ChainsawAsh

Well, I'm about 1/3 of the way through the film (fixing interlacing and DEFT issues) - just got to the first fade-to-black after the "Who?!  Am?!  I?!?!?!" scene.

My current FCP timeline.  Should give you an idea of how much needs fixing in this movie.  Every cut on the V1 track represents a shot or portion of a shot that I've had to apply some form of de-interlacing or IVTC to.  Every shot on the V2 track represents a shot like the example in my previous post where I was able to find a good frame to replace it with.  (note: the video file says "480i25" because that's what I named it when I rendered it from the DVD9 at a 25i framerate - when CinemaTools converts 25i to 24p, it doesn't change the filename, hence it still says "480i25" even though it's really 480p23.976, or 480p24.)

There aren't that many places where I wasn't able to fix a problem.  Each such issue is the last frame of one shot and the beginning of the next, and when you're watching it in motion you don't notice it unless you're looking for it.

I'm hoping to have the video done today so I can render out a new ProRes video file and start working on the DVD tonight.

Now, as far as uploading this ... does anyone know of a good guide for how to upload a torrent?  I've never done it (successfully) before.

(Interestingly, TheBox refuses to accept this as a torrent, saying it's not different enough from the 25fps PAL torrent they have.  This will likely be upped to PirateBay and Demonoid when it's finished.)

--edit--

Just passed the halfway mark - I'm at 00:50:17:22 in the NTSC timeline, which equals 00:48:17:05 in the PAL timeline.

Strangely, every once in a while there's one frame in the middle of a shot that's a blend of the lower field of that frame and the upper field of the next frame.  The rest of the shot is perfectly fine with no interlacing issues.

So there will be a few frames throughout that are half the quality of the surrounding frames, due to the fact that half the lines simply don't exist in the PAL master.

--edit again--

Noticed something funny - looks like the effects guys figured they didn't need to make the fake glass go all the way into the overscan portion of the frame (compare the pane the Doctor is standing behind [CG glass that the Doctor is about to walk through] to the one to its right [which had real glass in it]):

It's definitely real, and it looks pretty good.  Not perfect, obviously, but a fuckton better than the GOUT.

That was one of the question marks, along with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Towel.

Antivirus ≠ vaccines

You can not have an antivirus program, but be careful about your web browsing, and never get a virus.

It's quite another thing to not get vaccinated, then try to "be careful" that you never get sick.

I'm with the doctors.  Not vaccinating your children does not affect only your child, it affects every child yours comes into contact with.  Areas with high rates of non-vaccinated children also show significantly higher rates of diseases like measles among young people.

I have no sympathy for any parent who doesn't vaccinate their child.  I feel terrible for the children, since it's not their choice, but any parent dumb enough to fall onto the "Vaccines cause autism!" bullshit bandwagon deserves to be shunned by their doctors.

Nice, Frink - I just watched Shaun last night with the cast commentary on.

Well, after doing some tests with both versions, it seems that fixing the combing artifacts in the 480p file yields better results than fixing them in the 576p file.  So I'm going with that.

And you were right about that DEFT bullshit.  Good news is, I can isolate the affected shots and deinterlace them with no problems.  The only exceptions are a couple of shots where the last frame of one and first frame of the next have their fields blended.

In a couple instances of this, deinterlacing works perfectly.  In most, it doesn't work at all.

So what I've done with a couple of them is just repeat one of the frames from either the end or beginning of one of the shots - this only works when one (or both) shots are static, with no movement.

For shots where I can't do that ... well, they're just going to have to stay fucked up.  I mean, they look exactly the same on the PAL DVD, anyway, so even if you're watching the official disc, you're gonna have to deal with this issue.  Therefore, I'm not going to stress too much if I can't fix problems that were always there.

--edit--

Example of one of those "blended field" shots I was talking about:

Annoying?  Yes.  Fixable?  No.  Present if you watch the retail PAL DVD on your TV?  Absolutely.  So I'm not going to worry about trying to fix this, since it can't be fixed.

brash_stryker said:

This makes me wish Ady was a Final Cut person so I could ask him for that kind of help. :-p

You could always ask me! ;-)

Are you talking about the letterboxing?  Crop it out completely, color correct the source so it's at 16-235, then add in new black bars that are at 16 IRE.

You might also have to do more radical color correction to the SE source if it's been rendered in the wrong color space in order to make it look right.

TheBoost said:

ChainsawAsh said:

I got rid of mine when I got sick of looking at my face every time I came here.

This might be rooted in deep seated psychosis. Have you considered getting help?

Erm ... huh?

("woosh" in 3...2...1...)

CP3S said:

 

 

And to bring things back on topic (because I am such a rebel), finally after many years of being told I should, I have begun watching the first season of the new Doctor Who series. I guess it is okay, but as someone who has never seen anything Doctor Who before and has no attachments to it, it has a really high cheese factor and is obvious it was really made to appeal to kids falling somewhere in the 10-17 demograph. The Aliens of London/World War Three two parter was immensely painful to watch with all of its infantile fart gags, not to mention the intentionally over the top goofy looking alien villians. When I was twelve I may very well have loved this show, but I really don't think it is something I could get into in adulthood. Glad I gave it a shot though.

It gets much better after Dalek.  The cheese factor is still there, but it drops off significantly with Matt Smith's Doctor (current season).

Trust me when I say that Aliens of London/World War Three is the cheesiest episode of the revived series, with the possible exceptions of Love & Monsters and The Unicorn and the Wasp.

I urge you to finish Series 1.  If you don't want to watch all of it, then please watch these episodes before you give up:

- Dalek (somewhat cheesy, but much less cheesy than almost any other Dalek episode)
- Father's Day
- The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances (my all-time favorite DW episode[s], VERY low on cheese)

UPDATE:

I've finished downloading the DVD9, so I'm entering the final phase of this project - doing it!

Anyway, as of now, all audio tracks are finished.

Main Audio
Slowed down 4%; pitch has likewise been lowered 4%

Commentary 1
Slowed down 4%; pitch of original has been preserved

Commentary 2
Slowed down 4%; pitch of original has been preserved

Isolated Score
Slowed down 4%; pitch has likewise been lowered 4%

This means that for the commentaries, the parts where they are speaking preserves the correct pitch of the speakers' voices, while the portions with movie audio (when they are not speaking) retains the 4% increase in pitch caused by the PAL speedup.

The main audio and isolated score have been slowed down and the pitch has been lowered to compensate for the speedup and pitch increase caused by the PAL conversion.

You can tell by listening to the beginning, as for the first 5 seconds or so, each track has the exact same audio.  Tracks 1 and 4 definitely sound lower in pitch than 2 and 3 (it's only music at this point), but all 4 tracks conform to the new 89 minute length (the PAL version is 85 minutes).

Now I just need to work on the video.  I have both a full-resolution 720x576, 25fps PAL file, and a 720x480, 25fps "hybrid" PAL/NTSC file.

So, here's my question - I can CinemaTools both of these to play at 23.976fps.  Should I do it to the full-res PAL version, fix as many interlacing issues as I can, then down-res to 720x480, or work with the already-down-res'd file from the start?

As much as I hate it when other people do this ...

timdiggerm said:

I think the fancy menus on ANHR, which match the style of the official DVD menus so well, do wonders in terms of legitimizing the Revisited Edits in the eyes of most people.

     ^This.

What the movie got right:

- Martin Freeman as Arthur
- Sam Rockwell as Zaphod
- Alan Rickman as the voice of Marvin
- Bill Nighy as Slartibartfast

What the movie got wrong:

- Basically everything else

I definitely prefer the original two radio shows over any of the books.

Basically, in order of favorite to least favorite (edited after listening to all the radio shows again):

1. 1978 Radio Show ("Primary Phase")
2. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979 book)
3. 2004 Radio Show ("Tertiary Phase")
4. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980 book)
5. Life, the Universe and Everything (1982 book)
6. 1979/1980 Radio Show ("Secondary Phase")
7. 1981 TV Show
8. 2005 Radio Show ("Quintessential Phase")
9. 2005 Radio Show ("Quandary Phase")
10. Mostly Harmless (1992 book)
11. And Another Thing... (2008 non-Adams book)
12. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984 book)
13. ?
14. ?
15. ?
16. ?
17. ?
18. ?
19. ?
20. ?
21. ?
22. ?
23. ?
24. ?
25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005 film)

I got rid of mine when I got sick of looking at my face every time I came here.

Video black is 16, video white is 235.  That's 100% normal, and it's not a problem at all.

And NEVER set your luminance level to 0-255!!!!  Even if it doesn't seem to have any issues, you will still end up with an illegal video signal that could play back improperly on some displays.

Remember - ALWAYS 16-235, NEVER 0-255!

Two bits of good news:

1) A kind forum member (who shall remain anonymous, just in case) has pointed me to a torrent of the DVD-9 PAL Revisitations version, and it's downloading quite quickly!

2) I seem to have had good success in the following with the DVD-5:

- Cinema Tools is able to convert the PAL video and main audio to 23.976fps NTSC just fine.  A couple of shot transitions have blended frames, but I notice no jerky motion, and frankly, I'm not that worried about it being 100% perfect.  At least I know it's possible now.

- I'm working with Soundtrack Pro to adjust the audio of the commentaries while preserving the pitch.  I'll update about this later when I know more about how this will pan out.

So, I just need a way to adjust chapter times and subtitles from PAL to NTSC, then I'm golden.  I'm going to leave everything else on the R1 DVD9 alone, so just the main movie (video, main audio, both commentaries, isolated score, both subtitle tracks, and chapter timings) will be altered compared to the retail disc.

I'm not quite sure how I'm going to do that yet, but I'll figure it out...I hope.

--edit--

I quite like the results CinemaTools has provided.  It may not be perfect, but damn it, it's more than good enough for me.  I might fine-tune it a bit more once I finish downloading the DVD-9, but I may not.  I haven't noticed any issues in effects scenes - titles and credits look a little wonky, but they do in the PAL version, too, so I don't see that as a problem.

I've also had some success in time stretching in Sountrack Pro without affecting pitch, but I can't quite get the sync to work for some reason.  I'll figure it out eventually, though.

Can you export each audio track as a mono WAV (so, you'd end up with 6 mono WAV files), and then combine them into a 5.1 AC3 using another program?

And I second the "PM Adywan" suggestion.  He'll almost certainly be able to help.

As I don't have the money to import the PAL Revisitations box set, and I can't find an uncompressed PAL DVD-9 rip of disc 1 of the TV movie, I've downloaded a compressed PAL DVD-5 instead (don't worry, I own the R1 release, I'm not pirating here).

I'm using MPEG Streamclip to convert the video to ProRes 422 (HQ) to import into Final Cut.  From there, I'm going to try to manually convert from PAL to NTSC myself.  I'm also going to try to slow down the commentary tracks while preserving their pitch (as they are at their proper pitch at 25fps, whereas the main audio is at its proper pitch at 23.976fps/29.97fps).  Not sure what I'm going to have to do with the isolated score, or how I'll be able to keep the subtitles.

Anyway, this is all a trial run anyway.  If I can get it to work with the compressed DVD5, I'm going to import the PAL Revisitations set and do it all over again with the full-res video.

---OR---

If anyone here happens to own the PAL Revisitations set, and could upload a rip of the DVD9 (or, better yet, just the movie, 4 audio tracks, and 2 subtitle streams, with no extra features or menus, as according to the Restoration Team, all of that fits on a single layer, so you'd only have to upload a DVD5), that would be absolutely fantastic, and you would get first dibs on the finished product.

If not, I'll just have to pony up the cash to import it myself!

If anyone can upload the untouched PAL video for me, please send me a PM.

Don't forget that Darabont fired the majority of the Season 1 writing staff, and hired a new set of writers for Season 2.  Much like what happened with Buffy, and Season 2 of that show was much improved over the first.

How exactly does this thread belong on its own, and not as part of the "General Star Wars Random Thoughts" thread?

That is good news!

Try posting in the How-To's section.  I'm not familiar with Vegas, but I know a lot of members of this site are.

You both need to watch The Usual Suspects pretty much immediately.  I'd recommend going in as spoiler-free as you possibly can.