Chief Mouse
This feels a bit monumental because we haven't had an actual HD film transfer ever shared on this site as far as I know. Biggest thanks goes out to Barry Krumm who filmed this and was actually kind enough to provide us with a good HD transfer as he promised he would early on. He didn't bugger off and held his word. For that you can thank ChinWonder who is responsible for getting in touch with Barry. And thanks to Queen Official for uploading the original SD copy of this, thus letting us know of its origin. Also, thanks to Adam (genesismuseum.com) for doing the scan.
Shot on Kodachrome 2 at ISO 25, according to Barry Krumm.
So here I present you two versions. Raw version with added sound (synced by ChinWonder!). I took the original 5 GB AVI and muxed it with the audio, so it's a 5 GB MKV now. It is also in 16 fps which is great, no blends, no dups, just the actual frames! Good video for purists and collectors. If you want even more authentic, just mute the audio.
And a version I worked on. The video is in 16:9 but so is the scan. It is actually quite good cos it only has cropped off the top and bottom black gate border if we compare to the old 4:3 version, but the sides (especially left side) reveal more of the frame (although with visible sprocket hole) ! I removed the sprocket hole and the right side line. I also stabilized it so it's somewhat zoomed in and leaves out much of the sprocket area, still though not at all times so I had to mask out the sprocket area anyway beforehand. This version is in 24 FPS. I took the stabilized video and interpolated it to 24 fps, put the 16 fps version and now 24 fps version on top of each other in one timeline. Why? Well, I cut out the bits with bad motion pixel artifacts that are inevitable with this kind of movement and replaced these bits with the 16 fps version. So the result is a merge which includes both raw segments and smoother segments. Smoother segments are left only in places where it works without many artifacts. Final footage should look somewhat well balanced as I tried to avoid most artifacts (the previous version in SD I did was full of them, it didn't quite matter that much since the video was rather bad anyway compared to this). Also, the brightness was boosted quite a bit so that we see most of the detail in mid shadow and shadow areas, I felt the original was a bit too dark. Didn't cut out any frame splices and odd bits cos it wouldn't matter since this kind of footage can never be perfect anyway. And finally, muxed Chin's audio to it.
Also, please watch the comparison video below in the highest resolution you can -
[url=https://mega.nz/#F!9eIgGbRZ!faCnDNIKyt9Ch3aLe5Y0-Q]https://mega.nz/#F!9eIgGbRZ!faCnDNIKyt9Ch3aLe5Y0-Q[/url] .
I hope this will encourage others to share some of their material, we know there are more Queen films and audio recordings out there!