Perseverant

Thebiggerpictures, your work is absolutely beautiful on this, and I’m personally very interested in this. Are you okay and can you give us an update? Nine months of silence leaves me concerned about the project. I’d be happy with any update that gives us some idea of where this one is like:

• I plan to release this to the community by x date if y criteria is met
• I’m trying to partner with Disney to release this, but odds are against me and if I can’t work something out with Disney it’ll never see the light of day
• I have no intentions of ever releasing it to the public because Disney has sent me a cease and desist, so thanks for your interest, but no can do buckos.

I know this is not exactly what you’re asking for, but just as an FYI, I’ve been getting into AI upscaling of classic 80s/90s hand-drawn content using chaiNNer and some of the models on https://openmodeldb.info/, and they have some really impressive cleanup models on there that can help with things like dot crawl, rainbowing, haloing, etc (Dotzilla in particular). The results put Topaz AI to shame.

chaiNNer also has an “Average Color Fix” node that lets you compare an image to a reference image, and it will take the colors from the reference image and apply them to the image. It’s really impressive stuff.

There are three images in the following comparison: The source (sized up), the upscale (colors have shifted), and upscale (color-corrected using Average Color Fix)
https://imgsli.com/MjE5MDg0/0/1

If you think learning about this process would help you, give me a shout and I can get you more details on how to do it. Otherwise, good luck!

Would someone please PM me a URL for the best version that includes the commercials?

Thanks to everyone who has invested their time and energy preserving this!

I’m definitely interested in these as well. Sadly it looks like MrColeslaw has been away since June 3rd of 2023, so if anyone still has a functioning URL to obtain these, please send me a PM.

Hey folks,

I recently picked up the full series of DuckTales shown below and I’m not seeing any efforts anywhere to AI upscale it to 1080P. I know we have some really skilled members on here. Is anyone aware of an existing project, or is there any interest in beginning a project to give this classic show, and its movie (also released on laserdisc), the love they deserve?

I’ve done just enough research into AI upscaling to know that creating an ESRGAN model for this show is beyond me at this point, but I do have a powerful PC capable of chewing through encodes, so with a little help, I might be able to run with this. Thanks in advance for any help/info.

Hey folks!

Huge thanks to Octorox, WMX, and Greg Z for your combined efforts in giving The Brave Little Toaster the love it deserves.

I know many of you will be purists who want the absolute best rendering of the original film in its unaltered state. But, I also suspect that at least a few of you have little ones that you don’t want seeing a nearly-topless woman. So, in much the same way as WMX did with the intro, I painstakingly edited each frame to censor the upscaled version in a manner similar to the censoring that was done in the US DVD release.

I don’t have cloud hosting, but if Octorox or someone else would be willing to host this variant, I’d be happy to supply it to them so others can benefit from my work.

Before and After Images of Original Upscale, Censored Upscale, and Censored US DVD

Details:

• I’m not a professional or even hobbyist artist. I think the final rendering looks natural next to the other animation, but if you don’t, well, I did my best! Upon playback, there was a bit of jitter between some frames that I didn’t like, but when I compared to the original, a similar jitter was there, so I think that’s just me hyper-focusing on something that probably wouldn’t stand out to a normal watcher.
• I’ve re-encoded the film into HEVC/x265 (A 40-hour software encode at quality of RF18, preset of VerySlow for maximum quality at minimum filesize). There is a VERY slight loss of sharpness, but even in the comparison photos you really have to look to notice it. When things are in motion you’d be hard-pressed to notice a difference. The benefit? Nearly 80% reduction in filesize, from 20.0GB to 4.23GB. Nice for folks like me who are trying to maximize space on their media servers.
• I was painstaking in ensuring that I didn’t drop frames or add frames as a result of my edits. Even so, the original upscale has a length of 1:30:11.989 and my censored version has a length of 1:30:11.614. After all of my checks I’ve come to the conclusion that my version just has fewer black frames at the end of the file, because both the original and my edit are at the same place in the credits at 1:30:08.659, just before it fades to black. Must be a consequence of the re-encode.

There is so much talent in this community. Has anyone edited the audio tracks of the movies to remove the Wilhelm screams? Peter Jackson went a bit ham with them in this trilogy and I’d love it if I could just drop in an edited audio track.

I recall in particular the scene where Thrain is being flung somewhere and the scream was used. It was so out-of-place, so jarring, so distracting, they might as well have rotoscoped in a dog taking a dump in the middle of the screen. It really spoiled the film for me.

If anyone has fixed the audio to remove these screams in a seamless way, I’d love it if you could point me in the right direction.