Doctor M

CharlieSummers2 said:

Nothing like resurrecting an almost ten-year-old thread…

Doctor M said:
Much of the workprint consists of missing effects, shots with big honkin’ text saying “Temporary Effect”, or “Insert Shot of Cell Phone In Snow”, blue screens, and overdubs from people that aren’t the actor (or the even the same gender).
<snip>

The 2-hour recut film version of Storm Front (aired in Canada) is available on various torrent sites. I’m wondering, though, if anyone ever posted a copy of the 67-minute workprint mentioned above? It’s that I would dearly love to watch, as-is and not re-constructed…

Check your PM

VHS Hi-fi audio is probably about 6-8 bit depth quality and that’s your limiting factor.
That said, if I was archiving, I’d encode to PCM audio, because the source is high quality analog and PCM is lossless. You would get everything you could out of it.

If space is a concern, you won’t be disappointed by 256-320kbps AC3.
I rarely would consider 192kbps for high quality digital sources.

I have no idea what alternative you should use either. But VDM requires that you index the video first and then load an avisynth script into it. It’s a real pain.

Only Jim Crow, played by Cliff Edwards, was white. The rest were African American. Technically this means Disney was color blind when casting the crows.

It’s actually ironic that Jim Crow was white and in no way segregated from the other crows.

It’s only racist if you want to believe it was.

towne32 is completely right. MKVToolNix isn’t capable of re-encoding video. The space savings is only because M2TS has more padding.

That said, it sounds like you have a raw M2TS file from a Blu-Ray. Why wouldn’t you use tsMuxerGUI to build it as a proper Blu-ray disc.

You’d have superior compatibility.

Edit: Oh, you don’t have a BD burner. You could use BD Rebuilder to re-encode it down to a BD9 (AVCHD) and burn it to a dual layer DVD.

I took a look at the PAL DVD again. While there is some interlacing, it appears to be field inversion and is easily fixed.
Bumping the gamma also helps.

Is anyone working on a project with this? Something HD or an edit with a better quality source?

FrankT said:

Oh? Under the same circumstances?

Not from the film being lost, but from the actor being in poor health.

From Wikipedia:
Little’s talent for impersonation has been used in movies, when an actor’s dialogue was impaired by poor health. When David Niven proved too ill for his voice to be used in his appearances in Trail of the Pink Panther (1982) and Curse of the Pink Panther (1983), Little provided the overdub in Niven’s voice. He performed similar duties to dub James Cagney’s stroke-impaired voice in the 1984 TV movie Terrible Joe Moran, and in the 1991 TV special Christmas at the Movies by providing an uncredited dub for actor/dancer Gene Kelly who had lost his voice.

FrankT said:

Alright, so Corey Burton’s impression of Deems Taylor isn’t… too bad. Honestly, it’s all we have, at least at this point. Still - a vocal artist voicing a real person, does anyone else do that?..

Rich Little voicing David Niven in ‘Trail of the Pink Panther’.

They can do any number of things transferring to PAL. The most common is 24fps master to 25fps with speedup to the audio track (and the pitch rises with it).

I’ve seen weird things like 24 to 29.97 to 25 or 24 to 25 with blended fields (which yields a blurry mess of interlaced material, but correct play speed and audio).

That’s exactly where the clip came from. All clips from the movie in “The Making of Peter Pan” in the 2002 DVD is footage from the 1990 transfer.

The colors and the light splotches on Tink’s dress are the give away.

It’s not uncommon for even new bonus features to use old transfers for clips rather than the restored version on the disc with it.

But yeah, as far as I know, there was no digital clean up until the Platinum Edition. I’m no expert though.

It disappears in the 1998 transfer and I don’t think Disney was doing any real restorations until the Platinum Editions.

Spaced Ranger said:

Doctor M said:
They look more like a flaw than intentional effects.

Definitely agree.

I would rule out the standard procedure of washing and reusing animation cels (a cost saving measure) being involved in such an anomaly. If so, it would affect other colors. However, I don’t see it on the adjoining skin. More likely there was some other-color reside (or too much water) still on the brush or in the paint container to affect green painting across a group of cels.

Does anything show immediately before or after this shot, but nowhere else, for just this color?

I’m not sure I understand your question. I’ve never seen the 1990 release in its entirety so I don’t know if that splotchy appearance occurs anywhere else.

I still can’t help but think it has something to do with an optical effect used to create Tink’s glow… but the 2002 SE isn’t supposed to be a restoration, so you’d think if that were in the master it would still be visible.

Maybe it’s from the transfer itself?

More Peter Pan… I know, I know, but I came across some digital footage of the 1990 transfer.

Here is a slightly edited clip of Tinker Bell landing on the hand mirror. I used the three sources of most interest for comparison. The 1990 transfer that was used for the LD/VHS but from a DVD, the 2002 SE and of course the Diamond Edition BD.

https://youtu.be/RoWq8FDhMyQ

So now that I’ve seen those splotches on Tink’s dress in motion, I no longer believe they were intended to be pixie dust hand prints or something.

They look more like a flaw than intentional effects. Thoughts?

benduwan said:

is there a easier way to convert pal to ntsc or ntsc to pal?
i´m not so technical…
thanks

There are several all in one programs that will do the conversion, but results will vary, you probably won’t have the original menus and it takes a human to analyze the source to know the proper conversion method.

We do know that the Blu-rays are color timed based on the cells, not what the film or projector would cause it to look like. So we can rule those out.

When the Platinum Edition came out, most experts were appalled by the color changes. They are considered the most wrong.

The 1990 edition is thought to be the most correct by many.

If you want digital, the 2002 DVD is my second choice.

Very nice works Spaced Ranger.

I was happy with what goofydylan8 provided since they covered all the Platinum Edition screenshots.
There’s a more subtle difference between the BD and the PE DVD than the previous releases.

goofydylan8 said:

Ripped it again just to make sure I didn’t have the wrong version on my machine. Here are screenshots that look identical with a photo of my blu-ray. Peter Pan has only had one blu-ray release as far as I can find so it’s definitely the diamond edition.

Wow. You are right. I took a closer look, and there are some differences, but that’s disgustingly close to the Platinum Edition… except HD.

Edit: Okay, compiled everything you guys have linked, posted, etc. with my previous PP comparison sheet.

Here is an updated version showing everything up to the Diamond Edition: (see below)

Edit 2: I’ve been thinking about Disney’s trend in color changes and I’m starting to think this is the visual equivalent of Disney Enhanced Home Theater Mix soundtracks.

It’s just possible that the colors are intentionally wrong. The logic being that most people are using their TV’s default settings which tend to be over bright and with a cold color temperature.

It would explain the dingy whites, washing out of blues and a general tint towards gold.

That or Disney’s restoration people are dimwits that are using uncalibrated monitors.

Edit 3: Updated version giving proper credit for BD images: http://www.mediafire.com/download/xcbdcebef7r7z9d/Peter_Pan_v2.7.html

Btw, unfortunately all images are compressed jpg (with some being re-compressed). The software I was using was ill equipped for the job. It was this or a 25mb version which seemed ridiculous. The quality doesn’t seem to be perceptibly altered.

goofydylan8 said:

Here is a link to the screenshots listed from the Diamond Edition Blu-Ray

Pretty sure those are Platinum Edition screenies.

I have a link to a file containing those screenshots on the first post. It’s the Diamond edition I was hoping to get some shots from.

I’ve noticed that imgshack has yanked a lot of pictures including my links, and everyone else’s comparing the Diamond/blu-ray to the old DVDs of Peter Pan.

I recall the colors were off, but not as bad as the Platinum Edition. Does anyone still have screenshot comparisons squirreled away somewhere that they can share?

I wanted to see how the Diamond Edition holds up to the 2002 disc again. (Also sort of wondering about doing a color correction, unless someone is already working on that.)

Finally, does anyone know what animation special effect was used to generate the pixie dust hand prints that are on the first laserdisc but missing from all subsequent home releases?

For AVC video, you can probably try MKV Cutter. This may require remuxing your video to work with it, and it’s Alpha software, but I’ve had success on small projects: http://www.videohelp.com/software/MKV-Cutter

It’s NEARLY lossless, much like most mpeg2 editors. It only re-encodes the B & P frames orphaned by the cuts, but the bulk of the video is copied untouched.

This is largely in the first post, but:

franko said:

Hello,

does anyone know are DVD editions of these Disney’s classics have new transfer/restoration:
*Pocahontas 2012 DVD

Sames as the 2012 BD transfer. If you’re going to go with DVD, I’d take the 2005 version. Both versions are direct copies off Disney’s digital CAPS system, but the 2005 has an extended song that was cut late in production AFTER test audience saw it.

It’s not a newly animated scene like some of the other added songs Disney has put in to their features.
I feel it’s an improvement over the theatrical version.
So 2005 DVD or 2012 BD depending on which cut you want.

*Mulan 2013 DVD

Again, a digital transfer from their computers. Just avoid the early Gold Edition DVD which was non-animorphic 1.85:1.
Otherwise 2004 DVD or 2013 BD/DVD are about the same. The BD would be best because it’s HD, but if you go DVD you’ll likely get better extras from the 2004 DVD without sacrificing any quality from the movie.

*Peter Pan 2013 DVD

Read the first post on this one. Peter Pan is complicated. I feel the 2013 transfer is poor like most of the scrubbed and ‘restored’ discs from Disney. It’s not as poor as the Platinum Edition though.
I favor the 2002 Special Edition myself, but that’s me and it may be overly cold hued and edge enhance-y for other people.

*The Jungle Book 2014 DVD

I just noticed that the Recommended and Acceptable Alternatives should probably be reversed… I can’t recall why I made the decision I did there since the intended aspect ratio was 1.75:1.

My first post hasn’t updated in awhile. That’s mostly because new films are direct digital transfers and therefore perfect, and older films are just getting treated worse and worse, so there is little point mentioning them as useful releases.

The Jungle Book is another example of this. From Blu-ray.com:
“…a bit too polished and glossy for its own good. It’s by no means a failure, and nowhere near the disaster that is the Blu-ray release of The Sword in the Stone. The telltale signs of noise reduction are present, they’re just far less glaring and debilitating; almost, almost to the point of being somewhat easy to overlook. Grain has been scrubbed away in its entirety…”

Assuming the DVD is the same master as the BD (which isn’t always true), I wouldn’t recommend it.

And on another note, I wanted to post a couple pics of Mickey’s Christmas Carol. This has been on DVD many times, but only ONCE in its original intended aspect ratio of 1.66:1 on Mickey Mouse in Living Color Vol. 2. The BD is cropped to 1.77:1. The BD was also scrubbed within an inch of its life. I’ve upscaled the DVD to the exact dimensions of the BD so you can see what Disney has done to it.

BD
http://i.imgbox.com/acsSoUSC.png

DVD (upscaled):
http://i.imgbox.com/m62cFvrs.jpg

DVD (original frame):
http://i.imgbox.com/RN5tjSwK.jpg

(Sorry, I can’t remember how to post pictures here anymore.)
Sure the DVD is blocky from being upscaled, but how is it that the DVD STILL seems to have more detail?

g-force said:

Dreamaster said:

You_Too said:

The GOUT subs has the crawl in all the languages so I bet it could be synched into these as well as the Vader and Emperor talk in ESB and removing the abominable “Wesa free!” at the end of ROTJ if it’s in the subs. If there are any other differences I forgot please inform us. 😃

Jesus Christ! Please tell me you’re joking and that’s not really in Jedi…

No, not in the '97 SE. The line was not added until 2004.

-G

I was going to say ‘are you sure?’, but of course you are. Funny thing, I remember that line, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen the 2004 version.

Dreamaster said:

You_Too said:

The GOUT subs has the crawl in all the languages so I bet it could be synched into these as well as the Vader and Emperor talk in ESB and removing the abominable “Wesa free!” at the end of ROTJ if it’s in the subs. If there are any other differences I forgot please inform us. 😃

Jesus Christ! Please tell me you’re joking and that’s not really in Jedi…

It is. One of the many reasons I’ve never watched the Special Editions a second time.