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A forum for discussion of Crash's retro-style arcade game based on Star Fleet
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Crash
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Post by Crash »

No, this is better! because people can browse it. I only did those for people who might need a screengrab of any given character or vehicle or scene for modelling or whatever.I went and sent a program through the show and it made them at 1-second intervals. I don't think I bothered to go back and delete any clear duplicates either because once you go down there you think "well, should I have deleted that?".Well absolutely, the admissions people say "you can't do the course because you haven't completed the first one yet" (even though you can resit everything twice) and the course administrator woman says "oh well you get a buffer period because this is happens all the time, btw we're looking forward to seeing you in September!".I mean what the hell, really? The suggestion that you weren't doing what you thought you were working towards was quite a shock.In the North it's really terrible up here trying to get anything. Jungle is the right word.One thing I had to cave into doing was putting ads on X-Bomber's front page and I'm ashamed about that because I honestly needed the money to keep the project going.At least next year's course; the LPC is supposed to be a great deal easier than the GDL so I should be able to finish X-Bomber off.I managed to make pretty substantial inroads this year and still do reasonably on the GDL and I was fighting a court matter in Scotland.I was speaking to some a solicitor and a barrister the week before last who had done the GDL and they both said it was 'the hardest thing they'd ever done'. So considering I was diverting all my fire into X-Bomber all year and scraping by on the GDL, the result hasn't been too bad actually!We're doing good.
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Shane
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Post by Shane »

Well, I guess there's something to be said for having a few images from each episode for people to browse at.Great to have that extensive zip file of scans at hand though for any future fan projects. I'll have to remember that.I think you've hardly sold out by adding a few ads on your site. You've been working tirelessly on X-Bomber for years, unpaid, so a few ads seem like a fair trade.Hope you get everything sorted and are able to plough through next year's course and get X-Bomber finished too. Nearly there!
I like parties, I like fun, I want to live in a hamburger bun!
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Crash
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Well, I've been wondering how to condense both galleries down to one.The flash one has no ability for people to register themselves as uploaders (which is probably not such a bad thing).It's meant to be an online portfolio and doesn't use a database so it doesn't search or tag or rate anything. It also sucks at getting stuff shown on Google Images. Neither of them is perfect.Have you noticed btw that Star Fleet is 5:4 aspect unlike X-Bomber, which was 4:3?You get extra pixels with the former but I don't know if that's because you get more of the image or if it's just zoomed and cropped.
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Shane
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Post by Shane »

Hadn't realised that; I'd assumed they were both 4:3 on transmission. Maybe that means, like you say, that the DVD versions were cropped and zoomed as well as remastered (after a fashion)? So more pixels, but of a poorer quality image.Must confess, I still haven't gotten around to buying the Star Fleet DVDs yet, so I still don't know what the general quality is like other than screen shots I've seen and a general consensus on here which suggests that while better than it was it's still not a patch on the Japanese DVDs.Bladez made an interesting point that the French X-Bomber DVD set probably has the best picture quality of all the releases, including the Japanese DVDs.I think this is down to the fact that Bomber X was originally shown in France in 1980 (the same year as X-Bomber in Japan) and seems to be a straight copy of the Japanese Masters, with the same picture quality, music and special FX sounds; only the vocal dub is different.Out of the Japanese and the French versions, Bomber X now has the edge in picture quality because it has been remastered for the DVD release whereas the Japanese DVDs weren't and were merely the Laser-disc edition converted to DVD format.Poor old Star Fleet was knackered all the way back in 1982 because of the poor conversion process, so from what I've seen, the Star Fleet DVDs aren't too bad considering.Of course if the original Japanese film footage still exists and time and money was spent on remastering there's a possibility for one hell of a Japanese Blu-Ray release with gob smacking clarity. But I think that's crazy speculation on my part. It was never that popular in Japan so I doubt if the money would be there for such a release. That would be the way to go for the ultimate in picture quality though, if the original film footage still exists.



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Crash
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It would serve us well to obtain one of those french discs and apply the UK soundtrack to it.I think Bladez managed just that because the PAL format ran at the same speed as the UK soundtrack.Once my game is finished I'll try and mix the two together and crank out a h264 mkv rip of the series. If you set the bitrate high enough there'd be no discernable difference between that and the original.I think Bladez was converting the soundtrack to stereo as well. You could throw that in too. Infact with mkv you can have multiple soundtracks for different languages... and you can have subtitles as well.It'd take some computing time to manage that though.Presumably, if the master film was used to create the laserdiscs as recently as 2002 then it should still be around somewhere.At least it wasn't destroyed in the same way as the models.
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Shane
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Post by Shane »

There is some potential now for the ultimate fan DVD with optimum picture quality via the Bomber-X DVD along with different languages, drunken fan commentary, etc. Yeah I'd be interested to know the original process the makers of the Japanese X-Bomber used. They filmed all the footage, that much is clear, but was the film edited and mixed and then finally converted to video tape for transmission? or was the film footage converted to tape and then edited and mixed via video?To me it looks like the former, but anyway as long as the film element still exists there's potential for it to be converted to a stunning High Definition, then we would be talking some serious quality.And hopefully you're right. The masters were last used in 1993 for the Laser-disc set though, with the 2002 DVD set just a straight conversion of the LDs.
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Crash
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Post by Crash »

I'm glad of the news that Star Trek TNG is coming on Bluray this/next year.I've been looking at your screengrabs - they're really good btw - mine are only JPEG but these are lossless and I'm interested at the moment in the Alliance Fighters...Do we ever actually see them fire a yellow 'laser torpedo' stream from the 3 pods underneath the body?As far as I know they only fire those from directly under the cockpit bubble.And then in some shots they fire yellow and red tracers from the lowermost of the three pods.The red ones seem to be pyrotechnics as they have a smoketrail behind and the yellow ones are presumably cel-shaded as there is no smoketrail.One thing that interested me therefore was Captain Carter's ship, where the nose is covered with an extra module. So the laser torpedo stream emitter was presumably replaced by something else. Maybe that module contained a more powerful version such as what the carriers have.
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Shane
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Post by Shane »

Yeah, the grabs are all PNG's so no loss of quality. I have, however, not altered the contrast on them for time purposes, but when I've used screen grabs before I've always found a slight increase in contrast really improves the image further.I heard TNG was coming out on Blu Ray soon. Not a huge fan of Trek, but the Blu Ray versions should look great! As will the Star Wars ones, but Lucas won't be getting my money just yet as I don't have a Blu Ray player and can live with good old fashioned DVDs until I have a place big enough to buy a big LCD telly and Blu Ray player.I always thought the lightning energy blasts that came from the Imperial fighters were a bit slapdash as there were actual gun pods on the fighter yet the blasts always seemed to originate from the cockpit area.I think this was basically because the puppeteers couldn't always point the fighters' guns in the direction of the enemy and so having the energy blast stem from the cockpit area gave the FX animators a fighting chance to hit their target in post production.You're right though that the Imperial fighter did actually use its main guns from time to time this usually meant showing the actual blast from the gun and then cutting to the X-Bomber or Dai-X and showing the beam flying by or hitting.Fair play to the people involved for keeping some kind of continuity between all the different weapons systems.
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Crash
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Post by Crash »

Just download a rip. I'm not paying good money for a BluRay player when they'll just make it obsolete in 3 years time just to milk you again. - Especially when I have a perfectly good old PC with HDMI and hardware decoding. It's also a question of having a collection taking up loads of space. It's great to have all your stuff on a single box and never have to change a disc!I've also gone fully-off George Lucas - making changes to the films without keeping the originals as an option, exporting animation work to outer-mongolia or wherever for cost-cutting purposes etc, Lucasarts suing the poor UK-based guy (who originally designed the Stormtrooper armour and helmets) for making Stormtrooper armour and helmets. It's hard to know where to stop.They took him all the way to the Supreme Court over it as well and lost there too. Talk about throwing their weight around.I thought about altering the contrast on mine but you'd have to do it automatically in a batch process for mine because otherwise you'd still be doing it when they buried you.Problem with that is that it's an artificial thing and even Photoshop doesn't get it perfect every time. But you're right. In general it really brightens things up and makes them a lot more impressive. If you look at the strip of miniatures on the X-Archive and on the Screengrabs page - that's what I did with those but only those and they look very bright and crisp.So, I suppose the Fighter has two weapons at any given time although you never see them firing both within any single episode. You certainly never see the same group of craft firing both weapons.I wonder if the yellow torpedo streams were anti-ship and the red tracers were anti-fighter or for soft ground targets. That was how they seemed to be used to me.Is criminal that we didn't get a second series from which to draw more observations.



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