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REVENGE OF THE NERDS (* unfinished project *) — Page 3

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 (Edited)

Good stuff. I just dug out my DVD, too, so I’ll rip the stereo track for that and make it available soon.

Its gonna be a great year, Gilbert!

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Keeping my fingers crossed that these sources all come together nicely for you.

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I’m so looking forward to this release the more I see it.

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The Beta tape unfortunately suffers a lot of background noise. The noise level goes up immediately after the CBS/Fox intro and the file begins, gets worse somewhere in the middle and down a bit the rest of the film. I have no idea if this is from the ravages of time, exposure to magnetic fields or just really poor mastering. I dug out some other Hi-Fi tapes I have just make sure the deck was working properly. It is.
However, I think the audio for the phone number scenes can be cleaned up. Here’s a sample, and this is pretty good compared to other parts of the film.
https://mega.nz/#!6081VBZT!Mfth37o0q4m6qBBw9-BioSla_BeyXvzzWOg317TxKGk

If the LD audio is better, than this is academic of course. But I’d be up for capturing a VHS Hi-Fi as there are some sealed early 2000’s copies on Ebay. The phone scenes could be patched from the Beta.
On a side note, did the Mission Impossible theme music always seem to start a second late into the panty raid seqeunce? This occurs around a reel change and may simply be a video mastering error.

Forum Moderator

Where were you in '77?

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SilverWook said:

The Beta tape unfortunately suffers a lot of background noise. The noise level goes up immediately after the CBS/Fox intro and the file begins, gets worse somewhere in the middle and down a bit the rest of the film. I have no idea if this is from the ravages of time, exposure to magnetic fields or just really poor mastering. I dug out some other Hi-Fi tapes I have just make sure the deck was working properly. It is.
However, I think the audio for the phone number scenes can be cleaned up. Here’s a sample, and this is pretty good compared to other parts of the film.
https://mega.nz/#!6081VBZT!Mfth37o0q4m6qBBw9-BioSla_BeyXvzzWOg317TxKGk

If the LD audio is better, than this is academic of course. But I’d be up for capturing a VHS Hi-Fi as there are some sealed early 2000’s copies on Ebay. The phone scenes could be patched from the Beta.
On a side note, did the Mission Impossible theme music always seem to start a second late into the panty raid seqeunce? This occurs around a reel change and may simply be a video mastering error.

The LD is pretty nice sounding, I’m not noticing what you’re describing from the beta. The LD has no chapter stops, so I’m on my third capture of the film but I’ve been able to capture the deleted scene 7 times (thanks to rewind). Hopefully I’ll be able to median the caps and get it as close to the master used as possible. Here’s hoping it does turn out to be a good year!

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I’ve been told I have sensitive ears, so if you can’t hear the background hiss and hum, that’s a good thing? 😉
Like I said, other parts of the tape got pretty bad.
Glad to hear that the LD sounds good. Analog audio from such early titles can be all over the map sometimes.

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Where were you in '77?

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Hi U.N.!

It’s been a while. Any interest in picking up this project where it left off?

Even syncing the (cut) audio to the (cut) blu ray would be a step in the right direction.

I haven’t watched NERDS since I started this topic so I’m thinking a re-watch can’t be far away.

I’d hate to have to screen it in SD or with the blu ray’s terrible audio quality.

I have the DD2.0 audio from the DVD available for anyone who’d like to take a stab.

Cheers.

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I’m still watching with eager interest. Sadly I lack the skills or resources to assist in the technical implementation, but I’m here to offer encouragement - hopefully without being too pushy.

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I would love to see this scene restored as well. It has always been a pet peeve when they removed it.

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Hey y’all. If anyone is still working on this, I’m rooting for ya! Wish I had the skills myself to help out.

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Any more progress on this guys?

I picked up a pristine copy of the laserdisc on eBay for ~$30.

Just watched the scene in question today and then watched the chopped footage on YouTube.

Horrible.

It’s sure nice to have access to the original, but an HD copy would be fantastic!

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 (Edited)

I’ve been bothered by the butchering of the yard sign scene for literally decades and won’t watch anything except the original VHS. I actually bought what I thought was a NIB 1985 VHS release on Ebay so I could have a fresh replacement for my tired original. To my surprise, I discovered the sign scene was both 1) Intact and 2) The phone number was expertly digitally removed. I mean perfectly. I did some more research and it turns out this VHS was part of CBS/FOX’s “Summer Fun” release of 8 VHS films in 1990. Revenge of the Nerds was one of those 8 films. Identical box as the original, which is why I was fooled.

Anyway, now I’m angry because there is NO excuse for them to have been cutting the scene when the 1990 version existed.
I posted the video on my twitter @kipthegifted asking “why?”.

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Interesting discovery, Lewis(!).

Quite coincidentally, a friend of mine messaged me this weekend asking if I had Nerds on blu ray because he couldn’t find it on any of the streaming sites. I myself noticed a while back that it was absent from Disney+ here in Australia (whereas the sequel is very much available on that service). I seriously hope that the movie isn’t being suppressed by it’s new owners due to one (or more) of it’s more “problematic” scenes. I mean, Bachelor Party is on D+ here, too, so it is rather odd that ROTN1 is nowhere to be found.

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Anyone know why this project stopped abruptly?

Dr. M

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Hello, all. Long-time lurker, very rare poster.

I have the laserdisc of Revenge of the Nerds. I bought it not long after the first DVD came out, with the express purpose of preserving the phone-number scenes. I later made my own digital video, starting from the Panty Raid Edition DVD, with those scenes restored. I also created two audio tracks: English, with audio from the laserdisc spliced in, and the Panty Raid commentary, padded with some silence to keep proper time with the restored movie.

The good news: The laserdisc, and presumably all other 4:3 sources, aren’t purely pan-and-scan. As is often the case with 1.85:1 movies, Revenge appears to have been filmed full-frame and then matted to its intended aspect ratio. From what I could tell, the home release removes those mattes but also zooms in slightly, making the final 4:3 presentation a combination of open-matting and pan-and-scan (or perhaps just plain cropping). With those scenes reframed with the rest of the DVD’s widescreen video, they still end up with a small amount of pillarboxing, but they’re wide enough not to be very distracting. Certainly not as distracting as the unrestored butchering!

The bad news: I’m not the world’s greatest video editor, and the laserdisc doesn’t have the world’s greatest video. Even though the resolution is not dramatically different, the restored scenes are noticeably softer and a bit washed out in color. Maybe somebody could work better magic than me, or give me an idea of what to do if I were to try this again. I did try to glue the restored scenes into a Blu-ray rip, but even after resizing them and re-encoding everything with x265, the clips didn’t want to play nice when glued together. A more thorough Blu-ray remix could be possible, but I’d want to start with the best possible laserdisc restoration.

In the meantime, I could make my current cut available to anyone interested, if there is a good way of doing so. The file is a little less than 2 gigs.

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This was on Cinemax and AMC+ about a year ago with what looked like a 4k remaster. From what I remember the “House for Sale” scene was the same butcher as the BD unfortunately.

Only other way to properly restore the butcher job would be to get a 35mm print.

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Just popped in for my bi-annual post of encouragement for anyone who wants to help move this forward.

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Numenor2007 said:

Just popped in for my bi-annual post of encouragement for anyone who wants to help move this forward.

Here, here!

Spaceblackknight said:

This was on Cinemax and AMC+ about a year ago with what looked like a 4k remaster.

Interesting. It’s not on D+ here in Australia, despite Bachelor Party (same studio, same year, same rating) and Nerds II being quite available. I believe they’ve buried it, probably because some of the content is, as they say nowadays, “problematic”.