davidferguson

8 ms·

1.
by davidferguson 2mo ago
If you want a very in depth technical look at the differences between IMAX 70mm, 70mm and 35mm for _The Odyssey_, I wrote an article about this last month. https://www.theppt.org/rewind/articles/where-can-you-watch
2.
by davidferguson 3mo ago
Online stream for those without a LW AM receiver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ugd8G5w-Sfo
3.
by davidferguson 10mo ago
See my top level comment for more info on this, but the Aladdin scan used in the article was from a 35mm trailer that's been scanned on an unknown scanner, and had unknown processing applied to it. It's not really possible to comp
4.
by davidferguson 10mo ago
And it was made by a lab that made choices on processing and developing times, that can quite easily affect the resulting image. You hope that labs are reasonably standard across the board and calibrate frequently, but even processing two c
5.
by davidferguson 10mo ago
TL;DR: Linking to YouTube trailer scans as comparisons for colour is misleading and not accurate. --- > see the 35 mm trailer for reference The article makes heavy use of referring to scans of trailers to show what colours, grain, sharpn
6.
by davidferguson 1y ago
I stumbled across the article about the ThunderScan in about 2012 when looking for info about ImageWriter II upgrades, and have been slightly obsessed ever since. It's such a brilliant idea - a higher resolution scanner, that was far l
7.
by davidferguson 2y ago
It's fantastic work you've done. As someone who works at a older software company (founded early 80s), I'm sad that there isn't a push internally for us to make our old software source available, or even just the binarie
8.
by davidferguson 3y ago
Sometimes it's forced upon cinema owners. There's only one company making non-laser cinema projectors these days, and so laser is really the only tech in town when it comes to replacing an ageing or broken projector.
9.
by davidferguson 4y ago
Thanks for the advice, it's appreciated! Any ideas how to get in touch? If not I'll try my luck at public twitter (which has had a 50/50 success rate for me in the past...)
10.
by davidferguson 4y ago
Oh you worked on How to Train Your Dragon ? That's my favourite movie in the world! Really random follow up question - there's a How to Train Your Dragon advert that I assume played before the first film in cinemas, advertising t
11.
by davidferguson 4y ago
I have a Newton MessagePad 110, got it off eBay some years ago for a cheap price. It still works, and I’m going to take it to EMF Camp this weekend and send a fax using it!
12.
by davidferguson 4y ago
If you try hard enough you can fit more! I've seen a projector with all of 35mm optical, 35mm mag, DTS, Dolby Digital and SDDS. Was a sight to behold!
13.
by davidferguson 4y ago
There was no demand, because you can't buy 35mm prints, unlike 16mm and 8mm. And additionally, in order to finance the purchase of digital projectors, many cinema owners went with something called "Virtual Print Fees" (VPFs),
14.
by davidferguson 4y ago
Is that a Bang & Olufsen? They commonly had a similar system of main and "extra" speakers.
15.
by davidferguson 4y ago
Indeed it is! Films come on 20 minute reels, and from the late 80s onwards were spliced together onto one big reel (or platter) for playback. However the splice often wasn't perfect, and the reel ends are most likely to contain dust&#x
16.
by davidferguson 4y ago
There is actually a reason to do this - and people do. For long term archival film is king - it's store and forget, unlike hard drives that require migration every few years. So people write digital data to film, either in the form of
17.
by davidferguson 4y ago
Absolutely true and I agree with you. Something else to back up that it's not quite AC3 is that I've captured the raw signal that goes into the decoder box's "AC3-decoding card", and it's not quite what I'
18.
by davidferguson 4y ago
I've captured Dolby Digital data to rip the audio from the film before. I don't (yet) have a SDDS reader, but when I get one it's something I want to try.
19.
by davidferguson 4y ago
My knowledge comes from someone who helped develop Dolby Digital on film so I'm pretty sure it's correct.
20.
by davidferguson 4y ago
All correct (as far as I'm aware), except for the unfortunately common inaccuracy that Dolby Digital on film is AC3. Sadly it's not - it's an earlier iteration of that technology that's incompatible. It must be pretty si
21.
by davidferguson 4y ago
Yes, a few 35mm films had 4 track mag audio. The only one I can think of off the top of my head was Fantasia.
22.
by davidferguson 4y ago
Although interestingly, Dolby Digital on film isn't exactly AC3 - it's an earlier version that's incompatible.
23.
by davidferguson 4y ago
Dynamic loading was indeed a software update of the processor using the data carried on film. If a film contained an update, it would be contained at the start of a film. The processor would detect this, read the software update, reboot (an
24.
by davidferguson 4y ago
TLDR: If you know about audio encoding and/or want to help reverse engineer this format, I'd be very interested in hearing from you! ---- Oh, a topic I know a bit about! To add a few things onto the stuff mentioned in the article:
25.
by davidferguson 7y ago
And actually, spam is quite interesting to some people. It certainly gives a flavour of what early-2000s internet was like, and what happens when spam filters aren't good.
26.
by davidferguson 7y ago
That's nice, but it doesn't scale. Google only let you solve a few (5 or so) audio captchas in quick succession before you're banned for a while, so it's no good for us.
27.
by davidferguson 7y ago
It's going alphabetically through the group's people have nominated, and once that's done, it'll go by group member count.
28.
by davidferguson 7y ago
You can only join a very small number of groups this way before it just stops working - we did try this out early in the archive process
29.
by davidferguson 7y ago
Don't suppose you can find a way to unban our accounts...? ;)