The Hobbit Rankin/Bass Animated Film..... (Released) — Page 4

Would I be able to extract the individual frames from this....or will it blend them together thereby resulting in ghosted images and things of that nature?

ok, so can you lay out what kind of setup I should be looking for? And I'll see if I can get someone to rip this for me...

Picked up that Harry Abrams book with the concept art and boy was I ever glad I did......there's not much else I can use in it for this project, but I DID find some nice Beorn (and Beorn related) concept art. If I manage to get someone to animate a few new shots for me I can now model them after this stuff here....just to try and stay close to the original intent for these scenes. I figure the Beorn stuff and the Elves feasting in Mirkwood will be the big additions to this film (the feasting bit being added to fix the continuity error later in the film when Bilbo says the Elves came BACK even though we're seeing them for the first time....Beorn, just cause he's cool as all hell)......

which DVD is this?

Same old bullshit from the sounds of it.

http://www.amazon.com/Hobbit-Deluxe-Edition-Orson-Bean/product-reviews/B00ISZNAT2/ref=cm_cr_dp_synop?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending#R2F6O7DOBWY65N

other reviews state that it is the exact same transfer......and part of my problem with the film on DVD IS the color transfer....they went way over-saturated with the colors.....and even colored some things that hadn't really been before.

I can't imagine there's more than one transfer out there....not for something this small.....but I would be curious to get a hold of copies of those.

I have both of those "dollar store" Hobbit DVDs. They're about as good as you'd expect, possibly worse. And neither contains the missing sound effects.

I only spot-checked them, but the East West DVD appears to be the better of the two. It has poor image quality, a very basic menu, and only 3 chapters.

The Peter Pan/Parade DVD has absolutely horrendous image quality, a menu with only a single option ("play"), and has a bunch of cheap-looking video effects overlayed on the image--a "page turn" effect for one scene transition, that sort of thing.

SilverWook said:

Alas, a faded 16mm print was on Ebay recently.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/16mm-The-Hobbit-1977-Feature-Rankin-amp-Bass-/201254743018

A Betamax copy might be a good source for the soundtrack though.

 Probably no better way around this than to downgrade the new added colors from the DVD (unless it gets the Blu treatment anytime soon......which seems unlikely as the Peter Jackson abominations would have been perfect cross selling aids for something like this...and they didn't do it), and take the audio from the VHS. So far with everything that's been made available, this is still my best option.

Have you considered the Video8 release (8mm tape) as a slightly better quality tape-alternative to Beta/VHS?

The Hobbit - Video 8 Movie 8mm - J.R.R. Tolkein's Animated Film - BRAND NEW
http://www.ebay.com/itm/The-Hobbit-Video-8-Movie-8mm-J-R-R-Tolkeins-Animated-Film-BRAND-NEW-/400844825836
[note: see on the box -- "Stereo" & "76 minutes"]

Wikipedia - 8 mm video format:

In terms of video quality, Video8, and Beta-II offered similar performance in their standard-play modes. In terms of audio, Video8 generally outperformed its older rivals. ... Video8 later included true stereo ... In general, Video8 comfortably outperformed non-HiFi VHS/Beta.

Spaced Ranger said:

Have you considered the Video8 release (8mm tape) as a slightly better quality tape-alternative to Beta/VHS?

 The DVD has better quality, they only jacked the colors and added some in places where there weren't any before. Color correction of the DVD source will yield the sharpest image I can get at this time.....a shame they never bothered releasing it on Blu Ray.

Of course, using a tape source could never be a full substitute for DVD. But there may be quality differences for the available tape sources - noise, color reproduction, picture area, and audio - that may help.

I only mention that because I tried a quick color correction on your original DVD screen cap (page 1). Neither RGB nor color-wheel adjustments easily yielded results to exactly match your accompanying VHS cap. That might suggest an HSL recombination (Hue & Saturation from a tape source; Lightness from the DVD) to be a better workable process. It would look something like this (the added red border hi-lights the tape-source edge):

I think you have done something similar to what the Doctor Who restoration team did to restore colour to some of the episodes whereby they took the luminance from a high quality monochrome source (the original 16 mm b&w telerecordings) and a VHS or Betamax colour palette only.

Of course they were working with a source that was made with a PAL colour video camera, but that separation is likely to still be there. It would be harder to do if the film was on BluRay but likely the colour would be great on that anyway.

I don't know what software you would need to take the chrominance of one source and luminance of another (as I'm sure it can be done digitally now), but back in the 90s the Doctor Who restoration team had D1 VCRs to work with. I will see if I can find the link about this.

here is the article I was talking about: http://www.purpleville.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/rtwebsite/colouris.htm

and it came from: http://www.restoration-team.co.uk/

they just have an odd design of website on that site!

Of course as the Hobbit was film material and I don't know what version you are working with PAL or NTSC (although I assume that the VHS and DVD copies you have are the same type as each other) you could try working in 24fps as that is what the original film would have been, or 23.976 if you are using NTSC copies? Even if you are looking to have an NTSC copy at the end it might be better to edit from PAL DVD sources as that would be higher resolution but it wouldn't matter if the colour was from an NTSC VHS as that will actually have more colour information than PAL VHS anyway! Just remember to work in 24fps then output to what you want afterwards then it should be the highest quality you can get in both NTSC and or PAL!

In fact to keep the speed and the resolution higher upscale to 1080p 24 and add in NTSC DVD audio and it should be great!

I know it won't be actually HD quality, but 1080p 24 is the only way you can keep the resolution as high quality as the PAL transfer and keep the running speed the same as the film was at the cinema, whist also not having the 2:3 pulldown artifacts of NTSC.

It's definitely easy to do digitally. My "proof of concept" examples are completed in an ordinary paint program. It has Split Channel and Combine Channel functions to do that part of the work. The free Avisynth, and it's variety of function plug-ins, is the popular work environment that does on video what a paint program can do on stills.

As The Hobbit was a NTSC production, I wouldn't expect any improved quality from PAL sources. PAL releases are (almost?) always mash-ups of the original-NTSC releases, which probably would produce lesser quality.

IMDB says it was made on 35mm film are you sure the PAL version isn't taken straight from the film and sped up to 25 fps? I guess that the PAL version could have been taken from the NTSC version by removing the pull-down, speeding up to 25fps and interpolating from 480 to 576, I guess you would need the PAL version and NTSC version and check the exact same frames against each other?

If it's a native PAL telecine (not a conversion from an NTSC transfer), it wouldn't have any pulldown, it'd just be just a 1:1 transfer from the film running at 25fps instead of 24, to the video picking it up in 50i. Wouldn't it basically be a 25p image broken up into two fields per film frame?

The only PAL DVD release was in Spain. If it was a separate PAL transfer and not a conversion from NTSC, it would also have increased vertical resolution. But since it only got a PAL release in one country, they could have just done a PAL-to-NTSC conversion from the American DVD transfer, like you described (as was often done for stuff that was shot on film but had VFX compositing and post-production done on NTSC video - think Star Trek: The Next Generation, or the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie).

I think it would at least be worth a shot to get that Spanish DVD and find out.

Would a production as early as 1977 that was an animation have any video effects added after telecline? I know that was the case for Doctor Who the TV movie in 1996 (to much annoyance as being a Who fan I would have liked it in HD on BluRay and running at 24fps no pulldown) and the BBC rightly requested that it was converted to PAL using PAL speedup so that the video wasn't juddery, as the first copy was a regular standards convert of the 60Hz NTSC version.

As far as the Hobbit is concerned I guess if there really is only one country that got the PAL transfer that it might have only got a reverse pull-down and speedup to 25fps incased in 50Hz interlaced, or worse a regular standards convert from NTSC 60HZ straight to PAL 50Hz using interpolating.

In which case I would agree that the NTSC version is the only good copy, I would certainly say that about Doctor Who 1996 TV movie that they should have just released the NTSC version worldwide as PAL countries can happily pay NTSC DVDs.

Getting the Spanish version would be good to find out though it might turn out that it has the extra vertical resolution?

Sorry all, I didn't get a notification of new posts...so my reply is a bit late. 

I will not be doing an exact replica of the VHS look. This isn't a complete restoration. Things will be changed...some of the DVD color adjustments, while probably toned down, might be left in my finished version. It's a case much like the SW SE's from '97.....many changes were too big or in your face for people to like them, but some of the less noticeable clean up work was very nice. I might leave in a few things that I feel improve the film, but I will definitely be toning down the neon colors that have been added in. This was a very earth-tone/sepia colored film when I was a child, and now it looks like a brightly colored circus poster....I definitely lean more towards the original look, but would like to find some form of middle(ish) ground.

The Hobbit was fully done on film, so a PAL telecine wouldn't be hard. I'm sure there are PAL VHS releases out there that were done straight from the film being run at 25fps. But we'd have to actually get the Spanish DVD to find out if it's a true PAL transfer...