Originally posted by: mcfly89
I've been spending the last week or so learning Avisynth and VDub to tackle this project. Here's my plan thus far for a composit edit of the extended Waterworld footage:

Holy crap! That looks sweet!

The de-noise really did a job. And it was needed. Looks like the noise was from fine static.

The color artifacting looks like it might be a sync timing problem from the broadcast chain. There are filters for those color problems, but I don't know much about them, offhand. I'll try to remember to search them out.

I've gotta (try to) dig out my R1 copy--- but I don't see how that could be anything but open-matte there! And, in those shots, they didn't even zoom in like most open-mattes. (I'm a sucker for open-matte).

IMDB says "Panavision Cameras and Lenses" which means it's not Panavision anamorphic. "Spherical" reinforces that.

The Encore cap uses standard pulldown, so it'll be simple to IVTC. There's significant combing, though, because a Time Base Corrector wasn't used for the cap - the horizontal lines aren't aligned with each other.

The SciFi cap is NTSC resolution, and framerate, but has a weird pulldown. I'm not sure what's going on there. I don't really know much about weird pulldowns. But I suspect this one can be IVTC'd. Doesn't look like this one had a TBC, either. Anyway, there's at least one NTSC->PAL method that loses information, it can probably be IVTC'd to look good, but it wouldn't match on all frames.

Did you capture from Encore directly to DV, or was is from a tape? If it wasn't from tape, then it wouldn't have needed a TBC, and should look a lot better right off the bat. Your screencaps look much sharper & more detailed, and I don't see any combing, so it looks like like direct to DV. DV capture methods tend to be tough on highlights & shadows, but standard VHS automatically throws away tons of detail and is lousy for color.

Too bad Encore didn't show all the deleted scenes. But I don't think the difference should be too jarring.

I wonder if there's anyone with a PAL vcr, a TBC, and a good capture setup, who could recapture from Lorang's tape, if he's willing to send it to them?

I wholeheartedly agree that blurring the logos would be worse than leaving them alone. If they were partially transparent, then there's de-logo filters that could, at least, de-emphasise them, but they appear to be opaque.

I just realized that I'm causing confusion. We're using two of the definitions of "composite". You're talking about editing different sources together. While I've been referring to the stuff that Adobe After Effects does - combining pieces of two different images. Anyway, I know Vegas has compositing capabilities, and I don't suspect it'd take any advanced functions to composite between sources to lose the logos, if the color-correction is accurate enough. Should just need a feathered mask.

Of course the two sources would have to have the same color-correction (what I was talking about in my earlier post). After I posted, I realized that those automated color correction methods might do the job. And, then I realized that you'd already asked about them.

You'd align the pictures to each other, and maybe do a final color-tweak, within Vegas, to make them match, probably using "levels". Then you'd let the clean portion, of another source, replace the logo.

I don't see any logos on the torrented Encore cap. And the quality looks pretty similar to the SciFi cap. So it might be the choice for the deleted scenes that aren't in your Bravo cap.

If you don't want to delay things by doing the compositing bit, or if it turns out to be a lot of work, due to color-correction, or whatever, then you're the boss. But I hope you might give it a try. Thankfully, the Bravo logo isn't on screen full time, since it's huge.

Edit: I haven't used Vegas, and I don't know how to frameserve to Vegas, there's a plugin for reading mpegs, though.