20th Century Fox has released the first trailer for Assassin’s Creed (2016) – starring Michael Fassbender. I have put together an experimental 5.1 mix based upon the PCM 2.0 version of the audio. I think the end result is pretty good. If you are interested in comparing the two, I have included the 2.0 track on the .mkv file. The .mkv file has four streams in total, a FLAC 5.1, AC3 5.1, FLAC 2.0 and AC3 2.0. The .mp4 file only has the one audio track – which is the AC3 5.1 experimental mix. You can find these at the Assissin’s Creed (2016) page.
For those of you who have been patiently waiting for a 5.1 studio mix for X-Men: Apocalypse, the wait is soon coming to an end.
In other news, the RSS Feed has been disabled because it looks like it was causing a high number of script executions on the server. More script executions than what is permitted. So if you were using the RSS feed, the best way to be notified when content is added to the site is by subscribing to the site or be following thedigitaltheater.com on facebook. If you subscribe to the site, you will receive an email when a new post is published. If you go with facebook, then you will receive a facebook notification. Eitherway, you will be notified as soon as I post new content. Who does not want to know when the 5.1 version of Trailer 2 for Rogue One is available?
Time sure does have way of flying by; I can’t believe that I this is my first post of May. Time also seems to be going by fast as we are 5 days from moving. The place is a disaster – but it will soon be done. Sorry for not providing new content recently, I just have not had the time. The good news is that once I get all set up at the new location I will have dedicated space to work on these trailers and I will be able to do 7.1 channel mixes! So, I hope it will be worth the interruption.
I have posted trailer 2 for The Conjuring 2. If you can download using the wetransfer link I would certainly appreciate you using that instead of the direct link. If you are using a system that can not load the wetransfer page, then the direct link is for you.
I have the Assassin’s Creed trailer, but 20th Century Fox has only provided 2 channels again. I will attempt to do one of those “experimental mixes” but there is no guarantee that I can make anything decent out of it. I tried to do one for the most recent X-Men: Apocalypse trailer, but the result was absolutely horrible. This will likely be the last thing I will be working on for the next couple weeks as I need to pack this all up and haul it across town.
A few items of note today. First, Trailer 1R for The Girl on the Train, based upon the best selling novel of the same name by Paula Hawkins has been released. It looks like an interesting psychological thriller, and if you have read the book you probably will know all the surprises. Trailer 1R can be found at The Girl on the Train page.
I have the latest trailer for X-Men: Apocalypse but it is only in 2 channel stereo. I tried to do an “experimental mix” but the end result was pretty terrible. The track features a lot of ambient musical sounds that don’t work well at all. So I doubt it will be available anytime soon.
And finally, I am going to be moving some content from thedigitaltheater.com domain to thedigitaltheater.wetransfer.com as the bandwidth usage is getting too high, and I am pretty certain that it will soon draw the attention of the hosting provider as this has to be a bandwidth hog – we will exceed 10 Terabytes for April. The good side to this is that it should improve the site performance – but moving things around is never fun. Going forward new .mp4 files will be hosted on the domain, but for a limited time. Nothing is going away, only the links are changing.
Well, the latest trailer for Independence Day: Resurgence certainly looks great. I have to confess that I am a huge fan of the original. In fact, I just picked it up on Blu-ray, and I hear that there is a 4K version with a DTS:X soundtrack coming soon. Unfortunately, Fox has only released the trailer in 2 channel stereo, so I have put together another “experimental mix” for Trailer D. I think it turned out ok, certainly better than the default 2 channels.
In addition, I also performed a transcode using the High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC h.265). The result looks very similar to the normal Advanced Video Codec (AVC h.264) but is a lot smaller. The AVC is 425 MB with the FLAC audio, while HEVC comes in at 159 MB including the FLAC audio. I had some problems playing the file in PLEX, but I was able to play it back using GOM Player. Give it a try and let me know what works and does not work for you. H.265 is not yet mainstream, but it will likely be the preferred codec in the near future.
Jason Bourne is back, and judging from the trailer he looks set to give the CIA a hard time. It is good to see Matt Damon back as Jason Bourne, and July 29 is not that far off. Trailer 1 is available at the Jason Bourne page.
Trailer 2 for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is now available with lossless FLAC audio and AC3 5.1 tracks. Those of you who are Harry Potter fans will be delighted to hear the return of Hedwig’s theme – I know my wife was. Trailer 2 can be found at the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them page.
I had a reader ask for a list of trailers by upload date. I did some thinking about that, and I have modified the Movie Trailers list page so that it includes the last updated date. You can click on the last updated date column header to sort the table so that the movies are listed in order of update date. That should help those who are interested in quickly seeing what has recently been added.
I will be removing some old trailers and pages soon to make room for new content. I will be publishing a post that will list what is scheduled to be removed and when it will be removed.
I mentioned before that we put our house on the market. I am happy to say that is has sold, and that we have found a new house. The new location will have a dedicated theater room – which will also double as my video editing space. This should help to speed up the workflow as I will have editing and playback in the same space, instead of in two seperate spaces as it is now. The down side in the short term will be a bit of time at the end of May when I suspect that updates will be a little infrequent as things are packed, moved, and unpacked.
It took a bit longer than planned to get Trailer 2 finished, but it is now available. You may hear a couple of clicks in the first few seconds of the trailer – it was in the source and I tried to remove it. Unfortunately, the clicks remain. You can get Trailer 2 in various formats at the Suicide Squad page.
Trailer 1 for Marvel’s Dr. Strange has been released, and we have it here in glorious HD with Lossless Audio. The download links are at the Dr. Strange (2016) page.
I mentioned last week that I was upgrading my system to go from a 50 inch Samsung LCD to the BenQ HT1075. What got this ball rolling was moving from our current house, to a location that would allow for a dedicated home theater space. I am happy to say that it looks like we have found the right location, and we have a buyer for our current home. So at the end of May, I will be setting up the BenQ in the new theater space (provided there are no unforeseen complications).
The projector arrived on Monday, just in time for the release of The Force Awakens on Tuesday. I didn’t have a screen, but I really wanted to try the projector out. I did some research on-line and I decided to try blackout fabric for a screen. It comes in a width of 55 inches, so a 98 inch long piece would produce a 16X9 screen with a diagonal width of 112 inches. The fabric has a nice white finish, is quite smooth, and is totally opaque. In a pinch and for $30 it did quite well. I am sure it is not as good as a quality screen but it sure beats a wall, or some of the other alternatives.
Like virtually all reviews of this projector indicated, the setup was ridiculously easy. I placed it behind the couch on a small table that was about 3.5 feet tall. I did not need to use the keystone adjustment (which is good because it reduces resolution) and with just making a few adjustments I was good to go.
To mark the occasion of the release of The Force Awakens, we decided to watch the original Star Wars Trilogy on blu-ray. On Monday night we screened A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. I was just using the Cinema mode for those films, and we thought they looked fantastic. A New Hope obviously has some issues relating to its age, but it has never looked better viewed at my home. It really is amazing how much of a difference you get from going from 50 inches to 110. The whole experience is that much more cinematic. You can see all the details in the background because they are so much bigger. The other benefit is that the picture just draws you in. It is totally immersive. It is comparable to seeing it in a movie theater.
For the second night, I made a few tweaks to the settings based upon some other reviews on the net – those types who have all the measurement equipment needed to properly calibrate the projector. What I used was based upon the Cinema Mode. Brightness was increased from 50 to 51, and contrast was decreased from 50 to 49. I also changed the color temperature to Warm, which I was surprised to find was more appealing and realistic to me as I usually prefer the Cool setting on past displays. Warm seemed to provide the best skin tone. I also set the lamp power to the Smart Eco mode, which should provide the longest bulb life possible. I was watching the films in total darkness, and even in Smart Eco mode the screen was plenty bright – perhaps too bright in some cases where there are shots that have both dark and bright components (such as the shot of Starkiller Base against the blackness of space). In scenes like that, I found that the brightness of the planet, was washing out the darkness of space. This may be helped by the addition of some dark masking materials that would provide more contrast for on screen vs off screen. I have also been doing some reading about neutral filters, which would make the picture a little darker. And yes, I know, I did increase the brightness by 1 in the settings, but when I tried decreasing the brightness it had other undesired effects. But at the end of the day, this is a sub $1000 projector, and so far I am more than happy with the quality of the projected image. Actually, it is even better than I was expecting it to be.
The blu-ray release of The Force Awakens was nothing short of spectacular. The only real issues I noticed where like the ones mentioned above. But then again, I was not using a proper screen and there may be some configuration changes that could improve on that.
The Digital Theater vs YouTube
It appears that there has been a bit of a debate that sprung up across the internet over the past couple of weeks with regards to the latest Warcraft Trailer, where there has been a lot of passionate talk on Reddit and more recently Forbes.com where they are comparing the quality of the video of the YouTube trailer vs the version I have. I do want to mention that there are some who are suggesting that the lossless version I have here has uncompressed video, which looks much better than the YouTube version which is compressed to hell, pardon the expression. In the case of “lossless” trailers on this site, the term applies only to the audio. The video is compressed, but in the case of the ‘lossless’ mkv files, the bitrate is comparable to blu-ray, which is much better than YouTube. The HD Master of a trailer runs at 220 Mbps and is usually about 3GB in size. I am compressing trailers down to an average bitrate of 24 Mbps and usually in the 300 MB range. By comparison, the 1080p version of the 1 minute Warcraft trailer on YouTube is 18 MB in size, while the one featured here is 176 MB. Ours has 5.1 surround sound at a much higher bitrate of 6912 Kbps, instead of a highly compressed 2 channel AAC track at 144 Kbps.
Trailers on YouTube are substandard. A director should be angry to have the trailer for their film presented in such a way. But I am heartened that there are a lot of people out there that think that the promotional efforts I am doing are a better representation of the film than what is available at YouTube. After all, that is why I started this site. I wanted trailers that sounded better than the 2 channel versions readily available and I thought that there had to be more people out there who were interested in the same thing. Video and audio quality matter – maybe not on a phone or tablet, but certainly on anything in the home theater realm. One day YouTube may have multi channel audio and better compression, but until that day comes I am going to keep pushing for better quality.
