Live on Myspleen. I’ll be sending PM’s for those who requested them shortly. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
thank you very much Croweyes1121 for your effort, looking forward to see this movie after so long time again.
Trust me, I’m THRILLED to finally be putting this thing out in the wild. Most of the time, I feel like this film’s only (or at least biggest) fan. I really hope the few fans that it has appreciate the blood, sweat, and tears that went into this…which will be more evident in the extensive release notes. If anyone is actually waiting for this to hit myspleen (all two or three of you?), it’ll probably be around 6:45am Eastern tomorrow morning. I’ve already got the torrent created and the upload all filled out. Just have to redownload the torrent file from MS and start seeding.
It’s right down to the wire, but I’ve decided to add in an HD recreation of the Advance Teaser Trailer as well. I’d never seen it before today, but really like it a lot. The only copy I’ve found is really lousy quality, so it’ll be quite the upgrade over what’s publicly available. All edits, score underlays, and color corrections are completed. I just need to reformat some of the end title cards, which are justified differently than the versions I used for the regular trailer. Thankfully the teaser is only 50 seconds long, so it wasn’t a ton of work.
EDIT: Completed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsETGdxsilU 😉
That’s great 😄 thanks! looking forward to seeing this, can’t believe you got that copy off of an old DVR!
Indeed. A copy actually surviving from a digital broadcast on a DVR for over 25 years, never having been transferred to VHS, is damn-near miraculous.
I should be able to work something out via DM. It won’t have all of the bundled extras I’ll be including on myspleen (see my post above on that) as my available space on MEGA will be maxed out with the edit alone, which comes in at 32.2GB, but I can make the standalone mkv file available for those interested enough to ask for it.
This sounds really impressive man, great work! as the topic says released I was wondering where it is?
-thanks
The thread is super old. The title is referring to a 2016 effort I shared at this edit. The 30th Anniversary Extended Cut is what I’m now talking about. It releases on myspleen on Thursday. It being St. Patrick’s Day and all, I thought it was a good day to put it out. 😉
EDIT: I just realized that I could change the name of the thread and have now done so to avoid further confusion.
One more small tidbit regarding the running time. The final runtime of the edit is 169:36. But if you also tack on the additional “night two” opening credit sequence, that takes the overall length to 174:09 (so pretty close after all to the originally-reported 176:00, even adjusting for speed and pitch). The “night one” broadcast contained a repeat of the closing credits, which accounts for the remainder of the discrepancy.
Yes, I saw that! Great to see that, although it is a slightly different version than the one I did, which is based on the “standard” trailer. Theirs was taken from a version made specifically to advertise the 70mm screenings. The aspect ratio changes after the 70mm text blurb (which is not in the standard trailer at all), and the Dolby logo is different in the end credits as well (Dolby Stereo vs. Spectral Recording).
I’ll be bundling this with:
2020 original trailer HD recreation.
30th Anniversary Extended Cut trailer (from three posts up).
Unique opening credit sequence from night two of the ABC broadcast (unrestored, but changed to the correct speed/pitch).
Isolated Score audio track (Theatrical Cut).
Enya’s Book of Days (Film Version).
Yanni’s Santorini (Trailer Edit).
One week to go!
I made a video a few years ago showing a scene from the previous edit. I’ve excised the same section of the new version to demonstrate the level of improvement.
Expanded Network Television Cut (2014)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_BL-yDTmxs
30th Anniversary Extended Cut (2022)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zij3fXDPdwc
Release trailer.
I’ve completed my watch-through and made a few tiny fixes. Final version is exporting now. Releasing on the spleen on March 17th.
I’ll be bundling this as a Far and Away “pack” for fans of the film. Extras will include my fully-restored 1080p / stereo version of the original theatrical trailer and, for fans of John Williams’s incredible score, a DTS 4.0 isolated score (utilizing elements from the recent La-La Land score release) suitable for muxing directly into the theatrical Blu-ray as an optional audio track.
If I have the time, I may create a trailer detailing the process of creating this edit. Thanks a lot for all of the interest here. I hope you guys really enjoy it.
Initial edit is a wrap.
I’m exporting now, and will undoubtedly spot a few things that need a little extra TLC before this hits the spleen. Keep in mind that an edit comprised of A/V sources from both HD and SD eras will never be as polished as we’d all like. There are definitely a few areas that are rougher around the edges than others…but I think and hope that this will make fans of the film quite happy overall.
Banners and pop-ups masked out. Maybe one or two spots that need score underlays, and three brief areas where I have a few frames where the ABC logo needs to be manually painted out. But otherwise, we’re looking good for that SPD release.
Logo masking is completed.
Next step is masking the USA network banners and pop-ups. That should take about a week I think.
Then I’ll add in a few music score underlays you fill out the areas where the compressed broadcast audio sounds a bit digital / anemic, and this will be finished.
I’m tentatively hoping for a St. Patrick’s Day release if all goes well.
I took a bit of a break on this project for the holidays, but I hit it hot and heavy again a few days ago and have made a lot of progress.
All frame duplicate decimation has been done, and the footage has been sped back up to 23.976fps. There were actually MORE duplicate frames than would account for the typical variance between 29.97fps and 23.976fps, but this has been corrected. The audio from the original source was then sped up (and pitched up) to the decimated footage, which actually brought the audio / score pitch back up to proper.
All color correction has been done to the TV scenes.
All audio transitions have been done, along with volume matching (as best as can be achieved) to the Blu-ray. One issue with the TV version is that the dynamic range was clearly compressed for the broadcast (quiet scenes are loud, and loud scenes are quiet), so the volume had to be tackled scene-by-scene to match the surrounding HD footage.
Score underlays have been dropped in in a few places where they were needed to fill out the audio and make it sound a bit less compressed / digital.
So I basically have a version finished now WITH the USA logo and advertising banners over the extra scenes. The final step will be to take the lower-quality footage and use a feathered mask to paint out the network logo. I have someone (with far more experience with the process than I) decimating this footage right now. Once I get it back, I will get to work painting out the logos and banners. Once that is done, this project will be a done deal.
To say I’m excited to share this with you guys is an understatement. I watched much of it tonight, just scanning through to analyze audio transitions and color timing, and I had a smile on my face nearly the entire time. I can’t say for sure when I’ll get the decimated footage back (probably a week or two), but once I do, this will probably take about a month more or so to fully complete. So as of right now, I’m thinking maybe (hopefully) April for release. Cheers!
Thank you very much Croweyes1121 for the sneak peak.
I look forward to it.
Sure thing. I just did a quickie video this afternoon based on the screenshots in my prior post. Happy New Year.
Here’s a sneak peak at what’s being done with the TV footage.
Lesser-quality (logoless) source:
https://i.ibb.co/sQ9gHCH/correction1.png
Better quality source (with logo):
https://i.ibb.co/0Gkw55s/correction2.png
Initial Topaz AI upscale:
https://i.ibb.co/1rMcByv/correction3.png
Final restoration, with logo removal (lesser source used to mask logo area):
https://i.ibb.co/QNkDk00/correction4.png
There will also be a color-correction done to liven up the colors and bring it more in line with the Blu-ray on the final version, both to the main USA source, and to the low-quality source, matching it to the correction done to the USA version.
Okay, so it turns out that the framerate issue is a bit more complicated than previously thought, BUT I think we’ve figured out what’s wrong, and will be able to correct it. Basically, since the SD broadcast standard was 29.97fps, I had thought that removing all of the duplicate frames would automatically correct things to the proper 23.976fps speed. But for some reason, both halves of this broadcast have more duplicate frames than usual. Part 1 has an effective, decimated framerate of 23.22fps, and Part 2 clocks in at 22.98fps. Both parts then need to be reassembled to the proper 23.976fps rate to adjust for the speed problem. This will take time, but the end result will be worth it. It’ll be months, not weeks, but it should be great.
Well guys, it looks like I spoke too soon on this.
I have a very unique problem. The broadcast is too slow. It doesn’t stay in time with the BD. And yet detelecining the braodcast to 23.976fps DOES produce smooth motion (which then needs to be sped up to around 103-104% to match the speed and the pitch of the BD). This makes literally no sense at all. The film itself was shot at 24fps, so I have no idea how a broadcast would have the proper framerate yet not have the correct duration. This has me totally baffled. Speeding the footage up introduces jerky motion. Keeping it at smooth motion makes the footage duration take too long compared with the BD, so the audio transitions don’t work. This is the strangest thing I have ever seen.
I’m not knowledgeable about technical things, but the second option sounds more sensible to me.
I think, that smoothly motion is important.
Agreed. Once I noticed the skipping frames, I could not unsee the choppy motion. Unfortunately, fixing all the footage will add some time to the project now, but I can’t let it go out that way.
grateful thanks Croweyes1121 for your update, i’m really looking forward to the result.
My pleasure. It seems that somehow, the TV footage was aired at a native 23.976 fps, yet the footage is played slightly slow (around 96.77% of proper speed - it’s not a typical PAL to NTSC slowdown, which would have been 95.905%, I tried that…it’s quite peculiar), with improper pitch…so I have two options: speed up all of the footage to the correct pitch (which I did originally, resulting in choppy motion due to skipped frames) or maintain the 23.976 frame rate and run the audio through a lengthy pitch-correction process which will fix the pitch but maintain length. The resulting footage will play smoothly, with audio at the correct pitch. It may not be the “correct” speed, but the motion will be fluid and not detectably wrong. This is what I’m opting for with v2.0.
Work on v2.0 has progressed quite well. So much so, in fact, that I’ve decided to share some more information sooner rather than later as I believe this may be wrapped up in a few months.
v2.0 utilizes a MUCH superior source for the extra TV footage (I contacted a fellow fan who miraculously located an old recording, still stored in his DVR, from a PDTV USA broadcast). As this copy never got sent to a VHS tape, the quality of this source, while still 4:3 SD, is miles better than what I had to work with in v1.0. The audio is also clean, with no analog tape hiss.
The only drawback to the new source is that there is a semi-transparent USA network watermark at bottom right of ALL of the footage. Correcting this issue is the most time-consuming part of v2.0. I’m tackling this by using a lesser-quality, logoless source, applying a feathered mask, and letting this source show through where the logo would be. The hardest part is that the lower quality copy was not detelecined properly, so it does not share the same duplicate / skipped frames as the USA source, which is forcing me to fix the mask on the TV footage frame-by-frame so the image doesn’t skip around inside of it.
Both the USA and lower quality source are being color-corrected scene-by-scene using Dr. Dre’s color correction tool, and then by eye for fine tuning.
Both TV sources have been upscaled using Topaz AI to squeeze every last drop of detail out of this.
The USA audio track has been remixed into 5.1 using Audition to better match the surrounding HD footage. This process isn’t perfect, so there’s a bit of inherent flangy “digitalness” to the audio, but it’s still much, much better than v1.0, which collapsed into 2.0 stereo (and as it turns out, my original TV source was actually 2.0 mono and not true stereo at all) every time an additional scene occurred. This time, dialogue stays anchored in the center channel as it should, etc.
I am maintaining the constant image height presentation just as with v1.0. I know that shifting aspect ratios really annoy some people, but there’s simply no better way to do this. The extended cut has only ever been seen in 4:3, and the only other options would be to:
a. Crop the entire film to 4:3, ruining the cinematography for 2.5 hours for the sake of 30 mins.
b. Blow up the 4:3 footage to fill the 2.39:1 frame left to right, resulting in even more severe cropping.
c. Recompose the entire film for 16:9, leaving both the Blu-ray and the TV scenes cropped.
d. Pillarbox (fill the screen height with) the TV footage, causing every TV scene to appear too large compared to the corresponding HD shots in the same scenes.
So I’m not going those routes. People will just have to deal with the image changing from 2.39:1 to (windowboxed) 4:3, with constant image height.
The audio transitions on this version will be GREATLY improved over the prior version as well. Frankly, I have to throw myself on the sword for this one. I made v1.0 back in 2014, and I’ve learned a ton since then.
I actually missed 3-4 (very) brief shots from the TV version on the prior version. I was much more thorough this time, and absolutely everything is here in v2.0.
I’ll also be upgrading this version from 720p with LPCM 5.1 audio (again, I plead temporary insanity in 2014) to 1080p (at a much higher bitrate) with DTS-HD MA 5.1 audio.
Final running time is 169 mins. 27 secs. Side note: the reason for the running time differing from the 176-min. reported time are twofold: 1. The original two-night ABC airing contained a second credit sequence for night two, complete with a different opening credits sequence in Boston, etc. Obviously this has been excised (and does not exist on the USA source). Also - and I don’t know why this is, but - apparently all of the TV airings aired slightly slow (the pitch is incorrect compared to the Blu-ray and the film score - it is this way on all three sources I have in my possession), possibly to further pad air time. So that’s why we’re left with this running time. Anyway, this should be released on the spleen within a few months if all goes well.
2.39:1 is the theatrical ratio. But it isn’t that simple; it’s a Super 35 movie, which means the open-matte versions aren’t pan and scan - you see more of the screen with those versions. But the true theatrical ratio is 2.39:1, always has been.
v2.0 in progress. All I’ll say right now is that it will leave v1.0 utterly in the dust.
The TV scenes are still 4:3, but that’s where the bad news ends.
