PDB said:
Anyone have the Dolby Stereo/Surround PCM from the Aliens extended edition laserdisc? I have the theatrical cut captured but want to preserve the extended edition also.
Yeah, I have the unsynched PCM from the Japanese CLV LD on my home PC, but I'm on vacation now. Will send it after I get back.
I just skimmed over the page but the "4K Project" only appears to be a 28-minute special consisting of scenes from each movie, the individual airings of the movies themselves don't appear to be from 4K masters.
It'd make for a cool comparison, but I don't have cable. My GF does, but there's no way to directly record from the cable box. It would be possible if she was willing to spend an extra 5,000 yen a month to rent a special BD recorder/cable box, but lately she's doesn't even seem to want to pay what she's paying now.
But the bitrates on Japanese cable usually suck, and I'm sure these will be coming to home video eventually. The recent BDs were likely just a cash-in for the new movie, Toho will definitely want to get people to double-dip again.
I have the unsynched PCM for ST V and VI, as well as for TMP (since the one done by Jonno isn't bit-perfect). Not sure if I'll ever get around to doing V, and VI could be a hassle since I don't think the LD is the theatrical cut like the BD is. Plus the DNR and aliasing on the VI BD is really bad...
PDB said:
Another one from Buster D:
Movie:Star Trek IV
Format: Laserdisc LV 1797-2WS
The product code should actually be PILF-1204. Sorry about that, I'll have to remember to include all the information next time.
How bad is the stereo audio on the Star Trek TNG Blu-rays, aside from it being lossy Dolby Digital instead of lossless or PCM? I don't notice anything much when I watch the BDs in stereo (only just started Season 2 though), but I believe I've read on Trek Core about the stereo having missing/wrong SFX that matches mistakes on the 7.1 tracks, so I assume that the stereo isn't the original audio, but a downmix or new stereo mix done at the same time as the 7.1.
Most of the "Log" LD boxes can be found pretty cheaply in Japan, maybe I'll try synching one of my favorite episodes and see how long it takes me.
It's a bit of a tragedy that we may never see a proper restoration from the O-neg, but decent scans of release prints will still look better than most theatrical presentations of the OOT and will even look better than the official Blu-rays in many ways.
Yeah, building your own PC is usually the best way to go, but it's always nerve-wracking whenever anything goes wrong since there's so many things that can go wrong. I left a new PC I built mostly untouched for months because it kept having random problems.
Yep, that's what I figured. Hopefully it can be preserved someday, along with THX 1138 (which is probably more deserving considering it has far more obvious changes).
Looks like even the analog-only LD is stereo, so it might not be possible to do a preservation of the mono audio for American Graffiti unless someone has access to a film print from before the Dolby Surround remix.
Is the DTS-MA 2.0 for American Graffiti as close to the original theatrical audio (4-track stereo) as we can get? I have one of the Pioneer Japan LDs but it's Dolby Surround, so I assume it's mostly the same as the DTS-MA.
My Oppo BDP-80 will play BD-Rs containing MKVs with 44.1kHz LPCM 2.0, but it has a lot of bugs, like ignoring the chapter stops, and deciding to jump back to the very beginning if I try to rewind, and then stopping playback if I try to fast forward to the place where I left off (so I'm screwed unless I want to watch the whole thing again). My Popcorn Hour does a pretty good job with MKVs, but its kind of a pain to use in my setup so I prefer to mux to BDMV and playback in my PS3 or Oppo.
James Cameron recently did a Reddit AMA, but it doesn't look like anyone bothered to ask him about Terminator and Abyss getting a blanket teal tint. I'd kind of like to hear his justification for it, although I suspect the answer might not be very satisfying (if he even would be willing to answer).
hairy_hen said:
So to sum all that up in one sentence: always use tools with good quality anti-aliasing enabled, and you'll be far ahead of the curve when it comes to delivering high fidelity results.
Great, thanks for the detailed reply.
Will there be any degradation from applying the anti-aliasing filter twice (once for upsampling 44.1kHz to 192kHz and once for downsampling down to 48kHz)? Sound Forge allows one to set the interpolation accuracy from 1 to 4, and setting it to 4 takes a good while for the resampling processing to complete. So might it already be internally doing something similar to the 44.1>192>48 process? I'd have a bit more peace of mind if I only had to apply the filter once and could go directly from 44.1 to 48, but if 44.1 to 192 to 48 will still be better despite applying the filter twice, then that's what I'll do.
hairy_hen said:
All SRC processes unavoidably degrade the audio quality of the original source. SRC algorithms require very steep lowpass filters to reject unwanted high frequency energy at greater than half the sample rate, which is introduced into the signal regardless of whether the target rate is higher or lower than it started out.
I see that Sound Forge has elements of iZotope RX, Ozone, and Nectar built into it, which is awesome. I've recently started using these myself as Pro Tools plugins, and they really do sound great. You can get some very good results from them if you know what you're doing, so if this is what's being used for laserdisc audio preservations, so much the better.
Just to be clear, is this in reference to Sound Forge with anti-alias filtering, or without? I've been using Sound Forge without anti-aliasing since that's what I was recommended a long time ago on another forum (and so far I haven't noticed any audible difference with the original 44.1kHz LD audio) , but I can re-do the resampling with another method if it will produce better results.
I keep 44.1 versions as well, but I doubt if there's any noticeable quality difference when using the right software and settings to resample, I always use the highest quality setting in Sound Forge (without applying an anti-aliasing filter since I assume it's not needed when going to a higher rate).
Yeah, it was done with an M-Audio 2496.
I'll get to it eventually, but it could take me a while.
I have the PCM from the Japanese LD (uses the same master as the Criterion), but haven't synched it yet. Was actually thinking of doing the Director's Cut first since I haven't seen that version on BD yet.
If no one is willing to make the password public, if someone could PM it to me it'd be appreciated. (I'll return the favor if there's anything I can do in return.)
You may as well leave it it for posterity. It looks a cel that's affecting the image in between the lines as well, so correcting it would probably be more trouble than it's worth.
CatBus said:
Conclusion: it works! (at least for Japanese)
Thanks Buster D for getting this conversation started and pointing us at a good product, and Feallan and Sadako too! Corrections are still required, but it's not that bad. Perhaps someday Project Threepio will no longer have any graphical-only subtitles!
Awesome! What did you do to get multiple subtitle lines into one image, just manually copying and pasting? I might want to try this on some of my own projects someday.
BS says it's password-protected, what's the password?
I think there are actually some programs (not SubRip) that will OCR Japanese text in images. I tried FineReader a long time ago and it seemed to work somewhat well on scans of an old novel I had, but the output still required some editing. Not sure how well it would work on subtitle images, but it might be worth a try. FineReader isn't free though and I'm not sure how well other software works.
Right, I didn't think you were calling me a liar or anything, I just didn't think to doubt the ja.wikipedia article until you mentioned that you hadn't yet confirmed the re-broadcasts.
One possible bit of good news is that God Mars has been re-airing on a local TV station (TV Kanagawa, I think). Perhaps they'll air Mighty Orbots afterward as a sort of tie in. A long shot, but you never know.
It's possible it never did actually re-air, I can't seem to find anything in a quick Google search in Japanese (other than the Wikipedia article and other websites copying the article).