Viewing profile — davidferguson

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/r…

Online stream for those without a LW AM receiver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ugd8G5w-Sfo

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 processi…

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 t…

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…

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 brill…

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 so…

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 repl…

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...)

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 playe…

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!

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!

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 …

Is that a Bang & Olufsen? They commonly had a similar system of main and "extra" speakers.

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 perfec…

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 pe…

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", a…

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.

My knowledge comes from someone who helped develop Dolby Digital on film so I'm pretty sure it's correct.

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 t…

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.

Although interestingly, Dolby Digital on film isn't exactly AC3 - it's an earlier version that's incompatible.

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 proce…

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 f…

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.