EGOvoruhk

Are there any comparisons against 2.5? I’m curious about how the tonemapping of the new HDR source looks compared against the old SDR masters. How was the tonemapping/color correction done in 3.1? There’s always an issue with oversatution, clamped darks, and overblown hightlights with the standard HDR->SDR conversions you see in retail SDR Blu-rays these days, especially in shots with a mix of dark and light areas

Edit: Here’s some comparisons of the first 20 minutes https://slow.pics/c/Wrw7oeLp

44rh1n said:

Nah, that’s the wrong way to go about it, IMO. I’d do a ProRes transcode of the whole film, without tone-mapping. That way I’d have the entire dynamic range and gamut of the footage at my disposal. Using footage that’s already been automatically tonemapped would be very restricting.

It probably won’t come to that though, at least not anytime soon. I don’t have as much free time as I used to when I made this restoration. (Plus, I have faith that this new 4K version will be good! If it ends up sucking though, I may change my mind and decide to do it, haha).

Not a huge fan of HDR, especially all the regrading that comes with these older films (nor the Atmos audio upmixing that seems to come with them), and I fully expect the new SDR Blu-rays to just be a tonemapped version of their UHD counterpart

Would love to see what you could do

Is there any verification that the 25 FPS is correct?. Stop motion is generally shot at 12 FPS, since it’s too much work to animate any faster, and then doubled to film speed. That’s how they made Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The only reason for them to be 25 FPS would be if they sped up the video and produced the audio at 25 FPS for PAL broadcast purposes

Pitch is really only half of what you need to figure it out as well, you also need to check the timings. Pitch is easily fixed, by adjusting the tempo, which keeps the same pitch, but changes the length (most likely how they fixed it on the VHS).

The best way to figure out the proper framerate is to compare to the soundtrack/score, if it exists officially anywhere. You would check the pitch and length against the video audio. One might be the same pitch, but longer or shorter

Alternatively, surely someone at ‎Aardman might know. It might be worth reaching out via e-mail or social media

Harmy said:

You guys are misusing the word anamorphic - anamorphic 1080p would be 1440x1080 (with black bars in case of 2.35:1 movies), which would then be stretched to 16:9 for viewing.

Sorry haha, I just kept thinking back to anamorphic DVDs, it was the only word I could think of

Harmy said:

I use MPC-HC with MadVR too but I use Lanczos 4 taps with anti-ringing filter and debanding. Is NNEDI3 a lot better?

I don’t know if it’s A LOT better, but if your machine can handle it, you may as well use it. I couldn’t see any differences in RotJ 2.5 between Lanczos 4, and Lanczos 4+NNEDI3, but other sources will give you better output

You can see some better examples here: https://wiki.mikejung.biz/MadVR_Chroma_Upscaling_720p_Image_Quality

towne32 said:

Ah, okay. Is VLC something you’d rather not resort to using? I’m not really familiar with MPC, but VLC’s cropping has worked well for me when watching non-anamorphic widescreen DVDs/LDrips on a 16:9 display.

MPC-HC paired with MadVR/NNEDI3 is great (but very CPU intensive) if you’re upscaling content (eg. playing a 720p movie on a 1080p screen, playing a 1080p movie on a 4K ultrawide screen). I would recommend looking into it for playing your sub-1080p anamorphic content

VLC is fine, but not really ideal for regular movie playback. It’s not that I wouldn’t resort to using it, it’s always handy in fringe cases like this, I was just suggesting alternatives for people in a similar situation, but through discussion, I think a proper BD image would be much more useful than what I originally suggested

towne32 said:
I think what was discussed in TN1’s thread as ideal (whether or not they actually do it), was releasing both:

1. 50GB DL version
2. 25GB cropped version.

No one wants the primary BD compatible format to be a ‘third party’ re-encode, even from a high bitrate file. Might as well get it right the first time for something that’s going to be sitting on people’s shelves as their go-to copy.

Agreed, I would much prefer a BD50 from Harmy than some random person upscaling in on MySpleen

towne32 said:
I just don’t see the point of the cropped version.

This is for PC, not a TV. I use MPC-HC with madVR/NNEDI3 for most video playback, I’m not aware that I can remove the black bars. The only point of black bars is to meet the Blu-ray spec, there’s no point in keeping them in otherwise, and you can end up with encoding anomalies around the borders of them. Most proper digital releases will remove them, eg all iTunes movies are anamorphic (I’m not still going on about removing them, just providing points that you can’t see)

That being said, I’d much rather have a BD50 than an anamorphic MKV. It would serve far more people than just the niche Ultrawide crowd

Harmy said:
Also, my master-file for the 1080p release would be somewhere around 300-400GB with my current AVI masters but since I’m planning to move to image sequences for master for v3.0, the master will probably be more like 1TB.
So I’m not likely to release that and anything else would already be a re-encode

I didn’t mean the RAW source, just similar to what TN1 is doing, using Chouonsoku’s x264 settings and releasing a verge large MKV that other encoders could use as a source. That way someone could make a BD50 with it, a small 480p encode, or anything in between

CatBus said:

Harmy’s always tried to make his encodes Blu-ray compliant in the past. I suspect the creation on non-compliant streams will be left to the re-encoders out there.

Then how about a request for a proper full sized Blu-ray image, or a “master” sized MKV, like TN1 is planning? That way encoders could encode from a proper source, rather than a re-encode. I don’t mind encoding it myself, but an encode of an encode is never good

Any chance you can start making the MKVs anamorphic/without black bars in 2.6/3.0? I’ve got an ultrawide monitor coming in, and the current releases are non anamorphic so you get black borders on all sides. Not to mention, leaving black bars can lead to issues with the pixels in the surrounding border when encoding

+1 on the crop for the MKV version. While the black parts don’t waste much bitrate, cropping it out will eliminate possible issues with the image around the borders during the encoding process. It will also be beneficial to anyone watching on an Ultrawide/2.35:1 setup

For what it’s worth, I’ve seen Chouonsoku’s samples/proof in motion and would trust what he says. If Team Negative1 wants the best possible 1080p encode, they should at least be willing to listen to him. Not that anyone else doesn’t know what they’re talking about, but samples/proof are better than words

Is there any chance of you making a lossless type digital copy as well? 9GB is pretty small for a 247 minute. Based on the 1080p lossless type encodes I’ve seen of the individual movies, I would think closer to 25-30GB

Looking forward to 2.0!

Can I make a request for the MKV version? In that you crop out the black bars when encoding it? I don't always play everything back on a 16:9 screen, so it would be nice to scale it horizontally rather than vertically like Star Wars 2.1/Empire 2.0