
Dear readers, the good news is that I have plenty of time to get back to recording VHS/LD sources for obscure cult films and anime titles. I've recently added Yukio ABE's adaptation of IHARA Saikaku's 16th century erotica novel 好色一代男/THE SENSUALIST to the Kentai Films archive, a bizarre Tokugawa-era counterpoint to the jaw-dropping mind fuckery of Kanashimi no Belladonna. That's not to say that Toho's direct-to-video naughty character drama is anywhere near as amazing as Mushi Pro's erotically charged swan song about Joan of Arc, but the multi-layered yet limited animation and focus on blunt sexuality as the highest form of fine art certainly lend themselves to comparison, however subtle they may be.
The short of it was it was an offer to restore a film at the frame-by-frame level. In other words, I'd find frames that looked like this:

And make them look like this:

Yeah, sure, copy-pasting out film damage from surrounding frames (and resorting to the clone brush in dire circumstances... see above for a little of both) isn't so bad... for a second or two's worth of footage. Factor that a 2 hour film has 24 frames per second, and that 2 hour film has a total of 172,800 individual frames! Keep in mind I'm doing this with freeware tools, not a fancy MTI workstation designed to make this sort of work quick and painless, so this would be a maniacally painstaking and time consuming process requiring months of OCD dedication. Even finding film damage in LBKiller - forget actually fixing any of it! - takes for-fucking-ever, even with a relatively fast computer and starting with NTSC resolution DVD footage. If the film is littered with consistant damage - dirt, specs, stains and the like - that means it could take you several minutes to fix each damaged frame, meaning that a minute's worth of footage could easily take a single day to fix.
I liked the company that offered the work, and I even like the film I would have restored, but we just couldn't come to a price that I felt was fair. I don't mind getting a pittance for something I can do in just a few days, but getting paid only a fraction of what this job was worth - for something that would take about 4 months to complete - just isn't something I can do. As a crazy Meatloaf loving gigolo somewhere once surely said, "I would do anything for money... but I won't do that!"
So, anyway, expect some Go Nagai themed patching in the near future. It's been far too long since I've done that, hasn't it?
No comments:
Post a Comment