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Idea & Info: The Brave Little Toaster DVD - Ideas on how to restore? — Page 7

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Okay, my 1080p upscale of the PAL DVD (synced to the NTSC 5.1 audio) is available by PM. Here is an album of frames from the film so you can get a sense of what to expect: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Cu6UBCCqG7nrD7GbA. I’m pretty happy with how it came out. At times it nearly looks like native HD.

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Octorox said:

Okay, my 1080p upscale of the PAL DVD (synced to the NTSC 5.1 audio) is available by PM. Here is an album of frames from the film so you can get a sense of what to expect: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Cu6UBCCqG7nrD7GbA. I’m pretty happy with how it came out. At times it nearly looks like native HD.

Excellent upscale. This one’s a keeper. 😄

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Having gotten to sit down and look at it properly, wow! It’s dramatically better than the source material. The amount of noise removed is stellar, and entirely appropriate for this sort of movie. The animation is very clean and you can see the pencil lines as such rather than aliasing artifacts. I’d totally believe that this was an official HD release that used the same old master.

There’s still film specks and dirt and things like that, and I don’t know if an automated removal of such things would work well or not.

This is a wonderful release, and something I’ll be glad to have stored on my hard drive, as a big piece of my childhood. When I look over the movie with the question of its original aspect ratio in mind and aware that it had a widescreen form, I can’t help but wonder if it was done with an open matte. That’d be relieving to know.

Big thanks, Octorox.

My stance on revising fan edits.

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Glad you enjoyed it! As for the dirt and scratches, I think that would require some level of manual cleanup, which is beyond my time and abilities right now. If someone wants to tackle this, I can always share my ProRes file of the upscale without a grain layer applied.

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 (Edited)

So, it’s come to my attention that I can use the Proteus AI model in Video Enhance AI to retain the original grain from the source rather than having to add an extra grain layer in post. For the purposes of preservation, this might be the better way to go…

EDIT: On the other hand, retaining the original grain has the side effect of retaining more sharpening and compression artifacts. The grain doesn’t look entirely natural and uniform. Since this is animation and doesn’t have a lot of fine detail that is lost with DNR, the original approach might have been the best…what matters most, authenticity to the source or a pleasing image?

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TheFerbguy said:

Venny said:

https://i.slow.pics/Yjl40KuG.png
https://i.slow.pics/nn6NDNce.png
I did a quick encode to clean up chroma artifacts and decimate to NTSC on the German DVD and synced it up with Hifi VHS audio from the 91 VHS release. I think I did a decent job. Of course, Stereo LaserDisc audio would be superior.

Is the DVD surround sound not good?

I think it’s pretty mediocre. I just prefer the original theatrical stereo mix

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Venny said:

TheFerbguy said:

Venny said:

https://i.slow.pics/Yjl40KuG.png
https://i.slow.pics/nn6NDNce.png
I did a quick encode to clean up chroma artifacts and decimate to NTSC on the German DVD and synced it up with Hifi VHS audio from the 91 VHS release. I think I did a decent job. Of course, Stereo LaserDisc audio would be superior.

Is the DVD surround sound not good?

I think it’s pretty mediocre. I just prefer the original theatrical stereo mix

I think the 5.1 sounds okay (It really doesn’t use the rear channels much at all to be honest) but if anyone can capture the Laserdisc audio I would happily add that to my version.

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Hal 9000 said:

Without seeing each, I’d imagine the ‘pleasing image’ is better. DVD-locked grain sounds unappetizing, and it wouldn’t be on a negative.

Yeah I’ve decided not to bother messing with the upscaling model. Most people (including me) seem to be pretty happy with the version I already released.

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 (Edited)

(For anyone interested in this kind of thing, this post is just my blab and pics of clean up of…)

I’d never seen this movie and thanks to Hal 9000’s posting the above screengrabs I decided Octorox’s new version seemed like an “It’s now time” opportunity. 😃 Octorox was nice and gave me his version…but in an above post you see him say “As for the dirt and scratches, I think that would require some level of manual cleanup, which is beyond my time and abilities right now.”

When I started watching the film, I found what this was referring to, and it was a shame. The opening of the movie (but NOT anything after!) — the first almost two solid minutes of this print — was afflicted by damage ala a dancing line, and it was definitely an attention magnet, rather ruined the opening of the movie for me, which is a bummer because this film has a quite neat, atmospheric opening. 😦

But I can see why Octorox didn’t try to fix this damage. Indeed, it would have to repaired by hand, frame by frame (photoshop or similar) and it turns out we’re talking around 2400 frames!!! Who would subject themselves to that kind of insanity?

Long story short, I told Octorox I would dive in to take a shot at this crazy task, as both a challenge of sorts and to give full life back to this movie’s opening that was being robbed of its cinematic artistry/immersion. Could I actually do this whole thing without burning out? I gave myself a week and a half or thereabouts to see how much I could get done. Perhaps I’d end up only finishing the most crucial bit (the first minute), or maybe I’d pull off some miracle.

A big difficulty was that most of the the work required patching. I’d initially hoped I could just quite quickly airbrush away the dancing line in each frame, but that turned out not to be possible without looking terrible. So except in a very small percentage of the frames, I had to add many steps to each frame’s clean up to get something that had a chance of not being just a different kind of attention magnet.

Here we are a week and half later and I’m finished with everything (even if all is not at Hollywood-level perfection). I can’t believe it really. 2309 frames photoshopped in ten days. 😮 (Note that in addition to eradicating that #&^%ing dancing line I also cleaned up hundreds of obnoxious specks, as in things that are present for only a frame or two: dirt bits and white spots/blotches.)

Thanks for reading if you made it this far. I obviously wasn’t paid for this work and it was a lot of effort and I wanted to let the world know about it in this little spot, even if in the grand scheme of things in the world this is rather a nothing accomplishment.

Thanks to Octorox for making his fantastic home release version of this film, surely the best one ever available on home video to this point in time. 😃

Images to show

dancing line damage

One of the more grungy frames, before and after… (Grab/slide center bar left&right)

original vs. end result compare 1

The frame with the most specks in the project

original vs. end result compare 2

Short vid if anyone wants to see a compare of the things in motion

https://mega.nz/file/30AnzSTa#1fr8aPFR5fgSsTL4l3vpGPsknxk4zUkkER3YZuVvb4U

LightWave = fun times with gfx for me 😃

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I’ve incorporated WXM’s cleanup work and reuploaded my upscaled version. The link is the same as the old one, available by PM.

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Thank you both for restoring the Brave Little Toaster. It really is marvelous.

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 (Edited)

WXM said:

(For anyone interested in this kind of thing, this post is just my blab and pics of clean up of…)

I’d never seen this movie and thanks to Hal 9000’s posting the above screengrabs I decided Octorox’s new version seemed like an “It’s now time” opportunity. 😃 Octorox was nice and gave me his version…but in an above post you see him say “As for the dirt and scratches, I think that would require some level of manual cleanup, which is beyond my time and abilities right now.”

When I started watching the film, I found what this was referring to, and it was a shame. The opening of the movie (but NOT anything after!) — the first almost two solid minutes of this print — was afflicted by damage ala a dancing line, and it was definitely an attention magnet, rather ruined the opening of the movie for me, which is a bummer because this film has a quite neat, atmospheric opening. 😦

But I can see why Octorox didn’t try to fix this damage. Indeed, it would have to repaired by hand, frame by frame (photoshop or similar) and it turns out we’re talking around 2400 frames!!! Who would subject themselves to that kind of insanity?

Long story short, I told Octorox I would dive in to take a shot at this crazy task, as both a challenge of sorts and to give full life back to this movie’s opening that was being robbed of its cinematic artistry/immersion. Could I actually do this whole thing without burning out? I gave myself a week and a half or thereabouts to see how much I could get done. Perhaps I’d end up only finishing the most crucial bit (the first minute), or maybe I’d pull off some miracle.

A big difficulty was that most of the the work required patching. I’d initially hoped I could just quite quickly airbrush away the dancing line in each frame, but that turned out not to be possible without looking terrible. So except in a very small percentage of the frames, I had to add many steps to each frame’s clean up to get something that had a chance of not being just a different kind of attention magnet.

Here we are a week and half later and I’m finished with everything (even if all is not at Hollywood-level perfection). I can’t believe it really. 2309 frames photoshopped in ten days. 😮 (Note that in addition to eradicating that #&^%ing dancing line I also cleaned up hundreds of obnoxious specks, as in things that are present for only a frame or two: dirt bits and white spots/blotches.)

Thanks for reading if you made it this far. I obviously wasn’t paid for this work and it was a lot of effort and I wanted to let the world know about it in this little spot, even if in the grand scheme of things in the world this is rather a nothing accomplishment.

Thanks to Octorox for making his fantastic home release version of this film, surely the best one ever available on home video to this point in time. 😃

Images to show

image

One of the more grungy frames, before and after…

original vs. end result compare 1

The frame with the most specks in the project

original vs. end result compare 2

Short vid if anyone really wants to see a compare of the things in motion

https://mega.nz/file/30AnzSTa#1fr8aPFR5fgSsTL4l3vpGPsknxk4zUkkER3YZuVvb4U

Amazing work. Looking at just the comparison you posted for the before and after its like someone cleaned the projector lense.

Did you edit each frame for the entire movie, i’m imagining something like photoshops content aware fix tool?

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hermionegranger said:

Did you edit each frame for the entire movie, i’m imagining something like photoshop’s content aware fix tool?

I did only the first 1m45s or thereabouts, and my method was relatively primitive so definitely not the entire movie. (I don’t even know what that tool you mentioned is! 😃) Much of it was copying bits from the right or left of the problem spot to do patching, or when I was lucky (no gradients, grain, detail, etc. to worry about) I could just do airbrushing. But there were a number of spots with zooms where I had to re-size patches. Ugh to those cases and how long they take! (But they do look good when done.) I wish I had super software to make it easier, but I don’t. (My photoshop is old…but it gets the job done)

Largely what I did was stuff that most regular paint programs do: just load in a frame (image file), deal with the bad spot, save it…over and over and over…then eventually connect all the frames back together in an avi.

Beyond that damaged section (the in opening), Octorox’s up-scaled version looks GREAT! I’d almost say that any ten seconds of the part I worked on has as many blemishes as the whole rest of the movie combined, it looks that good/clean.

LightWave = fun times with gfx for me 😃

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I just registered here after watching this topic for years waiting for someone to release a restored version of this movie from my childhood! I was amazed to see someone attempted an AI upscale and seeing the screenshots put a smile on my face. This might look like a total newbie question but I can’t seem to find the option to PM you Octorox. Can I please have a link sent to me? Thank you very much for your time making this happen!

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This looks fantastic, thank you both Octorox and WXM!

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 (Edited)

There’s a major problem with Octorox’s video that I feel should definitely be fixed. I was told by the director Jerry Rees in a Facebook message conversation that the heavy red tint during the climax where Rob is stuck on the conveyer belt is supposed to be there. The restoration team for the PAL DVD removed it by accident. He told me this:

“My art director Brian McEntee and I worked out a progressive increase in the red tint - which builds as the action gets more intense, then fades once Toaster has successfully stopped the crusher. But the film lab kept trying to take the red out. Very frustrating. Brian had to keep tabs on them for every shot - letting them know that his carefully chosen series of filters had been mounted on the camera shot-by-shot, so the negative would permanently hold our intentions. But the lab was so used to “normalizing” live action footage, rather than accepting the purposeful stylizations of animation footage that they never truly got out of the way. The film print we showed at Sundance looked very close to what I had hoped for. The Disney home video release (which introduced a side-to-side wobble throughout the opening that was NOT in our original footage) at least kept my basic intention for the red - although they didn’t go through a true color balance check with Brian and me.”

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Someone named Venny has scanned a 35mm print of the Brave Little Toaster. Here’s the “City of Light” sequence in glorious 35mm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA23739nxYI&ab_channel=Venny

Note that this is from a proxy encode from his scanner and the raw scan files have yet to be released.

It’s about time that we finally watch the film in true HD!

a guy who minds his own business

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Just a heads up that I’ve added the LaserDisc audio courtesy of Greg Z to my PAL DVD-sourced upscaled 1080p release. You now have the option to select the uncompressed Laserdisc digital audio or the 5.1 AC3 audio from the NTSC DVD. The release is available in the same place.

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Hey folks!

Huge thanks to Octorox, WMX, and Greg Z for your combined efforts in giving The Brave Little Toaster the love it deserves.

I know many of you will be purists who want the absolute best rendering of the original film in its unaltered state. But, I also suspect that at least a few of you have little ones that you don’t want seeing a nearly-topless woman. So, in much the same way as WMX did with the intro, I painstakingly edited each frame to censor the upscaled version in a manner similar to the censoring that was done in the US DVD release.

I don’t have cloud hosting, but if Octorox or someone else would be willing to host this variant, I’d be happy to supply it to them so others can benefit from my work.

Before and After Images of Original Upscale, Censored Upscale, and Censored US DVD

Details:

  • I’m not a professional or even hobbyist artist. I think the final rendering looks natural next to the other animation, but if you don’t, well, I did my best! Upon playback, there was a bit of jitter between some frames that I didn’t like, but when I compared to the original, a similar jitter was there, so I think that’s just me hyper-focusing on something that probably wouldn’t stand out to a normal watcher.
  • I’ve re-encoded the film into HEVC/x265 (A 40-hour software encode at quality of RF18, preset of VerySlow for maximum quality at minimum filesize). There is a VERY slight loss of sharpness, but even in the comparison photos you really have to look to notice it. When things are in motion you’d be hard-pressed to notice a difference. The benefit? Nearly 80% reduction in filesize, from 20.0GB to 4.23GB. Nice for folks like me who are trying to maximize space on their media servers.
  • I was painstaking in ensuring that I didn’t drop frames or add frames as a result of my edits. Even so, the original upscale has a length of 1:30:11.989 and my censored version has a length of 1:30:11.614. After all of my checks I’ve come to the conclusion that my version just has fewer black frames at the end of the file, because both the original and my edit are at the same place in the credits at 1:30:08.659, just before it fades to black. Must be a consequence of the re-encode.
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Feel free to share your re-encoded and/or re-censored versions as you please (with credit). Personally I prefer the larger file size to preserve the film-grain look and to maintain blu-ray compatibility for those who want it.