TomArrow

Great news! I’m gonna assume your print is Open Matte? Could get some extra picture.

Chewtobacca said:

TomArrow said:
x264 is a DCT-based codec, so everything always gets converted into the frequency domain on a per-block basis, which of course can introduce rounding errors in theory, especially at 8 bit. It’s possible they have ways to avoid this, but it’s something to keep in mind.

Yes. This is why I’m not convinced that x264 is truly lossless.

Yeah, me neither. But it’s certainly good enough for almost any scenario imaginable, except maybe some scientific uses where it really needs to be bit-perfect.

Just a few notes about the (hypothetical) sharing of lossless masters, if it’s of interest to anybody:

• crf 0 is the wrong way to do lossless x264 afaik, the correct way is -qp 0 (as crf is conceived to achieve variable bitrate with varying qp (quantization parameter) across blocks/frames. QP explicitly sets it to 0 globally.

• x264 only encodes YUV values. A conversion from RGB will automatically lead to rounding loss and thus not be 100% lossless anymore (but still good enough practically). ProRes also works in YUV.

• x264 by default encodes in 4:2:0. Compare to RGB, which naturally is 4:4:4. So you automatically lose half the color information. The solution is to encode in the 4:4:4 mode of x264, which has to be explicitly stated.

• Normal x264 only has 8 bits, whereas ProRes has 10 bits (or even more with a proper Apple ProRes encoder). For sharing a master for proper color correction work, a higher bit depth would be highly beneficial. This can be achieved with the 10-bit version of x264.

• Lagarith as well as normal lossless AVIs only support 8 bits as well, therefore are not useful for sharing lossless masters, especially not if further color work is to be done.

• Lagarith has 3 modes afaik: RGB, RGBA and YV12. YV12 is a 4:2:0 mode and tends to produce significantly smaller files than RGB. RGBA includes alpha channel, should be irrelevant for most cases. RGB is default. The mode can be changed in the codec settings (for example in VirtualDub when selecting Lagarith).

• x264 is a DCT-based codec, so everything always gets converted into the frequency domain on a per-block basis, which of course can introduce rounding errors in theory, especially at 8 bit. It’s possible they have ways to avoid this, but it’s something to keep in mind. Same applies to ProRes by the way, also DCT-based; but ProRes is not meant to be lossless to begin with, so that’s okay.

• ProRes, unless you use the 4:4:4 mode, also is 4:2:2 and thus not ideal for anything that will require further color work imo.

• Currently the only way (known to me) to have a truly lossless master with high bit depth is an RGB 16-bit TIFF/PNG/(some other formats) sequence or some exotic AVI codecs that support higher bit depths, but aren’t widely supported or maintained.

Of course it’s still possible that x264 it’s not 100% lossless, because it was never really made for it and who knows what it does to the signal behind the scenes, but some people have evidently achieved losslessness in x264, see here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6701805/h264-lossless-coding

Either way, it’s certainly good enough, if you use the 10-bit version, in addition to qp 0 and 4:4:4 color setting. But at that point the bitrates will quite likely even exceed those of ProRes (as I believe ProRes in High profile has the equivalent of qp=4 if I’m not mistaken, at least that’s what ffmpeg shows), and come at the cost of being several times more inefficient than ProRes when it comes to editing. Most editing software doesn’t even support importing x264 10 bit, so you would have to convert it back to ProRes or the likes anyway in order to edit it.

With that said, I think that if you drop the strict “lossless” requirement, we could share very high quality masters (comparable to ProRes) suitable for color grading & VFX if we just set the qp to values above 0. Again, with 10 bit x264 in 4:4:4 mode. As a starting value, I would probably try qp 4, but maybe it’s possible to go even higher. To test the quality of the result, you’ll need to do 16 bit screenshots (as PNG/TIFF don’t support 10bit), for example using AviSynth+ & VirtualDub, and then I typically load that stuff into Photoshop and play with the Levels to blow up dark areas to see if any artifacts become noticeable.

I think this way there could be a notable size improvement over ProRes, which would help with transferring. The recipient could convert back to ProRes then for his own work.

Probably wanted it to look like the shadow was showing some color from the little lights above lol.

I can confirm the iTunes copy doesn’t have shifting aspect ratio (I have a copy). Can’t be shifting, because it’s cropped to the OAR.

What is so interesting about this version? Is it the new master, like the iTunes version?

That’s awesome man! Wish you the best for this project!

Awesome. I like these raw looking scans. It’s basically like the Grindhouse of the ROTJ and ESB scans, correct?

Is it available for sharing? I am not familiar with the etiquette here, pardon my ignorance.

Small project of mine.

I realize the Dreamastered version is already GOUT-synced, but I’m a fan of the untouched colors.

Naturally, syncing the already encoded video to the GOUT and reencoding it would degrade the quality unnecessarily, so I used this project as my first “proof of concept” for syncing it almost losslessly using TMPGEnc Smart Renderer 5. With the help of this tool, I was able to reencode the video only at the split points/cuts (around 20 across the movie), and end up with a resulting video stream that is virtually identical to the original release.

For syncing I used Chewtobacca’s script from the GOUT-sync thread and “adapted” it to the interface of TMPGEnc Smart Renderer 5.

Final video is 100% in sync with the Despecialized Edition, so I was able to mux in all the audio tracks from there into this. DTS-HD MA tracks were losslessly transcoded to FLAC, to reduce bloat.

The original optical 35mm PCM track from the scan was automatically synced as well with missing frames filled with silence. Was also included as FLAC.

As a little gimmick, I included a Dolby Headphone track of the 5.1 mix by Hairy_Hen.

All credit goes to the people who have created the content originally. Thank you, guys!

This little project and the full description is available at Blutopia.

MalàStrana said:

Dat_SW_Guy said:

Just found this a while ago, just wanted to share this if anyone wants to make an edit such as this. It shows an alternate ending of the film, wherein Luke doesn’t die.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8XE_8f49Qo

Ok but what happens to EpIX and the highly expected Luke’s Force ghost ?

Elevator scene is very good. I’ll add that to my “TLJ: wishcutlist to help me find the best fanedit available” 😃

“Luke, why are you translucent and blue?”

“Oh that. That … umm … okay, I admit it. I’m not really here. I’m sitting in my hut drinking walrus tiddy milk and I’m basically just here for moral support.”

Okay, I’ve been having this idea in my head forever, but ultimately I figure I probably just don’t like the two movies enough to actually give it a try, so here’s the idea, just to preserve it: Combine the two movies into a single story, rearranging all elements that are available. It may not be 100% coherent, but as long as it has enough “flow” I think it might work.

The following is a rough outline of how I imagine it. Depending on how well that works out, some parts may (will) need to be rearranged to make it better.

In detail, here’s how I imagine the flow to go:

• Intro crawl “Resistance pilots Rey and Finn are tasked by Han Solo to bring back the stolen Falcon”.
• Starts out with Rey and Finn stealing back the Falcon. Rey is not a scavenger, but a resistance pilot, explaining why she can fly the Falcon. Finn too.
• Kylo Ren pursues them (not sure there is enough footage but who nose).
• They get sucked into that space station where they meet Han (who already knows them). Through some trickery, this is also the place where Ben Solo appears and kills Han, which is how he gets introduced. At this place, Rey also finds Luke’s lightsaber and the visions coming from that coincide with Han’s & Ben’s confrontation.
• They go to that beautiful-nature-y planet where they normally meet Maz (but here they don’t). They are just here to meet Leia and the resistance. (we assume this is the resistance planet as well). Rey mentions some lightsaber-found blah blah. They find R2 and figure he has the map to Luke, so Rey decides to give Luke a visit. Finding Luke is never a major story arc, it’s just Rey’s personal thing, similar to Luke’s arc of finding Yoda in the OT.
• Rey goes to Luke and starts training.
• “5 years later”
• The village scene with Kylo Ren and the hidden data thingy that Poe tries to hide from Kylo. Turns out, this is the map revealing the existence and weaknesses of Not-Deathstar. (not the map to Luke Skywalker, as in the original). Making the importance that much more grave.
• The resistance mounts a plan to destroy Not-Deathstar.
• Not-Deathstar destroys Republic.
• Rey, who at this point is a somewhat trained Jedi, senses da disturbance in da force, decides to go help.
• Resistance is on its way to Not-Deathstar, but gets suddenly pursued by Snoke’s ship. 😉 A race against time ensues.
• Rey decides to help out and goes to Snoke’s ship, as in TLJ.
• Throne room confrontation now makes more sense, including Rey’s fighting skills.
• At the end of throne room fight, Rey gets knocked out by Kylo Ren through some force.
• Rey wakes up strapped to that thingy, manipulates guard into letting her go.
• Rey goes to Not-deathstar to help blow it up.
• There, final fight with against Kylo Ren that she wins. Tada.
• Not-deathstar blows up. Everyone’s happy.

Lots of scenes still missing that can hopefully be spliced in here and there. The main aim of this whole thing is A) to get rid of the ridiculous and boring chase plotline in TLJ. and B) to explain Rey’s proficiency with the force through her training with Luke. and C) to try something insane.

Not sure if this would remotely work, but it just might be a cool experiment.

EvenSteven said:

Based on the YouTube clips, I will not be using any of the deleted scenes footage for my edit. Most of them are superfluous or silly. The only clip that I could see being salvaged is Luke mourning Han’s death. However, that would mean going from a shot with Rey and Chewie in it to a shot of him mourning. Either that, or I would need to find a scene later on where I can cut to Luke alone in his hut.

On a side note, I never thought I’d see Rose biting Hux’s finger or Tom Hardy as a stormtrooper spanking Finn.

The funny thing is, in the commentary Rian says that they were able to take away the shot of Rose biting the finger “because she is already strong enough of a character to not need this scene”. Rian thinks this scene makes her look strong. Way to go lol!

Hal 9000 said:

Replace all women with Nicolas Cage via that app?

Lmao! That stuff is hilarious. Have you seen the Titanic one?

Wacko idea combining both movies:

Why not let Rey go to training before the whole Starkiller thingy is even introduced. Make it a mellow entry to the story where the villain (Kylo) still stays mysterious. She arrives and starts her training after retrieving the lightsaber and having been confronted with Kylo once.

Fast forward 5 years. First order has built starkiller base. Rey is in full training mode. Now, somehow mix together the ship chase and the starkiller thing and the planet being destroyed and rey and kylo having their first lightsaber fight and things suddenly make much more sense. She now has had the training to justify holding up against Kylo a little.

Not sure about the details (would like to include Snoke etc. as well) but that can still be worked out. Lots of stuff would obviously fall away.

Exactly, Home Alone 3 has little to do with the first two parts. Different kid actor etc. and yeah it’s not very good.

BOOK OF ELI RE-COLORIZED

DESCRIPTION

The desaturated look of Book of Eli is absolutely not my thing, so I decided to push the colour out a little more.

Played around for a while to get a good compromise with a blanket 3D LUT until I was satisfied.

Here’s a screenshot comparison (also included in subfolder of the files): http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/128273

Since the saturation is so low in the original, there’s lots of obvious chroma blocking when raising the saturation, which is why I applied a grainplate for each RGB channel separately. This results in some extreme grain/noise in some areas where there is strong chroma contrast, which I kinda like. Looks better than the blocking, anyway.

Audio is the lossless 5.1 DTS-HD MA audio from the Blu Ray transcoded to FLAC 5.1. On top, you get a FLAC 2.0 Dolby Headphone track rendered from the lossless 5.1 soundtrack, with amplification set so that there is no clipping. This track basically simulates a 5.1 surround setup on your headphones.

ENCODING & FILES FOR YOUR OWN RE-ENCODE

Final encode is done by applying the 3D LUT through ffmpeg in 16-bit, then piping into and encoding with 10-bit x264. If someone wants a blu-ray compatible encode, I have included the .avs-file, grainplate, 3D LUT and a .bat script using ffmpeg for the LUT application and piping into x264 (that took some tinkering to get it to work), so you can just make your own version with your own encoding settings. I personally don’t have a Blu Ray player, so I don’t care about compatibility much.

I know that not all the choices I made with the 3D LUT may be to the liking of everybody, so feel free to adjust the 3D LUT any way you like for your own encode to make it more to your liking. An example of this may be the intense red tones, which I chose because I liked the look and also because there are some red elements in less saturated scenes which otherwise don’t pop nicely. Another may be the dark yellow patches on the skies, which were originally green and brighter. I like it this way, but maybe you don’t. Partly the choices were also dictated by scenes that would have looked bad if I had done it differently, but you can figure that out for yourself.

TRAILER

Also included is a trailer which I created to give a sneak peak at the colors and picture quality. For this I recreated one of the movie’s trailers (I think it’s called Trailer #2) with scenes from the Blu Ray, then applied the same processing and LUT as for the movie. Shots that were trailer-exclusive were first regraded to match the Blu Ray as best as possible, for example by creating a conversion LUT for other shots of the same scene that do exist on the Blu Ray, using DrDre’s ColorMatch software, then also had the same final LUT applied.

Since the best quality trailer source I could find had an Apple logo, that one was patched out with a Youtube trailer. That one had slightly different color, but I was able to fix that with two passes of the ColourLike plugin (Planar & RGB).

The best audio I could find was a 318kbps 2.0 English DTS track from the German Blu Ray (despite the video only being in letterboxed SD there). I retimed it from 25 fps to 23.976 fps by interpreting sample rate as 48000*23.976/25, then resampling the result to 48000 with a good SRC. Normalizing was applied before resampling. Result was saved as 24-bit 2-channel FLAC. That one I ran through the Dolby SDU4 Hardware decoder using a good audio interface, from which I created a 5.1 FLAC track (BC minus 3dB, split to SL and SR, LFE created from low frequencies of all resulting channels, without removing them from those). From that 5.1 I also created a Dolby Headphone track, which is a FLAC stereo.

So the trailer comes with 3 audio tracks:

• Original DTS 2.0 retimed and resampled and saved as FLAC
• SDU4-decoded 5.1 FLAC
• Dolby Headphone 2.0 FLAC

Video encoding process is the same as for the main video.

This was a funny undertaking in general. Many of the scenes in the trailer were unfinished, missing matte paintings and VFX. For example the original trailer was missing an error arrow piercing someone’s throat and a head being chopped off. The remade one has all these … beautiful things.

I did not recreate the title cards (is that what they’re called?), so their quality is as good as the original trailer allows.

RELEASE

This project was released on Blutopia. As far as I am concerned, feel free to share it anywhere you like.

What does the restoration work consist of? How much work is it? Is it possible without PixelFarm products?

cpalmer2k said:

Thank you! I’ve been wanting to do a project with this film for awhile. It looks like they mistitled it at first which explains how my saved eBay searches missed. I’ll pursue this print

Cool! Good luck for your project. 😃

For those whom it may interest: https://www.ebay.com/itm/1990-HOME-ALONE-FEATURE-FILM-USED-COLOR-DELUXE-DOLBY-PRINT/292396163821

If for nothing else than a color reference from the screenshots

That sample looks great!

This one has been on eBay for a while: https://www.ebay.com/itm/35mm-Feature-DELICATESSEN-1991-ONLY-AVAILABLE-UNTIL-THE-END-OF-2017/332499999289

Quite a cool and iconic movie.

Costs $100, which is about 85 EUR. Double it for the shipping.

It’s faded and probably won’t be a good reference for the actual theatrical colors, but I think it can be fixed through grading a 16bit scan, to at least have a decent image.

I could add 50 EUR to the pot for buying the print (can do bank transfer to most European bank accounts). Seller says it’s only available till the end of 2017, but apparently he’s gone and the offer runs for 4 more days, so I’m guessing that means we still have a chance.

Anyone interested in seeing this happen?

Have posted this over on fanres as well.

Yep, I read that. But I didn’t find any specific mention of those intermediary elements.

Here it is: https://www.ebay.com/itm/16mm-Journey-To-The-Center-Of-The-Earth-unedited-feature/152841407076

Reason it caught my attention is that I read in the Blu Ray review that this movie does not have the original intermediary elements used anymore because the negative had deteriorated: http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Journey-to-the-Center-of-the-Earth-Blu-ray/39539/#Review

Here’s the excerpt:

“When Journey came to the then technologically “amazing” laserdisc format around 1990, it was evidently discovered that the original negative had deteriorated to such a point that it couldn’t be used for what would have then been a state of the art transfer. Apparently at that time new intermediary elements were created which may still be in use today, according to information passed on to me from Twilight Time’s Nick Redman. The results, while not completely staggering, are very good and should please ardent videophiles who bring appropriate expectations.”

I think it’s fair to assume that this 16mm print, although it’s described as “faded pinkish”, would stilll have all the original elements. With a bit of effort to restore the colors, this could make for a cool preservation project, I think.

$275 is the “Buy Now” price. I don’t really have any money to spare for this, but maybe someone here is interested? I also posted this over at fanres.

towne32 said:

Someone posted on a spleen comment, I think, that decent HDTV captures of the non DNR sequels are on PassThePopcorn. Can anyone confirm if that’s true?

Can confirm part 2.

Accidental post. Just wanted to subscribe.