The Intro Credits

As it is well-known, Kubrick (at least up to and including The Shining) used to do complete localization for credits for his movies. The Shining is no exception in this matter. The entire intro sequence is in German.

I had two sources of German credits. One was the VHS version, the original theatrical sequence was used. Unfortunately, it has a rather bad quality.
Then, the version by TV station ZDF. This has been re-created digitally.

After several attemtps of upscaling VHS footage, I was quite unhappy with the results. Neither the AI approach, nor my AVS filters could produce anything of at least of a decent quality, even after color-correction.

So I decided to take the English footage and rotoscope out the titles that need translation. For that, I broke up the relevant sequences into single frames and edited them one by one.

My first approach was using Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill feature. That worked quite okay, however, it had noticeable flaws at high-contrast areas. Then it tends to produce artefacts which I deemed unacceptable. They are especially visible in motion (see the random piece of rock at “L” in “STANLEY”). But what’s even worse, are the boundaries between the mountains and the sky. That was quite inacceptable.

After that, I had to refine my workflow. The German TV version has proved quite helpful, as the credits are rolling there at different locations and with a different speed. Therefore, I could combine the two footages (albeit after alignment and color correction) in order to cover up the credits in original footage.
As there were still differences in color, brightness etc., I have combined the two approaches. After that, some retouching by hand frame-by-frame still remains though.

Here a video sample I am quite content with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9CjRbTVCas

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