RidgeShark

This is my favorite cut of the film - my Primitive Screwhead Edition was essentially an extended version of this cut - so this is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, but the sources out there have been very unsatisfactory. As far as I know, the tv cut has only been released commercially by two companies (please correct me if this is wrong):

1. Koch - An interlaced PAL DVD badly converted from a good looking NTSC source (much better than my SciFi channel recording). The playback has almost unnoticeable back and forth speed shifts. Even a short scene will not line up at all on a timeline with my old SciFi recording. AviSynth SRestore added to a deinterlaced 50p version of this produces unusable results.

2. Scream Factory - It appears they simply took the Koch PAL DVD itself and did an extra poor conversion to NTSC. It has the same MPEG-2 blocking as the Koch DVD, but the resolution appears to have been further reduced and looks very poor.

So what appears to work here is to use a deinterlaced 50p version of the Koch and to go through and weed out unnecessary frames manually and make sure it matches my SciFi recording. I almost have the first tv-cut exclusive scene finished with this method and it looks very nice. But this is hugely time consuming (what I wouldn’t give for a high quality copy of the SD master!).

In the end, these scenes in addition to a high def copy of the Director’s Cut and Theatrical Cut will be used to help reconstruct the tv cut in HD. Audio will be taken from my recording the SciFi broadcast.

I’m really excited about your Off the Cutting Room Floor fanedit. I grew up with the TV Cut of Jaws the Revenge and the movie feels empty without the beginning narration and those extra character scenes.

And of course, the TV Cut has that establishing shot that Roger Ebert felt was needed to help the US theatrical ending make more sense : “That the director, Joseph Sargent, would film this final climactic scene so incompetently that there is not even an establishing shot, so we have to figure out what happened on the basis of empirical evidence.”

https://youtu.be/csrlOOZnKDw?t=31s

I can’t help but think if Ebert had seen this, he would have shaken his head in disbelief and agreed with the decision to cut it. Still - it’s so a part of the movie for me. I need to see that grotesque shark doing a slow-motion spin before impalement.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what you come up with. I know it can be a difficult task. I mentioned before that I had tried syncing up the film to Gillian Anderson’s reconstruction and didn’t get too far before putting in on the backburner. I managed to find my old project files and wanted to share what I came up with - maybe it can help in some way. I got about 23+ minutes in and had a lot of difficulty after. There is a ton of editing work here to adapt Anderson’s reconstruction and a lot of pieces seem to be missing and require a lot of personal choices. I always meant to come back but never did. Anyway, here it is -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68RYyUYxLjs

Hopefully it can be of some use. 😃

This could be a good frame of reference - http://www.brentonfilm.com/articles/nosferatu-the-ultimate-blu-ray-and-dvd-guide

Be careful to avoid using anything from Kino’s blu-ray. Somehow they managed to delete every 8th frame.

I wish you the best of luck. I too once tried to sync up Gillian Anderson’s recreation of the Hans Erdmann score to the latest restoration but found I couldn’t sync it. It could be that her recreation had to be condensed a bit to fit onto one audio CD, or maybe she based her recreation on a shorter, earlier restoration of the movie. What I had considered doing was a hybrid of hers and Berndt Heller’s recreation, but couldn’t make the time for it. However you do it, I would love to see the results! 😉

I recently traded e-mails with a source close to the Pierce estate about film prints of The Legend of Boggy Creek. According to him, the original negatives were stored at Technicolor but are now lost. The Pierce Estate does not have a complete print. The source himself has only a highly damaged reel. There is a private collector who claims to have “pristine” set of all reels, but will not allow a transfer because he believes it will cause damage. I have to wonder if this pristine set of reels is now fading into an unrecoverable red mess - it is an early 70’s low budget film after all.

I have no idea where a print of this may be, but wanted to get the idea out there of recovering this one. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe this one is in the public domain. I know Pierce tried to copyright a slightly modified version in 1975, but I’m not sure how that works out.

On a different note, I tried creating a more watchable presentation of the bootleg Education 2000 DVD which was a transfer of the 1988 Neon Video VHS. The 1988 VHS is believed to be of an anamorphic 16mm print. It looks horrible, but is the only widescreen version of the film available. The audio on this was equally horrible, so I took superior audio from one of the fullscreen releases. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4lYLrmmj9Y

And here’s a similar effort from another fan for reference - https://archive.org/details/TheLegendOfBoggyCreek1972 He may have been using the actual Neon Video VHS release.

I used srestore for a VHS transfer I did of the old Legend of Sleepy Hollow starring Jeff Goldblum (available at cinemageddon) which had many of the same problems your VHS does.

You'll have to deinterlace the raw 29.97i footage to produce 59.94 fps progressive footage so that srestore can have more frames to work with. You lose half the resolution, but using some more advanced deinterlace methods can produce good results.

Anyway, a basic re-purposing of my old settings with your proposed settings looks to work pretty well on your 1600-frame Huffyuv-compressed capture. EDIT - I've updated the EZKeepGrain setting from 0.6 to 1.4 to reduce the amount of denoising going on in QTGMC.

AssumeTFF()
ConverttoYV12(interlaced=true)
QTGMC( "slow", TR2=1, SourceMatch=2, Lossless=2, Sharpness=0, EZKeepGrain=1.4 )
srestore(frate=23.976, omode=6, speed=-25, mode=2)

QTGMC can be extremely slow and endlessly tweakable but many in the doom9 avisynth usage forum consider it to be the best deinterlacer out there.  The main limitation is that many of the settings require a YV12 color space but that should not be a problem for most.

None of these methods are perfect and some blending will remain, but I hope this helps!

Can anyone out there reseed the old 2.63 gb ISO http://zerotracker.com torrent?  Curious to see how it compares to the myspleen DVD-R copy which had high contrast with blown-out highlights and very strong DNR.  There's a few others on there stuck at 92.2%.

EDIT: Got it!  Thank you Rev.

Thank you, Aluminum.  Alright, so myspleen is finally back up, and now the Army of Darkness tv cut is available too.  Enjoy guys.

Hey, it's been a while.  I still have an old membership over at myspleen, so I'm checking in their forum if it would be alright to upload this.  Definitely don't want the tv cut to fade into obscurity.  I actually tried uploading this to CG a while back, but they didn't want it.

Same here!

If you still have these captures laying around your hard drive, I'd recommend using the AviSynth filter MDegrain.  It's the best temporal smoother/denoiser that I'm aware of.  It does a great job of cleaning analog video noise while producing a minimum of unwanted artifacts.  You'll get results similar to, if not better, than your first experiment.  http://avisynth.org.ru/mvtools/mvtools2.html  Even using the example scripts produce great results with analog video.

If only there was a way to get Lugosi's face on Carlos Villarias during that great moving shot that introduced Dracula to Renfield.

TheHelmetDork said:

(bump)

I must say it's nice, but it would've been pleasant to see the 'I ain't that good.' scene included instead of 'Good. Bad. I'm the guy with the gun.'

I mean, come on...

There was a lot of consideration that went into what lines to use.  For this particular instance, I chose "Good.  Bad.  I'm the guy with the gun." because it's a fan favorite (at least for those who grew up with the U.S. Theatrical Version) and because Sam Raimi himself said he preferred it.

It's a function in MVTools v2.  Found as a part of Fizick's amazing filter collection http://avisynth.org.ru/fizick.html  Or the direct link here for the documentation and download link -  http://avisynth.org.ru/mvtools/mvtools2.html  Sorry I failed to mention before that I was using v2 - MSuper and probably many other features are absent in v1.

There are lots of great examples on there - it's where I got the function MDegrain2i2 and there are other examples of functions made specifically for progressive (non-interlaced) video.  Also - I haven't tried using MVDegrain to remove rainbowing on progressive video.  I imagine it would help if all you have is a progressive source, but I'm certain that filtering the chroma on the interlaced frames before performing the IVTC would achieve better results in removing the rainbowing.

Have you tried using MVDegrain to filter only the chroma?  I find that at extremely high settings (thSAD=10000) while using plane=3, it can remove or reduce rainbowing that the other filters can't even touch.  It also does a great job of removing other chromatic artifacts.  Of course, at such high settings, you might only want to filter specific trouble spots.  Side Effects are few - I've seen some desaturation on or around fast moving objects, and also desaturation on the first frame of a scene change.  But for the most part it retains all of the natural color saturation.  Not too bad considering the effect it has on the most troublesome of rainbowing.

EDIT: Here is my script, which is an altered version of the function MVDegrain2i2 that deals specifically with interlaced video.  I simply call it MVDegrain2i2chroma.avsi

function MDegrain2i2chroma(clip source, int "overlap", int "dct")
{
overlap=default(overlap,0) # overlap value (0 to 4 for blksize=8)
dct=default(dct,0) # use dct=1 for clip with light flicker
fields=source.SeparateFields() # separate by fields
super = fields.MSuper()
backward_vec2 = super.MAnalyse(isb = true, delta = 2, overlap=overlap, dct=dct)
forward_vec2 = super.MAnalyse(isb = false, delta = 2, overlap=overlap, dct=dct)
backward_vec4 = super.MAnalyse(isb = true, delta = 4, overlap=overlap, dct=dct)
forward_vec4 = super.MAnalyse(isb = false, delta = 4, overlap=overlap, dct=dct)
fields.MDegrain2(super, backward_vec2,forward_vec2,backward_vec4,forward_vec4,thSAD=10000,plane=3)
Weave()
}

I hope this info may help in some way.  I wish you guys the best of luck!  It already looks wonderful

I had a similar problem too.  I was using filters that required YV12 input, but the source was interlaced.  When interlaced video is converted to the Windows version of YV12, it screws up the color because one line of color information covers two lines of the resolution.  The fix was to use ConverttoYV12(interlaced=true) in the avisynth script.  However, from the screen shots, it looks like the interlaced chroma channel doesn't have this YV12 interlaced problem.  But the problem I had was very similar - chroma was becoming misaligned and being dragged into other shots at scene changes.

What's the color space of the source video? - RGB24, YUY2, YV12?  Also, what filters are you using to filter the chroma channel?

I'm glad it's helping with those troubled spots.  Strange about the repetition problem, though.

Right now I'm trying out one of the filter's modes to restore a bad NTSC to PAL conversion.  It's going to take about 5-6 days to process 5 minutes of video.  Like the documentation stresses, "It's quality vs speed".

For this problem (and possibly even the whole film), I highy recommend using animeIVTC.  It is hands down the best automated avisynth IVTC tool I've ever used.  Try the settings (mode=1, aa=0, killcomb=0).  The default killcomb setting is 1, but I'd steer clear of it as it ever so slightly softens fine image detail. The 1 setting is best for slightly noisy VHS sources that don't have any fine detail in the first place - it shouldn't be needed for a decent LD capture.

This sounds amazing.  Any chance you'll create a PAL Hercules?

I'm glad you're going with the slightly curved borders.  It should look fine on tv and will give the whole presentation a unique look while giving us the most picture possible.  Good call on that and not overprocessing the image.

I wonder how long it will take before a fan editor incorporates scenes from the motion comic into the live action movie.  Not too long I would think.

Looks like videoFred's script is poorly suited for this high-contrast 16mm print.  HDTVs usually enhance the contrast in video anyway, so it's probably best to leave the contrast and brightness levels alone.

Doctor M said:

I was surprised that I did not find the aspect ratios to be an issue.

They way people were talking about it, I thought the movie would switch between 16x9 and 4x3 or something.  I did not expect the difference to be black borders on the right/left.

Watched on a device with overscan, the difference is invisible.

I am very glad to hear it!  It was difficult to ultimately come to the decision to present the tv scenes like that, but they do seem to play well on most traditional tv sets, and if played on larger widescreen units, the black bars never seem to distract.  I took the time to reframe many of the SciFi shots - even performing a vertical pan & scan on the first shot of the SciFi-exclusive windmill sequence so that I could include the creepy deer antlers above the door.  This was a detail you never saw on the letterboxed workprint footage and it really grew on me.

Btw, I am aware that Comcast has Army of Darkness in its free onDemand pool of movies. I don't know which cut it is, but if it's extended, it would be a digital source, if not HD.

Thanks for the info.  If anyone can check it out, please let us know.

Puggo, I just wanted to say that I'm extremely excited about this project.  I have a feeling that the audio/video presentation of the Puggo Grande will be the most personal-feeling of any Star Wars video release and will likely be the one I choose to watch anytime I'm in a Star Wars '77 mood.  

I was wondering if you've looked into any resizing methods for converting the full-frame anamorphic print down to letterboxed anamorphic dvd video.  There are plenty of high quality options out there, but I would personally recommend Spline36Resize in Avisynth as the best for downsizing.  It retains detail beautifully and tends to produce an accurate, sharp image without using artificial sharpening.