@ hofverberg - I still am hoping that you will be able to provide the Swedish dub audio tracks for this project ;)
@ ALL - I realize it's been a while since there has been an update posted here. I haven't been able to work on the project as much as I wanted to due to some family stuff popping up in my life. Now, not only am I taking care of my daughters (ages 4 & 2) but, my parents are getting older and need my help with certain things here and there as well.
This is a VERY time-consuming project. The "patching" method being "easy and fast," as I stated in my last posts, is only PARTIALLY true. With certain episodes, yes the process takes me 6-8 hours for an episode and with other episodes, it takes 4-6 sessions six hours each (so, yes, a total of ~24-35hours!) to finish. The reason for this is... well actually there is a couple reasons. First, the "patch" source in certain instances does NOT match in color/chroma/contrast/brightness/etc. at all. And since the "patch" source episodes are a very low bitrate xvids, there is a LOT of information that is just missing and doing any colormatch scripts yields garbage. Also, in cases where I have a Disney-logo episode that was PROPERLY converted to PAL, the PQ is noticeably lower (even though it's the second highest quality source I have to work with) compared to the incorrectly transferred logo-free encode. Here's an example of what I mean:
The LOGO-FREE version
And the exact same frame from the Disney-logo version (which in this shot is "patched" but incorrectly as it doesn't align perfectly because this was a quick sample shot I took, whereas with the actual "patched" frames I align them properly)
the difference is VERY noticeable, especially in the trees right behind Piglet's right foot and in the pattern of the curtain on the right side of screen where is lacks detail and looks a little "smeared." (NOTE: this is actually one of the better frames as some of the scenes are so much lower quality that it looks like a pixelated mess, especially in rapid-motion scenes)
Now, some of the episodes are proper DVD transfers (where the NTSC to PAL conversion was done right) and some of the episodes only have the disney-logo proper transfer version, where for the DVD transfers it's just a matter of de-interlacing and then going through it just to make sure all is well (as sometimes there is still an occasion frame blend) and then slowing them down to NTSC and adjusting the audio. The Disney-logo transfers are NOT all that much lower quality, but about half of them are and in the case where I have the two sources they are usually lower quality than than the logo-free source. Still, I have to "patch" those and replace Russian title cards, etc. BUT then there are episodes (about 25% of the entire series) that have a proper transfer disney-logo version and the field-blended (and I'm using that term correctly as the blending is down at the field level) logo-free editions that are the highest PQ. For these episodes I try to use as many frames as possible, correcting everything FRAME-BY-FRAME, from the logo-free version, ONLY using "patched" frames from the other source when necessary, HOWEVER I only do this for ENTIRE scenes (as in same background for the few seconds its onscreen) because otherwise it's too obvious that there are switches between sources for TWO reasons. First, the difference is PQ, second, the disney-logo version is slightly cropped on the left and bottom sides (about 16-20 pixels varying on scene) So, in certain scenes, I had to clean up the logo-free version of the blended frames by dupping the frame before or after, depending on when the blend occurs, but this is NOT always possible as certain frames are unique and this mainly happens when the scenes is panning across a certain background or during zooming sequences. Because of this, sometimes it seems like the zooming portion lacks smoothness a little bit. At times like this, I have to make a judgement as to whether to use the lower quality source or clean-up the better one as much as possible. So I have to do some test encodes for certain sequences to see how it looks in-motion because when looking at something frame-by-frame you don't see if it plays smoothly.
By the time this is all done, it looks decent when it all is playing in "real-time" and it's funny how some of the "defects" of the sources that I see when working on the project frame-by-frame I don't notice when it's playing. All in all, once I complete the entire series it will be the BEST transfer of the series BUT it will NOT BE PERFECT. There is only so much you can do when the sources you are working with are inferior. I am a little disappointed with this announcement as I was hoping for being able to reconstruct a perfect transfer. Either way, I'm completing this project and am still very excited about it, as it will be the closest to the original that will be available until Disney releases this properly (and for that I'm not holding my breath, LOL) For those that this will not be good enough, they can always "enjoy" the crappy xvid release that's still "floating around" on the net.
Sorry about the monolog, LOL...
Peace