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Droids Series Complete Set. Reconstruction from multiple sources. V1.0 is out! (Released) — Page 8

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LexX said:

I try to cap my Finnish Droids for you as well, but at the time being they are now elsewhere… Hopefully you’re not in a hurry. 😃

No hurry on my part. I imagine it is going to take me a good year or so before I finally get my SVHS deck repaired and new captures completed. I recently moved so still kinda living out of boxes at the moment.

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Mway1 said:

I thought I would do a proof of concept anyway on that Stormtrooper frame on the first post.

https://imgur.com/a/NJGnFPb Here it is in its original resolution, and at 1080p with two different settings of Noise Reduction.

I used this website http://waifu2x.udp.jp

I appreciate the effort of this, but I am generally not a fan of these for VHS rips. Too much warpsharp for my taste. Looks too plastic in a weird way. this is what happens when people run amok with it.

But the more I am thinking about it I may take my raw AVI captures and resize to 720p (960x720 with 4:3) and then re-do all post processing, minor noise reduction and cleanup (maybe some minor line darkening) at that resolution. Then release a 720p mkv set.

Anything beyond 720p is probably just circlejerking at pixel count, IMHO.

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Why resize to 720p? What resolution are you recording to anyways? You should just leave it in SD IMO.

Nobody sang The Bunny Song in years…

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Danfun128 said:

Why resize to 720p? What resolution are you recording to anyways? You should just leave it in SD IMO.

I have to agree (to a point).
If you could go back and capture again at a higher resolution that would probably provide the best possible result.
Upscaling to 720p may make the filtering marginally more effective, but I think that benefit would be lost by the fact the image will be scaled twice (once to 720p then again when viewing to either 1080p or 2160p).

You could turn it all on it’s head though… Capture again at highest resolution you can, run all filtering, then resize back down to SD. I know of professional restoration projects that followed that work flow for DVD releases.

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Danfun128 said:

Why resize to 720p? What resolution are you recording to anyways? You should just leave it in SD IMO.

9 times out of 10 I would agree with you. If somebody was just tossing a tape into a DVD/VCR combo and pushing “record” to output to DVD there wouldn’t be much to work with. Those recordings are generally awful and full of macroblocking and usually plain shit.

To start with I’ll be using a VCR off of this list. Then I’ll be doing a YUV 4:2:2 AVI capture saved to huffyuv or lagarith. Trying to get as close to a lossless VHS capture as possible even though it is technically impossible, but you get my drift.

When I capture a single 1.5 hour VHS tape of 4 episodes it is around 40-50gb per tape. That is a lot of color/chroma/luma information for avisynth and virtualdub to chew on to come up with the best possible image before converting to x264/x265 or mpeg2.

Not to mention the reality is avisynth scripts are a waaaaaaay better scaler than a dvd player or a tv. For all the same reasons 2006 GOUT upscale scripts are a thing. A lot of the popular scripts floating around out there will actually resize a smaller image to a larger resolution, do their work, and then resize back down to give the line enhancers/smoothers/darkeners more to work with on a larger canvas.

So I’ll give it a whirl. If the results are worth it I’ll move forward with it. If it is a waste of time I’ll move on from it.

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Baobab Archiver said:

I have to agree (to a point).
If you could go back and capture again at a higher resolution that would probably provide the best possible result.

Can’t really do that with VHS. Any capture card pulling off composite or svideo will be clipped at 480p (or 576p for PAL). Only other option is to use a DVD/VCR that also has component or HDMI outputs, but then you are just using whatever digital scaler is on the DVD/VCR combo unit instead of software on a PC.

I’m sure there are some sort of ways to “hack” the recording software to save a larger resolution, but not sure if that is actually reading that much more information from the VCR across the composite/svideo cable.

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hi,

could someone please hook me up with the links for this set?

have a nice day

ph.

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Was this ever uploaded as DVD-compatible MKV’s as mentioned in the first post? I have only found it as MP4’s.

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Has anyone tried using ESRGAN to upscale cartoons? It might produce promising results.

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If you need help upscaling, let me know- I can get it handled.

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Lukeade815 said:

If you need help upscaling, let me know- I can get it handled.

Do you think you could test a frame from droids in AI Gigpixel?

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It is extremely gratifying, Ted, to see you finally lay your hands on that elusive Mexican VHS. I think I can safely say we’ve all been rooting for you on that. It’s amazing how hard some of these things are to find.

–SKot

Projects:
Return Of The Ewok and Other Short Films (with OCPmovie) [COMPLETED]
Preserving the…cringe…Star Wars Holiday Special [COMPLETED]
The Star Wars TV Commercials Project [DORMANT]
Felix the Cat 1919-1930 early film shorts preservation [ONGOING]
Lights Out! (lost TV anthology shows) [ONGOING]
Iznogoud (1995 animated series) English audio preservation [ONGOING]

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Thought this was an interesting find and haven’t seen this R2-D2 & C-3PO appearance before
Star Wars R2-D2 & C-3PO with Tony Danza (1985) - ABC Saturday Sneak Peek & Fun Fit Test
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-oF2sXOQvfI

Also might be of interest, Ewoks and Droids promo montage https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Nkzhg1W6-ks and Star Wars Droids & Ewoks UK VHS Promos https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=im0DAhg-QOs

I’d also like to thank retartedted for his fantastic efforts 👏

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Hi everybody!

This is really a great project. Could someone send me the links to those files?
Would be really great.

Thank you very much.

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I’d be interested in these files as well if someone could help me, what is the easiest way I can get them?

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The same files were uploaded to youtube a long time ago by a user named Thall Joben (not me).

At the same time, I am neck deep in my ground up re-capture and re-master with the addition of the new sources. I have updated capture equipment as well as an updated process. So you may want to wait on those. Your call.

I started in earnest about a month ago once all of my new equipment was in place. I’ve finished the first episode and moving on the the next. Will probably be another month at the very least.

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the ugnaught said:

At the same time, I am neck deep in my ground up re-capture and re-master with the addition of the new sources. I have updated capture equipment as well as an updated process. So you may want to wait on those. Your call.

I started in earnest about a month ago once all of my new equipment was in place. I’ve finished the first episode and moving on the the next. Will probably be another month at the very least.

Oooohh! This will be good!

Visit my *NEW* Star Wars on Video Collection site:

http://www.swonvideo.com

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Yep, seeing a lot of improvements this go around. Hoping this is my final version.

Here is a quick screenshot for comparison.

img

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Something to look forward to! Thanks!

“Before the Dark Times. Before the Prequels.”

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Did you guys see the quality of Droids in Disney+? Really beautiful!
preview
preview1
preview2

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First compelling reason to subscribe, this could be for me. What resolution are they in?

“Before the Dark Times. Before the Prequels.”

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MattMahdi said:

First compelling reason to subscribe, this could be for me. What resolution are they in?

1920x1080 (with black bars each side)