Charles Threepio

Releases are scheduled to commence in January, with Castle, Doctor Who and the Silurians, Doctor Who: The Ambassadors of Death, Doctor Who: Inferno, Doctor Who: Terror of the Autons, Doctor Who: The Mind of Evil, Doctor Who: The Claws of Axos, Doctor Who: Colony in Space, Doctor Who: The Daemons, Doctor Who: Day of the Daleks, Are You Being Served?: The Complete First Season, and the first few installments of Film Odyssey in barebones form.

Ah, would it be possible to send me a raw file of the German DVD version, that I might be able to upscale the original closing credits with nnedi3_rpow2 for a possible restoration of my own? Thanks!

In honor of 50 years of PBS (itself celebrating with a new rebrand), I’ve decided to kick off a year-long celebration of PBS’s birthday with a thread dedicated to restorations of some of PBS’s best programs.

WORK IN PROGRESS

• Are You Being Served?: The Complete First Season (1972-1973)
• Castle (1983)
• Civilisation (1969)
• Doctor Who: The First Time-Life Collection (1970-1972)
• Film Odyssey I: Jules and Jim (1972)
• Film Odyssey II: The Blue Angel (1972)
• Film Odyssey III: Grand Illusion (1972)
• The Magic School Bus: The Complete First Season (1994)

I’ll try that.

Deblock_QED(quant1=24, quant2=26, aOff1=1, aOff2=1, bOff1=2, bOff2=2, uv=3)
Blur(1.0)
nnedi3_rpow2(rfactor=4, cshift=“lanczosresize”, fwidth=width3, fheight=height3, ep0=5)
Sharpen(0.25)
ConvertBits(16)
ConvertToRGB(matrix=“Rec601”)
ConvertToYV12(matrix=“Rec709”)
ConvertBits(8, dither=0)

Using the above script, I was able to get a serviceable 1440p upscale of the first episode of Sailor Moon. But when I tried using HDRTools to go the next logical step, to 4K HDR, just the first minute was riddled with artifacting, including several wrong colors that made certain spots look jagged! I don’t know where I went wrong there, or if I was simply being too ambitious.

Ultimately, I decided I would get better results with Avisynth+ than with just plain old Avisynth. I’ll first blow up the image to around HD resolution and convert the color matrix from 601 to 709, then, if the results are satisfactory enough to the both of us, I’ll go one higher, to 4K resolution and 10-bit (perhaps even 12-bit) Rec. 2020.

Well, if SD sources are all we got to work with, I say the best course of action would be at least try and make them look good. Avisynth with nnedi3_rpow2 (which just so happens to be also what I use), from what I heard, could well be enough to blow Toei’s Q-TEC FORS away.

I never thought Toei to be the types to use Avisynth, actually. I always imagined they were using paid software on the R2 DVD masters, albeit they haven’t come out looking great thus far (I heard somewhere, though I can’t remember where, that Avisynth is supposed to produce better results for free).

I got dibs on Sailor Moon. I’ll be basing my restoration on the R2 DVDs and will try to make them 4K HDR if I can manage it in Avisynth (I hear there’s an AVS plugin for converting SDR to HDR).

How’s it looking thus far? And do you plan to do this with other features as well, such as King Kong, 42nd Street, and Casablanca?

sampsoninc916 said:

Have you ever thought of using Topaz Gigapixel AI for the upscaling?

I’ve committed myself to only using freeware for restorations. I find freeware to be most effective if you’re inventive enough, plus there’s no cost in using freeware.

Only from the top and bottom. I can understand not wanting any cropping whatever if you’re combining a 4:3 DVD with a 4:3 laser videodisc, but when you’re dealing with VHS, which very often, if not always, has a bit of picture distortion at the bottom of the frame (my VHS copy is, of course, no exception), it just can’t be helped if you’re going for consistency, which I am in this case. Besides, I watched my entire VHS copy cropped to 1.66:1 just to be sure it’d work, and all the titles managed to fit rather well. Plus, the DVD, which I intend to use for most of the restoration process, has some artifacting of its own in a single shot, and cropping to 1.66:1 hid it quite nicely. One key objective of a restoration, after all, is to make the program look good.

This project concerns the restoration of the animated adaptations of David Macaulay’s architectural books for PBS, part of my planned 50th birthday celebration for the network.

As we speak, I’m working on Castle, the first in the series. I’m hoping to get this special restored within a month or two. The program will be presented in a 1.66:1 aspect ratio. I have taken a lot of things into consideration when deciding on the framing. Among them: the complete version, which features added exposition about Master James of St. George (the real-life inspiration for the character of Master James of Babbington, voiced by none other than Brian Blessed) at the end of the second live-action sequence, is only available on old videocassettes issued before the 1994 rebroadcast; the DVD release from Paramount has some distracting artifacting in a single shot; and I wanted to ensure the best possible widescreen framing for the purpose of alleviating those flaws, making the presentation look as even and consistent as possible, and sacrificing as little of the picture as necessary and possible. Needless to say, great precautions will be taken in the reframing, and it won’t be a straight center cut all the way. I will be using the DVD as my source as much as possible, with my VHS copy coming in for the opening and closing bumpers (yes, even including the original videocassette promo at the end) and the aforementioned extended ending of the second live-action sequence. Audio will be English 1.0, with subtitles in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. AviSynth will be used to upscale the sources, and FFMPEG is being used to deinterlace them before upscaling. Audio remastering, if and whenever necessary, will be undertaken in Audacity. Subtitle tracks will be created in Aegisub. The complete video program will be edited in Blender.

Looks promising thus far. Give it a little more time, and it’ll look even better for your patience.

Anyway, here’s an initial version of the restored still picture that will function as the Time Life Films logo at the end of each episode.

https://we.tl/t-kqhOqydVVR

Let me know what you think.

Good point. At any rate, for this project I’ll very likely work on just one or two episodes per month, to give myself room for the other projects.

Over the next year, I will work on a reconstruction of the original PBS broadcast version of Lord Clark’s Civilisation, based on extant sources I’ve been able to dig up on Google.

The format for all 13 episodes shall be as follows:

• Xerox Corporation underwriter spot (“This program was made possible by a grant from the Xerox Corporation.”)
• 1970 NET logo (“The following program is a presentation of NET.”)
• The episode itself
• 1967 Time Life Films logo
• Xerox Corporation underwriter spot (“This program was made possible by a grant from the Xerox Corporation.”)
• NET closing logo and copyright notice (“A presentation of NET © Educational Broadcasting Corporation 1970”)
• 1970 PBS logo (“This is PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service.”)

Each episode will be presented in 1080i30 with the original monaural English audio, in a manner that ensures perfect compatibility with the Blu-ray format, and I will try as best as I can to recreate the Xerox underwriter announcement and the closing Time Life Films logo. The reason why preserving this version of Civilisation is so important is because it was the first event program to ever be broadcast on PBS, as well as one of the first programs on the network.

I’m currently watching A Bucket of Blood in 1.37:1 on my PBS station. Soon as I get materials for capturing in higher quality direct from my DVR (my TV tuner is currently out of commission due to circumstances beyond my control), I’ll post screencaps here, complete with station bug in the lower-right-hand corner of the screen.

I’ll just blow it up to 1080p, then. Besides, I had to do the original master for this restoration somewhere between the 1080p of the feature and the 576p of the logos I’m restoring (IIRC that’s the highest resolution where you can find Toy Story with its original logos at present), and I figured the original 1.5K resolution was close enough to the median.

ETA: As for the 3D, it did get converted in 2009. I should know, I saw it on the big screen.

I might make some further tweaks to the color correction based on the current revision, and label it Color Correction Test v2.0. After I finish the color correction definitively, I’ll send out red/cyan and SpaceSpex (yellow/blue) 3D coloration tests, to verify which of the two look better, and then I’ll perform further optimizations to the superior anaglyph format.

Looks promising.

Toy Story: 1 terabyte
Toy Story 2: 4.5 terabytes

The DI of the first two Toy Story films is 1.5K–more precisely, 1536x922. Apparently, the animators were trying for a 1.85:1 aspect ratio but made the vertical aspect ratio a tiny bit too high. Current prints are cropped to 16:9, for a 1536x864 resolution, which is the resolution at which I’m preparing the restoration before cropping it further to its theatrical 1.85:1 aspect ratio, or 1536x830. (Interesting to note, the first 2K DI from Pixar ever to be produced was for A Bug’s Life, at 2048x871, which I doubt I’ll be able to replicate effectively in Blender.)

One color correction test further will be performed, to reduce the brightness just slightly, and I may send it to everyone who’s posted in this thread.

I’ve made a further color correction over the weekend to tone down the reddish-pinkish tint on Woody and Buzz’s faces and am currently awaiting input on how well I did there.