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Doctor M

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Join date
1-Feb-2005
Last activity
17-Jan-2026
Posts
2,553

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Post
#274452
Topic
Song Of The South - many projects, much info & discussion thread (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/274452/action/topic#274452
Time
Ok, my release has been dubbed the "NTSC Restored Mentor-BBC Edition". Any concerns or complaints about that?

Also, screwing around trying to decide on a menu I amused myself with something:

http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/5292/vaultdisneyju7.jpg

I was considering using the above for the menu (without the Disney Vault text) and having the word Play with some pliers... but that's a little too preachy for my taste. :-)

I'm having a hard time finding clean art to make a menu from. PM me if you can help out.

Finally... I'm thinking of using some music from Splash Mountain for the menu since it's cleaner and has a better soundfield. I know it's a bit of a sacrilege.
If anyone has any serious issue with that, speak now.


Post
#274359
Topic
Song Of The South - many projects, much info & discussion thread (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/274359/action/topic#274359
Time
Thanks for the info Moth3r. That's exactly what I did. AviSynth was outputting YV12, and I set Lagarith to YV12 to avoid loss from colorspace change (which is theoretical and nothing I've ever been able to see myself either).

The ghosting in the animated sections are quite odd. Although it seems to only occur about every other field in live action portions, there's something like 50% more blended fields in any section with animation. Sometimes many consecutive.

I don't know if it has to do with the original film, or something else. Since if I threw out 100% of the blended fields there would be large jumps in scenes, it's a necessary evil.

Restore24 is quite intelligent. It compares fields and determines (based on the number of edges in a field) the most likely blended field (and in our case the worst of the available ones) and keeps the best. So although there is still _some_ blending, you can definitely see smoother motion.
The original has ghosts that lead motion and is really ugly to my eye. That issue is largely absent in the final video.

Between that and the sharpening, I'm going to grudgingly say that my final video might be superior to the original...

I've tried to contact Mentor to get his blessing on this project and see how he feels about the use of his name in my final release... but to no avail.
I believe this might become another in the "RtW" series. :-)

(Oh and the posted test clip is not sharpened. It was just a test of restore24's function.)
Post
#274019
Topic
Song Of The South - many projects, much info & discussion thread (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/274019/action/topic#274019
Time
So after much testing, I've decided to drop in the asharp filter to bring up some of the detail lost in the clean up.
I'm usually opposed to edge enhancement, but in this case it looks quite good.

Now I have a tech question for the crowd.
The restore24 filter is VERY SLOOOOOOW.

To do a 5 pass encoding will probably take me something in the neighborhood of 30 hours (give or take)(estimate is based on an OPV encoding of 5% of the film).

Since the filter is the limiting factor is there anything wrong with me instead taking the avisynth output and encoding to a lossless format (HuffYUV or Lagarith) and then doing a mulipass CCE encode from the lossless version? I have to figure that'll cut the encoding time in half or better.

Is there anything wrong with that idea?
Post
#273379
Topic
Song Of The South - many projects, much info & discussion thread (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/273379/action/topic#273379
Time
Yes, there are some sections with large numbers of blended fields all together (especially during the animated scenes) that make it unavoidable that some will be kept.
Also, the software uses a threshold to determine if a frame is blended or not so that'll mean will some show up... but theoretically the best of the source is preserved and the worst discarded.

Not ideal, but pretty darn good considering what we've got to work with.
In fact I'd say it almost looks better than the PAL version because the large number of blended frames can show discernible trails during motion.
Post
#273195
Topic
Song Of The South - many projects, much info & discussion thread (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/273195/action/topic#273195
Time
Ok, using an unsupported release candidate of restore24 I've produced a fairly acceptable looking clip.
The bitrate is less then half what the final version is likely to be, because my upload speed is a bit slow.
I also used some denoising/deblocking/deringing.
Let me know what you think.
It's 3 minutes of some random 10 second clips from the first .vob file.

Discuss.

http://rapidshare.com/files/17660659/SotSRestored24.mpv.html
Post
#273087
Topic
Song Of The South - many projects, much info & discussion thread (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/273087/action/topic#273087
Time
Re-heh-heallly.

So then Restore24 is our guy. IMDB and Japanese laserdiscs releases (on LDDB.com) all say 94 minutes is the original runtime.

That means there is no speed up here, just them whanking around badly with the frames.
I'll have a test clip of Restore24 at work (which I've now added dgdecode's postprocessing for deblocking and deringing).

1 frame per second encoding with that filter... yikes.
Post
#273051
Topic
Song Of The South - many projects, much info & discussion thread (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/273051/action/topic#273051
Time
Bingo Moth3r, thanks for the lead. That's exactly what was going on.
I don't know if the filter will produce better results than what I've done manually, but it sounds like better minds than mine have been at work on the issue.

Edit:
This is restore24's method... does this sound wrong to anyone else?

1. Bob the video to 50fps
2. Detect fields that are blends
3. Replace those blended fields with unblended neighbors
4. Decimate the cleaned stream to 24fps

In my mind that means he separates the fields... I was doing that.
Detects the blended fields... seems to be the odd field only. Was doing that too.
Replace with unblended neighbors... why exactly?
Decimate... This only makes sense if there wasn't a speed up... which I can't confirm or deny but it sounds like a percentage of clean unique frames might get discarded.

Can someone give me the final runtime of the BBC version (I only have the first VOB)? That should indicate if there was speed up or not.
Post
#272970
Topic
Song Of The South - many projects, much info & discussion thread (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/272970/action/topic#272970
Time
Duh, I need to correct my idiocy (I'm surprise no one called me on this).

I commented about uberinterlacing (interlacing interlaced footage) but I neglected at the time to mention (or remember for that matter) that I have to do a deinterlace BEFORE resizing down to 480 lines.

The only reasonable method in this case would be motion adaptive (since blending would make everything look like it has trails (worse than before)), but even still... it's ugly jerky movement with artifacts, and that's before the pulldown.

When I finish what else I'm working on I'll grab the rest of this dvd and get to work.
But the even-fields-only look to be the way to go. It's sort of a manual Bob deinterlacing and it doesn't look too bad.
I'll see about posting a clip later.
Post
#272909
Topic
Song Of The South - many projects, much info & discussion thread (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/272909/action/topic#272909
Time
Sorry for the delay in getting back on this but I've been damn sick lately.

Anyway... just for giggles I snapped some side by side comparisons.
The first frames are from an old boot DVD version of SotS.
I found it as a torrent on Demonoid, but I believe it was from a website called SongoftheSouth.com or something (don't worry the site is long dead).
It's better than a lot of the versions I've seen and does not have really bad blooming/blurring colors or any hard subbed foreign language. It is 29.97fps interlaced. I tried to grab the cleanest frames.

The second frame is the new BBC broadcast with the odd field discarded and then the half-sized image resized to 480 lines.
You'd think the BBC version would lose out since you are using 288 lines to make 480... you'd be wrong.
Both seem to have a lot of compression artifacts so that can't be weighed in the comparison.

http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/8310/1oldij8.jpg
http://img484.imageshack.us/img484/6883/1bbcfl9.jpg
http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/8164/2oldhn6.jpg
http://img63.imageshack.us/img63/5826/2bbcyo5.jpg

I'll try the uber interlaced idea (as described above), but I think this method will actually turn out a passable progressive version.
The PAL release might look better, but it really contains no more video information than what I've done (since every other field is a blurry composite).
Post
#272899
Topic
***The ADigitalMan non-Star Wars DVD Info and Feedback Thread***
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/272899/action/topic#272899
Time
Just saw Redeemed and was impressed by how well it worked as an edit.

Besides the out of synch audio at the beginning, I have another technical comment (something I noticed in Superman II as well). When you go from the credits to the movie at the beginning, the letterbox bars and picture go gray. It's fairly noticeable on my TV (and is yet another bug in Womble).
If I recall correctly from when I had the same issue, it's because the cropping bars are removed during fade-ins/outs so they end up not appearing black enough on some displays. It gives the impression that the main picture area fades out and the bars are fading up.

Besides that... very impressed by both the technical and plotting.

Btw, did anyone else notice Harry Potter's Uncle Vernon was one of the terrorists on the Eiffel Tower (the one controlling the nuke)?