I have the HD DVD here, which I believe is identical to the Blu-ray, and I’m seeing the same sort of thing. In some cases the LD seems to be a fraction of a second “ahead”, but then the HD DVD catches up towards the end of althor’s clip. I don’t have time to go through it frame-by-frame at the moment, but it certainly is bizarre!
DirectShowSource(“X:\Movies\2001 ASO-BD\2001-ASO-BD.mkv”,fps=23.976,audio=false,convertfps=true)
While the LD has interlaced frames (30fps; technically 29.97), the BR has progressive frames (24fps; technically 23.976). It’s the LD that needs to be “converted” (de-interlaced back to 24fps). If you’re “ripping” the BR, it’s already progressive and doesn’t need to be “converted”, perhaps just frame-rate specified.
When you’re making a disc, the media will remain at 24fps, but pulldown_flag-ed for the 30fps display.
That should make everything sync perfect.
Otherwise …
 |
 |
Yeah. I think specifying the frame rate is enough but I’ve heard that for some reason a lot of vc1 encodes are vfr and the convertfps just makes sure that instead of variable you get normal frame rate instead. Simply specifying the fps might be enough to make directshowsource work right with this file. I’ll definitely play with it a bit to see what works before beginning to sync again. I’ll probably start working on it again this weekend.
Luke threw twice…maybe.
That seems to make sense.
You know, I think all this technology would have driven SK nuts. 😉
VADER!? WHERE THE HELL IS MY MOCHA LATTE? -Palpy on a very bad day.
“George didn’t think there was any future in dead Han toys.”-Harrison Ford
YT channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/DamnFoolIdealisticCrusader
I’m finished with my preservation of the criterion collection laserdisc. Myspleen hurts though. I gotta go lay down.
Luke threw twice…maybe.
| "Excellent!" | "Yes!" |
Is there a description? (hardware/software used, source info & procedure for capture, type of processing applied [ex: script info for Avisynth], problems encountered & solution methodology, etc.)
Just an FYI… it appears that all versions of the US and UK blu rays of 2001 are now OOP. Since this is Warner it wouldn’t be surprising if that means a new 4K restoration BD/UHDBD could be coming this Spring but that’s only speculation as of this time.
I would think they would hold off until the 50th anniversary in 2018. Let’s hope they find a way to include the footage SK trimmed as a extra by then. That is about the only new thing they could add at this point, save for the Trumbull documentary that got scuttled.
Where were you in '77?
As much as I would like all those trims as extras (or better still, in Trumbull’s documentary, included), the top priority should be a best presentation of Kubrick’s film rather than monstrosities as the widely-praised but atrocious Blu-ray!
| (smartly corrected by a spaced ranger with his cheap paint program) |  |
 |
"Excellent!" "Yes!" Is there a description? (hardware/software used, source info & procedure for capture, type of processing applied [ex: script info for Avisynth], problems encountered & solution methodology, etc.)
There is a small description on the spleen. Overall, it was a nightmare to sync it to the blu-ray. I gave up on it twice before returning to it only because I didn’t want to return to the star wars ld’s without having finished it. The avisynth script is 100’s of lines of rolling cadence changes and orphaned fields. As always, I simply stack the material I am syncing to next to the project material and scroll through frame by frame and make sure it actually is in sync. When it isn’t, I add black frames with audio silence to make up the difference. It’s hardly noticeable unless you know where to look or notice a pop in the audio.
I captured using the cld-hf9g/theater750 pcie card combo. Ld-decode looked about the same quality-wise so I took the route that works in realtime.
The last thing I did was downscale to 520x480, crop the black bars, and finally resize to 720p with nnedi3.
The downscale helps out a lot to remove ringing, rainbowing, and even noise to a certain extent without loss of detail (I learned this from Antcufaalb). 500 seems to be about the point where the picture starts to get softer. According to wikipedia there is only 420 tv lines worth of resolution but if I flip back and forth between the original and the downscale there is a noticeable difference around 480. 500 would probably be ok but as a paranoid precautionary measure I added 20 and that’s how I ended up with the 520x480 numbers.
Luke threw twice…maybe.
Thanks for that info! (I don’t ask invites as I can’t do anything useful when there anyway.)
By any chance, could you post (here) your LD's colorbars from your 2001ASO capture? And a Floyd space station arrival frame (see my picture-repost above)? I’d like to see the spectrum correspondence to the capture … especially as uncompressed .PNGs, if available.
Thanks althor1138 for another (and excellent) capture to preserve/restore these laserdiscs. I received your sample & color-bars snapshots and I’m sure PDB will be interested in them, too (not having color-bars on his laserdisc) to use as a Rosetta Stone for capture correction …
Thus far, these are the captures for the two releases of 2001: A Space Odyseey from Stanley Kubrick’s supervision of its remastering:
| 2001: A Space Odyssey – Criterion Collection laserdisc | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| . | ||||||
|
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
| . | ||||||
|
PDB: CLV | |
|
|
|
althor1138: CAV [re-issue] |
| . | |
|
 |
Right off the bat, the hues look the same. However, the brightness/contrast is different. A quick eye-dropper read shows the CAV’s brightest area is 236 while the CLV’s is 208. With different quality laserdisc players, a capture from a better/best player will improve it. Also, Antcufaalb has been assembling extra hardware to fix the laserdisc signal, which will help more with quality.
I’m greatly disappointed that the off-the-laserdisc image doesn’t look exactly like the Taschen book photos. If I had to guess, I’d say that the laserdisc production didn’t properly translate the “work prints” Kubrick critiqued and approved. Can anybody with the details of of laserdisc production chime in on this?
Me, personally? In the meantime, I’m going with Taschen (they had access to everything in the Kubrick estate) and my previous demonstration picture of Taschen-to-laserdisc:
Spaced Ranger said:
In fact, if I take the Taschen photo and apply the reverse of my LD-to-Taschen brightness (& contrast & saturation) increases (end of page 3), I get the LD coloring …Taschen photo top
brightness reduction bottom
So, moving on with that, here’s what I’ve come up with …
First, the picture is very noisy and that would interfere with saturation processing (a little later on). I reduced that noise with the paint program’s JPEG artifact remover. It looks like this process takes out-of-place pixels in JPEG compression and deals with them. It’s not intelligent and can misinterpret, but I’ve found it does an excellent job without the smear/smoothing of other de-noisers:
Next was a hue correction, as per the color-bars. By turning the color wheel (shifting all the colors simultaneously), the captured color-bars R-G-Bs change their values. When the capture R-G-B’s come closest to what would be the color-bar’s ideal (checking them with an eye-dropper), that’s the “1-for-1 match” we want in a capture:
As can be seen, the capture’s tint was off only by 1 degree and it’s correction is near unnoticeable. That’s a good capture.
Next might be contrast adjustment but I’ve found that it’s range expansion causes color anomalies to show with a following saturation increase. So, the saturation comes first. I could’ve used a simple saturation increase, but decided apply my “technicolor-izer” technique of over-boosting only the color-wheel’s RGB (with their application areas expanded into the secondary colors, for R-G-B to cover the entire spectrum) and then globally reducing the spectrum by some lesser amount. This spikes only the R-G-Bs without blowing out the entire spectrum, for that Technicolor® look:
It doesn’t look like allot when done in this sequence, but it showed when applied after the contrast adjustment (which would be a good approach to pre-determine the saturation adjustments).
Now, the contrast adjustment. Just move the spectrum out to get a nice picture. For this process, if one uses a normal contrast adjustment, the picture takes on a tint due to the built-in algorithm. Instead, adjust the contrast identically on the individual R-G-B channels. (Here, again, using the normal contrast would be a good approach to pre-determine the contrast adjustments.) This does the same thing as before but without that algorithmic tint:
Finally, to counter the initial de-noiser’s over-reach, a slight sharpen gets it back and gives it a little bit more for good looks:
Put it all together, and out comes like something Stanley Kubrick should recognize (yes, even from laserdisc):
Now that we have samples of all the laserdisc releases with Stanley Kubrick's direct involvement, here’s an updated comparison of their aspect ratios with the Blu-ray (color-corrected to conform to the Taschen book) as a backdrop:
I would have liked to see the LD synced to the 1999 Warner DVD audio.
I now have all NTSC BD/DVD 2001 versions and I prefer the 1999 Warner DVD for the audio.
Thank you for the LD preservation.
skoal said:
… I prefer the 1999 Warner DVD for the audio.
Aside from what was discussed before (missing dialog, panning, etc.), does anyone have any idea which of these is quantifiably, sonically superior? Since audio seems to be the weak-sister with video taking center stage, is there any definitive way to analyze the audio quality?
Maybe we just should go back to the film, with something like these …
| All 10 canisters of a 70mm print of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey |
|---|
Spaced Ranger, you have 2001 in 70mm? In Todd-AO?
In the 1999 Warner DVD there is some distortion in the scene right before the phone call and I wonder if it’s in the LD also.
I prefer the directional dialogue from the LD/MGM/1999WarnerDVD and it’s a toss-up for the orchestral music, however I think the orchestral music from the 2007 Warner release uses the surrounds.
Also, I’m wondering if the 1999WarnerDVD colors are similar to the Kubrick-associated LD prints.
I’m not much of a purist, however more and more, for 2001, I find myself leaning towards, how it originally was…
skoal said:
Spaced Ranger, you have 2001 in 70mm? In Todd-AO?
| I wish! | |
 |
|
Ode To Joy to reach over and hold up something like this to the light … |
Actually, I was thinking if we could get the 70mm (or from whatever) 6 channel soundtrack
and redistribute it in 7.1 (w/ the center dropped),
that would be ultimate!
Wow I have only seen the Cinerama print on the original run.
The 1999 Warner DVD supposedly has the original multi-track audio and I’m wondering what the 2001 enthusiasts think of the 1999 Warner DVD picture.
It’s a dream to see 2001 in Cinerama, oh my!
@ suntech
Then definitely check out DVDBeaver’s “DVD Review 2001: A Space Odyssey” and know that you saw it the best way. Every home-consumer release (Blu-ray, too) as been all over the quality-map!
.
@ skoal
However, the MGM 1998 DVD (and speaking of DVDBeaver’s review) is interesting to see compared to it’s fellows (including the Warner 1999 DVD). It comes out looking color-closest to Criterion Collection’s “Kubrick’s Blessing” laserdisc releases (thanks to PDB & althor1138 for their captures).
Of course, like the rest, the MGM 1998 has it’s issues (worst of which is sharpening halos).
BTW, realize that the original six channels into 5.1’s five channels would be a loss by deletion or mixing. That was the reason for suggesting 7.1 – keeping the original six as fully discreet channels on digital media.
To get the six-track mix onto home video without any alteration at all, there would have to be a home video format that supported having five channels across the front. There is no home video format that does this, so it would be both impossible and pointless. The left-center and right-center fronts most likely only contain a mix of the LCR channels anyway, which was only done to fill in the space in a gigantic cinema environment. In a smaller home viewing space, there would be no purpose whatsoever to hearing this, for it would just make everything phasey and weird.
The extra front channels on 70mm not having any discrete information of their own is one of the reasons why, beginning with Star Wars, they were reassigned to the purpose of being dedicated low frequency channels instead.
Spaced, cool, then I would say, the 1998 MGM/1999 Warner DVDs are the best for both audio and video. Cheers!
Also, thank you for the explanation hairy.
hairy_hen said:
To get the six-track mix onto home video without any alteration at all, there would have to be a home video format that supported having five channels across the front.
Oh, 2001:ASO-fanatics won’t mind picking up speakers and moving them to the appropriate locations …
The left-center and right-center fronts most likely only contain a mix of the LCR channels anyway, … to fill in the space in a gigantic cinema environment. … beginning with Star Wars, they were reassigned to the purpose of being dedicated low frequency channels instead.
“most likely” – is this a definite known for 2001:ASO? (I’ve never read anything definitive on the sound; video takes up most of my time.)
.
skoal said:
… the 1998 MGM/1999 Warner DVDs are the best for both audio and video.
By themselves, mostly. Together, definitely. MGM has severe sharpening halos. WB has bad coloring. But together (using the better color of the MGM with Hue and Saturation, and the better quality of the WB Luminance), they are greater than their parts [here zoomed-in for inspection]:
And here is the result full-sized (note that it should be trimmed to the smaller picture, as it’s empty space doesn’t add require information to the bigger one):
To get the six-track mix onto home video without any alteration at all, there would have to be a home video format that supported having five channels across the front. There is no home video format that does this, so it would be both impossible and pointless. The left-center and right-center fronts most likely only contain a mix of the LCR channels anyway, which was only done to fill in the space in a gigantic cinema environment. In a smaller home viewing space, there would be no purpose whatsoever to hearing this, for it would just make everything phasey and weird.
The extra front channels on 70mm not having any discrete information of their own is one of the reasons why, beginning with Star Wars, they were reassigned to the purpose of being dedicated low frequency channels instead.
Absolutely. This took me forever to realize when I first started researching the old formats years ago. Older films generally used them to fill the space of the grand halls playing 70mm as a mixture of L and R stage channels and panned sound/dialogue/across to create a unified stage. This also was due to the fact that they weren’t really mixing a surround styled setup, but something more along the lines of glorified stereo with a dedicated center and a single rear for ambiance to fill the back of the hall. It wasn’t until some of the bigger productions started trying to liven things up that they changed things, and even then it wasn’t until Dolby’s Star Wars remixing of the format to baby booms that anybody did anything about it. I think they were still largely basing this around mixing 4 channel LCRS for premiere Cinemascope engagements and keeping that idea intact for 70. 2001 is pure old school LCRS sounding in it’s original mix. You can plainly hear it on LD because they simply ran the 6 track mix through a Dolby prologic encoder. if you added in two extra speakers in the front and were somehow able to feed them in, it would recreate the proper experience, i.e. they would merely fill in the sound and assist in making the pans work better. Sony’s SDDS did a similar thing in the more modern 5.1 era by having the five channel front return but for mixes that were 5.1 produced.
VADER!? WHERE THE HELL IS MY MOCHA LATTE? -Palpy on a very bad day.
“George didn’t think there was any future in dead Han toys.”-Harrison Ford
YT channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/DamnFoolIdealisticCrusader
captainsolo said:
You can plainly hear it on LD because they simply ran the 6 track mix through a Dolby prologic encoder. if you added in two extra speakers in the front and were somehow able to feed them in, it would recreate the proper experience …
So, Kubrick’s sound guys were only outputting 2 track stereo, at most, and mixed-in mono’s. And the laserdisc’s soundtrack has the original 6 channel’s Left/Center/Right/Surround …
| LDDb - 2001:ASO Criterion Collection laserdisc - Digital & Analog tracks |
|---|
 |
… but not those deliberately mixed Left-Center/Right-Center channels. Is that true, or just a good assumption?
Then are the DVD’s (and HD’s) following the same laserdisc approach? Or are they a total rework from which we can extract nothing useful (for rebuilding the original 6 tracks)?
