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Info & Request: Muppet Christmas Carol - Widescreen w/ deleted song and Dir. commentary! — Page 4

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Hey, i am working on that movie in german too (never released as BD), unfortunatly i can’t setup an itunes us account, and in Europe we dont have itunes extra, so i have no acces to the cut song material in widescreen!

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 (Edited)

It works!!! I’ve had a trial run this evening and the new device bypasses the HDCP and records brilliantly. I’m now playing around with the bitrate to see what difference it makes.

EDIT:
I’ve just captured it in the highest bitrate the device will allow and it’s looking really good. I’m not sure when I’ll get a chance to incorporate it into the rest of the film so I’m now uploading the file to enable anyone who has more time than me to have a go at it. Message me if you want a link to the file.

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Clip re-captured this morning - new link sent to anyone who has previously requested it.

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Nice work - that looks great 😃

A little patience goes a long way on this old-school Rebel base. If you are having issues finding what you are looking for, these will be of some help…

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Despite a decent quality capture, there’s a pan judder problem which might come from a difference in frame rates. The iTunes extras are playing at 23.97fps but my capture device captures at 30fps. That will also cause issues when incorporating it into the main movie, which will again be at 23.97fps. So basically there’ll be some judder from the original capture, then it’ll be worsened by changing the frame rate a second time.

Unfortunately there’s no option to change the frame rate on the capture device, which is a shame as it would probably fix the problem 😦

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I just run such files through Blender and render them as still images, deleting every 5th frame on average as I meticulously check for duplicate frames.

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Charles Threepio said:

I just run such files through Blender and render them as still images, deleting every 5th frame on average as I meticulously check for duplicate frames.

Thanks for the advice - I’m on it.

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 (Edited)

I’m now going through the process of deleting duplicate frames to bring the frame rate down to 23.97, however I’m finding a slightly higher number of duplicates than I expected - 7 or 8 per 30 instead of 6, so I’m going to have to stick some of them back in and hope for the best.

Edit: I’ve currently removed 300 duplicate frames, but by my calculations I should have only removed 268.

Edit: One minute of the clip done. 404 frames removed, so current frame rate is 23.26fps. 42 frames to add back in.

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There might be some frames from the first capture attempt as well. If they look individual enough compared to the frames from the second capture, you might want to look into the possibility of adding them in at the corresponding points.

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Charles Threepio said:

There might be some frames from the first capture attempt as well. If they look individual enough compared to the frames from the second capture, you might want to look into the possibility of adding them in at the corresponding points.

Yeah, I’d considered that. Perhaps I’ll capture it over and over again until I fill all the gaps. There’s plenty of time until Christmas so I might as well make a decent job of it.

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So it turns out my first capture was actually better than the second. Out of curiosity I started going through the process of looking for duplicate frames in that one and was finding fewer right from the start, so I’m going to use that as the basis of the project.

After every 30 frames of analysis I’m checking to make sure I have 24 frames left once the duplicates have been removed, and if not I’m referencing it against capture 2 to locate the missing frame(s).

I’ve only done 15 seconds of the clip so far and have only had to locate 3 missing frames, which I’ve found successfully. If there are any frames missing from both captures I’ll do a third one to try to pick them up.

Bear with me as this is clearly going to take a while, but hopefully we’ll end up with a really nice version.

Edit: 33 seconds of the clip checked and I have 791 individual frames - all present and correct so far. I probably won’t have time to do any more until tomorrow.

Edit: 66 seconds checked and I’m one frame missing, but I know exactly where it should be so I’ll re-capture that section over and over until I get it.

Edit: 100 seconds checked and now I’m three frames missing. I still know exactly where those frames should be so I’m quite happy that I’ll find them on a subsequent capture.

I hope these updates aren’t too boring/annoying, I just thought some of you might like to know how it’s going.

Edit: I’ve finished the frame by frame check of both captures, and by my reckoning I’m missing just four frames. I’m now going to do another couple of captures of the middle section of the clip where the missing frames are in the hope that they’ll get picked up.

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I now have my first 23.976fps version of the clip ready for insertion into the main movie. I don’t have the bluray (or a full bluray rip) to do it myself but am happy to send anyone a link to the clip so they can have a go.

I will still be doing another (potentially better) version of the clip but I’m struggling for time at the moment so it might not be ready for a while.

Let me know if you want the link to the first version.

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I’d love to have a go if you can send me the link. Thanks in advance!

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dym2005 said:

I now have my first 23.976fps version of the clip ready for insertion into the main movie…

Wow man, that’s some dedication to getting it done right. 😄

Must have been quite tedious to look over all the frames and find the duplicates, re-capturing, repeat etc.!

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IR0NL0RD said:

Wow man, that’s some dedication to getting it done right. 😄

Must have been quite tedious to look over all the frames and find the duplicates, re-capturing, repeat etc.!

I figured if I was going to do it I might as well make a decent job of it 😃

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So I’ve edited the clip dym2005 shared into the blu-ray at full quality. I can’t find a copy of the 2002 DVD release so I had to make my own stereo audio to mux with it based on the itunes When Love Is Gone rip and the blu-rays 5.1 downmixed to stereo. If anyone can help dm with a source of the 2002 DVD I can swap it out with true 5.1 audio and include the Brian Henson commentary as well as the 2012 release Muppet commentary with a 3 minute gap for the When Love Is Gone portion that wasn’t included and share the final result

EDIT
Actually just ordered the 2002 DVD. Will have updated versions in 1-2 weeks. Now if someone just has advice on where I can share at that point we should be set.

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goofydylan8 said:
Actually just ordered the 2002 DVD. Will have updated versions in 1-2 weeks. Now if someone just has advice on where I can share at that point we should be set.

MEGA is a great place to share stuff.

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To be filed under the category of “absolutely not feasible for me to accomplish this year but would be cool.”

When messing around with dym2005’s rip I noticed that while finally widescreen the video was much muddier and less detailed than even the DVD quality. I figured I’d give a shot to see what kind of results could be achieved if we combined elements from the DVD, namely the characters, matted onto the widescreen backgrounds of the iTunes rip. Below are the results of 2 frames of that attempt.

https://imgur.com/a/IuiQyIp

I believe the results are substantially better than either individual element with the major flaw being that at 4446 frames I would have to do about 1.5 hours minimum per day to accomplish this by Christmas which is not feasible for me. I understand that is why projects like De-Specialized editions are such an epic undertaking, but below is my process if anyone has a more optimized approach.

  1. Converted all frames to png using ffmpeg for iTunes rip and DVD rip (deleting out every 5th frame from DVD rip)
  2. Load iTunes frame and DVD frame into Photoshop as layers and Auto-Align Layers
  3. Polygonal Lasso the characters from the DVD frame https://i.imgur.com/p2QrONV.png
  4. Select and Mask the selection using these settings https://i.imgur.com/e2dm9lQ.png and duplicate layer via copy to create a smooth transition between the DVD characters and the iTunes background
  5. Delete out DVD portion that exceeded iTunes frame dimensions https://i.imgur.com/CF12BYZ.png and then crop to 1920x1080
  6. Save as png
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goofydylan8 said:

To be filed under the category of “absolutely not feasible for me to accomplish this year but would be cool.”

When messing around with dym2005’s rip I noticed that while finally widescreen the video was much muddier and less detailed than even the DVD quality. I figured I’d give a shot to see what kind of results could be achieved if we combined elements from the DVD, namely the characters, matted onto the widescreen backgrounds of the iTunes rip. Below are the results of 2 frames of that attempt.

https://imgur.com/a/IuiQyIp

I believe the results are substantially better than either individual element with the major flaw being that at 4446 frames I would have to do about 1.5 hours minimum per day to accomplish this by Christmas which is not feasible for me. I understand that is why projects like De-Specialized editions are such an epic undertaking, but below is my process if anyone has a more optimized approach.

  1. Converted all frames to png using ffmpeg for iTunes rip and DVD rip (deleting out every 5th frame from DVD rip)
  2. Load iTunes frame and DVD frame into Photoshop as layers and Auto-Align Layers
  3. Polygonal Lasso the characters from the DVD frame https://i.imgur.com/p2QrONV.png
  4. Select and Mask the selection using these settings https://i.imgur.com/e2dm9lQ.png and duplicate layer via copy to create a smooth transition between the DVD characters and the iTunes background
  5. Delete out DVD portion that exceeded iTunes frame dimensions https://i.imgur.com/CF12BYZ.png and then crop to 1920x1080
  6. Save as png

Any updates? It would be awesome to have a complete 1080p by Christmas. Thanks everyone so far with your help. There is hope!

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Any update on this project? I would love to watch a version this Christmas!

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So - Disney + has the scene as an extra and it’s in 4K!

Now we need to find a way to capture and reintegrate it into the film.

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Variant04 said:

So - Disney + has the scene as an extra and it’s in 4K!

Now we need to find a way to capture and reintegrate it into the film.

I’m assuming proper widescreen too?

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Here is a screenshot comparison between the Disney+ bonus feature, the iTunes bonus feature, and the fullscreen DVD release.

https://imgur.com/a/3nRH3K0

The Disney+ screenshot is simply hitting screenshot with the video playing in fullscreen in Firefox as I don’t have access to a DL source yet.

From what I see it looks like it might be slightly better than the iTunes rip but still worse than the DVD which is disappointing tho I am more than happy to be proven wrong in case I am just looking at it wrong or a rip would look better. I guess this means there is still a use case for my dvd/hybrid. Sadly I don’t have good news on that front. I have got no where near finished and at current am planning on just watching a cut with the iTunes footage edited into the blu-ray movie with the dvd commentary slapped on.

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Sadly I don’t have good news on that front. I have got no where near finished and at current am planning on just watching a cut with the iTunes footage edited into the blu-ray movie with the dvd commentary slapped on.

Thank you for your progress nonetheless!

Would you happen to have a link for the Blu-ray/iTunes hybrid? I have a Blu-ray/DVD hybrid but the quality is very poor. PM if possible. Thanks again.