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New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh - Preservation Project (* unfinished - lots of info *) — Page 2

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SH*T, I'm triple-posting now, LOL...

Well, thanx2Andrea for exchanging some PMs with me on the subject of this preservation. After carefully going through the episodes that are frame-blended (turns out that it's almost 1/4 of all the episodes) I have realized that in 80-90% of the cases there is NOTHING that I can do to fix the problem as the issue happens most is fast changing scenes (where every 2nd and 3rd frame is blended into the 2nd frame - I know this as I have a low quality xvid German release that is properly converted to PAL but I can't use as source as the quality is sh*t which can be seen in some of the screenshot comparisons above) and duplicating frames there to solve the frame-blending doesn't work as the picture "jumps" too much (gets jittery) because there are actual frames missing then. So I have decided to leave most of those "as is" (except where I can duplicate a frame due to little motion and there being actual duplicate frames to work with)

That being said, some of the audio syncing has been a b*tch because I am syncing 4 (four) different audio tracks to each episode (most of which come from VHS sources and many have to be tempo adjusted for the PAL/NTSC conversion) I might be repeating myself on that note, but some have really proven to be problematic (especially when I have to do a 2% slow-down instead of 4.096% to sync the video which tells me some of those tapes were played on some funky VCR's because the speed there make NO sense at all) Then there are missing parts of audio (especially in the ENGLISH releases) at the beginning (2-4 seconds) around commercials (before and/or after, also 2-4 seconds) and the very end (also 2-4 seconds) where I have to replace the audio (fortunately for now I have managed to make the transition seem-less) from one of the other three language versions, depending on episode. This doesn't affect dialogue (in all cases but one, where the boys mom says "Christopher Robin?" with a German accent because the English audio is missing,) and I am just filling in missing music. Still this adds to the time it takes for me to go through all of this.

Right now, with me being busy doing many other things too, being a father to my little girls, and the time that it takes to edit, encode, mux, remux, etc. all the audio and video, I am completing about 1 to 2 episodes a day. I am on episode 20 and 21 of season 1 right now and with there being a total of 50 episodes (plus the bonus Christmas special "winnie the pooh and xmas too), it will take me, at least, another 4-5 weeks before this is finished.

On that note, I have a question for you fine people here:
Should I wait to release this until it's a complete series release?
OR
should I release these after each season is complete (there's four of them)?

thanx4letting me ramble about this and taking the time to read it. this is my first such preservation project and I am very excited about it. I hope that once it's finished, it won't disappoint as I am pouring a lot of my heart into this one (this series has a special sentimental value to me and my family)

peace,

jerry

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Jerry, first of all congratulation: to be your first project, it seems really hard to realize, even for an experienced restorer, so kudos to you!

Now you know how tough could be to put in sync more than one track, especially when it's from analog sources... but it seems you are making a good job.

For release time: if you think to make a Blu-ray project, and as the total space is around 90GB, you could always release a BD-25 for every season, hence every season when is ready.

Last hint: if you want to make menus, I strongly reccomend to use MultiAVCHD, the only free authoring software that could allow you to make BDs with menus.

Sadly my projects are lost due to an HDD crash… 😦 | [Fundamental Collection] thread | blog.spoRv.com | fan preservation forum: fanres.com

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If the source videos are interlaced, have you tried unfolding the fields?  The animation itself was done at 12 frames per second so, even with field blending, you should be able to get at least one field that is clean for each frame of animation.  If your source videos are no longer interlaced, this won't work, though.

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So, as this is my first such preservation project, I am still learning how to do this properly. That being said:

@ Molly - A HUGE apology concerning the "telecine" issue as you were RIGHT!!!
I have managed to deinterlace telecined material properly before but, apparently, you CAN'T use the same settings for all material. After playing around with the "Decomb Telecine" filter in avidemux, I have managed to produce a nearly flawless (as occasionally there are minor artifacts, but very minor) deinterlaced, NON-blended picture.

@ Space Kaijuu - HUGE thanx for pointing out that I should look at the video one FIELD (not frame) at a time (as this is what helped me realize that the source videos that had the issues were actually telecined) ALL of the source videos are MPEG-2 PAL files, all INTERLACED (only the low quality xvid releases are progressive and I ONLY use those as timing reference or for title cards)

@ Andrea - Again, thanx4kind words and4ur suggestions. When it comes to release time, BD-25 will probably be the way I end up releasing it HOWEVER there is a consistency problem when it comes to amount of episodes per season because:
Season 1 = 22 episodes
Season 2 = 10 episodes
Season 3 = 10 episodes
Season 4 = 8 episodes (plus the xmas special episode)

So how should I separate those between different discs is still a mystery to me, unless I release Season 1 on two discs, and each season after that on one disc each(?)

I do have MultiAVCHD and have made very (really, VERY) basic menus before (where there was only ONE title on disc), but for a release like this I would like to make nice (maybe even fancy) menus and things (I even downloaded some Disney and Winnie the Pooh FONTS so it can look nicer), HOWEVER I will have to learn how to do this first which is ok because this whole project is a learning-as-I-go experience.

Now, with all that out of the way, I have to go back and re-do a few episodes (fortunately I'm figuring this out early instead of when I'm nearly done) This will probably set me back a week on release time, BUT it will be worth it, as ALL episodes will look correct, will be progressive, at NTSC-speed, restored back to original broadcast format, and contain numerous languages synced up properly ;)

Again, HUGE thank you to ALL that have helped me so far. It is greatly appreciated. Peace,

Jerry

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Space Kaijuu said:

If the source videos are interlaced, have you tried unfolding the fields?  The animation itself was done at 12 frames per second so, even with field blending, you should be able to get at least one field that is clean for each frame of animation.  If your source videos are no longer interlaced, this won't work, though.

It's the same for the PAL conversions of the Ewoks cartoons; however you will probably find that even if the animation is 12fps, camera pans and zooms are at 24fps  - and therefore there are no "clean" versions of certain frames to restore.

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Moth3r said:

Space Kaijuu said:

If the source videos are interlaced, have you tried unfolding the fields?  The animation itself was done at 12 frames per second so, even with field blending, you should be able to get at least one field that is clean for each frame of animation.  If your source videos are no longer interlaced, this won't work, though.

It's the same for the PAL conversions of the Ewoks cartoons; however you will probably find that even if the animation is 12fps, camera pans and zooms are at 24fps  - and therefore there are no "clean" versions of certain frames to restore.

 Is this why my video now looks mostly correct (but there are still occasional frames with slight "ghosting" artifact, so slight you can barely notice, but it's there) because certain frames can't be restored?

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Yeah, pans and zooms are often done at 24fps while the cel animation is done at 12fps, so you may get a few frames where both fields are blended and can't be restored but, usually, at least one of the fields will have the animated parts without blending.  If the blending is limited to the background on pans and zooms, it's usually not as noticeable.  The biggest problem is the fact that you may only have one unblended field to work with for some of the frames, so that frame will take a hit in picture quality.

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Ok, now that I have tried the Decomb telecine filter in avidemux on an entire episode I have noticed a couple of things. When using the TDeint filter, I get a very nice picture (except for the field-blended frames, which there is a lot of) and with the Decomb telecine filter I have no field-blending (for the most part) but now in numerous other places I have a combing effect, so should I mix and match frames from both encodes (using decomb telecine for encode 1 and TDeint for encode 2) to produce the cleanest possible picture?
or maybe even do three encodes, where the third one I could use the seperate fields filter (for those fields/frames that can't be recovered properly using either of the other two methods) ?

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My go-to solution for field-blended sources is the Avisynth script Srestore(). I've found it to work quite well, YMMV with different sources.

An alternative option is AnimeIVTC().

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Yeah, srestore and animeivtc work wonders on weird stuff.  srestore is my goto for 25 fps telecined material.

"Right now the coffees are doing their final work." (Airi, Masked Rider Den-o episode 1)

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Thanx4the suggestions guys, however (honestly) this script stuff is way above my knowledge of these things. I can do some editing things and am pretty good at accomplishing nice results using Vegas Pro 11 but my real forte is audio editing and/or photo editing. This is not to say that I'm not going to figure it out or that I mind learning new things (as this whole project is a learning experience for me) but it may take me some time.

What is really interesting is that some of the "problem" episodes were actually just telecined and they haven't been giving me problems once I used the Decomb telecine filter in avidemux, but some suffer from some weird field-blending (where I'm not sure if they were telecined) and start giving me problems. It's interesting that srestore tries to do automatically what I have been doing manually by using this process:

First, I make a encode from source using the TDeint filter. Next, I make a second encode from source using the DGbob filter (doubling frames and fps). Next I load both encodes into Vegas, where I manually replace the frames with issue in the first encode (as a lot of it looks fine) with frames from the second encode and have been getting a pretty nice result so far. Granted, this is a "manual" way of doing what srestore (assuming I understand what I read about how that script works) does automatically, HOWEVER the advantage of doing it manually is that I am SURE that ever problem frame is restored properly.

Until I really figure out this script thing, this works. Also, I know that results will vary when trying to do it automated by using srestore and I might have to go through it and fix some frames anyway, whereas the manual way I am sure all frames are restored. A little bit more time consuming? sure, but that's ok for now. This project is already overwhelming because of its size and I'm willing to do it manually as I'm just more comfortable with it that way.

Still, thanx4suggestions and I am learning this stuff on the side either way, as I do eventually want to do things "properly"

Peace, Jerry

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This is a very interesting project, and thank you jerryshadoe for your hard work.

It's a shame that New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh hasn't been released on DVD, just some butchered few episode releases with a different opening theme, so I very much look forward to seeing the results whenever you finish them. As it seems unlikely that Disney will release proper season box sets on DVD of this show, it would be great to have all episodes with the best possible quality. I do know how time consuming these things are, so please take your time.

In case you're interested, I believe I have most episodes (maybe all?) with Swedish audio; most are from TV recordings on PAL VHS tapes (usually with good audio but somewhat iffy video quality). I'd be happy to digitize them and send to you if you're interested in syncing Swedish audio to the episodes as well. If you're not, I will probably have to sync these myself whenever you release them, as I would love a high quality source with Swedish dubs as well.

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So, I wonder how many of you laughed your asses off when I said I would do the whole thing "manually?" I started doing that, and after nearly a 1000 corrections within the first 6 (six) minutes of source video and about 8 hours of editing I realized that if I try to correct all the episodes that have problems, doing it like that will take me a few months to complete this if I don't give up from being over-whelmed first...

That being said, I have NEVER used avisynth before and was COMPLETELY CLUELESS about how to go about trying to do the SRestore script on anything. So, thanx2the "magic" of the internet and google, I started to do some research. After about six hours of learning proper syntax, installing all of the proper plugins and filters (and stuff, LOL), updating my avidemux to newest version (as I was using 2.5.4, but newest release from two weeks ago is 2.6.8rev2) and figuring out how to use the avsproxy in avidemux, I can now say that (at least for purposes of this project) I know what I'm doing with avisynth scripts. I figured out the script for the TDeint filter I was using to deinterlace (as before I was using the avidemux gui'ed version) and SRestore is a "God-sent" script. HOWEVER, as stated before, it's NOT perfect. About 95% of the video was cleaned up properly, but there were still some blends (on the first episode that has these issues, as that's how far I got so far) and this is where things get a little weird...

I, STILL, have to make two different encodes from the source file and then edit them in Vegas, as using this script:
FFVideoSource("C:\Users\Jerry Shadoe\Videos\!poohtemp\1x09PALDVD.ts")
LoadPlugin("C:\Program Files\Common Files\Common Share\plugins\mt_masktools-26.dll")
LoadPlugin("C:\Program Files\Common Files\Common Share\plugins\TDeint.dll")
Import("C:\Program Files\Common Files\Common Share\plugins\Srestore.avsi")
TDeint(mode=0, order=1, field=0, type=1, link=2, mthreshl=6, mthreshc=6, tryweave=false, full=true, sharp=true, denoise=true)

which is basically what I did in the gui'ed version of TDeint in avidemux gives me a mostly blended result (the one I was complaining about earlier) but some of the frames are fine, where SRestore corrected them incorrectly using this script:
FFVideoSource("C:\Users\Jerry Shadoe\Videos\!poohtemp\1x09 Babysitter Blues {DVD} [ENG+sub].ts")
LoadPlugin("C:\Program Files\Common Files\Common Share\plugins\mt_masktools-26.dll")
LoadPlugin("C:\Program Files\Common Files\Common Share\plugins\TDeint.dll")
Import("C:\Program Files\Common Files\Common Share\plugins\Srestore.avsi")
TDeint(mode=0, order=1, field=0, type=1, link=2, mthreshl=6, mthreshc=6, tryweave=false, full=true, sharp=true, denoise=true)
SRestore(frate=23.976, mode=3)

I played around with the SRestore settings for a couple of hours and this one gave me the best results (by FAR) and now I have to replace a blended frame in the SRestore'd encode with a proper frame from the TDeint encode here and there, BUT in first 5 minutes of video I have only had to fix 11 frames, so HUGE improvement and if this turns out to be the right "formula" for these, having to replace ~50-60 frames for a ~22minute video (which contains ~32000-33000 frames) as opposed to nearly a 1000 frames in first 6 minutes is a VERY welcome change.

SO A HUGE THANX TO ALL THAT SUGGESTED SRESTORE!!!

I can now say, that this project is back on the right path and completing it should be relatively easy now (although still time consuming as I have to go through it frame-by-frame, on the troubled episodes, to make sure that everything is correct and sycing the audio is time-consuming as well.)

Now, on to the "issue" of audio:

@ hofverberg- NOT a problem. Digitize all of the audio from the episodes you have (please label them: s01e01... s02e01... etc... - if unsure of this - the episodes are listed properly here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_New_Adventures_of_Winnie_the_Pooh_episodes) and then make a torrent containing all of them, send me the torrent file (in a PM, of course) and once I pulled them down, I can sync them to this release as well. I asked if anyone has extra languages available in one of my previous posts, so this is a VERY welcome thing.

@ ALL - I am still looking for German and Russian audio for the "Xmas special - and xmas too episode" and am now looking for Polish, German, and Russian audio for the "Halloween special - boo to you too pooh episode" as I will be including that episode as well (thanx2 roadkillwarrior -not on this forum - for supplying me with a very nice source, as the one in the xvid release sucked.) And, depending on whether hofverberg has the Swedish audio for those or not, may possibly need Swedish audio for those two episodes as well.

That's all for now, as now it's time for me to get back to editing on this project ;)

Peace, Jerry

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That's great! I will try to locate all my VHS tapes and will start digitizing them soon.

The first 11 episodes of season 1 actually have two different Swedish dubs - one made back in 1989 and the other made in 2005, with different voice talents and a different translation. I believe I have both dubs of most of these episodes, although I know I am unfortunately missing at least the original 1989 dub of Cleanliness Is Next to Impossible. Episodes 12 and forward only have one Swedish dub though.

Boo! To You Too! Winnie the Pooh has actually been released on retail DVD in Sweden, with Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finish, Icelandic and English audio; so that one is no problem.

I suspect Winnie the Pooh and Christmas Too hasn't actually been dubbed in Swedish, although I haven't been able to confirm my suspicions. Either way, I don't have it.

When everything is done, I would appreciate if you would consider making DVDs of the entire show as well, besides the BD-25 releases. As the resolution is close to DVD-Video, it would make sense in my opinion and it would be very practical to have everything on DVD-Video. Otherwise, I can certainly help out with DVD authoring if needed, as I have quite a lot of experience in that.

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Wait a minute, what? Are you trying to say that you guys weren't able to see it in Swedish (aside from first 11 episodes) until 2005??! That sucks!

WOW! I was not aware of the digital source for the Boo! To you too! episode. The one that I have is very nice, but it is a VHS transfer. If you would consider sharing it, it would be greatly appreciated as it would make this project have digital sources for ALL episodes that way (aside from some title cards/end credits)

Yes, I will be doing a DVD release as well, but am trying to figure out the right bitrate, as the point of this project is to preserve highest quality available for all episodes. When I'm closer to completing my "masters," I'll play around with bitrates and figure that one out. (thanx4offer of help, but unlike bluray, DVD-authoring is something I have lots of experience with) Either way, they will be HUGE releases that will take a while to upload. LOL ;)

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No, I'm afraid you misunderstood. All episodes were dubbed into Swedish around 1989 - 1990, but the first 11 episodes were then re-dubbed with other voice talents cirka 2005. The rest of the episodes got to keep the earlier dub. I suppose only Disney would be able to explain the logic behind that...

And to complicate things even further, episodes 1 - 11 and episodes 12 and forward have different dubs with different voice talents; so regardless of which dub of episodes 1 - 11 it's impossible to Watch all episodes with the same voices.

I own the Scandinavian DVD release containing Boo! To You Too! Winnie the Pooh, and of course I'd be happy to provide a copy of it. It was a while since I watched it though, so I'd have to re-check the quality and similar.

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Ok, wow, that's very stupid too. Can't believe Dis... wait a minute, LOL Of course, I can believe Disney would do something that stupid and it's a damn shame that they screw the fans in this way.

I look forward to seeing that footage, regardless of any short-comings in transfer, as it will still be better than a VHS source. No rush, as that's the last episode of the project anyway ;)

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Ok, so I just want to thank everyone for their support of this project and all the people that have given me technical advice and I hope that I'm not posting too often, but this is my first project, I'm very excited about it, and this also helps me keep a time-line of how this project is moving forward.

The awesome news is that I just finished editing the first "problem" episode. REALLY appreciate the suggestion to use SRestore script, HOWEVER it's NOT an all-in-one solution. I did actually have to "assemble" the video from the two encodes (with the different scripts I mentioned in a post earlier) into one video. First 5 minutes of footage had very little corrections needed (only 11 frames needed fixing) but as the episode moved on, there turned out to be more and more corrections needed. In total, I had to fix/replace/duplicate ~1000 frames (for the whole 22 minutes video containing ~32500 frames) and it was weird because there would be 800 frames fine and then every other frame in a 30 frame stretch would have to be replaced, then fine again for 500 frames and then 50 frame stretch to fix (almost all replaced) so it was an interesting learning experience. The time it took me to complete one of these "problem" episodes (including encoding) was about 16 hours, as opposed to the 6-8 hours it takes me to de-interlace and audio sync the other episodes. So it is more time consuming, but I am happy to say that the video is now 99% clean. The reason for the 99% and not 100%, is because there is still some occasional (very slight, as in just lines) ghosting on frames that were in motion, unique, and couldn't be duplicated from neighboring frame/field as they were the only one there. Overall, the result is very nice and now that I have this figured out, I am very confident that EVERYONE will enjoy this release once it's completed.

I do have a technical question about SRestore that I wasn't able to find an answer for online and was wondering if anyone here would know:
Someone mentioned that animation is at 12fps, so is this why SRestore tries to give me 12 frames (with each one being duplicated to give the 23.976fps) even when there actually is more "unique" frames there? Or is it just my results, because this is the reason I had to correct so many frames because it "ate" some of the unique ones.

Also, if anyone can suggest a solid video bitrate for the DVD set that I'll make out of this, that would help. Don't know if there is a "go-to" "default" bitrate there, as I've had different results with the same bitrate depending on source and encoding software, but I still thought I'd ask.

Thanx4letting my ramble,

Jerry

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The "best" bitrate on DVDs will of course depend on quality, source, type of material, etc. For instance, VHS sources usually require a higher bitrate than digital TV rips to compensate for noise and similar.

But assuming these are digital transfers of high quality (not too much noise or grain), I would personally recommend putting 5 episodes per disc. That way, it should be under two hours per disc, which is a common standard on retail DVDs. If you use a good encoding software (such as HcEnc), that should then look very good.

The exact bitrate will of course depend on the exact running time, number of audio tracks and the audio bitrate (are these episodes in mono or stereo?). But the video bitrate should then be somewhere between 4100 and 4750 kbit/sec, which are pretty normal bitrates compared to many Hollywood retail DVDs.

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Encoding MPEG-2 for DVD - obviously quality will vary depending on the compressibility of the source (noisy/grainy sources, or content with lots of action/motion, do not compress so well).

For optimum quality I would use CCE to do a multi-pass VBR encode, an average of 3000kbps would be an absolute minimum, above 4000kbps would be preferred.

How long is each episode? If you decide to fit 2-3 episodes onto a DVD5 then, taking into account size of audio & menus, try and fill the DVD5 to as close to capacity as you can.

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 (Edited)

@ hofverberg - So far, there is a total of 5 audio tracks (will be six once I have your Swedish dub rips) and they are English in LPCM (as to not degrade the lossy audio even more by converting back to lossy ) English AC3 (for those that don't care about the audio being re-encoded), Polish AC3, German AC3, Russian AC3. From what I can tell, all English & German episodes are in stereo. Some of the Polish and Russian ones are in stereo and some are mono. All intros/end credits are in stereo.

@ Moth3r - thanx4suggestions about how to encode this and the episodes are all ~22:30. So I guess hofverberg is correct in saying that I should put, roughly, 5 episodes on each DVD.

@ ALL - I have hit, yet another, brick wall when it comes to some episodes from that "problem" batch of episodes. So the SRestore script works wonders on some of those and on some it actually makes them look WORSE. I have tried every single de-interlacer available in avidemux (version 2.5.4 and newest 2.6.8rev2) and every setting possible in the SRestore clip and NOTHING seems to work. If I use the DGbob filter (with each field being a frame, SAME fps, so the slow motion setting) I can see how the script could have problems with some of these. With the TDeint script I get the most usable video that I would have to replace a LOT of frames with from the DGbob filtered encode (but it would be replacing about a third of the frames PER episode)
Was wondering if any of you with more experience could help me figure this one out, so I made a 15 second sample (by remuxing and spliting it using tsmuxer) from the source file of an example of some of the troubled spots and posted it here (contains video ONLY): link removed, PM me if interested in giving this a crack
If ANYONE could help me figure this out, it would be appreciated and help this project move forward. For now, I'm working on the episodes that have no "issues" and will return to the "problem" ones once I know how to go about it. If there is NO easy solution, then I WILL fix those episodes frame-by-frame.

Peace,

Jerry

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jerryshadoe said:

@ hofverberg - So far, there is a total of 5 audio tracks (will be six once I have your Swedish dub rips) and they are English in LPCM (as to not degrade the lossy audio even more by converting back to lossy ) English AC3 (for those that don't care about the audio being re-encoded), Polish AC3, German AC3, Russian AC3. From what I can tell, all English & German episodes are in stereo. Some of the Polish and Russian ones are in stereo and some are mono. All intros/end credits are in stereo.

 I would personally recommend skipping the uncompressed LPCM audio track on the DVD, and just make one English audio track in AC3 with a generously high bitrate. LPCM audio would be very useful for the untouched material on Blu-Ray, but is in my opinion overkill on DVD.

LPCM audio takes up very much valuable space, which would be better used for raising the video bitrate. On DVD, LPCM can practically only be used when there's very little on each disc or when using DVD9 (dual layer media). With a good AC3 encoder and a high bitrate (such as 256 kbit/sec in stereo or 128 kbit/sec in mono), it should be quite hard to distinguish that audio from the lossless one.

As season 1 consists of 22 episodes, my recommendation would be to alternate between 4 and 5 episodes per disc in order to make the season use 5 full DVDs (I e 3 discs with 4 episodes each and 2 discs with 5 episodes each). That makes most sense in my opinion, to keep the number of discs to a reasonable number while still maintaining a very good quality.

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@ hofverberg - that's what I was planning on doing, was including the LPCM on blu-ray only and on dvd ac3@384kbps for English and 192kbps for all others.

@ALL - I'm hoping to resolve this issue with those troubled episodes that I mentioned in the last post because frame-by-frame correction is going to be time consuming as hell and I hope someone will have an easier suggestion ;)

UPDATE: Thanx to Andrea for verifying whether I'm running my scripts correctly and trying some himself, I now know that these extremely troubled episodes will actually have to be fixed frame-by-frame. NOT a problem, but will be time-consuming for those episodes. Fortunately, it's very few in the whole series.

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VERY EXCITING UPDATE ;)

So, I got a little frustrated working on these "problem" episodes for the last few days and started wondering if I can possibly find any other high/decent quality source for these episodes. AND I JUST DID :)

But now I face a dilemma and was hoping for some input from you wonderful people here. Let me start off by saying, SOME of the episodes (due to no other high quality sources) have a LOGO (oh, NOOOOOO!!!!) in the lower-bottom corner of the screen, as can be seen here:

and when I initially wrote about this project, I KNEW that some of them will have this logo and there's nothing I can do about it BUT now...

Well, the dilemma is this: Do I try to clean-up the "problem" episodes just because they don't have a logo (they are a b*tch to work with, as it looks like they were telecined first (23.976p to 29.97i) then improperly transferred to PAL where they still have the NTSC duration and there are TONS of garbage frames (I figured out a new script that takes care of most of this, but there is still some ghosting here and there AND some blending here and there which means some of the "unique" frames are just missing)
OR
Do I use the properly transferred (direct 23.976p to 25i, utilizing PAL speed up, so all the original frames are actually there, I'm sure as I already downloaded a couple of these episodes and verified this) for ALL the "problem" episodes even though they DO contain the ugly logo?

There is NO difference (on average) in the video bitrate between the two different sources, so that is NOT a factor in the decision and neither is amount of time I have to invest into completing this project (although I have to say, saving some time would be nice)...

Peace,Jerry

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The best will be to get rid of this logo; you could try to cancel it somehow, using an avisynth script (or some other method) but result will be less then perfect; or you could use the source without logo, OR... you could try to use the source with no logo as a "patch" to cover the logo... it's a hard task, but could save a lot of time; I have done it with Supernova, and results are perfect, but in your case, with blended frames, you have to test it...

Good luck!

Sadly my projects are lost due to an HDD crash… 😦 | [Fundamental Collection] thread | blog.spoRv.com | fan preservation forum: fanres.com