Just to keep you posted with how things are going, I’ve got the first four episodes pieced together.
Each episode has a short segment missing in the middle on the French DVDs, I’m guessing where the advert break would have been. I’m deciding what to do on an episode by episode basis with this. On episode one for example, I used a short segment of the UK DVD and copied another segment from the same episode. In episode four, I chopped a few frames out and edited the audio very slightly.
Over the weekend I tried various upscaling algorithms and I’ve settled on my favourite, so will progress with the rest of the episodes using that method. I also did a whole episode in 50fps at the original DVD resolution. The difference wasn’t hugely noticeable, but I might give it another try on an upscaled episode as the shorter upscaled clips I did previously looked really nice. That won’t happen until I’ve finished the whole series though.
In case you’re interested, a full episode takes about 9 hours to upscale to 720p using my preferred algorithm. I think increasing the frame rate took about 14 hours at the original resolution, and will take longer at 720p.
I’m hoping to get episode five done tomorrow and should have the first six done and upscaled by the weekend.
If anyone wants to see a full episode, either in the original resolution or upscaled, just let me know. In the meantime I’ll keep plodding on.