Hi all,

Any classic movie lovers out there who may have any sceenshots of B & W sources? I'm curious what these projectors and HTPC's can do with something as sensitive as neutral greys.

Citizen Kane - Psycho - Rattle and Hum - ... I'll take anything!

GENE

I've got a B&W versions of "It's a Wonderful Life" on DVD .... interested in that ??

gs

Im doing a project on Bernard Hermans music score from Psycho

No Htpc here exactly...
But I am curious about this too.

I will post some shots in here.




"It's more than a hobby....
A hobby is supposed to pass the time, not fill it"
~Norman Bates

For the longest time I could not remember where that quote came from, because it reminds me of PJ building.

Hey,

Sure, I'll take any B & W flick...I'm curious how a PJ like these handles the midtones...

I haven't built one yet, but I'm wondering if I would need to set the PJ contrast and brightness differently on a B & W film than I would on a Pixar digital romp.

I wonder if by studying the B & W results it might help with the color settings??

yoshuaspawn: My dad is a big movie music buff, so I grew up listening to all his Bernard Herrman vinyl (along with Ron Goodwin, Elmer Bernstein, Eric Korngold, John Williams...)

I seem to remember reading somewhere that Herrman had written an honest-to-goodness symphony at some point that was not movie music. I've never heard it, I 'd like to find it at some point. I like Debussy and Ravel, and I hear alot of Ravel in Herrman's music (to my ear Daphne and Chloe hints alot to "the Ghost & Mrs. Muir", and some of the passages are very Hitchcock-esque). Doubtless Herrman studied Ravel, everyone does, the guy was brilliant.

Herrman was great - even people who don't know movies that well know what the stabbing violins are from!

GENE

here ya go.. scene from sin city

Wow, that looks really good - alot of dark areas in the scene, but then my co-worker said it's a pretty dark movie (I haven't seen the movie yet). No noticeable heavy color shifting, and the fleshtones in the victim's face are balanced.

Did you tweak anything or is it shot with the same settings as for the rest of your color movies?

GENE

i did not tweak any contrast / color settings for this movie vs. any other color movie.. just popped it in my laptop and let fly

well...for comparison I can show you the hd frame of that scene...Just so you can see how well his image captures the scene...

Click to view attachment
Remember...not from a projector...
arg...had to downsize my 1080 to 720 for it to fit....I thought bc upped the max attachment to 200k?

wow.. now i feel like i'm losing a lot of the detail in the shadows

Excellent comparison - very useful.

That B & W shot looks way better than I was expecting from a home PJ, to be honest.

The HD frame capture shows the detail in the dark mids, ie. the aggressor's face and the victim's neck, as well as the pure darks (hair and leather jackets).

But without tweaking, I'd say this is an excellent projection when you figure that the camera is adding a level of contrast to the image it is capturing.

I wonder, if you were to fine-tune contrast/brightness by using screen comparison and HD capture in a frame such as this, if color movies wouldn't start to look flat and drab... anyone tried this?

Color adjustment is such a can of worms anyways - what looks good to you might look terrible to someone else.

GENE

I posted some B&W screenies in my PLOG. here

gs

I don't know what these htpc's and digitally remastered versions can do, but I've found a lot of older movies have absolutely terrible resolution. I don't know, maybe they just copied the VHS version to a dvd, but it appears to be like half of 480i which doesn't look good on our projectors either.

Well...that may be the case for some films...But for films like Dr. Strangelove The actually scan each frame from a real print....That's actually how they are doing many of these hd conversions as well...But you get into a situation of "Who's got a mint print of Dr. Strangelove....or The Day The Earth Stood Still?"
Right now, films shot with hd cameras are best. But, 1080p is the best they will ever look...If a better hd with a higher res comes out, movies like sin city and the last 2 star wars films won't be able to reach it.
Comp: How does your image in real life look? How is it comparable? I'm assuming your camera is doing a great deal of injustice...And let's also keep in mind that all I had at hand was the hd version...It's going to have way more detail anyway...And I could send you a small clip so you could take a pic of this hd version...

Whoa, those are very very impressive.

We should keep in mind that old B&W movies (even old color movies) used old film. Film emulsions were not as developed as they are now-a-days, so grain is certainly a problem for some old films. Not to mention, sometimes a grainier film is used on purpose... lighting and dramatic effect are what the film maker is looking for... in addition to many other things... There will be limits on any conversion of these films to DVD. This is also not to say there aren't good conversions and bad conversions as their are certainly both...

It is not necessarily the intention of every film maker to produce a film that has absolutely crystal clear resolution just because the technology exists.... just something we should keep in mind as the new HD DVD technologies get released...

cheers,
gs

edit: Thanks blake.

Nice results - I'm encouraged to continue my quest for cheap parts so I can finally build one of these things and stop goofing off at work.

GENE