Ok, so first of all, if this should NOT be posted here I want to apologize and make sure that I’m not trying to violate any rules on this forum as this is a Disney production that is the topic. That being said, I would like to post some thoughts, things I’m doing towards this coming together and (hopefully) get some feedback on the topic.
It has come to my attention that almost all of the cartoons I watched in the late 80s and early 90s, as a kid, have been released in some digital format (usually, at least, DVDs) but one of my favorites (aside from the Maya the Bee series that aired on Nickelodeon), the New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh has never been released. Granted, some of the episodes have had releases as part of other Disney DVD media, but the entire (with original intro) series has NEVER been released. There is a horrible quality xvid torrent floating around of the series, BUT most episodes are VHSrips and all are at very low bitrates.
I know that the series has been popular in many other countries as well, so I started looking for other video sources (regardless of what language they were in) that were of better quality. I found some German and Polish releases, but they were both low quality as well (in some episodes even worse than the English release) and then…
FINALLY, on rutracker, I found a 70GB release of the entire series containing PAL DVD-remuxed episodes and PAL DVB mpeg-2 episodes, all with bitrates between 3800kbps and 8000kbps. Unfortunately, over half of them are in Russian ONLY, are all PAL, and are all interlaced.
So, I am in the process of putting them all together now. I de-interlaced them all properly, slowed them back down to NTSC from 25fps to 23.976fps and am now putting them all together with the original intro, original title cards (most sourced from the English xvid release), all in English, also with all original end credits. Since I have these in four languages (English, German, Polish, and Russian) I am also syncing all sound tracks to the NTSC speed encodes. Converted all of the episodes to AVC at max bitrate of 9000kbps to ensure highest quality, at least for my masters, and am keeping the English tracks in WAV format as to not degrade the sound more by encoding lossy tracks back into lossy.
I started this project about six weeks ago and it will take me, at least, six more weeks to finish this whole thing. The reason it’s taking so long, as some episodes are converted from NTSC to PAL incorrectly and there is some damaged/garbage frames (due to frame blending) that I have to fix. Fortunately it’s not that hard, as those Disney cartoons had lots of duplicate frames, but it is time consuming. Once it’s done, I’m wondering if I should release these in the format I will have for my “masters” (which will make a ~90GB release) or if I should make these into a proper (for the first time) DVD release of the entire thing…
I don’t know yet, guess I’m waiting on some feedback from other people first… If you have questions, suggestions, comments, etc. - please feel free to make a post… Thanx 4 ur tyme… Shadoe