Hello there!
A few months ago, I released ThreeDee Seventy-Eight, a 3D conversion of the Holiday Special. Initially meant as a testbed for refining my 3D conversion workflow, it spawned a several months long project: “restoring” the Holiday Special. After about 4TB of intermediate files and several hundred iterations later (and yes, I mean all that quite literally), I am finally pleased enough with the results to share. Based on the EditDroid DVD, I have significantly cleaned a majority of the analog and digital noise, providing a much cleaner viewing experience. I have also doubled the framerate from 29.97 frames per second to 59.94 frames per second via deinterlacing, resulting in smoother motion and a presentation that feels far more natural and stable than the original interlaced DVD. But how could one call this a restoration if it were only focused on the video? Well, I am so incredibly honoured to announce that this restoration also features a cleaned up STEREO audio track provided by the talented @plaidcookies91! To say it makes all the difference is an understatement; the quality of the audio is simply phenominal! It really livens up the Special in really unexpected ways and allows for the dialog, sound effects, and music alike to shine.
Technical Breakdown
For the first release of ThreeDee Seventy-Eight, I used Topaz Video AI to “clean up” the footage before converting to 3D. While I thought the results looked somewhat okay, after consulting with @SKotK and @Zion, I realised that a more hands-on approach would be better. The first hurdle was deinterlacing. There are many different deinterlacing algorithms, and many opinions of which look better. I decided to test over thirty deinterlacers, and quickly realised they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Some were sharper and more detailed, but also a lot more noisy. Others were smoother and less noisy, but also less detailed. I couldn’t really find one deinterlacer that I really liked, so in the end, I chose the three best looking deinterlacers (QTGMC, MSU, and DaVinci Resolve) and averaged the results to create a clean base with very minimal issues.
All intermediate files were encoded in the lossless FFV1 codec to prevent generational loss as I worked on the restoration. After deinterlacing, I upsampled the 8-bit YUV420 footage to the 16-bit YUV444 colour format to allow for greater precision when averaging and denoising. While each file averaged around 330GB in size, I believe the results were worth the storage and computational sacrifices. I then used Hybrid to help generate VapourSynth scripts which I manually modified. The main VapourSynth tools used were SMDegrain to handle denoising, LUTDeRainbow to eliminate some of the analog colour issues, CAS to resharpen the somewhat softened footage, and NNEDI3 for resizing. After finalising the cleanup, I downsampled the footage back to 8-bit YUV420 and reencoded the cleaned video to H265 for more optimal playback. I also muxed in the cleaned stereo audio track from @plaidcookies91, as well as the subtitles and chapter marks from the EditDroid DVD.
Release
There are currently two versions: v1.0 and v1.1. Version 1.0 contains a minimal amount of analog noise. The majority of it was eliminated by SMDegrain, but I didn’t want to push the denoising too far and create a plastic-like appearance, therefore it has a tiny bit of analog noise left in. Version 1.1 has an additional denoise pass via DFTTest and an additional CAS sharpening to offset some of the blur added by the extra denoising. In reality, there is very little difference between the two, but v1.1 can look a touch bit better up close. Both are at a resolution of 640x480 at 59.94 frames per second.
Version 1.0 (preview)
Please PM me for download links!
Version 1.1 (preview)
Please PM me for download links!
Future?
While I am happy with this release for what it is, there’s a few more things I’d like to accomplish in the future for this restoration. First, I’d like to handle each shot individually. A couple of shots are at a slightly different aspect ratio from the rest of them; I’d like to correct that by individually cropping and resizing each shot. Some shots will also require stabilisation that I didn’t want to apply to the whole project. This should eliminate the handful of cases where the deinterlacers didn’t handle diagonals well, or where they created a moire effect. I’d love to touch up the colour per shot as well, as there are various inconsistencies throughout the Special that I would love to see fixed. Individual frames might also receive manual touch-ups to correct damage and degredation. Finally, I’d also love to crop and downscale the 1080p cartoon segment from Disney+ and either average it with or fully replace the EditDroid version entirely.
To EditDroid (if you are out there): please reach out; I would love to discuss a higher quality release if you are willing!
Credits and thanks!
There are many people responsible for this release, and I wouldn’t be able to share this with you all without the talent of (and in no particular order):
- EditDroid (digitising the Holiday Special)
- @plaidcookies91 (audio restoration)
- @Zion (Holiday Special consultant)
- @SKotK (Holiday Special consultant)
- @That Guy With No Name (colour consultant)
- The many devs behind all the great tools used (Hybrid, VapourSynth, VirtualDub2, DaVinci Resolve)
- You, the audience (eyes, ears)
I wish each of you a happy Life Day, and may the Force be with you, always!