AntcuFaalb

Also, sorry for the delay. I burned myself out a little while back and I'm just starting to recover now.

LD: I've spent the past few weeks writing a 3D comb filter for Avisynth in C. I'm getting good results, but I took a look at a different spatial-only approach (basically low pass filtering chroma to a particular frequency) and it does a much better job. I'll post some samples in a bit with pros and cons as well as an explanation as to why it works so well.

16mm: At least 2-3 shots were messed up by a scanning defect, so poita is going to give it a rescan soon. My project today is to just dump what we have (warts and all) in order to share and give you all the ability to start analyzing it.

CatBus said:

I think that puts a point on the question of what exactly this project is doing--a warts-and-all GOUT fixup (in which case distorted AR might be preserved), or something more akin to the actual theatrical prints (in which case they may want to skip right past the D1 master--which might have its own issues--and go to a theatrical print as the reference)

Are we sure the AR is truly distorted? I think we should make a distinction in this circumstance between distortion and cropping.

The GOUT is only missing 2 scanlines to make it a proper 2.35:1 release (648x274 at 1:1 PAR rather than 648x276 at 1:1 PAR).

A distortion in this context would imply that a circle drawn on the film (after applying an anamorphic lens) would not be a circle in the GOUT after PAR correction and I'm just not sure that that's the case.

The easiest solution to this would be to grab a frame from the film, apply anamorphic stretch, downscale to get it close to GOUT, get the cropping close, and then apply an image registration algorithm to spatially align the two images.

I'll grab a frame from our 35mm IB scan tonight. Do you have any particular frame in mind? I have reels 2-6 currently.

CatBus said:

AntcuFaalb said:

Cropping a D-1 master from 720x486 to 720x480 and dumping to DVD (as is the case with the GOUT) does not result in an up-to-spec DVD.

I think it's fairer to say you just end up with a distorted AR than an out-of-spec DVD, but I know what you mean.  The distortion is baked in.

Agreed.

DrDre said:

The standard for NTSC is that the 8 outermost pixels should be blank and are meant for cropping and not be displayed. The centre 704 pixels contains the video and determine the AR. These are displayed as 640x480 square pixels for a 4:3 AR. So if you remove the black bars and rescale the GOUT to it's correct AR, you get a 640x274 video with an AR of 2.34:1. If you then upscale by a factor of 2, you have a video of 1280x548. Now as you have noticed the blank areas of the GOUT are not entirely blank. They contain video. However if you were to upscale the 714x274 video to 1280x548 (the left 4 pixels and the right 2 pixels are blank for Star Wars) you would get the wrong AR, since the true AR is determined by the centre 704 pixels, not 714 pixels. So I did what was necessary to keep the correct AR and that is the crop the video to 704x274 and upscale to 1280x548.

This all assumes a DVD properly mastered to the true "Blue Book" (DVD Forum) specification.

Cropping a D-1 master from 720x486 to 720x480 and dumping to DVD (as is the case with the GOUT) does not result in an up-to-spec DVD.

D-1 PAR is retained, for instance, and is not 640/704≈0.9091 as is assumed here.

The active picture area for D-1 is 710.85 with a PAR of 4320:4739≈0.9116. The closest digital approximation of this is obtained via rounding up to 711 and slightly modifying the PAR to 72:79≈0.9114.

Notice how 711*72/79=648 and 648/486=4/3. Yes, that's = here, not ≈.

NTSC GOUT has 712 active pixels horizontally (most D-1 machines do 712 rather than 711 to make 4:2:2 work). Where do you see 714?

Check out: http://xpt.sourceforge.net/techdocs/media/video/dvd/dvd04-DVDAuthoringSpecwise/ar01s02.html

It would be cool to have a barcode for each of the Star Wars releases.

Anchorhead said:

Yet I'm beyond excited and completely on-board with the seventh film now that Lucas is completely uninvolved.

I am too, but it has less to do with Lucas' lack of involvement for me and more to do with the following image.

generalfrevious said:

The movies though...there hasn't been a good one in 32 years.

FTFY

happycube said:

On my end, I think I'll relatively soon have a complimentary technique to merge two captures of the same master (preferably from different disks) - should be particularly good for rotters (since most of the time the rot will be in different locations) and disks that are pressed a bit noisily (points at Technidisc ;) )

We currently have TooT (two-out-of-three: average the 2 most similar pixels of the 3) and median-of-three for doing this with three captures (three different copies of the same master). I'm doing this with THX 1138 right now.

Requiring one less LD is most certainly welcome!

TV's Frink said:

Plug a USB stick in your ear and watch it directly in your brain.

This reminds me of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNvdflWsrFQ

slask said:

I agree, but '11 versions need remasters too...

In what way? Isn't the '90s-looking CGI, waxy DNR look, and terrible color grading all part of GL's original vision for Star Wars?

slask said:

I will.

But then tell mr. know-it-all to respect everyone's opinion, and not to call ignorant or childish the ones who don't think like him.

You do know that SilverWook is a mod, right?

Simple solution: Blade Runner 'em. Release the original, '97, '04, and '11 versions of the movie. The '04 and '11 versions really don't need any extra work done in order to be included.

A few more BDs will drive the price up, but Star Wars fans are pretty reliable when it comes to purchasing Star Wars sets of just about any price, so this doesn't matter too much.

generalfrevious said:

TV's Frink said:

Oh shut the fuck up already.

 Whose fault is that we no longer have any film negatives that exist to restore the OT again? That we have to resort to secondary sources for restoring ONE OF THE LARGEST FRANCHISES IN MOVIE HISTORY?

Those so-called secondary sources are closer to what was seen in theaters in '77/80/83 than the negative since they have the "baked-in" damage due to handling that the negative does not necessarily have. Consider: http://fd.noneinc.com/Glitch/starwars-tantiveorangeerrors/starwars-tantiveorangeerrors.html

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss them if I were you.

generalfrevious said:

The jokes don't matter, because they are lost films now. George always hated us and wanted to destroy the negatives and mouth rape us with the Special Editions as the only films we could see. Disney has failed us and they are doubling down on the PTSE narrative that has hijacked the franchise for the last 20 years. The OT is gone forever and Disney is making sure any last pockets of resistance get flooded with cease and desist letters.

As I've said before and I say again: The negatives are not the only available source for a good restoration of the OUT.

Many IP (interpositive), IN (internegative), and theatrical release prints exist. Obviously lower generations are better, but even a good restoration from a theatrical release print would be sufficient for a nice 1080p BD release.

Who cares about the negative? An interpositive, internegative, or even a release print is fine to use as a basis for restoration. Obviously, lower generations are better, but all would hold up just fine on Blu-ray.

GameofThrones said:

i am a religious person since my birth (orthodox) and if i am breaking the law capturing Netflix & Hulu, then i will not be doing this anymore in the future.

Why does your piety matter in this context?

Being religious does not require you to be law-abiding and being law-abiding does not necessarily make you moral.

Would you stop practicing your religion if Austria made it illegal?

bigrob said:

SilverWook said:

This is getting interesting! Anyone got a PAL VHS deck handy?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/VHS-Video-1980-FLASH-GORDON-Sam-J-Jones-Ornella-Muti-Brian-Blessed-Queen-/390713746670?pt=UK_DVD_Film_TV_Videos&hash=item5af85aa4ee

 necrobump lol

I have a copy of this now. Planing to capture it shortly

Any updates?

Thanks, Andrea! This is great work!

dvdmike said:

Grain management is part and parcel of a restoration now.

Indeed.

For everyone who may not know the difference between grain management and scrubbing: Take a look at the restoration of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Falaskan said:

Mondess122 said:

AuggieBenDoggie said:

From what his Facebook page says, there is not much left to do. So I'd say late summer or sometime this fall. I also suspect that work has already began on ROTJ:R. Maybe we will see a teaser for ROTJ:R on the ESB:R dvd. He had a Teaser for ESB:R on the ANH:R dvd.

However, I'm pretty sure we've been hearing that since late 2012. Not to critique anyone, but don't act shocked if this once again gets pushed to 2016 or a year later. It's almost routine at this point.

 Not to critique either, but it hasn't needed to take this long either.

Oh, yeah? Please explain.

Feallan said:

Harmy said:

Those are some of the best seeded torrents on the spleen. Try using uTorrent instead.

 Only utorrent 2.2.1, newer ones are terrible. They even went as far as hiding a bitcoin miner inside the client. Stay away.

Try qBittorrent or Deluge, they are great clients.

+1 for qBitTorrent.

DavidMerrick said:

Whoa, I had no idea there was another 35mm preservation going on besides Team Negative 1's. Goodness there's a lot to look forward to.

"There is another."

CatBus said:

Dang, that was your cue to trash-talk CRT's! Oh well, maybe next time.

CRTs are wonderful. >:-{

nickr said:

Sorry my post was meant to be light hearted. You have showed me how inadequate my setup is.

I am just so used to doing without silver discs, that I am surprised these days when people talk about them.

No offence intended.

Hey, it's no problem. I don't think your setup is inadequate. Very few people (relative to the world population) truly need calibrated setups for critical viewing.

I'm sorry for missing that your post was meant to be light-hearted. We get a good number of new users around here who come in and start talking trash about what they perceive as antiquated, etc. and I mistakenly thought you were one of them.