RU.08

VidFire recreates the missing fields. It doesn't "recover them" it makes new ones. Once a videotape is telerecorded onto film the missing fields are gone. You can actually use VidFire to "recreate" "missing" fields from material that originated on film and was never on videotape, if you wanted to. Which isn't to say it's bad technology at all, just that it is what it is. :)

No, I think you're better off using a consistent CRF or a consistent 2-pass bitrate setting. There are other ways to degrade picture quality without using different bitrates - for instance you could resize the scenes surrounding your inserted SD footage to make the transition more smooth, if desired (downscale to a resolution in-between and then upscale it again to degrade the quality).

The credits take up a negligible amount of space compared to the rest of the film anyway. So I agree with junh1024 on that one. For instance, in my encode for Jurassic Park the video file came to 3542.2 MB, yet the credits are only 147.1 MB of that. So by compressing that area of the film further I could only really save an extra 50 or 60 MB and that's being generous. Out of 3.45 GB, 50 MB is nothing.

However, he's wrong about 2-pass. CRF and 2-Pass are equivalent. The only difference is that CRF maintains consistent quality and achieves the desired level of quality, whereas 2-Pass maintains consistent quality and achieves the desired average bitrate. If you have a 2-Pass file and a CRF file that come out at the same size then they will be exactly the same quality. Which you can test yourself easily - set CRF quality to something low like 26 or 28 and encode, then take the average bitrate from the file you just encoded and encode again using 2-pass. The two encoded files will be exactly the same quality - they just came to it using two different routes.

Here's another tip... with 2-Pass you can't know the quality in advance. So my suggestion is you set the CRF to what you want and encode the file. Let's say you want the CRF at 18 or perhaps 19. Encode it and see what size it comes to. If it's well outside the size you're wanting then you should find a way to make the file more compressible instead of lowering the encoding quality to force it to fit the desired size. You could resize from 1080p to 720p for instance. De-grain, De-noise, etc. Once you get it to encode around the right size at the right quality then use 2-pass to get the exact size that you need.

Well, I was going to do a test encode but it turn out my file is too complicated and crashes the encoder!

So, in the meantime while I sulk about that, here's another pic from the BD. And no I'm not using a single frame of the BD in my project, but I'm just carrying on about the absurdity or inconsistency or whatever you want to call it - Lucas' Gawt-Dang Shenanigans perhaps - of Naboo's never-the-same capital city architecture.

Okay, so this huge hanger is supposedly positioned out the back of those dome shaped buildings, somewhere. See if you can figure it out.

Nope? Well it's not the main building because it looks different to that dome, and plus they walk away from it to get to the hanger. It's also none of the buildings to the right (the bridge-side) since we're given a pretty good view from the side. But wait, it can't be a dome to the left either because if it was we'd see the other right-hand side domes to the left of the picture - but we don't! So where is it located? Give up? I'll show you where it is:

If you squint really hard you can just make it out:

Wouldn't you know it, George forgot to show us the front of the building! It's somewhere there just of camera-view.

But I was thinking, perhaps a long time ago their building projects were simply much more efficient than they are today - it's not unreasonable to expect the Nabooians to build a bridge between when we see the city at the start of the film, and when we see it again towards the end of the film.

But, it turns out it wasn't a very useful bridge because:

By ROTJ (20-something years later) they decided to get rid of it entirely! And not just the bridge, but the building attached to it, and that spear-shaped building too. And in their place they grew more trees. Not to worry though, half the other buildings have changed as well. Seems the capital went under quite a bit of redevelopment over just 20 years! It's not as strange as those truly funky shadows happening to them roof-top gungans though!!

At least they have shadows unlike the guys standing on the far right here:

Which also brings into question - where did all the street lights go? You know the ones that were there just two shots ago:

If you look closely you'll notice they are there in the other shot, however they've mysteriously moved from in front of the celebrating Nabooians to inside them... it's very bizzare. Of course the ones on the near-side of the street are missing entirely in that shot - as are the giant violet and blue banners.

Plus where did all them trees go? You know the ones you saw from the Queen's view:

What a shame I just can't understand the brilliant artistic vision here. Then again, let's have another look. Here it is just after the Queen's window-pane shot:

And clearly some of the trees already went missing! Some of the street lights were missing too, and the ones that were there didn't cast shadows for some reason. At least they're not casting their shadows the wrong way though like everything else in that shot! You can quite easily identify the near buildings from the Queen's view with the ones above on the left and the right there, they haven't moved, just the damn trees and streetlights! Perhaps George meant to have CGI storm-troopers riding on walking trees or something?

However, there's quite an amazing thing since as well as building the bridge, they also managed to build a new arch by the end of the film:

Yeah yeah I know you can already see it earlier in the film from the Queen's window-panes - but it disappeared when she went outside. It was nowhere to be seen.

I'm pretty sure they had no, uh, fire-trucking clue which file they were supposed to be rendering Naboo from!! It was a flipping lucky-dip each time!!

Ah, well there's more than one way to do it, but one possible solution is to feed the SR part of your script just the luma, and use an alternate up-scaling method for the chroma.

And this is what I was wanting to post...

That's from my render or SR-v10, and there are many other examples of chroma-bleeding. Did you correct this in later versions of the script DrDre?

On the topic of telerecordings (/kinescope), I've never heard the term "low definition" applied to 405 and 625 line television. Especially not 625-line. I'm pretty sure you just call 405-line standard definition. Telerecordings reduced the 50i source to 25p by throwing away every other field, and recording it onto film. As the source however was videotape, it never existed in a higher resolution than what's available on the telerecording - it simply had the other fields as well - and you can't recover missing field information from existing fields.

I don't think you can get much out of such a source - the 16mm film doesn't reproduce the exact line-pattern of the source for a start, so you're working at a disadvantage in that you have a source that higher resolution than the material it contains, whereas SR is designed to work with a source that's lower resolution than the original material. Hope that makes sense.

We'll wait to hear from Vinnie. :)

Thanks for the kind words. That's enough of derailing this thread from the Team -1 version now though!

I don't think they intended to add the bridge, I think it was a result of re-rendering the scene from the wrong computer file. These screenshots are from the bluray:

Laserdisc:

Cheers Jetrell.

@nightstalkerpoet - yes really close now. I'll do a test encode soonish, and then readjust a few things like the vertical subtitle placement and all the upscaled stuff.

BATB is not true HD though, it's just up-scaled to HD.

I have it on demonoid, remember?

Vinnie981 said:

where is this released? i don't see in on myspleen : (

 Check your PM.

AHHHH I'm going to have nightmares for weeks now!

johnlocke2342 said:

RU.08 said:

TV's Frink said:

Have you ever tried seamless branching before?  From what I hear, it usually ain't so seamless.

 True for DVD but I think bluray is a different matter as the files are physically different.

 I used seamless branching for a multilingual Blu-ray based on Harmy's DeEd and foreign projects based on it with multiAVCHD. Well I can confirm it's NOT seamless AT ALL. But I think professional software might be able do fix it.

Ah I was just wondering where this discussion was. multiAVCHD can't create seamless branching, however, BDedit can. Sadly exactly how to use it is anyone's guess, all I know for sure is you use the playlist file (.mpls), put the parts in order, and set "c" to "1" for the first part and "5" for all the others. What I would like to know is if it's possible to hide certain tracks (e.g. subtitle or audio tracks) using a playlist so they are only available when played back on a certain title?

No they're some other exceptionally high quality format.

Then they'll just have to give him a 70mm version instead.

Are you encoding your file in parts and then joining them? That's what I would do with a long encode like that...

towne32 said:

RU.08 said:

Just a note - my encode finished and it looks really good. A huge improvement over the original encode at the same file-size (about 3.5GB). What a difference the grain makes! I'll probably just use this version for my AVCHD... I don't think this needs scratch/dirt/damage removal - except for a a handful of scenes mostly involving the end and start of the reels - and frankly I'd rather leave in the residual dirt as it doesn't really detract from the experience at all.

 Sounds nice. Still waiting to see what The Team cooks up, as far as scratches/dirt go. But I agree that it's in decent shape already compared to many films.

I actually uploaded it almost right after leaving that post. You can find it on Demonoid/AMPSdeux.

Just a note - my encode finished and it looks really good. A huge improvement over the original encode at the same file-size (about 3.5GB). What a difference the grain makes! I'll probably just use this version for my AVCHD... I don't think this needs scratch/dirt/damage removal - except for a a handful of scenes mostly involving the end and start of the reels - and frankly I'd rather leave in the residual dirt as it doesn't really detract from the experience at all.

Best wishes to you & your family potia. :)

Pfft, 45 days is nothing. The CGI effects for Jurassic Park took on average 10 hours to render, per frame. There's about 4mins of CGI footage in Jurassic park, so that's 57600 hours (342 weeks/6.6 years!!) Mind you that was back in the day when computer hours were more expensive than they are now, these days you could afford to spend millions of computer hours for complicated effects and still achieve a short turnaround time (with a large enough bank (network) of computers of course).

Here's the retro-looking disclaimer I made in all of 2 minutes. Click the picture to download (3.4 MB)

Will you be keeping it at 1.78:1?

@towne32; I currently have a 720p version encoding as we speak with image stabilisation. I'll see how it looks when complete, and then probably wait until this version is released and work off that for an "unofficial" AVCHD file.

Just a note on that though, I did a test encode a few days ago (with faster settings and CRF not 2-pass), it came out at the right size (about 3.5GB) but there was clear macroblocking due to the level of grain in the print. Which makes it obvious why we see macroblocking in the previews that Team Neg 1 upload of the SW stuff - the bit-rate just isn't high enough to cope with the low compressibility of the source. So this time I degrained it, like I said though I'll probably wait until the -1 Team release their version and then work off that. I didn't do any scratch removal because the algorithm I used left behind smearing (akin to what's commonly referred to as DVNR). If the Negative 1 encode is free from DVNR I'll use it, if not I'll leave the scratches in.

The AVCHD is not intended to in any way to replace the current version though, it's just something I'm doing for the more public trackers so the film can be shared in acceptable quality.

When they started the project everything was scanned at 1080p. Later, they changed their camera and later scans were done at 4k and resized to 1080p. By every account they've given, all work being done (clean-up, stabilisation, etc) is being done at 1080p and not 4k. By their descriptions, their 4k scans don't yield meaningful detail above 1080p anyway.

team_negative1 said:

Once DVD's came out, they matched Laserdiscs in resolution. And with remastering, at times, better quality.

So there was no high-end at that time.

Once DVDs came out, it beat LDs in resolution off the bat. LDs don't store pixels, they're an analogue format that is horizontally compressed just like VHS. DVD's can produce 100% of the horizontal fidelity (all 720 pixels). That's equal to 540 lines per picture height (TVL). LDs have a resolution reported to be around 425 TVL, meaning that it has 78.7% of the horizontal information that a DVD can hold.

As for how it looks, that's another matter. LDs can look just as good as early DVD releases (or even better if the MPEG2 compression was rubbish), and for releases based on the same master they can look near identical. It's quite hard to tell the difference in horizontal fidelity when it's only a difference of 21%. This page has a good visual representation.

With 4K BDs though, the main advantage won't be pixel resolution. It'll be the wider colour gamut, the higher bitrates, and the HEVC codec.

Possessed said:

Most peoples ears can't tell a difference.  192 is better for *recording* the audio because it captures more details in the recording process, but once it's recorded downsampling it to 96 or even 48 will be virtually lossless.

 I agree entirely, I doubt that I could tell the difference. I was simply pointing out that BD already matches and even beats DCP in terms of audio quality. The UHD-BDs should match or beat DCPs in terms of video quality.