You mean for the dub? Yes, maybe. I wonder why they didn’t use Italian and German in the first place? Was that maybe a must from the production company?
By the way: For Tonemapping purposes I highly recommend to use https://www.videohelp.com/software/DGDecNV .
libplacebo is quite popular at the moment, but in results not much better than other standard conversions.
You can actively adapt parameters while watching what happens, and take the best parameters in to Avisynth. To me by far the best way. Maybe all scrreenshots I saw here went through libplacebo, then I understand, what happened.
Edit: Our postings crossed…
Unfortunately the German dub also has the “original” English opera texts. Especially the Zauberflöte-papageno aria I know quite well (a good friend sang it many years ago) and the English text is quite horror to me. I second this.
Ultimately, opinions on that are all subjective.
I don’t agree 100%. There are references like 35mm copies and technical things, but you are right, when you say that coloring has a lot of subjectiveness. So… about 72.4%…
I think the new version looks gorgeous, and you are entitled to your opinion on the previous version. If we’re both happy, then great.
Yes. That’s right.
I’d like to know more. How did you go about work on that?
The German dub of the Theatrical version is really great! In my opinion (and of many others) the best is the German voice of Salieri, spoken by Gottfried Kramer. Though it’s not extremely similar to M. A., it is absolutely gorgeous with its underlying sarcasm. For the director’s cut there were some reasons to make a complete new dubbing in 2002. One of it was the sad fact that Gottfried Kramer had passed away in 1994.
He was replaced by Joachim Höppner, who also spoke Gandalf in the German dubs. A nice and friendly, slightly wise voice, but much too nice for Salieri.
Also some of the other voices would have sounded too old to fill the new scenes. Tom Hulce’s voice is dubbed by the same speaker. He still sounds quite funny, when “laughing”, but not that powerful and “anarchical” as in the first dub.
So I decided early to take the HD-director’s cut, take most of the scenes of the old dub, and the rest of the new one. Which is not that easy, as you well know, because there are lots of small differences, which make lots of cuts and repairung of these necessary. I remember the scene with burning wood in a fireplace with a lot of talking of Salierei in the background as one of the hardest, although you even don’t see the actor speaking - I don’t know if the English version was similar hard to adapt here? Also one scene when Mozart comes home and meets his father in the staircase I remember as hard to adapt. Some in the director’s cut missing or shortened scenes (3? I don’t remember, maybe I took also the staircase scene?) I took from the German Theatrical-DVD after careful upscaling (although I am no friend of this still), just like you. Also the Orion intro - but here you took a better one. But you wanted to make a “final release”, I did it just for my personal use. 😃
Later I realised, that these additional scenes disturbed me - first maybe because of the new voices, but there was something else. After having watched the movie some times I decided to cut the additional scenes completely, and the result was much better. The cutting was easy, because the picture was already cut after the German dub of the theatrical version, I mainly just had to cut the new scenes.
Today I only watch the movie in its original (but German) version, and all my friends do the same.
I have to disagree with you on that one. The 2000 master has a dull, digital-looking white balance. What you call as “too yellow” on the remaster, I counter with “too pink/magenta” on the Blu-ray.
…
But in the case of Amadeus, supervised by Paul Zaentz who really cared to make this version exist again, I think they nailed it.
As I said: In terms of colors, I am of completely different opinion. I am just working on nearing the 4k colors to something neutral, in direction to my HD master. Too much red/pink/magenta? No. The opposite, and well seen in your example. Sorry, but here I have to stay with my sight.
Any appearance of superior sharpness of the 2000 master is a result of artificial sharpening. Just look at the slight halo around the mother-in-law’s headdress compared to the remaster. Also note the blown out contrast on the highlights:
https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?a=1&x=424&y=208&d1=4791&d2=19001&s1=44634&s2=225179&l=0&i=2&go=1
I am also of complete different opinion here. HD Colors are by far better. The typical 4k greenish-brownish look really hurts my eyes. The HD highlights are a bit too much, but in this you cannot compare SDR and HDR. The highlights in the 4k master are not overdone, so that more details kept alive, that’s right, but therefore you have much too low contrast in the picture. You often have to pay this price (when you don’t overdo). In HDR you can keep every highlight, that’s one of the advantages.
There is a certain amount of haloing in the HD master, that’s right. If this is done by sharpening it was a very “cheap” sharpening, but when the master is from 2000 it is throughout possible.
Nice to read this here. I never was much interested in this, because I made my own Theatrical cut myself long ago, I think at quite the same time when this started here. Now my interest has become re-newed, because I finally got a German soundtrack without extreme flutter sourced of an optical track of a 35mm copy, which is not of the best quality, but really a gift, because each and every source I inspected had this extreme flutter, best heard short before the end at the final chord of the Requiem (A----men). Simply horrible.
Also English and other soundtracks have some flutter, but not as bad as the German one. I even tried to correct it in small parts with Capstan, but this does work very bad when it comes to vocals - no chance. I always hoped for some A.I. solutions, but up to now there is none for de-flutter that works here, at least I don’t know it.
Ok, so now I got this 4k release, BUT:
The colors are as bad as the most HDR releases of the last years: Brownish, (incorrigible) much too much yellow and a bit too much green, much too less blue. Even when you put in all skills in tone mapping, and even when you watch the 4k itself - The BluRay releases are far better!
There even are scenes that are much too bright, and much too less contrast.
The bit of grain the 4k release has got more than the HD releases is of no use… The HD releases (at least the ones I know) are sharp on the point!
An A. I. 4k-upscale of the HD-source would be of even less use… But this people do not want to understand, so of littlest use is to even discuss this point.
What I want to say: I highly recommend to keep this nice project up! Because the picture is far better than this 4k master, and also the efforts about the sound tracks are a wonderful contribution!
What people say, who know absolutely nothing, is not very important… 😉
By the way: Could you send me the link for the documentary? I would love to see it!
Nice to have an alternative to the “4k”-version officially released. Thanks a lot, and if you are open for donations for the third project, I will donate.
Am I right that tone mapping should be hable?
As I thought. Nothing changed. Have fun.
Someone needs to stabilise reel 4 of BATB. Anyone is welcome to give it a shot.
Is that meant? Then just let me try.
Can you give me a small part? I have some limited deshake-methods.
@lorang
Sounds like everything I always have to fight against… Good luck then!
Sounds quite creative. 😉
I read about this U.S. “dub”, but nothing for me, I’m German. Those additional 10 minutes of scenes would be interesting.
Why 24hrs? B & W, a few text tables, plus changing framerate sounds like realtime conversion?
Yes, FEARLESS, not Famous… Thank you…
Thanks also SilverWook, but this is not new to me. These are 12 minutes scenes that had been cut in the U.S. release. But additionally to these cut minutes even in the longer European version (108 min.) there are still 10 minutes missing from Polanski’s original cut (118 minutes!). That’s what I am searching for. 😉
Hi all,
not much to say to this movie - one of the best of its genre. Polanski made an “original version” with 118 min., later cut it to 108 min., and it was shown in most parts of the world with or without some minor cuts. In the U.S. it had been cut for about 20 minutes and new dubbed. But since a couple of years there are a lot of fine uncut releases in original length of 108 min. (BluRays with 23.976 or 24 fps).
Two questions, I hope someone can answer:
1.There is an older U.S. VHS release, many copies on ebay, on the cover it says 111 minutes. Is that wrong?
Thanks for any hint!
I don’t agree to this. The new master is worse than the older one. Less details due to too high contrasts. See lights/shadows in picture 2. Many light details are missing.
Colors are slightly more saturated, but to me seem also worse in sense of being less original.
EDIT:
Oops, it seems I stuck on page 40. My comment refers to this post:
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1363928/action/topic#1363928
Sorry.
triadne said:
…using the hd versions of TNG alongside the SD versions of that, to help teach the AI how to upscale star trek images better?
Up to now this won’t work, because the A.I. only uses structure-similarity to guess what new details it might create. What you suggest will be the future, but not the near future, I fear. Machine learning will be really convincing, when it will begin to think like humans think: To categorize and associate things in “tree views”, in order to take details from things that really correspondate with the missing details in the version to be upscaled.
Maybe in 20 years your suggestion would not be wrong. 😃
I just took the time to try something. I always thought the worst picture quality of the pilot is in the scene with Cisco and son. There is no magic that can turn this in something really good, but it is possible to remove most of the rainbowing, aliasing and (bad) grain, in order to get something to experiment with:
One could sharpen this a bit, but that wouldn’t do much good. Too many vertical-ringing-kind artefacts, that would be sharpend, too. It’s even possible to remove these (didn’t try yet, just think so), but would surely cost a lot of sharpness, and I doubt if in the end this would be profitable for AI input
@Animaxx
Wonderful story! A trekkie-family-tradition! And: what an obligation!
I know this kind of feeling very well: The strong wish to take part, help, somehow in something you really love.
Joel Hruska said:
The problem is DS9 itself. There’s a reason I didn’t use Emissary (1x01) to show off my work. Early Deep Space 9 does not respond to upscaling nearly as well as later DS9 does. It’s not as clear. It’s not as sharp. It makes early greenscreen effects look really fake, and the footage can almost look as though it’s being spliced in from VHS. There’s moire on everything, the models are dull, and it scarcely looks like an upgrade. Some of that is baked right into the source and looks bad there (like the early holodeck scene), but gets magnified by the upscaler. But the show looks bad – really bad – on DVD.
Yes, I know that. I recently watched it (about two months ago the first episode). They seem to have improved scanning equipment through the years… Problems are Rainbowing (see Borg-cube), Ringing (I guess not because of not-so-well DVD-encoding, but somehow compressed storage in the past, quite common - see captions after upscaling), rests of aliasing (same reason, some of the past storage compression algorithms did not 100% take respect of interlacing), artefacts of not-so-well encoded film-grain, a. s. o.
Maybe I can find some time next week for this, I see some possibilities.
Another little note here: My old device had a mode (unfortunately I can’t remember the exact name, let’s just call it “Pure SD-Resolution”) which played files in their natural ratio/size, only going to a max of 1080p, which - funny as it sounds - looked better than the 4K upscale my present device does. So the only way around that is to use a separate player, that can play back the older files in original resolution, since the TV always upscales (which is as I have said fine for everything else, just not the older shows).
So the technical evolution of playback devices may “force” fans to take action in order to keep enjoying their shows because they look worse through enhancements they can’t change manually on the devices themselves.
This certainly has to do with bad deinterlacing… You are right: Especially NTSC-DVDs can be watched best, when you set HDMI to 576i. That may be the mode your player used.
I just looked into the upscaled pilot. Well, I don’t want to be negative, but it’s not for me. And I still think, there is not REALLY much done about new details. Everything Topaz did, seem to me to be also possible with slight sharpenings (if you know how) and simple resizing.
But: This can be the future, and everything new needs pioneers who just do it, become better and better, inspire even better techniques, a. s. o.
Maybe it’s also about youth and age. I watched my first Star Trek episodes in Germany in 1972, so I think I can also wait a few years longer to see something really revolutionary.
But keep on to move forward, where no man has gone before!
Thanks for all your input. But I must ask: Does the 25 FPS bother you on my version? If so, I would consider doing the slowdown to 23,976 FPS, but I did watch my pilot-version and did not notice any decline in audio quality despite me doing modifications.
No bothering at all. But
-23.976 (24, but THIS difference isn’t noticeable…) is the original speed.
-Resampling audio is never lossless, but quite lossless, if you change speed AND naturally pitch together with it. Manipulations of pitch are always lossy. Meanwhile there are really good algorithms, but it’s never the same.
Bothering? No. But you want the best possible quality, don’t you?
I see. “true” means audio resampling. I never used this, we handle audio mostly with Audition. I hope the quality will be the same with your “true”-method.
Joel Hruska said:
Then you can pitch-shift the audio down by 4% or get yourself the NTSC discs.
4% isn’t enough. This would fit if you slowed down to exactly 24fps. You have to resample with 104.271%
We use these numbers (the opposite for speedup is 95.904%) that often, that I know it by heart.
I don’t know anything about Staxrip, but this might work:
Staxrip-Framerate AssumeFps
The newer masters for the DVDs were carefully IVTCed (and the 29.97 portions brought to 23.976 in I-don’t -know-what-way), and then sped up to 25fps.
Are you sure they did this?
From what I found it was suggested that they used a method called DEFT to convert it to 25 fps. It does produce some combing artifacts but it works 99% of the time and that’s why I haven’t touched the PAL discs since then.
The portions with originally film, 23.976fps, seem clean progressive, and just sped up. That’s why the German sound for the DVDs had to be sped up too, while in the nineties they had done another type of conversion without speeding it up. Often done at that time, but not suitable for modern Flat tvs. This was a mixture of keeping the original interlace structure plus blendings - sometimes quite well reversable with avisynths SRestore.
The portions with originally 29.97fps (cgi, and, as Joel pointed out, even more scenes) have to be converted in another way: To get them from nearly 30 to 25 it is not possible just to slow down, that would be much too highly noticable, for sound and also picture. Also decimating is not possible, because there are no double fields to remove, and the result will be very jerky. So this is done with motion flow algorithms, f. e. with hardware or software alchemist (which can also DEFT, as I just read, but I don’t know anything more about this special technique).
In this special case they had to bring it first to 23.976fps, so that the whole episode in the end could be sped up alltogether to 25fps for PAL.
This is all a bit speculation, because up to now I haven’t seen any of the NTSC DVDs to be sure, but it should have been made like this - I can’t think of any other reason, why the German sound was sped up for the DVDs. And this was used typically.
So you can simply take the PAL discs, slow it down to 23.976, and you have the best possible conversion already done to
-one unique framerate
-progressive (if the original 29.97fps sections ARE progressive, I just assume this - if not, deinterlace first)
Everything you need for upscaling.
Animaxx said:
Strangely enough, the tv broadcasts and dvd versions are higher pitched around germany than the original vhs tapes, which had lower pitch.
Interesting, I didn’t know that. That means:
By the time the series was brought to Germany it was often practised technique to convert from NTSC to PAL in a mix of blending and keeping the original interlacing, especially with such mix-content of pulldowned and native 29.97 material.
So they seem to have dubbed it in its original length. This is what is also on the VHS cassettes.
The newer masters for the DVDs were carefully IVTCed (and the 29.97 portions brought to 23.976 in I-don’t -know-what-way), and then sped up to 25fps. Then they sped up the sound without correcting the pitch to its lower original. So you are damned right when you pitch down - even better would have been to slow down to 23.976 and then simply resample the German dub down, pitch would be corrected automatically and everything fine!
As for the speed down to 23,976 FPS: That would cause motion stutter again, which I was happy to have avoided with PAL at 25 FPS.
That’s an error. Slowing down does not at all cause any stutter, if you do it right - that means the very simplest way. Try it with avisynth with, as I said:
new=assumefps(old,24000,1001)
This will just change the SPEED, no t one frame will be added or dropped.
Guys, I have done it. The 4K-pilot is finished. It was rendered at 15 Mbps in 4:3 format at a display size of 2846x2160p (4:3).
First: Congratulations!
I also used the original NTSC audio and adapted to the PAL-running time while maintaining the original pitch; also, I have pitch corrected the german audio so the PAL-Speedup has been taken care of (no more high pitched voices).
Critics: (as always…)
By the way: These pitch corrections always produce a quality loss, even with the best algorithms, be aware of that fact.