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Star Fleet/X-Bomber (1980) Remastered Edition (a work in progress) — Page 2

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That's good to hear. As you can see, you have a lot of appreciative folks supporting and egging you on.

I don't think we really care how long it takes (although I'm now pushing on to my 40s so don't know how long I have left on this mud ball), provided the end result is worth waiting for, which I'm certain it will be given your efforts to date.

I've added you as a friend on here in the hope that I'll receive a note from you when project X is complete, but if you have a Facebook page we could join or some other idea to keep everyone interested up to date, that'd be good.

Anyway, leave you to it.

Can't wait!

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I recently replaced my files of the French DVD's from mp4 to m4v, because it's much better quality (and oddly enough, some take up less space than before). But that means I kind of have to start over in some ways (really adjusting each Premiere file accordingly). I initially ripped the files I had been using in Mac DVD RipperX which worked alright, but like a twat, I ripped the PAL DVD's in a NTSC framerate (29fps); while they looked fine with no ghosting or pulldown, at least that I noticed, I still felt the need to redo the ripping.

The farther I go into this project, the more I learn and am constantly making adjustments.

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Sorry if things seem inactive. I've been busy both with work and I've been remastering under the hood, not updating much about it.

Most work goes into reinstating and color correcting the "Next Episode" sequences, which weren't present on the French version. I've been working mainly in converting and cleaning the versions on the Japanese DVD from NTSC to PAL. Unfortunately, the first and last scene on those versions are always covered by large Japanese text and thus not usable for my project. Episodes give varied results, but mostly look awful... Here's an example of what I mean; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GwJgHUcGps

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I suppose the first is https://i.imgur.com/Wq1C9w8.png (next episode preview) and the other is the episode title? That seems to be the norm.

(Mods: I tried to insert unicode text, it failed, then I tried adding an image link and got a blank page instead of the insert image menu. 😕 That’s why I wound up having to just leave a url in there instead.)

 

Edit by Mod to show the picture linked above in this post:-

"Right now the coffees are doing their final work." (Airi, Masked Rider Den-o episode 1)

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Yeah, that’s exactly what it says. The end one roughly translates to “Do Not Miss”

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I want to give an update.

My Macbook is giving me troubles. Given it's still running, I don't think I'll be losing anything, but I still need to take it in. I suspect them to be RAM issues, the symptoms seem indicative of that, but I'm not an Apple Genius.

Anyhow, the project is on hold again. But no worries, I do have the project files I've updated up to this point and video files backed up on flash drives. Other stuff such as audio and my frame by frame remasters are on mediafire too.

So sorry this just seems to continue and continue. This whole thing is really a learning curb, the more I continue, the more I learn about video editing. If I released this to the specifications I understood back in 2012/2013, videophiles would be slaughtering me.~Bladez

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Thanks for the update. Some of us are subscribed to this thread and following your efforts with keen interest.

And what you describe is completely understandable when involving computers and time. :)

Keep up the great work you're doing and can't wait to see the finished article.

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I don’t have a whole lot of updates to really go on. I need to take a break every now and then so I don’t lose my mind completely.

I do have a request for help though. Is anyone insterested in this project knowledgeable in virtualdub / avisynth?

I want to see if anything can be done to enhance these footage pieces from the UK DVD that I have no other choice but to use for the project.
https://www.mediafire.com/?8djg6866vkajp2o

That’s really only if anything can even be done with them to make them better looking, which I kinda doubt. All I know is with Premiere Pro, I can’t do much else but sharpen and “color correct” (I put that it in quotations because most of them only end up looking mediocre, usually due to the bad exposure of these clips.)

I’ve tried using virtualdub, and can’t get it to even import due to its limited file types.

On another note, I mentioned a long time ago that I was going to be using DNR. Well, don’t worry about that anymore, because it takes learning to realize the repercussions of that. It’s a bigger pain in the arse than it’s worth. I will use it to reduce grain in some of the really grainy episodes, but that’s about it.

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Glad to hear you’re stepping back from using DNR. It will be easier for you and the results will be better. I’m looking forward to seeing how this turns out.

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Sorry for lack of updates. School takes up time, as well as my roller coaster of depression. I haven’t posted as many updates as I had hoped when I started this thread.

I’m trying to work on a portfolio page for on my webs page, though am having troubles thanks to their page limit counter having a bug - apparently 5 and 10 pages are the same thing…

I made this for it, an example of the overscan the French master has in comparison to the Japanese, which kinda sucks, but the English masters are roughly the same with overscan. It’s not like you lose anything important in this overscan, so it doesn’t bother me all that much.

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Interesting. The overscan is unfortunate, but not a big deal when you take into account how much better the quality is. Keep up the good work! I know these projects must seem daunting and I can’t imagine how time consuming they must be.

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Oldfan said:

Interesting. The overscan is unfortunate, but not a big deal when you take into account how much better the quality is. Keep up the good work! I know these projects must seem daunting and I can’t imagine how time consuming they must be.

Pretty consuming. I remember when starting this I thought I’d be done in months. Hell, if that were the case you’d get an avi quality product with incorrect/overly blue toned next episode preview scenes and Premiere’s crappy built in noise reduction effects.

I also plan on doing the original Japanese episodes separately. I could edit them to sync wih the English dub, but that would require audio butchering (the Japanese version was 24fps which would require a speedup to 25fps) and re-editing (Japanese version and English don’t use the same opening/closing plus there’s some minor scenes cut from Episode 8) something I’m OCD about. Wouldn’t take much more work really, though. I’m in the process of cleaning the Japanese audio, which has a strong hiss and a lot of film crackle to it. The English audio was a lot more simple in that the hiss was easier to get rid of with a simple lowpass filter (which it needed since the treble was strongest).

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Discotek seems to do a good job with stuff.

"Right now the coffees are doing their final work." (Airi, Masked Rider Den-o episode 1)

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Good news that it’s getting a US release later. But don’t let that discourage you. We have no idea what they will use for masters, compression, etc., so we have no idea how it will look. Hopefully they will do a great job but I’m still looking forward to your release.

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Oldfan said:

Good news that it’s getting a US release later. But don’t let that discourage you. We have no idea what they will use for masters, compression, etc., so we have no idea how it will look. Hopefully they will do a great job but I’m still looking forward to your release.

I have no plans on giving up. We’ll just say this is the PAL Remastered edition then. Even so, if Discotek remasters it, I’m doubtful it’s going to be the same as the French remaster since they have to get their materials from Japan (at least that was what was mentioned in the fandompost posting.)

I hope that it’s still a step up from the UK, because then I can purge the atrocious looking color correction attempts from the project. Here are some samples of ones that I’m particularly disappointed with the results. Originals are on the left




Even as someone who’s overly harsh on himself, even I know I cannot take the blame for the final results here. I can only do so much to those blurry looking and badly colored shots, and they end up sticking out with the much sharper looking masters from the French and Japanese DVDs.

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I just got Discotek’s release today. And it’s really as I expected; the quality is about the same as the UK DVD. There are a couple differences though;

-The intro and end credits are grittier looking. I think the UK DVD may have actually touched the intro and end up. It was always clear to me though that they copy/pasted the same version of the intro/end to every episode on the UK DVD. Here they look unaltered, or more like how they looked on the “Space Quest for F-01” credits did on the Japanese DVD.
-The commerical intermission frames with the “Star Fleet” logo are intact.


Other than that, Discotek’s masters are pretty much indistinguishable from the UK DVD apart from being NTSC, with the same fuzziness, color grading problems and brief audio cutouts. What I am grateful for is that the editors didn’t slow the footage down to 24fps, which was my biggest fear. It’s interlaced to 30fps which is proper procedure, keeping the speed/pitch. When things get slowed or sped up like that, that makes it about unwatchable for me, with few exceptions.

The menus are nice, but nothing to write home about compared to the UK release. There are no extras except for the “Making of” Special on the last disc. They should’ve at least included the Brian May music video. Then again, there’s probably some royalties to be paid in including that…

Am I disappointed? No, I’m really quite happy that we finally got a release at all. It’s been 8 years since the UK got it, so it’s about bloody time. I’ve never found these transfers at all unwatchable. They’re just subpar.

So, if it’s not already clear, the French DVD is still the best quality out there. With that said, the remastering project goes on…

I’m just about done with the project, but there are a few things I need to do. Waiting for this DVD release we can cross off that list. I need to get my burn drive fixed for one, and find someone who could do an S-VHS transfer for a UK Star Fleet VHS I got my hands on (the Thorn EMI one with Episodes 4 & 5). The thing about the UK VHS tapes is that they clearly came off of 35mm transfers rather than the 16mm ones that the TV airings and DVDs came off. It may be for absolutely nothing because for all I know, the tape could look awful.

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Thanks very much for that review. I was wondering when this was going to get released. I’m rather disappointed by the news honestly. I was hoping it would have been closer to the French masters. I already own the UK set, so now I’m wondering what to do. I’d certainly appreciate the NTSC, but with the image itself looking no better, I wonder if it’s worth the money. It sounds like your presentation will likely be the best presentation when it is finished. I have a 55" 4k TV, and a good DVD can still look outstanding on it upscaled. More compressed videos like avi can definitely be more of an issue for my TV, with compression artifacts being much more apparent. Since you are of course re-encoding these, I wonder how much compression will factor in?

If they had used the French masters I would have pounced on this official release.

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Oldfan said:

Thanks very much for that review. I was wondering when this was going to get released. I’m rather disappointed by the news honestly. I was hoping it would have been closer to the French masters. I already own the UK set, so now I’m wondering what to do. I’d certainly appreciate the NTSC, but with the image itself looking no better, I wonder if it’s worth the money. It sounds like your presentation will likely be the best presentation when it is finished. I have a 55" 4k TV, and a good DVD can still look outstanding on it upscaled. More compressed videos like avi can definitely be more of an issue for my TV, with compression artifacts being much more apparent. Since you are of course re-encoding these, I wonder how much compression will factor in?

If they had used the French masters I would have pounced on this official release.

I was hoping more that it would offer more to my project. My remaster at this point is probably as good as it’s going to look. The scenes that come from the UK DVD I enhanced, but still stand out pretty bad compared to the sharpness of the French and Japanese DVD masters.

My rips are m4v and ripped in Handbrake, most approximately at 600-800MB. I don’t notice any differences, whatever loss is minimal and whatever problems on my videos are also present on the DVD. The reason they’re not MPEG, I don’t know why but most free rippers for Mac are such a pain and don’t offer MPEG as a ripping option. I’ve previously had them as avi’s and later converted to mp4 when I had to switch from Windows to Mac. As my eye for quality and better understanding of framerates evolved when working on this, I re-ripped them back in 2015. If you’d like, I can send you the raw MPEG 8 minute test render I did of episode 1 last year to see if it holds up for you. Just PM me for it.

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Just wondering how this is coming along. I’d love to see these when they’re finished. Any updates?

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Same here - reading through this thread shows just a glimpse of the hard work and time required that goes into making remastered versions by volunteer fans.

Well in to Bladez636 for undertaking and seeing through such a project too 😃

A little patience goes a long way on this old-school Rebel base. If you are having issues finding what you are looking for, these will be of some help…

Welcome to the OriginalTrilogy.com | Introduce yourself in here | Useful info within : About : Help : Site Rules : Fan Project Rules : Announcements
How do I do this?’ on the OriginalTrilogy.com; some info & answers + FAQs - includes info on how to search for projects and threads on the OT•com

A Project Index for Star Wars Preservations (Harmy’s Despecialized & 4K77/80/83 etc) : A Project Index for Star Wars Fan Edits (adywan & Hal 9000 etc)

… and take your time to look around this site before posting - to get a feel for this place. Don’t just lazily make yet another thread asking for projects.

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Hi everybody,

To be honest, there’s been no real progress, for varied reasons. One is having found steady employment, another is focus on other projects, but mainly indecision.

This popped up in April of last year on the sfxb forums; http://www.xbomber.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1332

To put it short; somebody got ahold of 16mm reels of the Japanese version, wanting to do an HD remaster of his own. I’m not stopping my own project, if anything I’ve wanted his help so I could possibly clean up some scenes for my project - but he hasn’t posted since.

Many will likely be disappointed that my project is staying at standard definition (576p PAL) because I don’t have access to anything HD for it - not to mention; the Japanese version has text over scenes that the dub doesn’t, and I’m having a hard enough time trying to color-correct / clean up the scenes from the UK DVD to look presentable to even standard quality.

I don’t think there’s any miracles that can be pulled here, but I want to ask for some advice on if there’s anything I can do to these scenes to make them look better? (color correction aside) Or if anybody wants to do their own tinkering with these; http://www.mediafire.com/file/yh1c6o6qobk9z31/sfxb-16mm-clips.mpg

Don’t know if that’s against terms to share that, but it’s just a compilation of all (or pretty much all) the scenes I have to utilize off the UK DVD’s poor quality transfers.

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I fiddled around a bit with the mpg.
Comparison 1
Comparison 2

It looks better in motion. 😃

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^ that looks impressive, nice one 😃

A little patience goes a long way on this old-school Rebel base. If you are having issues finding what you are looking for, these will be of some help…

Welcome to the OriginalTrilogy.com | Introduce yourself in here | Useful info within : About : Help : Site Rules : Fan Project Rules : Announcements
How do I do this?’ on the OriginalTrilogy.com; some info & answers + FAQs - includes info on how to search for projects and threads on the OT•com

A Project Index for Star Wars Preservations (Harmy’s Despecialized & 4K77/80/83 etc) : A Project Index for Star Wars Fan Edits (adywan & Hal 9000 etc)

… and take your time to look around this site before posting - to get a feel for this place. Don’t just lazily make yet another thread asking for projects.