HUGE thanx to Andrea (yet again, LOL) for all the advice and suggestions in the e-mail exchange we had. It turns out that, yes, the blu-ray release has completely crushed blacks regardless of scene, even in the daylight, bright, outdoor scenes, and the footage there is absolute garbage, on top of the fact that it has a WAY different color-timing from the OTR. So even though it may have a higher bitrate and slightly better detail and sharpness, it's still unusable. So, keeping that in mind, I ran numerous tests on different settings for the HDTV source that I'm forced to use. After a few hours, and a broken cup I threw at the wall from frustration, LOL, (just kidding, but the urge was there)... anyway... I finally got a very nice result where I applied a very slight filter to decrease brightness/contrast (where, now, the blacks look black, but not crushed, and the whites are not too bright to the point of being blown out), I applied a very slight, selective, saturation boost, where the skin tones look more vibrant now and some of the "washed" out scenes look better without over-boosting ANY of the colors. I, also, applied, the slightest (literally) sharpening to the video (where I used the first change to the right of no sharpening at all, a level of 1.1%, as anything more looked like sh*t and no sharpening left the image a little soft, so used that as a happy "medium" and in many test I concluded along with a few other viewers here, both on an 1080p HDTV 46 inches in size and the 100 inch projected image onto the wall from my projector, that it looks better this way.... bla,bla,bla...LOL) WOW, side-tracking, sorry guys but I'm trying to cover all the steps I had to go through... I found out why there were some 10 frames more than the DVD OTR that I'm syncing the audio from. There are a couple of scenes where the last 3 frames and first 2 frames where either doubled on the HDTV release or missing, depending on scene. I managed to fix these transitions, by means of cutting and, in two cases, dupping one frame as I wasn't going to upscale a slightly more cropped DVD sources frame (BOO, no way!) Then I applied a REAL 35mm film grain plate and am now encoding it, using the AVC codec, at a bitrate of 27000kbps(which, apparently, is the max that sony vegas will allow me for the project and codec) and am nearly the middle of finishing the final rendering...
As you can see, this is a slow process and after 17 hours, I still have nearly 24 hours left to go. Once the video is finished, I will verify that it all looks good, mux the English audio from the R4 Brazilian NTSC DVD, mux the isolated-score track (that came as an option ONLY from the extras menu of the DVD, which is a 5.1 AC3 file at 384kbps, which is a cool extra) and since I have it the Brazilian Portuguese track from that same source, and then... well, I'm wondering if anyone has other languages of the OTR that they would like me to include. I looked at my R2 DVD but it's cracked and useless now :(
So I guess I'm asking if anyone has other language tracks they could share if they wanted me to include. I will also include the English subtitles from the R4 DVD, that I'm using as my reference point and am open to anyone sharing others for inclusion of the release. Once finished, so far the release is ~19GB so it will fit nicely on a BD-25. Screen shots before/after, and more news to follow after encoding finshed.... peace... :0)