BrynS
Mr Kat says...
As I mentioned in this thread I was sorting through some old VHS cassettes the other day and noticed that on one of the tapes I had recorded a brief "behind the scenes/making of" feature of the Wing Commander Movie.
IIRC, the segment aired in about June 1999 on M-NET, a then Subscription-based channel in South Africa. The segment was compiled by Pygmalion Productions (a local company I believe), although I would assume that the feature itself was probably initially compiled and syndicated by 20th Century Fox for marketing the movie?
The footage I captured comes in at 2 minutes, 58 seconds (2:58), however I'm pretty sure that I missed the first 10-15 seconds, as I can recall switching various channels and suddenly being aware via a continuity annoucement that a Wing Commander preview was about to be shown. In my haste, I grabbed the nearest tape to hand and put it into the VCR, unfortunately this particular tape was fairly used then and hasn't aged very well. As such, the source is fairly dirty with quite a bit of flicker, noise and colour blurring.
I captured the source (768 x 576i PAL) uncompressed and went on to try a combination of different filters (such as DeFlicker and dynamic noise reduction)and varying strengths of filters in VirtualDub to clean it up a bit, but there's a limit to what can be achieved and in many cases, these filters introduce more artifacts or blur the image too much and lower the overall quality.
I did a number of encodes at the source resolution with different filters, but the end result wasn't great IMHO and at about 45-50MB, it's a really bad encoding. Resizing down to half-D1 or below (320 x 240) doesn't look too bad at the native size, although enlarging to full screen will introduce more pixellation and lower the detail. Saying that though, the fullscreen 320x240 encode is not significantly lower definition than the fullscreen 768x576 encode, but comes in at about 20MB.
The two versions I have uploaded are both 320x240. The first version was encoded with XviD 1.1 Beta1 at 800kbps and has 128kbps 44100Hz CBR LAME MP3 audio -- size is 20.3MB. The second version was encoded with Windows Media Encoder (WM9 Codec) at 448kbps and has 64kbps 44100Hz CBR WMA audio -- size is 12MB.
You can download the latest XviD binary here or use the DivX Codec If the WMV version doesn't play, update your Windows Media Player software at Windows Update.
3-MINUTE PREVIEW LINKS
Right click on the link and select "Save Target As" if using IE6 or "Save Link To Disk" if using Mozilla/FireFox to download.
Behind The Scenes of Wing Commander 800kbps XviD - 20.3MB
Behind The Scenes of Wing Commander 512kbps WM9 - 12.0MB
I'd be interested to know if anyone else has seen this particular preview package before or perhaps a different version entirely?
Cheers,
BrynS
IIRC, the segment aired in about June 1999 on M-NET, a then Subscription-based channel in South Africa. The segment was compiled by Pygmalion Productions (a local company I believe), although I would assume that the feature itself was probably initially compiled and syndicated by 20th Century Fox for marketing the movie?
The footage I captured comes in at 2 minutes, 58 seconds (2:58), however I'm pretty sure that I missed the first 10-15 seconds, as I can recall switching various channels and suddenly being aware via a continuity annoucement that a Wing Commander preview was about to be shown. In my haste, I grabbed the nearest tape to hand and put it into the VCR, unfortunately this particular tape was fairly used then and hasn't aged very well. As such, the source is fairly dirty with quite a bit of flicker, noise and colour blurring.
I captured the source (768 x 576i PAL) uncompressed and went on to try a combination of different filters (such as DeFlicker and dynamic noise reduction)and varying strengths of filters in VirtualDub to clean it up a bit, but there's a limit to what can be achieved and in many cases, these filters introduce more artifacts or blur the image too much and lower the overall quality.
I did a number of encodes at the source resolution with different filters, but the end result wasn't great IMHO and at about 45-50MB, it's a really bad encoding. Resizing down to half-D1 or below (320 x 240) doesn't look too bad at the native size, although enlarging to full screen will introduce more pixellation and lower the detail. Saying that though, the fullscreen 320x240 encode is not significantly lower definition than the fullscreen 768x576 encode, but comes in at about 20MB.
The two versions I have uploaded are both 320x240. The first version was encoded with XviD 1.1 Beta1 at 800kbps and has 128kbps 44100Hz CBR LAME MP3 audio -- size is 20.3MB. The second version was encoded with Windows Media Encoder (WM9 Codec) at 448kbps and has 64kbps 44100Hz CBR WMA audio -- size is 12MB.
You can download the latest XviD binary here or use the DivX Codec If the WMV version doesn't play, update your Windows Media Player software at Windows Update.
3-MINUTE PREVIEW LINKS
Right click on the link and select "Save Target As" if using IE6 or "Save Link To Disk" if using Mozilla/FireFox to download.
Behind The Scenes of Wing Commander 800kbps XviD - 20.3MB
Behind The Scenes of Wing Commander 512kbps WM9 - 12.0MB
I'd be interested to know if anyone else has seen this particular preview package before or perhaps a different version entirely?
Cheers,
BrynS
