Whats the LAST movie you have watched?

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I met Ruby Keeler after "Forty Second Street" had a revival on Broadway. 1972.
That quite a connection - and a famous pair of legs. Puts you a handshake away from a lot of classic Hollywood.
In the mid 70s I worked with a group of Ziegfeld girls. They were in their 60-70s at the time, but still lovely. They had an association and kept in touch. One claimed to have done all the screaming for Fay Wray in King Kong.
 
I watched Blade Runner 2049 for the 2nd time a few days ago. I know it was slammed a few pages back in this thread, but I still think it is the best science fiction movie ever made, except perhaps Alien, which I consider more horror movie than scifi.

The Glass Castle was also quite good.

I thought it (BR 2049) was very well filmed with good musical score and good story.

However, i found the dialogues dull and uninspiring.

Alos, i was somewhat surprised and disappointed how cold the main character was.
 
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Joined 2017
ota tv recording from 1992 on VHS of Off Limits (1952) Mickey Rooney, Bob Hope.


Using a Panasonic NV-FJ620 6 head VCR that has such a good picture quality in dynamic picture setting mode that I'm having to capture in MPEG-2 at 7500kbps bitrate just to get all of the detail and film grain from the original broadcast, original broadcast is also in VHF which makes it even better. Not doing too bad for a 26 year old video tape.


Spent about 4 hours calibrating brightness/contrast/saturation (aka color for us old timers, colour for aussie old timers) and sharpness to get the best possible picture quality, I adjusted the sharpness first then brightness second until a pure white image was not bleeding then adjusted brightness until everything was bright but not eye-strain bright and then adjusted color third to make it pop but not overly saturated then contrast fourth until I could still just see film grain and video grain and then went back and made comparisons with previous captures until I was happy with what I've got. I had to remember that VHS was a much brighter video source than DVD and my capture card (Avermedia A188, also SAA7134) was dimming things down by quite a lot.


I settled also on using my Avermedia A188 capture card over the SAA7134 mainly because of software issues, the bundled software had problems with detecting the soundcard, I suspect because it is obsolete and won't work properly with Windows 10. Anyway, because of the bundle software issues I had to use the Avermedia A188 card to get real-time encoding without any dropped frames into MPEG-2. When I was using the SAA7134 card I was using the FOSS Virtual VCR software and MagicYUV codec which produced 30GB files for just an hour of video, not ideal, and a lot of disk activity which didn't improve things. I don't like the idea of having to re-encode VHS footage, I'm already spending 3+ hours watching and recording the video while doing nothing else, I don't need to waste my time re-encoding the video into MPEG-2 or H.264 yet again. Even if it is with Handbrake and GPU acceleration. I really doubt I would've gotten better results anyway than my current setup which is using the Avermedia A188 card and encoding directly into MPEG-2.



I then settled on using MPEG-2 at 7500kbps full D1 or 720x576 with 44100khz at 192kbps over H.264 because I felt that even with H.264 I was getting an image that was far less detailed than MPEG-2 was, it was just removing all of the film grain and detail in the VHS tape, probably because it might have a noise reduction algorithm in it. Adding noise reduction to an analog source isn't really preserving the original format now is it, so H.264 lost the battle for me.


Granted MPEG-2 will produce a 10GB file for 3 hours of footage but I never really noticed much of a benefit of using H.264 over MPEG-2 when dealing with recording analog sources such as VHS. There certainly wasn't any size difference between the two codecs, not enough to warrant throwing away a hell of a lot of detail by going with H.264. I still had to use 7500kbps with H.264 and even then it still threw away the fine detail in favor of a more digital and noise reduction processed looking picture.
 
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Bizarrely these results were found when using H.264 Part 10 (Which Aver MediaCentre encodes into automatically when you select H.264) which supposedly lends itself to high bitrate situations such as archival purposes like I'm using it for, yet I still lost the fine grain information.


You might find it odd that I'm beating on such a gloriously well praised codec such as H.264, well I would have thought that we have come further in the field of video encoding technology in the last 18 years than something such as antiquated as MPEG-2, I wasn't expecting the loss of fine film grain and VHS video noise. But I'm betting that H.264 is a codec that is really tuned for digital camera and digitally transferred film sources and not something as noisy as an analog film source over VHF airwave broadcast taped onto VHS...


Two different era's in technology, two different results.
 
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