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Song Of The South - many projects, much info & discussion thread (Released) — Page 8

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Sorry for the delay in getting back on this but I've been damn sick lately.

Anyway... just for giggles I snapped some side by side comparisons.
The first frames are from an old boot DVD version of SotS.
I found it as a torrent on Demonoid, but I believe it was from a website called SongoftheSouth.com or something (don't worry the site is long dead).
It's better than a lot of the versions I've seen and does not have really bad blooming/blurring colors or any hard subbed foreign language. It is 29.97fps interlaced. I tried to grab the cleanest frames.

The second frame is the new BBC broadcast with the odd field discarded and then the half-sized image resized to 480 lines.
You'd think the BBC version would lose out since you are using 288 lines to make 480... you'd be wrong.
Both seem to have a lot of compression artifacts so that can't be weighed in the comparison.

http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/8310/1oldij8.jpg
http://img484.imageshack.us/img484/6883/1bbcfl9.jpg
http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/8164/2oldhn6.jpg
http://img63.imageshack.us/img63/5826/2bbcyo5.jpg

I'll try the uber interlaced idea (as described above), but I think this method will actually turn out a passable progressive version.
The PAL release might look better, but it really contains no more video information than what I've done (since every other field is a blurry composite).

Dr. M

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Those look great! I would love to get a copy of that.

Take care, Greg
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Duh, I need to correct my idiocy (I'm surprise no one called me on this).

I commented about uberinterlacing (interlacing interlaced footage) but I neglected at the time to mention (or remember for that matter) that I have to do a deinterlace BEFORE resizing down to 480 lines.

The only reasonable method in this case would be motion adaptive (since blending would make everything look like it has trails (worse than before)), but even still... it's ugly jerky movement with artifacts, and that's before the pulldown.

When I finish what else I'm working on I'll grab the rest of this dvd and get to work.
But the even-fields-only look to be the way to go. It's sort of a manual Bob deinterlacing and it doesn't look too bad.
I'll see about posting a clip later.

Dr. M

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Doctor M, is the interlacing the sort of thing that was discussed in this thread?

If so, you might be able to process it using an AVISynth function called Restore24. However, the threads on Doom9 confused the hell out of me; I think it will take quite a bit of reading to work out exactly how this function is supposed to work.

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Bingo Moth3r, thanks for the lead. That's exactly what was going on.
I don't know if the filter will produce better results than what I've done manually, but it sounds like better minds than mine have been at work on the issue.

Edit:
This is restore24's method... does this sound wrong to anyone else?

1. Bob the video to 50fps
2. Detect fields that are blends
3. Replace those blended fields with unblended neighbors
4. Decimate the cleaned stream to 24fps

In my mind that means he separates the fields... I was doing that.
Detects the blended fields... seems to be the odd field only. Was doing that too.
Replace with unblended neighbors... why exactly?
Decimate... This only makes sense if there wasn't a speed up... which I can't confirm or deny but it sounds like a percentage of clean unique frames might get discarded.

Can someone give me the final runtime of the BBC version (I only have the first VOB)? That should indicate if there was speed up or not.

Dr. M

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1hr34min24seconds.

I've got better things to do tonight than die! - Springer, Transformers the Movie

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Re-heh-heallly.

So then Restore24 is our guy. IMDB and Japanese laserdiscs releases (on LDDB.com) all say 94 minutes is the original runtime.

That means there is no speed up here, just them whanking around badly with the frames.
I'll have a test clip of Restore24 at work (which I've now added dgdecode's postprocessing for deblocking and deringing).

1 frame per second encoding with that filter... yikes.

Dr. M

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Edit: Nevermind... just found a newer version of Restore24. Trying again.
Edit's Edit: Ok no I don't like Restore24.
Instructions are thin, but what I got out of it, although great for screenshots is very jerky looking.

I'll need to think about this more.

Dr. M

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Originally posted by: meedermow
Here we go - well worth the wait !

This is obviously just a preview - Jmoomer has said its about 97% done, so any minor flaws will be picked up in a final sweep, though any feedback would be appreciated.

I think it's a winner !

http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/9393/previewsotsop9.jpg




Where is the high resolution cover? I would like one. If there is no problem.

Remember, Remember,
The 5th of November,
The Gunpowder Teason and Plot,
I know of no reason,
Why the gunpowder teason,
Should ever be forgot.
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Ok, using an unsupported release candidate of restore24 I've produced a fairly acceptable looking clip.
The bitrate is less then half what the final version is likely to be, because my upload speed is a bit slow.
I also used some denoising/deblocking/deringing.
Let me know what you think.
It's 3 minutes of some random 10 second clips from the first .vob file.

Discuss.

http://rapidshare.com/files/17660659/SotSRestored24.mpv.html

Dr. M

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You have entered too many wrong codes. Please try again in a few minutes.
I hate RapidShare.

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Yeah their new codes are damn hard to read sometimes.

Dr. M

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The clip is very, very impressive! I noticed a little blending of frames/fields when I examined the video frame by frame, but that's just a minor issue that's barely worth mentioning. When the video is playing, the motion looks very natural. I never thought that a bad NTSC to PAL conversion job could be converted back to NTSC with such good results.

Great job, Doctor M!
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Yes, there are some sections with large numbers of blended fields all together (especially during the animated scenes) that make it unavoidable that some will be kept.
Also, the software uses a threshold to determine if a frame is blended or not so that'll mean will some show up... but theoretically the best of the source is preserved and the worst discarded.

Not ideal, but pretty darn good considering what we've got to work with.
In fact I'd say it almost looks better than the PAL version because the large number of blended frames can show discernible trails during motion.

Dr. M

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Would it be possible for someone to further clean up the video, particularly the animated segments? I mean isn't animation easier to restore than live action? I'm just thinking about the cleanup that was done for Grave of the Fireflies by Central Park Media. They used DVNR and it the before/after shots were impressive although I noticed smearing in a few scenes like there was with the Star Wars THX versions.
By the way, the Sing A Long Songs dvd "Pongo and Perdita" has Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah on it. I know it's considered bad to use varying quality levels for a film presentation but I still think it could help. Someone did mention the song sounded off so that could be used for comparison.

Take back the trilogy. Execute Order '77

http://www.youtube.com/user/Knightmessenger

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the sounds is a little off in that song when I compare the Mentor dvd with my dvd that was made from a pal vhs -> ntsc via convertor. The video in the Mentor dvd blows the old dvd I have away.

the pal VHS tape was pulled out of the factory shrink wrap, played the one time through a pal -> ntsc convertor and the colors were manually adjusted at the beginning of play.

I've got better things to do tonight than die! - Springer, Transformers the Movie

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Doctor M, your restore24 results look pretty damned awesome if you ask me! Considering the flaws in the source material, the quality is phenomenal. I've had the CBEE version for a couple of years now and it's nice, but I've been on the lookout for something better. This is, undoubtedly...

Thanks for all the time and effort you're putting into this...
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So after much testing, I've decided to drop in the asharp filter to bring up some of the detail lost in the clean up.
I'm usually opposed to edge enhancement, but in this case it looks quite good.

Now I have a tech question for the crowd.
The restore24 filter is VERY SLOOOOOOW.

To do a 5 pass encoding will probably take me something in the neighborhood of 30 hours (give or take)(estimate is based on an OPV encoding of 5% of the film).

Since the filter is the limiting factor is there anything wrong with me instead taking the avisynth output and encoding to a lossless format (HuffYUV or Lagarith) and then doing a mulipass CCE encode from the lossless version? I have to figure that'll cut the encoding time in half or better.

Is there anything wrong with that idea?

Dr. M

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If there are no comments or concerns I'm going to go ahead with the .avi method and see how it works.

Dr. M

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I replied yesterday but the forum seems to have eaten my post.

There's nothing wrong with that approach; I've done the same thing myself with heavy processing scripts.

The only thing to watch out for is that colourspace conversions are not lossless. Although it's only a theoretical loss and not something I've ever noticed in practice, it's probably still a good idea to avoid unnecessary colourspace conversions. What this means is that if the output from your script is YV12, make sure that lagarith is configured to use YV12 format. Huffyuv can only compress YUY2 or RGB.

BTW I finally managed to download your sample. There is some faint ghosting visible on the cartoon segments, but I suspect (without actually seeing the source) that's probably the best you can do with it.

It looks very good. I'll have to dig out the Cyber-EFX version I downloaded and make some comparisons.

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Thanks for the info Moth3r. That's exactly what I did. AviSynth was outputting YV12, and I set Lagarith to YV12 to avoid loss from colorspace change (which is theoretical and nothing I've ever been able to see myself either).

The ghosting in the animated sections are quite odd. Although it seems to only occur about every other field in live action portions, there's something like 50% more blended fields in any section with animation. Sometimes many consecutive.

I don't know if it has to do with the original film, or something else. Since if I threw out 100% of the blended fields there would be large jumps in scenes, it's a necessary evil.

Restore24 is quite intelligent. It compares fields and determines (based on the number of edges in a field) the most likely blended field (and in our case the worst of the available ones) and keeps the best. So although there is still _some_ blending, you can definitely see smoother motion.
The original has ghosts that lead motion and is really ugly to my eye. That issue is largely absent in the final video.

Between that and the sharpening, I'm going to grudgingly say that my final video might be superior to the original...

I've tried to contact Mentor to get his blessing on this project and see how he feels about the use of his name in my final release... but to no avail.
I believe this might become another in the "RtW" series. :-)

(Oh and the posted test clip is not sharpened. It was just a test of restore24's function.)

Dr. M

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Ok, my release has been dubbed the "NTSC Restored Mentor-BBC Edition". Any concerns or complaints about that?

Also, screwing around trying to decide on a menu I amused myself with something:

http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/5292/vaultdisneyju7.jpg

I was considering using the above for the menu (without the Disney Vault text) and having the word Play with some pliers... but that's a little too preachy for my taste. :-)

I'm having a hard time finding clean art to make a menu from. PM me if you can help out.

Finally... I'm thinking of using some music from Splash Mountain for the menu since it's cleaner and has a better soundfield. I know it's a bit of a sacrilege.
If anyone has any serious issue with that, speak now.


Dr. M

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ROTFLMAO...

That's GREAT! But you're probably right... something more "neutral" would wear better with successive playings of the disc...

First thought that comes to my mind is the artwork from the early-70's(?) movie poster: Uncle Remus, the two kids, Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox & Brer Bear coming over the hill, with a very simple background. In fact, that artwork is featured on the entrance page of SongOfTheSouth.net - which is still there, BTW! (A post or two in this thread led me to believe it was taken down. Indeed, when I tried to access the site, I couldn't, but when I found a link to the aforementioned entrance page, there it was!) Anyway, there's plenty of artwork (albeit at varying resolutions) to be found there...
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The post you're referring to might be mine about SongoftheSouth.com.
I'm pretty sure it was a different page that specifically only sold bootlegs of the film (I believe from the Korean un-hardsubbed laserdisc).
That site is gone, but I'll plow through the .net one for art.

Dr. M

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Long time lurker here. I am glad to see we're going to have something replace the LD version of Song of the South. I have a bunch of stuff that I had ready to make a SOTS DVD, but my source material fell through. If there is anything you need, let me know. I even have 2 DVD covers ready to go.