Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN) - SD Episodes restored in HD (On Hiatus)

UPDATE: I’m a little more than halfway through the first season. Exporting as mp4’s was resulting in far worse quality, so these will be released as HD mov files. I’ve also decided to pretty much go in order and release each season as I complete them.

I’ve started work on a fun little project to restore all of the SD episodes of AVGN in HD. My process is simple, using DVD rips (the blurays are far lower quality for some reason) upscaling in Topaz Video Enhance AI to HD, then a bit of color correction in Final Cut Pro. Some of the earlier episodes will have to be stitched together from low quality youtube sources as some scenes were altered on the DVD versions, i.e. the Rocky review from season 1 having clips from the movies removed to avoid copyright infringement.

This project, like many of my others has no specific scheduled release date, and will be extremely time consuming. I’ll probably release episodes in groups of say 3 at a time, and the final project will be folders of mp4 versions gathered by season.

Sounds neat. I haven’t seen a lot of these since they were first uploaded, would be fun to go back and watch some in HD.

Ooh, interesting. I’ll keep an eye on this.

Assorted screenshots from Season 1. Please note that since these were originally shot on Mini DV, there will still be a bit of interlacing no matter what I do. At least, I haven’t been able to eliminate it entirely. However, I think the noise level, details and color have been nicely improved.

Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde

The Karate Kid

Back To The Future

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

A lot of the gameplay in the early episodes was pretty poorly recorded (using composite and a DVD recorder). If you wanted you could probably re-create it in emulation and get much better quality.

stwd4nder2 said:

A lot of the gameplay in the early episodes was pretty poorly recorded (using composite and a DVD recorder). If you wanted you could probably re-create it in emulation and get much better quality.

Good point. I mean, the first episode “Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest” is literally just gameplay footage with no footage of the Nerd whatsoever. The gameplay footage may not be suitable for Video Enhance AI, but instead upscaled using a Nearest Neighbour algorithm such as PointResize in Avisynth.

stwd4nder2 said:

A lot of the gameplay in the early episodes was pretty poorly recorded (using composite and a DVD recorder). If you wanted you could probably re-create it in emulation and get much better quality.

That seems a bit overkill. The game footage is turning out surprisingly clean, so I think it’ll be fine.

Here are some screenshots.

Top Gun

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Back To The Future

So episode had that were removed in the DVD versions BUT, some episodes had scenes added in the DVD version (ex, the Rocky review) so what I think you should do is combine all of them to create the ultimate version of each episode.

Damn! great result 😄 hope you keep up through the rest, the videogame results are surprisingly good as well, I think it suits it more looking like that with the composite noise, rather than sharp emulator pixels for what it’s worth
-thanks,

Mango said:

That seems a bit overkill. The game footage is turning out surprisingly clean, so I think it’ll be fine.

Here are some screenshots.

Not bad, that’s better then I expected.

YoshiKiller2S said:

So episode had that were removed in the DVD versions BUT, some episodes had scenes added in the DVD version (ex, the Rocky review) so what I think you should do is combine all of them to create the ultimate version of each episode.

I think it’d be better to have 2 versions, an original version and a DVD version.

YoshiKiller2S said:

So episode had that were removed in the DVD versions BUT, some episodes had scenes added in the DVD version (ex, the Rocky review) so what I think you should do is combine all of them to create the ultimate version of each episode.

I think just doing the original youtube versions interests me more, at least for now.

what will you do about the tmnt 3 movie review

Will you also upscale the Nintendo World Championship episode? Can’t seem to find it in any other resolution other than 360p.

Avatar_Emil_Borg said:

Will you also upscale the Nintendo World Championship episode? Can’t seem to find it in any other resolution other than 360p.

Yes. In fact, that was the last one shot in SD before he permanently switched to HD.

nobodybutjarjar42 said:

what will you do about the tmnt 3 movie review

There’s still an uncut original version on Cinemassacre, which I have downloaded and will use as my source.

any update

should you show the snapshots yet?

This project is on hiatus as I continue to work on several other projects. I’ll start work on it again sometime next year.

Mango said:

This project is on hiatus as I continue to work on several other projects. I’ll start work on it again sometime next year.

take as much time as you need.
bye

You could recreate the game footage in HD

friendsofmine said:

You could recreate the game footage in HD

Mango said:

stwd4nder2 said:

A lot of the gameplay in the early episodes was pretty poorly recorded (using composite and a DVD recorder). If you wanted you could probably re-create it in emulation and get much better quality.

That seems a bit overkill. The game footage is turning out surprisingly clean, so I think it’ll be fine.

EDIT this is wrong
the Odysee.com uplouds are better then the dvds

https://odysee.com/$/list/1cfc4aabbe66d9c80cadc07adf3641100f8a4a97