Talos

Animaxx said:

lilmanjs said:

Stargate SG-1 is already completely in HD, just not released for whatever reason on blu ray. Wouldn’t be worth it to work on that show.

Perhaps, but I had the “pleasure” to watch some of that HD-Versions, while seasons 8-10 are in what I would call “decent HD”, seasons 1-7 have been done by SyFy, and they are really soft and show signs of aliasing, therefore I think perhaps going from the DVDs would be better.

Anyway, I am not going to work on it today or tomorrow, perhaps something will change until I get around to it.

As you said, seasons 1-7 are just upscaled from SD sources for Syfy, and not well at that. Seasons 1-3 were filmed in 16mm and 4-7 in 35mm, the difference between the two sticks out even more with that release. The entire run needs a TNG-R-style remaster to be properly in HD.

Animaxx said:

Thank you for joining in. No problem, everyone also has a life to get back to at some point 😃

Since I will be working on DS9 and Voyager first, I would contact you once I get around to SG-1.
Also, I am planning to work on Babylon 5 (later on).

Sounds good, just let me know. I wasn’t planning on deleting the raw assembled episodes anytime soon, so no rush.

JadedSkywalker said:

Not to derail the thread but i wasn’t aware there was a good source for Babylon 5. The DVD is fake widescreen and you cannot find the original 4:3 ratio version on DVD.

And with frame blending due to the special effects you cannot restore 24 fps.

As for SG1 i hope you use the uncut pilot film and not the censored directors cut version.

I have the original pilot episode version. I actually need to track down a PAL copy of the director’s cut movie to encode alongside it just for completionist reasons. If I recall correctly, Babylon 5 was available in 4:3 on Vudu.

Animaxx said:

By the way: I have thought about two other SciFi shows that were unfortunately “overlooked/underestimated” in their time and through re-runs or recordings have still managed to develop a devoted fan-base.

• Earth : Final Conflict
• Stargate SG-1

Since I do own the PAL and NTSC Discs of Final Conflict and the PAL of SG-1, I would do those after I am through with DS9 and Voyager. Funny how I am planning away probably years of my life, but I think it could be worth it.

But since SG-1 was available from Seasons 8-10 (as were the movies) in HD, I would only do Seasons 1-7.

I hope that would be something you guys might be interested in as well.

But for now, back to Trek.

I haven’t been responding in the thread because I have been busy, but I have been reading it. I have all seven PAL DVD seasons of SG-1 already converted to NTSC framerate if you need them. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel if you think my work was good enough, I can upload them for you. That being said, I’d love to see Earth: Final Conflict get an upscale like that as well. I’d also like to see Dark Angel get the same, so I can share my PAL conversions for that if anyone wants to do that one.

A lot of the discussion in the thread (which was insanely awesome to read, and great seeing another big name in DS9 HD conversions pop in) went right over my head. I did a simple slowdown of each element and didn’t have any issues with extra/dropped frames or quality loss. I don’t know if that was something intrinsic to SG-1’s CGI sequences or not.

Animaxx said:

Talos said:

Thanks, I will look into that, MeGui does sound interesting. In the end, after a few trials and experiments, I did end up preserving the 5.1 audio and it worked out well. I just didn’t realize at first that you had to go into Audacity settings and change a setting to allow you to use a custom mix output. Before that, it downmixed everything into 2-channel audio. After changing that setting, it preserved everything, even the oddball four-channel mixes some of the SG-1 discs used.

Oh yeah, I remember that strange sound setup on stargate, I think it was the first couple of episodes (DVD 1 and possibly two) of season 2 of SG-1.

Yeah, the start of season 2 is weird. None of the early seasons are consistent in audio languages, channels, commentary, subs, chapters, etc.

I didn’t mean to sidetrack your thread though, I just saw you discussing shifting to a PAL source so I thought I might be able to help by showing what I did on a similar project. You got it under control though!

Thanks, I will look into that, MeGui does sound interesting. In the end, after a few trials and experiments, I did end up preserving the 5.1 audio and it worked out well. I just didn’t realize at first that you had to go into Audacity settings and change a setting to allow you to use a custom mix output. Before that, it downmixed everything into 2-channel audio. After changing that setting, it preserved everything, even the oddball four-channel mixes some of the SG-1 discs used.

Animaxx said:

I guess I will try the PAL-discs now, since they have a professionally done 25 FPS, which is present uniform and throughout. Perhaps that will work.

I did this earlier this year with the PAL DVD releases of Stargate SG-1 seasons 1-7 and Dark Angel seasons 1 and 2 (the NTSC Dark Angel discs are 4:3, only PAL got a widescreen release). I wanted to have higher resolution copies of both, but I couldn’t put up with PAL speedup. It took a few months of poking and prodding at it before I settled down into a workflow and I got it all done early in the pandemic, as it proved to be a good quarantine project. This is what I did:

1. Ripped disc with MakeMKV
2. Disassembled MKVs into components with MKVCleaver and MKVToolNix. The latter program is used to take apart the audio and chapter files, and can export the video file itself at 24000/1001p. MKVCleaver is for the subtitles, as it can export them as idx/subs.
3. Using MKVToolNix, took the chapter files and convert timing by applying a conversion factor to the start and end times. This is also when I go in and add the chapter titles if available.
4. Loaded each file in Audacity, changing the speed under effects -> change speed. I used a .959 value for it. You then save in the highest quality you want and take care to preserve the channels, since it won’t save 5.1 properly by default.
5. Using VobSub Sub File Cutter, loaded the .sub subtitles and used it to modify the timing.
6. Opened up MKVToolNix and used it to -re-assemble all of the components.
7. Used Handbrake to reencode the whole thing into whatever format desired. I used x265 at high bitrate for the video and audio and got good results.

This worked for me. There are probably easier ways to do it, but I had decent success with the two programs. I still have all of the seasons I did at their step 6 pre-encoding stage (usually a couple gigs an episode), if someone wants to do something similar to this with them as I lack the processing power to upscale more than short clips.

To bounce off of 400tx’s comment, I’m the same as them and Chrismon1001. I’d love to find a copy of this to go with D+77 and D+80. Thank you!