Festhalle, Bern

Notes :
From first generation tape.
Credits: Taped by Pierluigi Canonica,
Photos (all were taken at the actual show): Arnold Melcher
Roger Salem for 'unearthing'
the tape & letting this remaster possible.
The Genesis Museum
Genesis-Movement
The main problem with this tape was the slow speed/pitch.
In this respect it is similar with Rochester-Lamb tape where
with every 15-20 sec there is a different speed/pitch this
being probably due to a low-battery problem.
Remaster was made using Steinberg-Wavelab.
The 2 missing parts were patched from the 2 days earlier
Nuremberg-show, which was a bit more reverbed-sounding.
In the middle of 'The Colony Of Slippermen' (around the 4 min mark)
the big wov & flutter is corrected. There were many mic bumps,
the most annoying ones were removed. (In the Rapids)

Torrent Notes :

* fixes/edits (Audacity and CD Wave Editor)
-retracked 103 Broadway Melody of 1974 correctly.
-retracked the musical 'Interlude' that followed In the Cage to the track 105 In the Cage, of which it is a part.
-removed pop in the applause following 110 Counting Out Time.
-removed 2 pops during the applause following 112 The Chamber Of 32 Doors.
-smoothed the transition at the cut @1:23 in 201 Lilywhite Lilith.
-removed loud clap toward end of 202 The Waiting Room.
-smoothed transition between 201 Lilywhite Lilith & 202 The Waiting Room; retracked.
-removed two pops at end of 205 Interlude.
-joined 'Arrival' to 208 'The Colony Of Slippermen' as it is the opening section of that song.
-removed excess applause following 213 It; faded out applause.

-Fixed Sector Boundary Errors, added new ffp and md5 files (Trader's Little Helper).

Aside from these edits/fixes, there was no EQ work or alteration of the sound.

woolie - June 2020

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 all…the 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 Serge’s 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” film…if 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 Phil’s 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 don’t 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.

8mm audience film dubbed with audio from 'Swiss Lamb'

Audio taken from 'Swiss Lamb' bootleg, which is a bit out of sync with the video. [Simon_Funnell]