FujiSkunk

Hello, all. Long-time lurker, very rare poster.

I have the laserdisc of Revenge of the Nerds. I bought it not long after the first DVD came out, with the express purpose of preserving the phone-number scenes. I later made my own digital video, starting from the Panty Raid Edition DVD, with those scenes restored. I also created two audio tracks: English, with audio from the laserdisc spliced in, and the Panty Raid commentary, padded with some silence to keep proper time with the restored movie.

The good news: The laserdisc, and presumably all other 4:3 sources, aren’t purely pan-and-scan. As is often the case with 1.85:1 movies, Revenge appears to have been filmed full-frame and then matted to its intended aspect ratio. From what I could tell, the home release removes those mattes but also zooms in slightly, making the final 4:3 presentation a combination of open-matting and pan-and-scan (or perhaps just plain cropping). With those scenes reframed with the rest of the DVD’s widescreen video, they still end up with a small amount of pillarboxing, but they’re wide enough not to be very distracting. Certainly not as distracting as the unrestored butchering!

The bad news: I’m not the world’s greatest video editor, and the laserdisc doesn’t have the world’s greatest video. Even though the resolution is not dramatically different, the restored scenes are noticeably softer and a bit washed out in color. Maybe somebody could work better magic than me, or give me an idea of what to do if I were to try this again. I did try to glue the restored scenes into a Blu-ray rip, but even after resizing them and re-encoding everything with x265, the clips didn’t want to play nice when glued together. A more thorough Blu-ray remix could be possible, but I’d want to start with the best possible laserdisc restoration.

In the meantime, I could make my current cut available to anyone interested, if there is a good way of doing so. The file is a little less than 2 gigs.