WXM

Great stuff as always! 😃

That’s incredible! When I saw the source I wouldn’t imagine that was possible on non-pro/non-studio set-up.

For the color (ala your cheap laptop) I went and did a quick tweak that I think takes it closer to realism, but maybe not? I just reduced saturation a decent amount and also shifted the color a tiny bit from the red/magenta toward the green/yellow. This isn’t remotely belittling your efforts. Just seeing if you agree and if it’s perhaps a smidge of help (or maybe it’s just not)

https://mega.nz/file/ikZgCT7B#wHTZUKyerRw6KAZbfwgmFcHaqM-i9X6ISgWM7k5C4c4

This is just a mild, not-remotely-definitive reply for you. I don’t have any LDs, caps of them or anything, but I have the BD of The Driver, that I haven’t looked at in a long time. I opened it up in VDub and it generally looks like blanket teal was applied (as you’re rather saying/showing above). I did a quick try at overall cancelling the teal and the whole thing (well, what bits I bopped through) went from looking strange to much more natural…but this is the main reason I’m posting…

One exception was the car garage scene (with the orange Mercedes). That was still very teal, didn’t look at all like the DVD frame you have above, so that’s a mystery! My casual observation is most of the BD seems recoverable(ish) for a regrade except for the car garage scene. I can’t imagine getting colors like the DVD above without the quite elaborate technique of pulling chroma from another source to replace it in that scene (a technique currently outside my wheelhouse, but I’d love do be able to do it).

Sorry I don’t have anything more solid for you, but no reply after half a day so I figured I’d offer this FWIW.

For anyone following this, I took it to PM with LeperMessiah117 because my long-winded-ness shouldn’t be slathered upon more eyes than necessary 😃

Oh, just a few trims to that third act showdown. I find it important to the catharsis of Tinky-Winky’s character at this point.

😄

.

I don’t know if it’s weird to care this much about the visual and audio fidelity of such an old anime like this, but I put so much time and effort into it, I want it to be as perfect as possible by the end of it all.

I’m of the opinion (oh, not that anyone cares!) that if you have a passion like this for something then sap it for all it’s worth, such as getting experience with achieving a higher/highest level of technical proficiency. So at least I say it’s absolutely worth it to go that distance you’re pushing for here.

Are you starting with keeping the VOBs as is and editing Womble style (no re-encoding) or are you IVTC’ing (have a good/great method for that), shooting for higher res right away?

Yay, glad it worked out for you!

Now, I just have 24 more disks to rip (for the 3rd time), then replace my old rips with the new ones in my projects and hopefully I should be golden!

Hopefully all your replacing those Teletubbies and Care Bears episode VOBs for your epic edit will go smoothly because I can’t wait for this! Yeah, I’ve long hoped that someone would do something like the extended Lord of the Rings trilogy but with Dipsy, Proud Heart Cat, Po and Lotsa Heart Elephant leading a perilous journey to the Baby in the Sun (instead of Mordor). This is going to be awesome! But my big advice for your edit is to tone down the katana fight between Professor Coldheart and Tinky-Winky. It’s just way too gory in the original. I hate censorship, but we really don’t need to see that scene of Tinky trying to catch his intestines in his purse. Yuckipoo to that!

(J/k everyone!…unless my random jokiness just happens to really be what this mystery edit is 😃)

I’ve been using old DVD Decrypter for ages.

For setting it up I use Mode->IFO. In the settings: Under the “IFO mode” tab I turn file splitting to NONE. I think that’s all that’s needed for it to give you one full VOB for a movie instead of the standard, annoying 1GB chunks.

I could be wrong but I think that’s about all you need for it to give you a nice VTS folder of a good rip. Been a long time since I set it up so I can’t remember if I checked or unchecked anything else, but of course you should look around yourself for kicks, if you even want to use DVD Decrypter.

Hi!

I have a pal (on Mac) who wants to start out just tooling around with some light fan editing, the likes of which he’s never done before, and the DVD realm is fine. The goal is for the process to be easy and great for learning, NOT to output some 2k/4k seamless fan edit masterpiece with 5.1 surround.

I always loved Womble for quick, easy, efficient fan editing, especially how (as long as you don’t use filters) there was no need to do any rendering or processing for the export. The output is just a 1:1 data copy of the original VOB file for all the bits you’re keeping, so fast, easy, saves drive space, etc.

So, yes, I’m seeing if anyone can report to me if any (simple) editing software on Mac is like ol’ Womble MpegVideoWizard. (To be clear, I don’t have a Mac; I want to help him set up/choose since I generally know more about the digital video than he does, but not when it comes to the Mac platform software.)

Thanks for reading!

TVArchive said:

The VOB files were indeed 29.97, but were encoded such that every piece of software I dropped them in to deinterlace said the framerate was 24.172. In all my years of ripping/encoding, I’ve not seen that one before. The second episode on the first disc was 29.97 but the other 3 were reporting back 24.172. Strangest thing I’ve seen. Pulldown was extremely weird! I had to run them through Hybrid to get a reliable 23.976.

Egads indeed, I’m glad I’ve never come across something like that!

Thanks for the replies 😃

TVArchive said:

Yes, they’re the standard old NTSC DVDs. The framerate is kind of wonky on these so I had to do some cleanup work on that as well.

I can’t help but be curious what the issue was. The framerate of the VOBs must be 29.97, right?.. so do you mean there were extra or missing frames throwing off the pull-down pattern?.. and/or fields swapping? I’m not well versed in dealing with those kinds of things so hearing others’ stories of how they overcame IVTC issues is interesting (to me at least), might be great info to help expand my bag of tricks in the future.

But if you’re too busy to elaborate, don’t want to go into things not having to do spec. with the upscaling, etc., no prob.

TVArchive said:

Here are some screenshots from the pilot episode, up-scaled to 1440x1080.

Okay, here are my criticisms of your up-scales. You see, when I do my up-scaling of SD material I try to be sure to… Wha-what I’m aiming at is when ya upscale ya should try to avoid… I guess I’m saying you should consider changing your techniques here by implementing… Oh, NEVER MIND (and j/k!) PHENOMENAL results! 😃

The third one’s trees’ details in the b.g., and the strands of hair in #5, wow just wow! When I clicked on the fourth one I was actually kind of expecting to be able to read the tiniest print of the newspaper clipping. Not at all a slam on you that I (of course) couldn’t. Just expressing the effect I’d already gotten by then that full/native HD was the territory we were in. And this is 2.25x vertical enlarging of mpeg2-compressed material (assuming your DVD are NTSC and not PAL?). Amazing

At least some bits are salvageable from all that time, money, effort spent. Sorry that (much) more of it wasn’t what you had hints would be there for you. 😦

What are you using for the upscaling?

You saying “broadcast equipment,” that sounds cool and isn’t the likes of something we see mentioned here too often. Interesting, and welcome aboard 😃

I’m in rather the same boat as BedeHistory731. I’ll just leave it at that. 😃

Great update, thanks for the details.

I have a suggestion that I think would solve a lot of these issues: Just get the original 16mm negatives of all that material and have Peter Jackson’s company scan it all in 4k for you, and let them know what you do want done and not left alone on the scans. Yay! So simple, bet you’re kicking yourself for not thinking of it 😉

Bridger12 said:
The Archive.org version will be fully uncompressed, right?

Maybe someone will correct me because I’ve missed or not considered something, but I’d suspect a fully uncompressed file of this, even only the video — high bit depth to keep the color and all — would be over a TB. Even using Lagarith lossless results in a HD feature file being over 200GB, and fully uncompressed (at least what I’ve seen in my playing around) results in MUCH bigger file sizes than using Lag.

So, I’d assume Venny wouldn’t be trying to upload things in the 200GB-2TB range onto Archive.org … but if anyone throws info at me to correct me on any of that above I’m all ears in my mere hobbyist-ness. 😃

ElectricTriangle said:

The Probert concept was for…

Thanks for that info and the images. I think I read about that back in 2001-ish, but obviously it slipped out of my mind since. Nice and concise tell and show of what it was supposed to be! 😃

Fullmetaled said:

@WXM can you improve the shot like what was done with the empire strikes back scenes in revisited like what was done to the green screen scenes etc.

I’ve ceased doing elaborate help because I’ve kind of fallen behind the times on software; I’m far from a lot of the fan effects gurus around now, and honestly I’ve just learned that for me it’s a little too thankless in the end to put so much mind power and such into these kinds of things that can take a long time and/or are elaborate (unlike cleaning up specks/scratches from a couple of minutes of Brave Little Toaster).

However, I’m guessing there will be at least one talented fan who’ll tackle the lounge shot and do a great job of it, surely better than I could do with my limited software. With the 4k of the TR/SLV to give everyone great foundation footage, yeah, don’t worry, someone will tackle it and have it look awesome 😃

Fullmetaled said:

It was possible to update the effects in empire strikes back with adywan doing hoth with revisited so how is this impossible for a fan or even a major studio to do?

[Edit: Oops, this turned out long, sorry!] Fans don’t have time constraints and budgets restrictions and more. Pros have to coordinate with other individuals and other departments and deal with hardware set-ups that may not be their first choice, and they have to show their output to studio higher-ups for approval, and more. It’s a complicated web, mess, of interaction surely always walking a tightrope due to time constraints, rarely with a blank check safety net.

A fan, on the other hand, can work on only what they want, at their leisure, pick projects to begin with that are within their parameters of full comfort/desire, use only their fave software on a computer system they built themselves, do all this without having to answer to anyone else. A fan can seek help from others on their own terms (without legal hassles/contracts or even without paying someone) if there’s a bit they personally can’t quite do something themselves. (Because he couldn’t do such himself I did CG shots on Adywan’s New Hope Revisited — the Death Star plans graphics and the “40 Tie Fighters flying in” — I worked on those bits off and on for ten months; so he got targeted skill goals met for those shots of his project without having to pay anyone, deal with paperwork, etc., unlike professional studio environments that have to coordinate and juggle all that and more, especially budget.)

These guys/gals at studio departments surely have MASSIVE lists of things they have to get done within a time frame. One bit of my work on Adywan’s New Hope was making a Death Star mesh from scratch. That took me about a month, me working on it when I was in the mood, only when I felt charged to do the work. I could take a month “having fun” with it because there was no deadline. What if I had a five-day crunch to do it, couldn’t “hire” anyone to assist me for the more tedious parts of the modeling (couldn’t get help even for free because of legal reasons) and on my workload list for the whole project was also to make meshes for the three Star Destroyer types, Tie Bomber mesh, several beat-up variant meshes of X-Wings, Luke’s landspeeder with 100% matching damage to what’s in the film, and an AT-AT? Yes, I will have accepted the work because I thought I could do it, but what about any snags cropping up (like Covid or whatever)? What if I was locked to a partner on the project — he does texturing while I do modeling — and it turned out he was tripping up and dragging me down like an anchor while we’re on deadline and I couldn’t just replace him as my partner due to seniority structure? And if he and I tripped up, took longer than we were supposed to, the cost might be that the scene layout/rendering department would have to make up time by implementing some unfortunate shortcuts like sloppy compositing and shittier-quality rendering.

Getting a fan to help… There are pipelines that work certain ways; I imagine it’s not as easy as just getting a fan to do this shot or that and wallah, put their work into that of teams of professionals. Yes, one would think, but for reasons I’m not privy too it rarely seems to work out this way.

The solution of course is for Paramount to spend more money, hire more people to spread out the workload, but… When it comes to big studio spending, who knows what’s going on? So much messiness when it comes to that kind of thing. Let’s compare real quick the new Obi Wan Kenobi series and the latest Orville ep 4. I’m not a big fan of The Orville overall, but one has to admit that at times — yeah, I have s03xe04 stuck in my head — Orville looks a LOT better than pretty much everything in OWK, even though the latter has a budget of $25m per episode. What’s the excuse? OKW is official modern Star Wars, starring cast from Lucas-directed films, and freakin’ Trek parody Orville has much better effects (and a kicker is that ultimately both are Disney shows so one can’t even point out the studios making just have different philosophies). There’s surely a lot going on when having to coordinate thousands of people under contracts and such that make it messy in ways that are hard to both comprehend.

I’ll cease my rambling now. 😃

Fullmetaled said:

What the heck were they going for but failed with the 4k version of that scene?

I don’t recall the why’s behind it, but this is what they were going for… In the DVD version the windows are supposed to be ones on the (back right) edge of the saucer (these windows can be seen on the model IIRC). I believe this location of the lounge is the case for the TR as well, but the effects team didn’t have time to composite in the nacelle as would be proper for that view (so the 2001 DE team tried to fix that “incomplete effects shot”).

For the 4k they have switched to having our people in the area at the back of the large lump atop the saucer, which has different shaped windows (as per what we see behind our characters in the 4k version). Again, I don’t recall the issue that prompted this change, but hopefully that explains a little what you see in those pics.

Fullmetaled said:

What does it look like on the dvd version of the director’s cut?

Scroll down this page to get the 3-way comparison, fifth one down…

https://trekmovie.com/2022/05/25/12-most-fascinating-updates-for-the-4k-star-trek-the-motion-picture-directors-edition/

DMC, I’m not seeing too many post-received thank yous here so I’ll offer mine. Thank you 😃 You’ve been keeping this alive for everyone for over half a year now. Very cool of you!

Also while here, for those who don’t know, the great YouTube Channel Defunctland did a wonderful 6-part series on Jim Henson and his creations. Average length of each ep is half an hour. Link to the playlist…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVoGf1JTVeI&list=PLplWWKocAfTYIGzH8eQ0x0kEQgoV9CpYm

(In case the link is not allowed and gets removed just search in YT for “DefunctTV: Jim Henson”)

Attempting contact would likely result in nothing or might open up cans of worms for reasons you said, but sometimes fan passion for something can blossom surprising results; I guess seeing how in the Brave Little Toaster 35mm thread here — where contact has been made and discourse carried out with the filmmakers — just urged me to want to present that idea here.

layswave, mediamogul, and others here… Has anyone tried contacting people who made the movie (ala producers or other people behind making Nothing Lasts Forever)? The first post of this thread was seven years ago with no big release of material found in the interim — and the movie is almost four decades old — so by this point maybe it’s worth seeing if one of the makers (now in their 60s? 70s?) might be happy to supply things to big fans of their film, might be happy to see it so appreciated.

If anyone has the Halloween (1978) LD audio that’s supposed to be the best — preferably in flac or wav but HQ ac3 would do if that’s all anyone has — I’d love to get that if someone reading here has it, I’d be very thankful, thanks! 😃