Aliens (Part 2)
So after cutting the Extended cut down to the TV cut (and adding the parts needed from the Theatrical cut) I decided I wanted to "fix" the Bishop scene in the hanger. For those who don't know. When the spacedoors are opened in the end of Aliens, Bishop grabs Newt and saves her from being sucked into the vaccum of space. In that scene you can briefly see Lance Henriksen is clearly sticking out of a hole in bottom of the set. Its been a famous error that Aliens has had from the beginning. Something you point out to your buddies. well for the BD, Cameron went back and had the hole digitally removed. It wanted to put it back.
Luckliy I had a recording of the old HDTV broadcast. It is from before all the BD's changes in colors, etc. Problem was the HDTV had logo at the bottom right.
Taking some advice from Doombot, I was researching how to do rotoscope in Adobe Effects to fix the hole under Bishop when I had an idea. I thought about Adobe Premiere and using layers and opacity. So I re-graded the HDTV broadcast to match the BD. I then layered them up. I turned down the opacity so I could match the frames spacial as much as possible, in keeping with advice _,,,^..^,,,_ gave me. The HDTV broadcast is 1.77 vs the 1.85 of the BD, so the HDTV has more top and bottom picture whereas the BD had more info on the right (the HDTV was a little more stretched and wrapped too).
So once lined them up, I got the HDTV broadcast and carved out the area where the logo was and lowered the opacity to 0 so the lower layer of the BD came through. And it worked as long as the color regrade. This was the simplest fix since the area of the logo is in the same place all the time. Problem was I noticed all the imperfections of the HDTV broadcast. Not as sharp, lower bitrate, etc. So I decided to reverse the procedure and have the BD as the top layer and bleed in the HDTV part. Problem is unlike the logo, the area to cut keeps changing. So basically it was like old-school manual rotoscoping, I cut the scene into each frame and manually craved out the area to add the HDTV part.
It worked pretty well. Only problem was the HDTV was still a bit pixealted, so Doombot re-grained the HDTV for me, I did the process again and it seems to be a pretty good match:
BD/BD with fix
I even found a mistake in the BD footage. When the computer guy painted out the hole in the ground he didn't fix the lens flare in one frame. You can see in this pic the triangle cut out of the blue lens flare under Bishop's armpit (and a shadow that doesn't make sense):
BD/BD with fix
Here is the fixed clip in motion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA2AJYXrD4c&feature=youtu.be