Spaced Ranger

Hi, team_negative1!

I've been trying to find you're use of the HSL recombination technique (since your mention over at msycamore's THX 1138 "preservations" thread) -- if you caught my reply there.

Spaced Ranger said:

I had better success in first equalizing the Luminance of the separations before recombination in muddyknees2000's The Hobbit Rankin/Bass Animated Film (see Page 4 that thread). In that case, ... The DVD was too dark to accurately carry the VHS Hue & Saturation. A "color correction" of the B&W DVD Luminance was first made to match the VHS Luminance (very easy with B&W only) before recombination.

You're having the same problem in this instance. The faded film's Luminance is too light for recombination with the LPP's Hue & Saturation, to accurately carry those colors.

So, after HSL-splitting the faded film and the LPP, you'll see their Luminances are not near enough to one another. Since you're adding LPP's Hue and Saturation to the faded film's Luminance, you'll want to adjust the faded film's Luminance to approximate LPP's Luminance ..

                              faded film                                                                             LPP

           faded film-L & LPP-HS recombination                                                    LPP

                                                       faded film-L adjusted to match LPP-L

     faded film-L(adj.) & LPP-HS recombination                                               LPP

BTW, there is a little mis-registration between the two screenshots that resulted in mis-aligned coloring. You would want to conform them to better line up, for better results (no "color fringing").

The Knick Knack Boobs Restoration

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Feminist-aliens from warped-space-time have invaded our planet to have their foul way with Earth's ... women's ... boobs ..

Who will save our chicks?

        "Don't worry about it, saving chicks is what I'm all about!" -Duke Nukem: Zero Hour

Holster that freezerthrower, Duke. Science & Commerce are taking care of this one:

"Put the smile back on Sunny Miami's face with our new, patented Boobs Restoration Therapy® -- guaranteed! or your money back." ..

So ... "Let's rock!"

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Back in fun-loving 1989, an incredible short film entitled Knick Knack was created by John Lasseter and his crew of Pixar. It was state-of-the-art 3-dimensional computer-generated animation, it had boobs, and it was good. Fast forward to the darker days of 2003 and the now married-with-daughter Lasseter was hit with pangs of feminist madness and took a digital knife to his feminine knick knack creations. 

Lasseter claimed Disney did not force him to it, that it was his own choice ..

John Lasseter said [Pixar Talk - Knick Knack]:

"It was just crossing the line for me personally as a father, so I made the decision to reduce breast size"

In animation no one can hear them scream.
So steel yourselves, oh my brothers, and gaze upon the pix'ly deed he left behind   ..

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I have worked up a proof-of-concept procedure in a paint program. To do an entire project this way would be tedious and time consuming, to say the least. Note that even though less-than-ideal YouTube sources were used for this test, it looks quite good.

To start, get 1989 and 2003+ sources of Knick Knack (older VHS & DVD videos from YouTube here) ..

                    VHS [noisy & blurry]                                                        DVD [clean & sharp]
  

The smaller 1989 source is resized and repositioned to the 2003+ source. Note that the 2003+ was recreated from the existing files from their old system and software. They had to remake the video, with the altered female models, using decade-newer resources. In to-to, everything is not exactly aligned. So, only the female knick knacks need be targeted for exact resize and reposition ..

Next, the boobs, along with some of the torso area, are isolated from the 1989 source. By checking the mask (here outlined) against the 2003+ source, any extra area needing to be overlaid can be revealed ..

This critical 1989 area is then embedded into the 2003+ update and we see things starting to take shape    ..

Finally, the original 1989 source is matched (de-noise, sharpen, edge clarify, color correct) to it's superior-quality 2003+ update ..

"And here we have another satisfied customer!"      "Be sure to recommend us to your friend, Sunny Atlantis the mermaid!" 

For the actual boobs restoration, the best 1989 release (laserdisc) and the best 2003+ release (Blu-ray) should be used to produce a superior hi-def restoration. This might require specialized (read "expensive") software to (semi?)automate the resize and align of the two sources, edge detect and isolate the original breasts/torso for overlay, and the seamless blending for a finished production.

Recommendations anyone? Better yet, can anyone actually do this?

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DID YOU KNOW ...

Pixar releases film in Disney 3D (yes, it was about Knick Knack)
http://www.mickeyxtreme.com/Archives/ArchiveOct15212006.htm#Pixar_releases_film_in_Disney_3D

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                             original Knick Knack storyboard card

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"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

@ Doctor M

Again, kudos! on your thread! Laserdiscs are new to me and their relative value over updated digital versions continually amazes me.  :O

Whenever you have opportunity, I wonder if you would include, in your exhaustive list, mentions of when laserdiscs are available but are not better sources, or are available but have not been evaluated?

msycamore said:

Just remember that the true warrior of this thread is the silver haired wookie who have captured laserdiscs, videotapes, shipped his personal print for transfer and bought a vintage film print in hope and in order to make some sense of this mess.

Yes!  HEAR, HEAR!  for SilverWook!

msycamore said:

I know Antcufaalb will do a great job on the laser and it will be awesome to see what Poita's magic will bring us. :)

.. and for Antcufaalb! and poita!

That is telling about both Kubrick and Lucas. We expect professionals to admire their betters, but are surprised learn the other way around.

A search for "kubrick" "lucas" "admire" (in any order) brings up hits on ... Stanley Kubrick.  

“If I made as much money as George Lucas, I would not decide to become a studio mogul. I cannot understand why he doesn’t want to direct films anymore, because American Graffiti and even Star Wars were very good.” -Stanley Kubrick, IMDb - Stanley Kubrick's All Time Favorite Films

Lucas describes 2001: A Space Odyssey as "hugely inspirational" and Stanley Kubrick as "the filmmaker's filmmaker". (Wikipedia: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) )

Even they know who is who ...

msycamore said:

Sorry, is this the THX thread? A little Shining cannot hurt, all work and no play... ;)

msycamore said:

                                 Has there been any good efforts to preserv these two classics in their original form? if so,
                                 could someone please point me in the right direction. I am dying to see them again and
                                 I've searched everywhere with no luck. :( Have them on VHS of course but the quality is
                                 so bad you cannot watch them anymore and I thought there must've been some LD to
                                 DVD preservation done to them and was chocked that I couldn't find any. Any help would
                                 be much appreciated, thanks.

LOL   I know it's been a lo-o-ong time!   :D

You're allowed ... Johnny.   :O

The 50 Greatest Star Wars Gifts in the Galaxy

http://hiconsumption.com/2013/10/the-50-greatest-star-wars-gifts-in-the-galaxy/

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Mine? Definitely no.43 … Darth Vader Dark Side Coffee! Mmmm … the power of the dark side …

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Hey, SilverWook, I can guess your’s … (no.17, right?)    😃

Spaced Ranger said:

Worse coming to worst, play the file and record it with your system's sound recorder (save as a .wav file for no additional compression artifacts).

[emphasis mine]

.MP3 is a lossy (compressed) format, while .WAV is loseless (no compression). Compression artifacts, audio or video, are cumulative on each save -- something to avoid if ..

darth_ender said:

There are lines without background sound effects or soundtrack, so it could be useful for fan edits.

Well, this is probably the wrong place for Star Wars  ;)  but the HSL recombination can be useful in assorted instances. I found out in PDB's Blade Runner Color Regrade that anomalies become magnified, as you've discovered. My last conclusion there (without having best sources for further HSL recombination tests) was in favor of a RGB color correction (Page 3 that thread).

I had better success in first equalizing the Luminance of the separations before recombination in muddyknees2000's The Hobbit Rankin/Bass Animated Film (see Page 4 that thread). In that case, the VHS look (at better resolution) was the target. The DVD was too dark to accurately carry the VHS Hue & Saturation. A "color correction" of the B&W DVD Luminance was first made to match the VHS Luminance (very easy with B&W only) before recombination.

Definitely skim this thread from the beginning (if you haven't been following it). Lots of good info scattered throughout. However, for the short-form, I'd recommend ..

.. the Criterion laserdisc for the Kubrick-supervised transfer ..
http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Cinerama-70mm-2001-preservation-Is-it-possible/post/632583/#TopicPost632583 (Page 1 this thread)
.. with this releases caveat (ouch!) ..
http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Cinerama-70mm-2001-preservation-Is-it-possible/post/746946/#TopicPost746946 (Page 4 this thread)

.. the MGM DVD (which is supposed to come with a booklet) for it's awesome widescreen (letterbox) motion menus ..
http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Cinerama-70mm-2001-preservation-Is-it-possible/post/643160/#TopicPost643160 (Page 3 this thread) (note the referenced DVDBeaver's 2001 comparative-releases review with lots of eye-opening pictures)

.. and the Blu-ray for it's general clean-up & superior resolution.

Spaced Ranger said:

BTW, http://s21.postimg.org/7r80easzb/ld_comp_2.jpg is not coming through for me. ... Postimg.com appears to be a little flaky.

 @ PDB

I've tracked down that problem with Postimg.com. Some time back I had blocked something in the Windows "hosts" file and it took out the entire "s21." address, and anything attached to it. (Oops, my bad.) So ... never mind.
Please forgive me, oh great Postimg picture-server in the cloud ...

Awesome, thanks!

Well, roughly doing my maladjusted TV simulation on this laserdisc frame (as on the HD & DVD, above) ..

.. it confirms my reflection and SilverWook's mention -- that's the way of doing things on film. That plus Kubrick's production team using multiple exposures of self-matted elements to produce 1st generation special effects on the original negative. Little wonder it reveals itself when pushed out-of-bounds. Actually, that's a good thing for a retification. It makes finding misalignments a task as easy as bumping up the gamma. (I love computers!)

As an aside, I tried Taschen-izing this shot (see Page 4). Before, it had no stars (not really, but it looked that way). After, ..

.. the stars show normally. This confirms to me the laserdisc needs that brightness / contrast boost to be accurate.

That's a resourceful idea, _,,,^..^,,,_ ! But DrDre is right -- using duplicated frames doesn't help for finding new information for the processed frame.

My thinking was, if there were adjustable parameters in the program, the number of new frames referenced in one direction could be increased to compensate for the lesser number of frames in the other direction:

shot change -  (Y) (Z) |  A  (B) (C) (D) (E)     +0  A  +4 == 4 sourced
change +1    -  (Y) (Z) | (A)  B  (C) (D) (E)     +1  B  +3 == 4 sourced
change +2    -  (Y) (Z) | (A) (B)  C  (D) (E)     +2  C  +2 == 4 sourced

Of course, in a running film, diminishing returns may make this unnoticeable.  :D

My favs are your compelling menacing Episode VII Stormtrooper Concept and your Han Solo, who looks more like the quintessential rouge he never was as Lucas' kitsch.

2-thumbs-up for your Marty Feldman as Igor in your YouTube GIMP Speed Painting Marty Feldman!

Intruder said:

... to simulate a scene change, I cut the clip so it starts from the given frame and used VideoEnhancer. Comparison with full 40-frame clip ... when zoomed in with Photoshop you can see it.

DrDre said:

The super resolution algorithm has half the number of frames in a scene change, so you would expect it to do worse.

The teeth separation shows it really is grabbing additional detail from the more neighboring frames ..

Is there any adjustment for substituting missing frames in one direction with additional frames (if available) in the other direction? That would nicely help shot changes and other frames near a change.

Nice work!

I can easily imagine your red & black blaster print on a t-shirt with something like everyone's favorite exclaim ..

Of course, the blaster collage in glass frame would look pro (used a pre-existing frame as a base) ..

BTW, beware of copyrighted images (no exact replicas; use another of Han's blasters *nudge, nudge, wink, wink*) and good luck on your venture.  :)

That'd be great! Whenever you get a chance. Thanks again!

I'm guessing that Kubrick wasn't responsible for that (hinted at in that article)? Unlike Lucas, who is responsible for messing up his films. 

@ PDB - If you have a chance, would you post the above shot from your laserdisc? It's just after the title appears but before Discovery enters frame left. Thanks!

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Chess anyone? Hope you like it ... 'cause Stanley Kubrick was playing chess through his films (and he was no patzer).
                  
    New York Review blog 2010/04/05 - Playing Chess With Kubrick

Which brings us to the microcosmic chess match in 2001. The Chess webpage 2001: A Chess Space Odyssey is a semi-interactive chess game of Roesch vs Schlage (Hamburg, 1910) ... I mean ... Poole vs HAL9000 (space, 2001+) ..

My previous 2001 webpage-recommendation's author surmised that HAL made a mistake in it's chess game, deliberately, to test Poole. This new recommendation is an in-depth critique of 2001 tempered by Kubrick's other films and thematic patterns notable in his works.

This article has teeth, lots of pages, and lots of pictures (I love it!). So put on a pot of coffee, pour yourselves a first cup, and, as Dr. Morbius might phrase it, prepare your minds for a new scale of values on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey ..

Analysis of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey
http://www.idyllopuspress.com/idyllopus/film/2001_toc.htm
"Are you one of the league who find Kubrick's cinema fascinating and wonderful but are also confused by seeming peculiarities? Are you certain those often under-the-radar-over-the-head weirdnesses must mean something? Or maybe you're just curious? Well, I am the person who "discovered" the open door opposite Room 237 (and a lot more besides) so if you're looking for Kubrick high strangeness then you've come to the right place. But if I delve into the high strangeness, the oddities are simply a component part of analyzing the themes and ideas that Kubrick carries from film to film."

[This thought came to me over at the THX 1138 thread and I've copied the back-and-forth here for any further exploration] ..

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poita said:

In reality though when watching a movie, no one will see it ... But I can't help it, knowing it is there is enough to irk me.

And it's worse if you've actually seen it once. Like first the time I watched the newly acquired 2001: A Space Odyssey in high def. The TV wasn't wasn't properly set up (I was playing with it) and I saw this ..

.. instead of this ..

What!? I had seen "behind the curtain" and saw ... the title board? From Stanley Kubrick? Genius? Perfectionist? And I just saw a sloppy overlay? Ever since, I can't watch 2001 without subconsciously scrutinizing every little corner to spot more poorly-joined seams. 

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SilverWook said:

There are issues with the HD master of 2001. You're not supposed to be seeing the seams in the front projection screen used for The Dawn of Man sequence. They were never visible in 70mm, and they sure as heck shouldn't be now.

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...  I think their monitors weren't calibrated and they pushed the film beyond reasonable limits. I just grabbed the DVD (Warner 1999) and it shows the title board more plain (just like with the above downloaded HD image, when I paint-program pushed it to duplicate my maladjusted TV) ..

I wonder if this would show on the laserdisc, too (the Kubrick approved, Criterion Collection one PDB is using at the 2001 thread)?

Not to go too far with this here ... but, I think their monitors weren't calibrated and they pushed the film beyond reasonable limits. I just grabbed the DVD (Warner 1999) and it shows the title board more plain (just like with the above downloaded HD image, when I paint-program pushed it to duplicate my maladjusted TV) ..

I wonder if this would show on the laserdisc, too (the Kubrick approved, Criterion Collection one PDB is using at the 2001 thread)?
[I'll copy this over there to continue with it.]

AntcuFaalb said:

Spaced Ranger: Shoot me a PM.

Alright.

         PM

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poita said:

In reality though when watching a movie, no one will see it ... But I can't help it, knowing it is there is enough to irk me.

And it's worse if you've actually seen it once. Like first the time I watched the newly acquired 2001: A Space Odyssey in high def. The TV wasn't wasn't properly set up (I was playing with it) and I saw this ..

.. instead of this ..

What!? I had seen "behind the curtain" and saw ... the title board? From Stanley Kubrick? Genius? Perfectionist? And I just saw a sloppy overlay? Ever since, I can't watch 2001 without subconsciously scrutinizing every little corner to spot more poorly-joined seams. 

AntcuFaalb said:

.. with the DPS-575 ... in "normal" ... every significant shot change ... has SeriouslyScrewedUp™ chroma; ..

So it seems their algorithm doesn't account for such major changes. Is that a "known problem" that requires a down-shift of it's settings -- lower than normal?

This begs the question -- does this happen all the time? That is, no accounting at all for it going out-of-bounds? Perhaps it's visually noticeable only in the worst case. Try your processed playback with saturation doubled (or even tripled) and see if SeriouslyScrewedUp™ chroma then shows on every shot change and/or every instance of fast frame/object movement.

I'd say definitely go for the fix. If settings fail, frame replacement as a corrective solution sounds good. (If time is not of the essence, I could help document frame changes and transitions. But I don't have a guaranteed 24fps source. Is a small, review file available for that application? PM me if any details.)

I'm a little late to this party (missed out on the punch bowl). But the Video Enhancer with Super Resolution website crossed my travels some time ago and it's good to see this innovative approach in practical action. Thanks for a great thread that demonstrates another useful tool for our arsenal!

It manages to squeeze a little more juice out of that discarded lemon GL tossed to us.  :)

Thanks, guys! This is a great technique with lots of uses. I love re-inventing the wheel -- it forces one to learn it's nuts & bolts ... so you can screw everything up in novel ways (and that's mostly a good thing)!

For example, the resulting frame of this proof-of-concept shows an "apparent" fringing of red in some areas. (I hope that was not being referenced as the "registration" problem. The film scan itself does have fringing from chromatic aberration, but that is from the scanning equipment -- see this thread's page 52). This HSL-recombination "fringing" is actually damaged coloring in the DVD, courtesy of GL and company, which used this occasion to surface (an easy fix, though).

Notice in the DVD H-S-L split that saturation "hits the roof" (white) in small, particular areas. Back to the resulting frame, those very same areas glow (red in this case). Yet the 16mm scan, even with it's film fade, does not have any corresponding spike in saturation in those (shadowed) areas.

Alas, Lucas Film is everyone's whipping boy ... but for good reason. And, thereby, we have our work cutout for us.  :)