Here is Volume 3 of the Genesis Museum 8mm masters project, over 8 years of work and hundreds of reels of film in the making. All of these films I personally held in my hand and took to a film lab for a 100% digital transfer. I am not making these volumes in any particular order, other than they are all in the same format on the disc and have a running time to fill the disc without sacrificing bitrate. Volume 3 is HD with PCM audio, for films that could benefit from the higher resolution and wider screen transfer.

NOTE: These files are blu-ray formatted. If you have a blu-ray burner, you can burn these as-normal and play then in a blu-ray player. But I also adjusted the indexes for AVCHD, and sized the collections for standard DVD-Rs. All you have to do is burn these files in UDF 2.5 format using a program like Nero or Imgburn onto a regular DVD-R. This AVCHD will then play in almost all blu-ray players, PS3s, etc.

For those who have used material without permission or credit, broke promises, irritated, criticized while offering nothing, and generally wielded bad karma...I am choosing to ignore you.....though it is becoming more difficult :-P I am doing this for those who do appreciate it. For those who have offered up material as well as time, generosity, and inspiration, this collection is a salute to you: Mino, Marcello, Maurizio, Max, Edouard, Magog64, Chris West, RaelMatrix, Willem, Volker, Dietmar, Duane, Simon, Serge, Tom, SAB, dR, and a host of others I am probably forgetting.

These films can not be used elsewhere without either permission or credits. Many people were involved in bringing this enjoyment to you...myself putting in the time and money, the filmers in capturing the concert and saving it all these years, others providing help with syncing, audio sources, etc. [Note: if you have given me films and asked me not to share them, they will not be in this collection] 8mm films (like photographs) are copyrighted by the respective film owners. If these films that are being generously shared are then used elsewhere without permission or credit, I will have no choice but to end this project early.

HD offers many advantages over SD, even for tiny 8mm film. Of course, the increased level of detail exposes film grain and damage, but the picture detail is much higher and can use the widescreen HD format. A bright 8mm film is capable of a resolution around 1280x800 or 1600x1000, which is more than twice the resolution of SD 720x480 (or 720x576) but not quite a high as full HD 1920x1080. And while full HD uses widescreen 1.78 (16:9) format, 8mm can only achieve about 1.6, but this is 20% wider than 1.33 of typical SD transfers.

The only caveat is that most of our 8mm film is in a dark concert hall, which greatly reduces the capability and detail of the film. But in the films I have included in HD for this project, I felt the HD offered a significant enough improvement. An easter egg is included that shows the difference between SD 8mm and HD 8mm. In my eyes it is significant, but not necessarily night and day. Some films only benefit from the widescreen format.

genesismuseum.com


29 March 1975 - Bern, Switzerland (27:13) - Long segments of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, Fly On A Windshield, Broadway Melody Of 1974, In The Cage, Back In NYC, Counting Out Time, The Lamia, The Colony Of Slippermen, It, and The Musical Box

This now infamous film is one of the best documents of the rarely filmed lamb tour. I was able to get more out of the film than any previous transfer, but there it is not a night and day difference due to the film limitations. The good news is that the film images held up extremely well to the color correction and other processes. It retained a very rich level of detail and color. You can see several hints of the slide projections in the background, which almost never show up in 8mm films. The segments are long, which gives great perspective to each song. There are great shots of each band member. 

Best of allthe camera captured a sort of widescreen view of the stage. I was able to recover an additional 20% of the stage, right up to - and also above and below the sprocket hole on the left. This may be the widest 8mm film I have ever transferred. I blacked out this hole because it just shines a distracting white light, but above and below are new details and during IT you can see both peters, although the one on the right is blocked by a speaker or something.

The color has mostly turned throughout the entire film. It is very much gone blue. It is not an understatement to say we are lucky to get the image we have. The original film looks like a light blue peter on a dark blue stage with reddish-blue lighting. I was able to fix the color, and using Serges color as a crutch helped tremendously. Since the film is so long and the color fairly consistent, I was able to use color information from one part of the film to fix another part of the film. For example, matching the color red of Phil's drums in one part of the film can help match a green in another part of the film. I tried for a nice even black background and was very pleased with the color dynamics throughout.

The most disappointing thing to me was the low exposure range in this film. Most films have a large dynamic lighting range. Increasing the exposure can show many background images while making the singer look like a white blob. Or decreasing the exposure may get perfect detail of the singer on a totally dark stage. So there are normally some choices and combinations I can do to get the best from both. But in this case the exposure was so dark I was not able to get any more details from the film. Increasing the brightness only increased the noise so I found a good compromise between brightness and noise and kept the exposure consistent.

The film had some damage, so some frames here and there were lost. The biggest damage is at the beginning where the sprocket hole comes lose just before get out! in the first few seconds. I did my best to fix, substitute, or otherwise recover from these short breaks. The beginning is also the only part where the massive amount of smoke literally ruins the image. Neither the camera (nor my software) can separate smoke, peter, lights, dust, film grain, etc. They all blend together. Thankfully, this passes after a few minutes.

There are several parts of the film that are out of focus, but my feeling is that with this higher quality transfer it is not as distracting. Of course when the camera locks in perfect focus we are treated to a perfect picture. But I was able to get enough extra detail from these out of focus areas that in some cases they look better than a bad transfer of an in focus filmif that makes any sense.

One problem I was not expecting was that it appears that the camera was losing its batteries. The first song starts out about 1% fast and by the end it reaches 5% fast (60mSec per frame) I fixed this timing, or rather adjusted the film to match the audio. This causes an obvious problem in trying to do the sync.... The drum beat was after this frame, but before the next frame, or was it? Sometimes Phils sticks move so fast compared to the film that he seems to hit the cymbal twice in a single frame.

There was a lot of shaking in the film, which is very common when a long zoom is used, but I was able to significantly reduce this. Of course I could not eliminate it completely, but I estimate about 90% of it is gone.

I want to make it clear that I dont think anything was "bad" on previous transfers. In fact, there are many places in the film where previous transfers were able to get additional lighting and background slide images that my lower-noise transfer could not. I was able to use previous transfers as a guideline for audio and color, making my job much easier. It is just that newer transfer technologies and software are able to squeeze some more detail out of the film, to reduce the shake and noise, and take it to another level of enjoyment.








