Long time reader, first time poster!
I have been dabbling with film restoration and sound mixing for a couple of years now.
I just purchased Diamant Dustbuster + from Germany a few months ago and have been getting into restoring both HD and SD footage from films “off the shelf” to get my feet wet before I buy a film-scanner.
For one of my first projects, I chose one of my all time favorite films to “remaster.”
For this project I took the currently available Blu-ray source and did some additional spec/dust removal and corrected the black level throughout. The major difference on this project here is also the audio. I went back to the original orchestral recordings of John Morris’ score to produce a Surround track for the film which was always mixed in Mono, even though the music had been recorded in three track stereo.
First I made sure to align the stereo music track properly so as not to create an echo when placed against the original audio track, then balanced the volume between them. I used the existing mono mix as the center channel, then I placed the stereo music track and created a light surround ambiance soundtrack with a few atmospheric effects such as wind or rain when called for and mixed these in all 5.1 channels. I also created an extremely light room-authentic reverb that is mixed extremely low but does provide a more natural feel on the vocals.
I also was able to use some score cues that were cut from the film when I felt appropriate and fixed a lot of audio anomalies that occurred during post-production, since a lot of looping was done, the lips don’t always synch and the audio quality jumps sometimes mid sentence due to poor ADR mixed or hard cut right next to live set audio. Once the project was done I culled some bonus features from Youtube, created some of my own (Including a before and after comparison reel) and then I created my own menus and encoded using Adobe Encore and Apple Compressor in Dolby 6.1 EX surround, while also including the original Mono audio track, an alternate music only track, and an alternate effects only track.
I also paired the feature “Murder by Death” with the disc as a fun Murder-mystery double feature and got it all onto a BD-50! I’m really proud of it!
Let me know If anyone is interested in seeing clips from the film or cover art. Since I’m new, I don’t know all the rules yet, so please help me out and let me know what the best way is for me to go about sharing my work!
