THX 1138 "preservations" + the 'THX 1138 Italian Cut' project (Released) — Page 42

thxita said:

Reinstalling Windows never solved anything. A format and a fresh install is the only good solution but requires backing up all the data

Oh sorry, that's what I ment. My buddy suspect the problem is either memory related or something with the bios...

I'm interested in seeing the color correction you achieve.

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

I'm interested in seeing the color correction you achieve.

Yes, I will definitely share my results with you if I come up with something nice, it can be some time before I do though, depending on when I get my PC back.

Nice results! thanks for posting. :)

I really hate that you're so limited by working in YUV (YV12) colorspace, you have so much more advantage, control and accuracy in RGB, as I understand it a colorspace conversion, YV12 to RGB and back to YV12 is a very lossy process and always not recommended, right?

Going through the Japanese LD from 1986 that SilverWook sent me a capture of, just like the '82 Betamax, you can see that the Buck Rogers segment appear quite close in its colors to the '04 DVD. So that's basically the timing I will go with, if you don't mind.

They squeezed the opening titles for this transfer, if only the cropping had been better it would've been an even better alternative than the DVD titles, damn!

Another interesting thing is that this release was censored just like Skyjedi mentioned could be the case earlier in the thread.

EDIT: Sorry, ImageShack don't like women's breasts. ;)

^^ I find this one pretty funny as you cannot even see anything in this shot. See the pixelated area.

From wikipedia:

"In Japan, it is illegal for any commercial work to display the human vagina and phallic in an explicit manner. Any publications depicting the penis or vagina must be shrink-wrapped and barred from sale to minors. However, it is not uncommon for pictorial magazines to depict nude women with their genitalia airbrushed over in black, and video pornography routinely depicts explicit sex scenes with the participants' genitalia mosaicked out. Until 1991, the entire pubic region, including hair, was deemed obscene and unpublishable. Recently there has been a diversification in the censoring market with there now being several companies which offer it. The government's sexual watchdog group is still considered to be the more harsh though this in many cases depends upon personal taste as most of the companies practices vary, with some opting for the more controversial (as opposed to the mosiac) big black bar. As of now it looks as if the censorship laws will be lessened due to the Internet's pervasiveness and the underground pornography movement which began in the late 1980's. However, it still has a large number of followers in the society as a whole and regardless of opinion it has become somewhat of a "cultural practice". An example would be that even though pubic hair is no longer illegal to depict, many AV movies still frequentlly censor it and hentai art and films do not usually even have it drawn. This has led some, predominantly westerners, to view Japanese pornography as being somewhat pedophiliac and seeing many of the females as being younger than they really are intended to be."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pornography

I was wondering if you were going to spot that. ;)

I have a Japanese LD of The Shining with similar pixelation of nether regions. You can probably guess which scene it is.

Yeah, I just never knew they were that sensitive about it. Is that the LD of The Shining with the different colored titles?

Yes it is. How did you know about that?

You mentioned such a version some time ago when we discussed the color of the THX opening titles. As a huge Kubrick fan and a love of that film it stuck.

Still waiting on my old trusty computer. ;) In the meantime please let me know if this will work or not: http://www.sendspace.com/file/r4m70d

It's a video only sample of the opening titles and the very beginning of the film.

Thanks for the feedback, yeah those white dots are that film damage we talked about earlier, but I cannot see that continuous change in colour/brightness you describe, it may be the fluctuations and the slightly unstable colors and brightness in this old transfer you're seeing, I don't know, whatever it is you're seeing it's not something I have introduced. What bothers me in that scene are the extreme amount of haloing/edge enhancement and video dropouts.

So the transition from the clean opening titles to LD footage aren't too jarring then?

Works for me! Watched it on the big screen. The logo and titles from the DVD blend in very well now. To the casual viewer it will be seamless. :)

Nice to hear that the opening is ok.

Yeah, I can see the unstable color/brightness there, definitely a limitation of the source material.

Another sample: http://www.sendspace.com/file/nea2gy

this one is a short sample from one of the problematic reels with the infamous "Coily" (white dirt) but this time from the UK LD source Jaitea provided. When we now don't get people cut off by the bad cropping the US LD had, I think I can live with it.

I should also mention that I did try to get rid of it with a delogo filter but unfortunately the results weren't good enough, I prefer a clean white speck over a blurry patch in the video. ;)

The evil that is Coily will not die easily. ;)

Is the conversion from PAL to NTSC a long and laborious process?

Came across a THX still on Ebay with an interesting little detail in it.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/CT-PHOTO-auk-489-Movie-THX-1138-/260900565441?pt=Art_Photo_Images&hash=item3cbee2b1c1

SilverWook said:

The evil that is Coily will not die easily. ;)

Is the conversion from PAL to NTSC a long and laborious process?

At least the evil is reduced by half now. 

No, it is a quite fast process, thankfully.

SilverWook said: 

Came across a THX still on Ebay with an interesting little detail in it.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/CT-PHOTO-auk-489-Movie-THX-1138-/260900565441?pt=Art_Photo_Images&hash=item3cbee2b1c1

Nice still. Yeah, another car in the upper corner. Don't think I've seen that one before.

Spaced Ranger said:

With the source already this badly halo'ed, you must de-halo, especially before applying any sharpening, to get decent results. To demonstrate:

I max'ed the settings on "DeHalo_alpha" (rx=3.0, ry=3.0, lowsens=0, highsens=0), a script I copied somewhere -- DeHalo_alpha(clip clp, float "rx", float "ry", float "darkstr", float "brightstr", float "lowsens", float "highsens", float "ss") -- but couldn't make all the halo-ing all disappear. Maybe there's a better version? It softens the picture a little but following up with "LimitedSharpen" (made it pretty strong here, too -- strength=600, soft=true, overshoot=0, exborder=4) nicely brings the crispness back ... for a better overall result. (Of course, you would tweak the settings for better balance than I did for this proof-of-concept.)

The thing is, no sharpening was applied, that is how badly oversharpened this LD is in many scenes, the PAL transfer don't suffer it for the most part but the NTSC is so much better in terms of detail, colors, cropping and in how clean the capture is, so using the PAL is not an option despite the severe haloing in the NTSC transfers. 

I was actually about to try out some de-haloing just as my PC crashed all the time so I was never able to see the results. Thanks for posting those examples, much appreciated. :) The result of de-halo is what scares me, the halos are reduced, not gone but you end up with side-effects that is worse than the original problem, but I'll see what I can do. I can clearly see some "water-color painting effect" in your LimitedSharpen example.

Yeah, sorry but those de-haloed pics look really ugly to me. Look at the de-haloed pic in the middle, it's apparent that the watercolour effect is caused by the de-haloing and then exaggerated by the sharpening. It look like animation.

Yeah, I feel it's gonna hurt the picture quality more than it will help, this is one of the reasons I consider to release a DVD of the PAL LD at a later time when this one is done, either in NTSC or just as it is depending on what is wanted as I think some of you will appreciate it.

The thing that kills me a little about this project is that no matter how fine SilverWook's captures are, I could've produced a cleaner transfer if I had been able to average or make a multi-cap-median to get rid of player generated video noise and video dropouts etc. But that is easy for me to say when we only now know which captures was needed. But I have studied the different captures and choosen the best parts of every one I received to make it the best I could. In the end we will definitely have something much better than is available to us at the moment.

When I get my PC back, there's basically just syncing up the audio that is left to do. I should also mention that nothing special have been done with the colortiming, I just set the black and white level and boosted the colors slightly, I will also get rid of the slight red tint seen throughout the film, most noticable in the white void scenes, I will post some before and after pictures later so you don't think I'm fiddle too much here.

Does anyone have this in their collection?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/GEORGE-LUCAS-THX-1138-RARE-GERMAN-PROGRAM-/380390621769?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item58910c4249

Well, somebody got it. Hope it was one of you guys!