Piyo Piyo Productions presents:
Lensman (the movie) (v2.0)
5/17/2015
Plot synopsis:
The story is about a dying Lensman who transfers his Lens to a young man named Kimball Kinnison. To his best knowledge, Kim wasn't aware of how big the responsibility of holding the Lens is. This Lens contains vital information that would enable the Galactic Patrol to face the deadly DNA weapon created by the Boskone Empire. The Arisians initially were the ones who created the Lens in order to stand up to the evil Eddorians, because in spite of their great power, they alone could not vanquish the Eddorian menace. Through the Lens, the Lensmen minds were merged with the cosmic conscientiousness of Arisia. On another side is Lord Helmuth, the ruthless, merciless Boskone leader, who would stop at nothing to get his hands on the Lens.
Project notes (original):
I was going to work on something else next, but the guy who requested I finally release The Visuallist Series also informed me that the existing rips of Lensman are all from the shitty Streamline laserdisc that has janky Japanese audio. It was never reissued on DVD due to rights issues, and a lot of the original Japanese LDs are rotted. Mine, fortunately is in great shape. But don't take my word for it - see for yourself!
The letterboxing on the original disc is oddly jittery - I've never really seen that before. I fixed it by cropping it out and using Avisynth to add new borders. I've had trouble with jerky panning before, but this one cleaned up real nicely.
Nevertheless, I am including both my X264 filtered version and an untouched DVD conversion for future editions.
V2.0 Project Notes (5/17/15)
...Okay, I guess I didn't do that great after all. It was pointed out to me, by somebody who wanted to use my raw for subtitling, that there were two problems:
1) When I chopped the original letterboxing and replaced it, I did so EVERYWHERE, even where there was no letterboxing originally. In other words, the Pony Canyon intro and the "do not copy" stuff I pretend doesn't exist were now "letterboxed," or, rather, had the tops and bottoms cut off and replaced with black bars. Obviously when I checked to see how things were coming along, those WEREN'T the bits I was looking at. Normally, why would I?
2) The original disk is very dark. Like, way too dark. So dark that details that were visible in the shitty Streamline edition were getting lost. Normally I don't like to mess with a disk's original chroma or luma settings - too subjective. But some specific scenes were pointed out to me, and I adjusted the gamma a bit, and pop, new picture details emerged. From now on I will be much more watchful for such detail loss.
Since I was already chopping the film up into segments to apply different filter chains, I also segmented out the English introductory text at the beginning of the movie, as it was rather shaky in the original, and stabilized it a bit. The ending credits are still a little wobbly, and a few of the scenes involving CG are too, but I'm not gonna fix all THAT. I have had more than my fill of Lensman for now, thank you very much.