You’re new here it seems, so do you maybe want to tell people generally what you use? DaVinci R, or Avisynth, or ???, ???, ??? (If you want to keep that kind of thing your secret, totally fine of course 😃)
Happy to! Didn’t want my initial post to be too waffley, so tried to keep it short.
I don’t use any tools that are all that exciting, really. All my colour correction and restoration efforts are done in Davinci Resolve Studio (with Dehancer) and Audacity. Davinci Resolve is just incredible. I’m at a stage now with my colour corrections that what I would once have accomplished with a dozen nodes and power windows, I can accomplish with a much smaller, simpler and more stable node tree.
Dehancer I used to touch up very small things, and to cut corners with some colour timing on some of the more extreme shots. Its grain algorithm, while yes not desirable, has been a good tool to help hide some ugly compression artifacts (something I hopefully won’t need when I have the 4K!) which even the best blu-ray release has plenty of.
Audacity has been used to adjust and clean up (lightly) the Dolby Stereo theatrical mixes so that the 25fps PAL audio can sync to the 24fps Blu-Ray.
I’ve attempted to use DrDre’s Color Matching tool to absolutely zero success. I just don’t have the patience or the know-how on how to properly crop and align the source images.
I do see a future re-grade with the 4K UHD as a source to be a future definitive version to this project. However, if I were to have the chance to scan any film prints, and archive as many different releases of this movie as possible, I’d take it.