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I brought it up in the other thread but the use of compositing is terrible in this show. Like how everyone was complaining about how soulless The Mandalorian felt in the scenes that you could tell were just an actor surrounded by an LED screen, I get that same feeling interspersed randomly throughout this show. And it’s not even consistent. One scene at an airfield will feel completely real and in-world, and the next, there’s a very obvious mismatch between the absolute black points of the subject and the background it’s being composited into. And that mismatch seems emphasised by a kind of gaussian blur filter that’s been applied to the CGI rendered parts of the scenes alone (whether whole or in part), like a bad Snapchat filter to hide wrinkles. I just revisited Memphis Belle again, which was my favourite movie as a kid and I must’ve watched dozens of times in Jr. High, and while I understand there are definitely fewer B17s now than there were in 1990 to use as props or set pieces, Memphis Belle also got crafty with scale models in a way that would have been worth revisiting here. Instead we get these very obviously, poorly composited B17s that I’m questioning whether they’re even to-scale in the scenes they’re placed in for lack of anything else to compare them against size-wise, and what’s worse is seeing them wobble like gelatin. Whose job was it to measure wing flexibility physics of these planes and apply that same math to the models in this show? Because there’s a scene in episode one where the plane is warping so much as it bounces down the runway that it looks like it has no internal structure at all, and what structure it does have seems arbitrary and weird. Like it’s a helium filled balloon. I’ve seen these planes in person. I raced a B17 down a service road delivering pizza to an airshow as it was taking off on the runway directly beside me. Its wings were not “doing the worm” as I watched it overtake me and depart the surly bonds of Earth or whatever that phrase is. Just some real goofy stuff. I hope the rest of the series spools up nicely because I’ve got my RCAF veteran grandpa into the idea of getting together and watching it every week from here on out. I, on the other hand, will be watching The Pacific for the first time to get ahead of any spoilers in this thread. 
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Jan 27, 2024 19:31
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 22:29 |
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I think I was being a little too harsh in my earlier review. I just got back from re-watching the first episode, plus episode two for the first time, with my 90 year old RCAF veteran grandpa who served an anti-submarine patrol role over the Atlantic in the 1950s aboard the CP-107 Argus. Not five minutes into the first episode and it hit him hard. My grandpa served six months at the exact same airfield they showed the B17s landing at: Bluie West One. He was sort of at a loss for words, it was just like being back there. When the one B17 called off its landing and decided to go around, he basically said "Oh that's a terrible idea," I guess on account of how they had to fly in surrounded by mountains and there isn't a lot of safe airspace around the base to do that. He said that the one end of the runway is at about sea level, and the other end is at about 120' of elevation, and that the idea is to land on the incline and take off on the down slope. However, that's not always the case, and one time when he left, for some reason they had to take off uphill, in a C-54, and as he was explaining this I could see he was pulling it deep from memory, that he wasn't sure if they were going to make it into the air, not only on account of having to take off uphill, but because "The C54 was the most miserable goddamn airplane ever built." So it's got his approval, and if it's got his approval then I guess I can overlook the cheesy CGI here and there. XYZAB fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Jan 29, 2024 |
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Jan 29, 2024 06:34
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He did say that he noticed some “fooey” in some parts, but when I asked him to elaborate, he went off on a tangent about how he and his friends used to throw rocks on the roof of his officer’s quarters, which were those semi-circular corrugated metal things so it’d make a hell of a racket, and the officers used to come running after them screaming at them to gently caress off as he ran as fast as he could. I don’t know if this was in Greenland or if he was remembering this from somewhere else he was stationed. He tells me this and starts laughing hysterically, all the while my grandma is right beside him, giving him the meanest stink eye. They’ve been married 64 years and met in the air force. She was a signals officer and still can’t tell us exactly what she did on account of it being classified or something. All we know is she intercepted radio signals from Russia. Edit: He mentioned that he was confused about how the navigator in the show was doing his job. As he was familiar with it, navigating required the use of “sun-spotting” and something that I got the gist must have been like a sextant, which they didn’t show in the show. It was just a lot of looking at a map. And then he got real stern and said “Those damned Americans were always getting lost, we’d have to station Canadian navigators with them to get them where they needed to go.” Mind you he was more or less in a crew chief position doing repairs and mechanical work as far as I understand, so I don’t know exactly where he’s getting this navigation knowledge from. XYZAB fucked around with this message at 07:34 on Jan 29, 2024 |
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Jan 29, 2024 07:19
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George H.W. oval office posted:I do appreciate that the show is giving some minor spotlight to the rest of the support crews involved on base. I thought that one crew chief was going to set those kids on fire by accident what with the fast and loose gasoline pouring and little girl wearing what looked like a burlap sack.
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Jan 29, 2024 07:49
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War is hell.
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Jan 29, 2024 18:14
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I pointed out to my grandpa that these are all F model planes or earlier, which made me realize that I wasn't at all sure when the G model started making its way over. I'm curious if we're going to see an episode dedicated to the arrival of G models, or if they're just going to sort of filter in planes with the chin turret and not say anything about it. Bonus points if they find a reason to bring YB-40's into the plot that had their bomb bays converted to ammo magazines and got deployed as defensive gunships. Though that was the 327th and they weren't stationed at Thorpe Abbots so I can't really see a reason for it aside from drawing a connection explaining how it was the YB-40's chin turret that migrated over to the G models. Will they explain it? Won't they? What other WWII airplane nerd poo poo are they going to throw into this that only like three people are going to care about? We saw the Tuskegee Airmen in some of the trailers. Me-163s? 262s? A sky blackened with so many Ho-229s that it makes us all throw our hands up in disgust and cancel our Apple+ subscriptions moments later? Oh, on that note, can anybody tell me what the yellow string is seen hanging from the forward fuselage of the plane in several shots? In a couple of the earlier scenes I thought it was laminar flow oil leaking from somewhere, but it definitely isn't. Example: 
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Jan 30, 2024 02:53
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Episode 3 of show was excellent. More like that and I'll be happy. I just wish the episodes were all exactly 60 minutes instead of doing that thing that streaming services started doing of just sort of making GBS threads out TV shows with bullshit inconsistent episode lengths. I want to spent an hour watching bombers over Europe with grandpa, dammit! Not 45 minutes. Because I only had that one 45 minute episode on Sunday I started looking around for other related media to bring over to his place, and found a rip of the 2018 total restoration of the 1944 Memphis Belle documentary on rutracker. They sourced the director's original 16mm film repository, rescanned every frame of 90 hours of film at 4k resolution, removed all of the camera shake, all of the scratches on the film, and basically made it look like it was filmed yesterday. It's insane. Probably some of the best WWII colour footage you'll ever see. I also sourced Bah Bah Black Sheep in high def and we watched the first half of the pilot (lol) episode. I mistakenly thought it was only going to be 30 mins long, but it's not, it's two hours long, so we watched half of it before 10pm came around and it was time to leave. That's a drat good show too. Find the 2018 restoration of this and you'll be completely amazed at how night and day they are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNWb18kpCCI George H.W. oval office posted:Aces of the Pacific was my air sim of choice growing up. That midi soundtrack is still in my head to this day. Hell yeah. I played the everloving gently caress out AotP as a kid. And MS Combat Flight Sim. But then Jane's WWII Fighters came out and that game just blew everything before it out of the water with its 3D Voodoo texture smoothing. I wasted so much time playing combat flight sims as a kid that I blame them for having to flip the Y-Axis on every game controller I've picked up in the last 25 years. Edit: According to the article linked above, the Memphis Belle aircraft herself was restored and unveiled in 2018, and the full 4k restoration of the 1944 documentary was a side-project of a side-project of that, it wasn't even second-fiddle to the aircraft unveiling, but rather third-fiddle. Something called The Cold Blue, which I've found a trailer for and features additional footage from the same director's lost reel trove was more important than that. I haven't seen it yet but if it's anything like the 1944 restoration, it ought to be insane. Trailer linked below with three comparison shots to the above linked film. It will blow your mind. The Cold Blue seems available on HBO but I can't find anything on where to watch the Memphis Belle restoration, so I have to assume it was a limited production thing that maybe only sold briefly at the display museum. https://vimeo.com/261525256 XYZAB fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Feb 7, 2024 |
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Feb 7, 2024 01:35
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George H.W. oval office posted:Being a combat videographer in a b17 sounds absolutely horrifying. Like at least kinda in ground combat you can duck and hide somewhat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmwm4VPW7RY
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Feb 7, 2024 02:10
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XnvlmcBiAk This guy basically goes into way more detail than any sane person would care about re: what they got wrong in episode 3. Which I appreciate.
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Feb 10, 2024 04:54
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I've got some bad news for whoever cares about the F/G model distinctions in this show. IIRC somebody mentioned they were a little concerned to see F models flying on a D-Day raid in the intro, mentioning that they should be in silver livery with the chin turret, as G models, but I either can't find that comment right now or I dreamt it up, my apologies. This plane caught my eye in the title sequence today recalling that comment. It's silver, but it's an F model. But that nose art makes it a known plane, so I looked it up.  Bingo. B-17G-85-VE. Ergo, vis-a-vis, concordantly, IT SHOULD HAVE THE CHIN TURRET IN THE SHOW. 
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Feb 12, 2024 06:15
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Stegosnaurlax posted:That plane didn't get delivered until Feb 1945, so D-Day is out. Yeah, maybe I was dreaming about having read that comment. Either way, Tim Apple is going to be receiving a sternly worded iMessage tomorrow let me tell you.
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Feb 12, 2024 07:08
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Stegosnaurlax posted:According to the records, the first G the 100th got was in October 43, still hadn't flown a mission until November when it's Pilot, Co-Pilot and Navigator took two nurses on a joyride and crashed it into farm buildings. God I hope this is the plot of one of these episodes. Also this channel rules: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPk5C50ajho
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Feb 13, 2024 01:10
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M_Gargantua posted:For context, since this is TVIV instead of one of the coldwar/history threads: Oh boy if we're posting TOR videos about aerial operations we want to see big screen adaptations of, if only because both of them fit the category of "You can't make this poo poo up," my number one would be the Falklands Vulcan raid, and the other would be Midway. But the Midway movie would never be made because in order to make it compelling you'd have to overtly premise it on how the US won because of luck alone, which makes for huge amazing suspense, but probably wouldn't do too well with the "RAH RAH USA BACK-TO-BACK WORLD WAR CHAMPS" crowd who'd also be their prime demo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5yAtuYPHK4 ^^ WATCH THAT AND TELL ME THAT'S NOT THE MOST INSANE poo poo YOU'VE EVER HEARD. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HkBW7X7LaU edit: wait there was midway movie??! i have some catching up to do XYZAB fucked around with this message at 15:01 on Feb 16, 2024 |
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Feb 15, 2024 20:18
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Junkenstein posted:How realistic was that dogfighting scene? I guess it was never usually an option due to flying in formation. Spawn in a B17 in War Thunder and see for yourself how well slowing down and presenting a larger surface area to aim at would go for you. 
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Feb 20, 2024 22:43
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Oasx posted:I honestly have no idea how the navigator can figure out where the planes are, i'm old enough to remember a time before GPS, but even then I hated maps. https://www.303rdbg.com/crew-duties.html quote:The navigator's job is to direct your flight from departure to destination and return. He must know the exact position of the airplane at all times.
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Feb 20, 2024 22:51
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I hope they can devote an episode to this famous battle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsLyG6A13f4 Actually if I'm being serious for a moment, I would loving love to see a series or a movie devoted to RAF night bomber / German night fighter operations. I've always been incredibly... Incredulous?? About the capabilities available to night fighters in the 1940s and the kind of cathode ray tube/TV antenna radars they employed to both find and take down opposing aircraft. It seems anachronistic to me almost. This kind of poo poo:  I've wanted something like this ever since I first watched that scene in Heavy Metal. Edit: I swear to god if the Loc-Nar shows up any of the remaining episodes (as a Foo Fighter maybe) I could completely forgive all of the questionable CGI. XYZAB fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Feb 28, 2024 |
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Feb 28, 2024 02:28
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Mental Hospitality posted:I haven't been terribly impressed by any of the CGI in this series. I don't hold that against the show though, I really like the show. But I'm sure this stuff involves insanely complex models and trying to incorporate the physics of it all, with particulate effects like smoke and fire, and it must be a real challenge. Still, every time there are planes in the air my brain keeps blasting me with "look at the cgi planes!". The part that fucks with me is that I question whether the physical cameramen and the digital compositors were using matching depth of field/focal length/lens measurements for the same shots that each were teamed up on, because sometimes I'll see a CGI B-17 that looks stretched along its X-axis away from the camera in a weird way, like maybe the physical shot was using a 55mm lens and the compositor rendered the plane into the scene with the equivalent of a 30mm lens and just hamfisted the plane into the scene as good as he could, if that makes sense.
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Mar 4, 2024 06:07
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M_Gargantua posted:I'm still kinda amazed that they got the CGI for the bombing wrong in a show about bombers. I'm kind of amazed they got the loving bombers wrong in a show about bombers.
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Mar 19, 2024 05:23
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 22:29 |
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Like really. No G variants at all. I'm half surprised the Red Tails weren't flying around in P-82s with B canopies and Allison engines.
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Mar 19, 2024 05:25
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