable.

So, yeah, when looking at the projection rig, I'm trying to parse exactly what's going on as they thread through what looks like some bell & howell projector some old film and aim a camera at it, thinking "is that a RED?".

wacky.

[sharkshark]

Originally Posted by DenonCI

I met Lucas a few years ago in a Subway sandwich shop in San Rafael, CA. He's much shorter than I imagined and also much thinner. He's overweight for sure, but doesn't look like Jabba the Hutt like he does in interviews.

Shall I admit publicly that I was at Celebration III and stood in line overnight to hear him speak in front of a throng of thousands, only to have that lovely awkward moment when he confused one Maori actor with another?

priceless...

[sharkshark]

Originally Posted by DenonCI

Actually, I thanked him for making "Star Wars," my favorite film as a youth and for the great childhood memories attributed to his film. Then I told him to "enjoy your lunch."

Awesome. The cap of that Crash-at-Cannes story was that Francis Coppola was the head of the Jury that year, and as I came down the stairs he was just standing there, kinda hanging around. I went up to him and basically said pretty much the same thing. I actually saw him again several years later (he did a Q&A for at One From the Heart screening), and had a nice chat with him then. The next day at the Uptown he was there with Eleanor, and I congratulated both of them on the sucess of their children's films (Lost in Translation had just come out, and Roman had done CQ). I politely bugged her to get Hearts of Darkness out on DVD, and then let them go enjoy their show.

Probably slightly annoying to them, but much better than "uh.... can I have your autograph?"

[sharkshark]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

That caused quite the ruckus in the telecine operator’s community, which I would prefer not to get into.

OK, my curiosity is totally piqued now, if only cuz this little quirk that I spotted caused a ruckuss for people that actually care/know what they're talking about.

Me feel proud now.

[sharkshark]

Originally Posted by SquidPuppet

See? Damn two wheelers. Doesn't he know that he's doing that wrongly?

[sharkshark]

Originally Posted by cjamescook

What? No Canvas 3.5?

(Talk about dating yourself... )

No, I gave that up when I switched from Gem to Windows 3.0.

Is it sad that one of my first home PCs was a Commodore PET?

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by cjamescook

For those who don’t understand why James is rolling on the floor and laughing, the reason is that ‘the transfer *chain*’ consisted of an RCA TP-66 projector, a multi-plexer and a RED camera, and at the time, the project was publicized as “film preservation”.

The fact of the matter is that any projector based system runs the film through a very archaic beam splitter which significantly degrades the image quality, no matter how modern the capture device(a RedOne in this case) is.

On the contrary, RAH is probably crying rather than laughing, since I doubt he would recommend passing archival material through a projector-based system because it is just too harsh on such delicate material.

Luckily, apparently not all of the film received this type of handling...just the 8mm stuff. The 16mm film went through a traditional telecine system.

One thing that people may want to consider is that everyone has to work within a budget and in this case, the filmmakers had to transfer and have color corrected 3,000 hours of footage. Combine that with the real-world fact that there is a lot of ‘archival’ or ‘rare’ footage out there which is absolutely irreplaceable and people think that just because somebody finds it, the stuff automatically gets “preserved”. Well, it don’t work out that way. Most of the stuff gets thrown in the garbage because of the cost involved in properly preserving it in the first place.

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by sharkshark

OK, my curiosity is totally piqued now, if only cuz this little quirk that I spotted caused a ruckuss for people that actually care/know what they're talking about.

Me feel proud now.

See above. Good catch.