RidgeShark

It’s looking great. Very much looking forward to this 😉

That’s great. Why don’t you buy the Scream Factory set and make your own custom edit that is exactly what you want?

Thank you Mr. Brown - you do understand everything correctly.

I really don’t have a preference, but the stomach punch will be used since this a recreation of the tv cut. Which one do you think is better?

I was considering a 2nd audio option with the swearing restored. I was never sure why “buckethead” was censored, lol. But this will come later. Still lots of work to be done.

jedimasterobiwan said:

RidgeShark said:

The first tv sequence is finished. And so begins scene 2. The very first shot will be whittled down from 1,486 frames of the Koch 50p to match the 698 frames of the SciFi 24p. Crazy…this is going to take a while.

so is this going to have the edited lines please say it won’t

“Apeheads” “Jack and Spit” “Buzzards!” - Yes, it will all be there. And so will the alternate take of Ash getting punched in the stomach at the graveyard. This is to be an exact recreation of the Tv Cut. Others can modify it as they wish.

The first tv sequence is finished. And so begins scene 2. The very first shot will be whittled down from 1,486 frames of the Koch 50p to match the 698 frames of the SciFi 24p. Crazy…this is going to take a while.

jedimasterobiwan said:
ridgeshark when it comes to which footage to use. use the 4k transfer international cut footage with good bad i’m the guy with the gun line the theatrical ending and the tv scenes and the director’s cut footage.

Once I’m done picking out the frames, I’ll consider each transfer and see what works best with the tv scenes. One of my main goals is to make the transition to the upscaled SD scenes as seamless as possible. It may be that the older HD transfer of the Director’s Cut is more up to the job. We’ll see.

jephyork said:

The aspect ratio will be cropped to match the blu-rays.

Aww. I’m a little disappointed to hear this, since the open-matte nature of the TV cut is one of its biggest appeals to me. Then again, I suppose I understand it – since your only other option is to restore every single frame of the Koch version manually, and that’s a pain in the tuchus.

You speak much truth, Jeph. 😉 Maybe we’ll get lucky and a NTSC region somewhere in the world will do an appropriate release of the TV Cut.

How do you plan to delete the SciFi logo?

Thankfully that will be easy. I’ll just patch in the plain Koch back over that spot. It will be unnoticeable.

jedimasterobiwan said:

Too bad the deleted scenes and the scenes from the tv cut couldn’t have been remastered in hd by shout 😦

I love Shout and typically defend their work, but this was a letdown. Universal has a very good looking SD NTSC master of the tv cut and it looks great upscaled. I’ll give them the benefit of a doubt - It may have been a budget or deadline issue? At least they corrected the issues with the US Theatrical and International Cuts. Unfortunately, the TV Cut is more unknown and a lesser priority.

Good to see you too Jeph!

The aspect ratio will be cropped to match the blu-rays. What’s great is that the Koch release has a bit more picture info on the left and right sides when compared to my old SciFi recording, so the cropping will be less severe than it was on the PSE. Additionally, I will slowly degrade the surrounding footage so the jump in quality will be much less jarring, or hopefully not jarring at all. I’ve already figured out the proper resolution decrease and blurring to make the HD Director’s Cut look just like the TV Cut. So a slow fade from HD to lower res, and then vice versa should suffice. I’m excited to play with that when I get some time.

And generally, I’m still ecstatic that I can extract vertical resolution from the SciFi Recording and then place it into the Koch. I had no idea such a thing was possible. It’s a huge help to the upscaling process.

May have made an interesting discovery. It appears the Koch DVD was vertically blurred, similar to the GOUT DVDs, to hide aliasing. My SciFi recording is lower resolution, but was not vertically blurred, so some horizontal lines and details are preserved better in the SciFi recording, despite it being generally inferior looking to the Koch. Modifying an AviSynth script I found for extracting grain and reinserting it later, I think I found a way to reinsert that missing vertical resolution.

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/176668

This avisynth script goes like this:

AviSource(“C:\SciFiChannelAlignedtoKoch.avs”)
grain1=mt_makediff(Blur(0,1.58).Blur(0,1.58)) #this extracts vertical resolution details

AviSource(“C:\KochDVDAlignedtoSciFi.avs”)
mt_adddiff(grain1) #this adds the extracted vertical resolution details to a different source

You’ll notice in the bottom right you can slightly see the SciFi Channel logo being added into the Koch image.

Although not 100% perfect, it appears to restore more detail than it takes away. Definitely requires perfect 1:1 alignment between sources. Not really needed anymore for Star Wars, but this would have been useful for taking vertical resolution detail from the Star Wars laserdiscs and adding back to the blurred GOUT.

Love to hear what you guys think. This was an early test to see how this process looks when upscaled to 1080p. This is processed from the Koch version using the manual process I described above. I’m not completely happy with the motion of the shots of Ash looking upward. I’ve gotten better at the process and will likely redo those two shots.

Be sure to download the full 1080p mkv copy for a full inspection.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5eEa2k1FrDHc0pSTmRGQXlLTDg/view?usp=sharing

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.