Lately I've just been working on cleaning up the other SciFi exclusive scene - Ash and Arthur's first confrontation. It now looks just about as good as I can get it - and I am now 98% happy with it, like I am the Windmill scene. I tell ya - cleaning up those compression artifacts is extremely tricky. Video filters can certainly clean up the video, but it comes at the destruction of detail. Since the SciFi footage is merely standard definition, there's very little fine detail and most of it is easily smudged and smoothed away by your average video filter. Luckily, I've been using the avisynth filter, FFTD3D, by Fizick - FFTD3D Info . It nicely cleaned up a lot of the video noise and compression artifacts in the Windmill footage that I uploaded a few months ago - and now it's done a nice job with the Ash and Arthur scene. When used right, it can preserve most of a video's detail while suppressing video noise and compression artifacts.
Today I watched both of the filtered SciFi scenes on a 100" screen, being projected onto by a 720p projector - which was connected to an upconverting OPPO DVD player - and the results were very good. That isn't to say that the footage looks like it was mastered from HD or anything like that - but considering that the footage is originally from a highly compressed, standard defintion DirectTV source, it looks damned good and holds up nicely!
And mcfly89, thank you for showing what your recording of AoD looked like. I think it's fascinating to compare different recordings of this movie (yeah, I'm a nerd). Anyways, the corresponding images on my first post were from an earlier period when I had decided to kind of redesign the color scheme in the movie. I thought the movie would look better if it were more colorful and technicolor-ish - sounds crazy right? I just think of the movie as being more in-line with an earlier period of fantasy filmmaking - I honestly could see it has a fantasy film from the 50's or 60's. So I did kind of pretty-up the footage by altering the colors. I've long since abandoned that idea and I'm going to remain true to the original color scheme. The only problem is that each dvd has a different look.
The Anchor Bay Theatrical DVD and MGM Director's and European DVD's usually have a bluer/cooler look - while the Universal DVDs (original non-anamorphic, and new HD-DVD/DVD combo) usually have a warmer/orangish look to the footage. The TV version sometimes has a warmer look, but not always - the night scenes look more like the MGM DVD footage. So it's a bit of a toss up as to what the movie should actually look like. It's not a big deal - just gives a few options as how to present the movie.
Anyways, I don't have time to write a guide as to how I've done it all, but definitely look at that link in this post about FFTD3D - learn about it and avisynth. Also - as for how I'm getting the vobs into vegas - I open the dvd files in DGMPGDec (lots of options in this program, use it wisely) and then save the project as a d2v file, and then I convert that d2v file with VFAPI Reader into a usable, dummy AVI file than can then be used in Vegas. You can find DGMPGDec and VFAPI Reader at Video Help's Tools Section So that takes care of the video - dealing with the audio is one whole other headache.
Also - the Time Warp shot of Ash - as far as I know - isn't in any official version of Army of Darkness. It was just a nice little addition that OCP threw into his version. As far as I know, the version shown on WGN is exactly the same as the SciFi version.