Queen Live Dayton, Ohio 8mm December 4, 1977

Includes segments of: We Will Rock You/A Day at the Races Overture, Brighton Rock, Somebody To Love, Death On Two Legs, I’m In Love With My Car, You’re My Best Friend, Liar, 39, White Man, Guitar Solo, Now I’m Here, Bohemian Rhapsody, Keep Yourself Alive, Tie Your Mother Down, We Will Rock You (reprise), and some in-between song moments 8mm Film: Dave Myers Audio Sync: Chinwonder & The Real Wizard Transfer, Restoration, Production: The Genesis Museum Technical Details: This reel of 8mm was lent to me by my friend Bruno. At 150’, the normal runtime would be around 9 or 10 minutes. If you can’t help but notice the runtime clocking in at over 13 minutes, you may come to the conclusion that the camera was in serious need of new batteries. At around 13fps, this may be the slowest running 8mm I have worked on, so I interpolated to a much higher frame rate, which worked very well to smooth the motion in most areas. Unfortunately, some issues during panning caused by the slow frame rate could not be avoided. I also stabilized the film as this was a shaky camera in the audience pit. Since the view was not overly close, there was plenty of room to stabilize and not lose very much of the stage in the process. I also cleaned dirt/scratches as it seems this film had a hard life. The biggest issue however, was just a reality of the stage show and 8mm film. Freddie and much of the band was bathed in white spotlight that washed out any details in white blobs. I salvaged additional details using RGB curves to reduce the blowouts in these areas. However, I had to reach a balance to keep the rest of the stage bright enough, and not make things look odd. I ended up using different settings based on the amount of light on the stage at the time. The results are a drastic improvement over the original transfer where Freddie could almost never be seen. I then handed off to Chinwonder and The Real Wizard for the audio sync. This was a huge job as very little of the band details could be seen in the spotlights, and there were well over 50 segments. Also, there is no known audio recording to match the December 4th performance. In the end, they did an amazing job with the Long Beach recording from a couple of weeks later.