RU.08

Norman, you would make my day if you capped a "Return of the Musketeers" LD!!

team_negative1 said:

Again, we know it is the SE version. But the frames don't match up. Are they missing completely.

From the looks of it, the Tie Fighters path seems to match the original, so we're not sure what the comparison was for.

Team Negative1

They don't match at all, that's my point. I'm pretty sure the last frame I posted was the same frame in both versions, but in any case this one certainly IS - it's the 3rd last frame of the shot before the interior:

They're a bit harder to see in that frame, so I've highlighted them:

Here's a pic of the difference:

Evidently they left out two red glows as well when they re-did the shot from the camera elements.

team_negative1 said:

Yes, the original matte lines and boxes are visible in a lot of the shots.

==========================================

You can see a lot more in the ESB deconstructed raw version.

Team Negative1

And also, Harmy's despcialized was based on the SE. In some scenes he recreated matte-lines, but usually the SE composting was used. In this scene, for instance, the placement of the tie fighters is quite different between the theatrical version and the SE. In the SE the two the the left are more level, and the other one is placed further to the right than in the original theatrical version. This would have been one of the changes made for the 1997 edition that the director agreed to (although how much involvement he had in Lucas's decision making is debatable).

There's only one LD release of TPM though.

Yes but the Z-VCD clearly cuts out earlier than the LD - and you can tell this is the case by the position of the arch in the foreground. The LD has about 11 more frames than the Z-VCD.

That should would work fine as it is, yes. Just as the crowd shot does - it doesn't look out of place at all (have a look at this comparison to the true HD version!). The senate is one of the lower quality ones. Although, it doesn't look that bad in motion either.

But if I could comment on your earlier reply where you said "the best result ever" - perhaps from the sources I have, yes. But sometime in the future someone will scan those scenes in true HD from a print, and that will be the best result.

It should work for Empire. Not sure if DrDre has gone and tuned the script frame-by-frame, but Empire is pretty much the same quality T/C. Jedi is a much better T/C (doesn't have aliasing), so I'd be doubtful that the SR plugin will get much from it, but you never know. I actually have another film who's DVD would probably benefit from greatly with this script, so when DrDre's done and releases the script I'll have a look at that. As we've discussed, you really need a DVD that has considerable aliasing to benefit from it.

The drive-through in the Mos Eisley sequence posted above never looked great because it had something like 5 or 6 generations of optical composites in it. The SE version got rid of the old version entirely, and Lucas had ILM or whoever recomposite it from the original elements (hence why MikeV's doesn't resolve the detail in the SE of that shot).

That's already as detailed as it gets, thorr. Just sit at least 6 feet back from TV set to enjoy properly.

Have a look if you like, here are all the scenes with just a crop and quick transcode (CRF-10). I've also put uncompressed AVIs up.

LINKS MOVED (see the op).

I can't get SR to find meaningful detail in there, but perhaps DrDre can.

I've just cleaned-up the op now as well. All these links and more are in the op.

As DrDre already discovered, the Infognition plugin probably isn't suitable for this source:

Geometrical SR reconstruction algorithms are possible if and only if the input low resolution images have been under-sampled and therefore contain aliasing. Because of this aliasing, the high-frequency content of the desired reconstruction image is embedded in the low-frequency content of each of the observed images. Given a sufficient number of observation images, and if the set of observations vary in their phase (i.e. if the images of the scene are shifted by a sub-pixel amount), then the phase information can be used to separate the aliased high-frequency content from the true low-frequency content, and the full-resolution image can be accurately reconstructed.[12]

In practice, this frequency-based approach is not used for reconstruction, but even in the case of spatial approaches (e.g. shift-add fusion[13]), the presence of aliasing is still a necessary condition for SR reconstruction.

(Wikipedia)

The reason why it works for the GOUT is because of how it was transferred to video. The aliasing is necessary as there is meaningful information missing between the scan-lines that can be recovered from from other frames. It'd be nice if Infognition was more forthcoming with this information.

In any case, to use SR you would need to do the upscale first and then the alignment.

Your later versions are worlds apart from the original you posted a couple of months back.

And just a quick note on SR - I do know how it usually looks. On most sources when compared to a simple script using NNEDI3 it has little (if any) benefit, and introduces its own interesting type of noise. DrDre's script overcomes this nicely, and proves that the SR plugin can be used to create a greater result than it yields on its own.

I used to think DCPs were actual video files *facepalm*. Nope - just a few thousand JPEG2000 files (yeah of course in a MXF container), uncompressed audio, a subtitle file if you need one, and a XML document. On a USB stick.

Check out this very special version of the trailer:

https://youtu.be/v93Jh6JNBng

Thanks. I wish it looked better though. The crowd shot is one of the better looking ones. Andrea has kindly offered to provide better quality caps of the LD scenes, so once I have those the scenes may look a bit better than they presently do.

Since I haven't posted one in a while, here's a preview clip. It shows the LD+DVB upscaled crowd shot and the DVD-extras sourced "Sebulba" scene with Watto and Warwick Davis cheering Sebulba.

Also, if you're curious you can download the Sebulba scenes and compare them.

Downloads:

Preview clip (52.3MB).

Sebulba scene - DVD version:
1. Uncompressed AVI (96.8MB)
2. x264 crf16 (2.56MB)

Sebulba scene - LD+DVB version:
1. Uncompressed AVI (96.8MB)
2. x264 crf16 (2.34MB)

You'll notice that the version in the preview clip has been softened slightly and has a grain-plate added, compared to the raw version.

Upscaling...

As I mentioned earlier in the thread, it wasn't easy designing an upscale script for this film. Not only that, but the upscale itself is now extremely slow - making progressing it further difficult. Here's a comparison to my old upscale script from last year (there are two scenes in that link).

Here's the links for LD and TB:

Laserdisc vs Upscale (4 scenes in the link)

TB vs upscale (4 scenes in the link)

Yes it is good, one thing you have to be mindful of though is that the method (and in fact just about any really aggressive method like this) wants to bring everything in the frame into focus, and you can lose picture depth. For instance in this screenshot the door frames in the background have been brought into focus, as has some of the stormtrooper on the left of frame, and the stormtrooper on the right is also brought into focus. It is what it is. :)

Harmy said:

I don't think pan and scan VHS has better resolution than widescreen LD, let alone digital PAL anamorphic broadcast.

Oh the vertical resolution would be better, but the horizontal fidelity would probably be no better. The thing with all analogue video is that they all have distinct lines of resolution - NTSC is 480 lines* regardless of whether it's VHS, Betamax, or LD. Note there is actually 525 lines of resolution in the NTSC standard, but the picture window is 480 lines.

The horizontal information is compressed, when decompressed it yields 720 pixels (or whatever amount your TV can handle). The actual amount stored on VHS is said to be only around 320 distinct points (pixels) or so. Also expressed as 240 lines per picture height (240 * 1.33333 = 320). Laserdisc, I believe, yields perhaps 80-90% more horizontal fidelity. And DVD yields more still (no horizontal compression).

And that's just luma - chroma is compressed even more.

And then there's the noise. VHS is noisier than LD which is noisier than DVD (no analogue noise).

I've never seen the officially released HK TPM VCD, I'd be curious to see it though (so if anyone has it - spleen it!!) VCD has only 50% of the vertical resolution, and its horizontal resolution is comparable to VHS (Luma that is, Chroma is better).

ScruffyNerfHerder said:

I haven't seen the preview but I'd just like to echo Jan's suggestion. CRF mode is designed specifically to be fast, efficient and high quality. If you're not aware of it, basically you set a quality level, with lower numbers being better, and CRF determines the lowest bitrate that can achieve that quality. Talking heads? Low bitrate. Explosions in the middle of a hurricane? High bitrate. It happens automatically and quickly, with only one pass. I've had great luck with it. 

Keep up the great work! :)

CRF is not constant bitrate. I didn't see the preview, and I agree with you about CRF. :)

NP. There's really nothing that can be done about it when working with a source that has DVNR. DrDre's script does improve the quality of the source, but it can't remove that. Someone with more technical knowledge than I could tell you if the DVNR is applied directly from the T/C machine or if it was added by a secondary process, but either way it's in the source. For some of the movie it doesn't create considerable problems, but in some scenes it creates considerable drawbacks. For a 1993 T/C it's not all bad, it probably wasn't cutting edge, but it was what it was. :)

Today we want better, of course. Even the 2004 DVD was made in a T/C and not a film scanner as I've mentioned elsewhere. DrDre's work, however, is very valuable. It's given me a way to improve my own upscale of the SD elements in The Phantom Menace.

It won't be.

Since there's interest growing in this, here's my alignment/clean-up script. I'm currently re-working the upscale aspect of the script, but this is the basis that underpins it, and I haven't altered it since last year (and probably won't). You need to crop the right-hand side of the final product. I use that script to create uncompressed AVI files of the scenes I need, and then load the scenes into the upscale script.

Also, I have worked out how to handle the bridge scene. Labour-intensive, but it will work. :)

Jetrell Fo said:

I have a widescreen VHS of the Theatrical release if it would be of some value in this project?

Thanks but I don't need it. Between althor's LD and the TB (DVB recording) (and the Z VCD for subtitles) all the material is covered.

Here's the subtitle script (the current version of it), even something as simple as adding subtitles is actually quite complicated.

Well even the link you provided listed changes to the DVD version, as well as further changes to the 2011 BD/3D version.

And yes, unfortunately the subtitles will not be absolutely perfect. Their vertical placement is consistent in all but one scene (a close-up of Sebulba saying "you slave scum", and their horizontal placement is consistently centred. Since the DVD/HDTV version is not cropped exactly the same, the subtitles are not in the exact position they would have been in originally. I will be making sure they are as close to right as they can be when averaged across the 27 of them (and the Sebulba one will be lower as is theatrically correct).

It'll be synced to the LD as ripped by althor, but without the LD logos (so from the 2oth century fox logo on). I've never actually seen Adywan's version, so I'm not sure how it differs.